In a studio inside Abbotsford Convent hangs a 1970s Yves Saint Laurent safari suit. Nearby, a perfectly cut Givenchy jacket swaying next to a delicate silk blouse with thirty tiny shell buttons that have survived for more than a century.
None of them are for sale. In fact, no one is supposed to wear them at all.
Instead, they are borrowed the way someone might borrow a rare book.
Designer Hannah Canham brought This Era Archive to the Convent in March. As far as she knows, it’s Australia’s first fashion archive dedicated to lending garments not to collectors or stylists, but to fashion designers looking for inspiration.
“People think designers sit down with a blank page,” she says. “But often the process starts by looking backwards.”
Hannah’s collection, worth more than AUD $100,000, contains around 1,000 garments spanning the early 1900s through to the late 1990s. Most are pieces from the great European fashion houses – Yves Saint Laurent, Chanel, Givenchy, Chloé, Dior – and are in a Brunswick warehouse. Only a carefully curated selection is displayed inside her Convent studio.
Designers don’t hire the clothes to wear. They lease them for one to three months to study.
Sometimes they’re searching for something specific: military tailoring, 1970s suiting, antique blouses. Sometimes the brief is wonderfully vague.
“‘Spring in the 1960s’,” Hannah says. “Or romantic Chinese gardens.”
In response, Hannah pulls garments from the archive for loan. Designers sketch them, examine seams, study silhouettes and pattern cutting. Each piece is rented only once per season before being “rested”, ensuring no two designers begin in exactly the same place.
The idea is commonplace in fashion capitals like Paris, New York, London and Berlin, where Hannah has spent much of the past decade building her business. In Melbourne, it’s almost unheard of.
The concept first clicked while she was working alongside designers in New York.
“They would go to these archives like a library,” she says. “Some were huge warehouses with tens of thousands of garments. Others were incredibly curated collections with a really specific point of view.”
One Brooklyn archive was an industrial space filled almost entirely with Yohji Yamamoto, Issey Miyake and Comme des Garçons.
Slowly, Hannah began building her own collection, adding pieces from every city she lived in.
She spent Sunday mornings in Madrid wandering El Rastro flea market, practising Spanish with Rosa, one of her favourite vintage dealers. One morning Rosa produced a pristine 1950s couture jacket by Pedro Rodríguez, the Spanish couturier who dressed Audrey Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor.
“To find a couture jacket in a basement vintage store at nine in the morning is a good day,” Hannah says.
There was the silk shantung Cerruti 1881 suit hiding in an unassuming Paris antique shop which Hannah snapped up before anyone else noticed.
Then there was the fragile Edwardian silk blouse she found in a second-hand shop in Tasmania, covered in delicate pintucks and thirty tiny shell buttons.
“It was too small and too delicate to wear,” she says. “I bought it because I’d fallen in love with it.”
Looking back, she thinks that blouse marked the beginning of the archive.
There’s something fitting about This Era Archive finding a home at Abbotsford Convent — both places where history and heritage is preserved and respected and from which lessons can be drawn.