Inside the Westminster Menswear Archive
Inside the Westminster Menswear Archive is a unique guide to the role of garment archives as an industry resource for designers to research and examine both historical garments and the work of their peers. Groves and Sprecher analyse over 140 key garments from the Westminster Menswear Archive, spanning the last 275 years, each brilliantly photographed in close-up detail and annotated with curator commentary, to inspire new generations of designers.
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Highlights include garments from A-COLD-WALL*, Ahluwalia, Aitor Throup Studio, Alexander McQueen, Belstaff, Bernhard Willhelm, Burberry, Casely-Hayford, C.P. Company, Carol Christian Poell, Comme des Garçons, Craig Green, Dior Men, Fred Perry, Helmut Lang, Hussein Chalayan, Jean Paul Gaultier, Junya Watanabe, Louis Vuitton, Martine Rose, Meadham Kirchhoff, Nigel Cabourn, Paul Smith, Prada, Stone Island, Umbro, Undercover, Vexed Generation, and Vollebak
When I met Andrew for the first time in 2017, he told me he wanted to set up the archive, and it was the first time I had heard about a fashion school taking that approach to design education, offering their students the chance to work the same as my father did. It’s a game-changing way to form and shape new designers and develop an alternative way of working. I’m very humbled that Andrew was inspired by my father’s archive, and I’m grateful that he is offering this unprecedented opportunity to a new generation of designers.
Lorenzo Osti
Far more than acting as dormant academic study resource, the archive and this book both play an active role in shaping how students and fashion designers are thinking about the social definitions of masculinity today, and in the future.
Sarah Mower MBE, fashion critic, Vogue
Andrew Groves and Danielle Sprecher open the door to a tantalising glimpse of the significant collection of the Westminster Menswear Archive. Focussed essays and lavish illustrations make this book a truly valuable insight into a wide range of historic and contemporary, designer and utilitarian menswear garments.
Dr Shaun Cole, Associate Professor in Fashion, Winchester School of Art
The Westminster Menswear Archive is one of the most important clothing archives ever created; it captures the undervalued, the ordinary, the mass-produced and the everyday, with a rigor observed through archival garments. This extraordinary collection has been compiled into a book with writing as unique as the objects themselves.
Shelley Fox, Donna Karan Professor of Fashion, Parsons, New York
The Westminster Menswear Archive allows us a unique, non-hierarchical insight into menswear, a space where it is possible to examine anonymous everyday clothing alongside the work of celebrated designers and retailers and to contrast clothing constructed for utilitarian purposes with clothing made for leisure.
Most significantly it collapses the distance between the past and the present, the unique and the commonplace allowing us to understand the history of menswear as a process that is continually evolving.
Professor Jonathan Faiers
Inside the Westminster Menswear Archive12 A
by Andrew Groves and Danielle Sprecher
Introductions from Lorenzo Osti, Professor Jonathan Faiers, and Dr Samuel Ross.
Hardcover | 320 pages | 21 x 27cm | released 16 May 2024.
Published by Bloomsbury Visual Arts