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This article explores fashion collecting and dress exhibitions in nineteenth-century France. The first three exhibitions of historic dress in France, which occurred in 1874, 1892, and 1900, raised a host of questions for French dress historians, collectors, and curators: they debated how historical dress should be displayed, what kind of garments should be collected, and what role fashion had in the narrative of French history. This article explores the “historical turn” in dress history, which formalized the practice of using historical garments and accessories as sources for the writing and display of history. It also examines how the shift from industrial to decorative arts spurred an interest in fashion collecting. Finally, it argues that the spectacularization of fashion display between 1874 and 1900 had an impact on the garments themselves, as collectors and curators began to alter garments in order to display them within imaginative settings. Rather than condemning these restorations, this article proposes that we view them as forms of historical imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Together with the Revd Daniel Tyerman, George Bennet formed part of a deputation sent out in 1821 by the London Missionary Society with the aim of undertaking a global inspection of the state of the mission. This paper aims to map the collection that Bennet assembled in Central Polynesia during that journey and to ask what the parties involved in the collecting encounters understood to be embodied in the material forms that were collected. By paying attention to how the various agents involved in the collecting process played a role, the Bennet collection offers an appropriate case-study to query the view of missionary collecting as merely trophy collecting. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article considers Goethe as both practitioner and theorist of the art of collecting. Drawing on biographical, historical, critical, and fictional sources, it explores how acquiring objects establishes a nexus of telling relationships among the object, the collector, the collection, other observers (real or fictitious), and between all of these and the external world. Producing at once a body of knowledge and a source of aesthetic contemplation, collecting figures prominently in Goethe's epistolary novella, Der Sammler und die Seinigen (1799), a rich exposition of collecting practices and their multiple meanings, and a text which can be seen obliquely to illuminate many of its author's later writings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]