A Passion for Fashion

The first major exhibition devoted to costume held at the Walker in 2006, A Passion for Fashion highlighted an important but previously unseen collection. 

All of the 130 items displayed in the exhibition were selected from an enormous collection of 700 items formerly belonging to Mrs Emily Margaret Tinne. Donated to National Museums Liverpool by her daughter, this is now probably the largest surviving collection of period clothes from one person’s wardrobe in Britain. 

Clothing, shoes and accessories worn by Emily Tinne and her children between about 1910 and 1940 were showcased in the exhibition, giving an insight into a long-vanished part of Liverpool’s past. 

Emily’s wardrobe provides us with a snapshot of changing fashions, as worn by a middle-class woman and her family in one of Britain’s greatest provincial cities in the period between the two World Wars. It also tells us something about how people shopped for clothes in Liverpool during that time.