Janet Arnold

Janet Arnold was born in Bristol on 6 October 1932 and attended the Red Maids School there. At the West of England College of Art she obtained qualifications in arts and crafts and dress design, followed by a certificate in education from Bristol University and an art teacher’s diploma. She then spent a year, 1954-5, in the London workrooms of two of the leading couturiers of the day, Frederick Starke and Victor Stiebel, learning to cut, sew, tailor and fit clothes. In her spare time she worked as an assistant in the wardrobe of Bernard Miles’ newly established Mermaid Theatre in Puddledock. From early childhood she had been captivated by visits to the Bristol Old Vic and this fascination with all things theatrical along with a chance reading, in her student days, of an extract from the Stowe inventory of Queen Elizabeth’s glamorous `apparell’, inspired her to undertake research into historic dress, a subject for which she was to become pre-eminent on both sides of the Atlantic. To pay her way, Arnold taught at Hammersmith College from 1955-62 and then moved to Avery Hill College of Education as senior lecturer until 1970. During this time she travelled widely in Britain, Europe and America, visiting museums and galleries to study the clothes of both men and women depicted in contemporary portraits; libraries to consult fashion plates and book illustrations, and historical costume collections to learn how the garments were put together. Arnold produced meticulous drawings and patterns, made slides (she had over 100,000) and wrote detailed descriptions of the items she studied, all of which stimulated interest in the study of costume as well as being of practical use to theatrical costumiers and designers. Her first two books in the Patterns of Fashion series were published by Macmillan in 1965 and appealed to a wide audience of students, designers and historians, as did her numerous articles in Costume, The Burlington Magazine and other journals. Arnold began to make her name; invitations to lecture and to undertake television projects increased and in 1970 she resigned from Avery Hill to take the first tentative steps towards working free lance, her initial safety net being a part-time research lectureship at West Surrey College of Art from 1971-5. In 1973 she was awarded a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship for three months’ study of sixteenth-century portraits and textiles in Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden. A Handbook of Costume was published in that year, and in 1975, now dependent solely on income from fellowships and grants, she began single-minded research into her first love, the finery of Queen Elizabeth I. While Jubilee Research Fellow in the department of drama at Royal Holloway College, she published in 1978 the first fruits of this research,`Lost from Her Majesties Back’, items of clothing and jewels lost or given away by Queen Elizabeth I between 1561 and 1585. Arnold’s consummate publication appeared in 1988, Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Unlock’d, the first complete transcript of the Inventories of the Wardrobe of Robes prepared in July 1600, edited from the Stowe manuscripts in the British Library, the Public Record Office and the Folger Shakespeare Library. She included a commentary drawn from day books, records of gifts, seamstresses’ bills, laundry lists and other trivia from the Tudor court unearthed during her lifetime’s study of the subject. The volume was handsomely produced by Maney, illustrated by many of the author’s own photographs, and there could be no more appropriate memorial to Arnold’s dedication, scholarship and imagination than this description and interpretation of the extravagant attire of the most theatrical of monarchs, obsessed with the illusion of eternal youth.When, in 1992, the publication was first mooted of the Inventory of Henry VIII from manuscripts held by the Society of Antiquaries and the British Library it was obvious that Janet Arnold would be invited to write the commentary on dress. An indispensable member of the advisory panel, often outspoken but always constructive, she was among the first to complete her contribution to the proposed volume 2 of the Inventory, despite the onset of fatal illness. She was also looking forward to contributing to the publication of the Mary Rose finds. But Tudor costume was not Arnold’s only interest. Beginning in 1983 she participated in the decade-long conservation of the remains of the sixteenth-century Medici grave clothes at the Pitti Palace; she was consultant to the Royal Armoury in Stockholm, the National Museum in Nuremburg and the Bavarian National Museum in Munich and worked in Prague on the grave clothes of Ferdinand I. A final award in June 1998 which gave her supreme pleasure, though her health was rapidly failing, was the inaugural Sam Wannamaker Award from Bankside’s Globe Theatre, in recognition of her unrivalled work for the theatre, not least in persuading Shakespearean actors that authentic underclothes, as well as properly constructed period costumes and accessories, enhanced their performance. As long ago as 1969 she had organized an exhibition of her costume designs for the BBC’s television programmes, Six Wives of Henry VIII, at the Victoria and Albert Museum, which proved one of its most popular displays. Characteristically, she had completed preparations for a retrospective exhibition of her work which opened at the same museum in February 1999 and two further volumes of the Patterns of Fashion are sufficiently advanced to be finalised for publication by colleagues. Janet Arnold was always willing to review a book, give a lecture, referee a paper, or offer an (unsolicited) opinion. Her long letters, written with a thick nib in a strong, positive hand appeared regularly; she was never known to type, her books and articles being handwritten and prepared for the press professionally, on a computer. She loved cats, enjoyed detective stories, and the theatre never lost its allure. Along with typewriters, she hated aeroplanes and one wondered if she ever succumbed to a sewing machine, accomplished dressmaker that she was. Janet Arnold died on 2 November 1998 and is buried in the Devonshire village of Sampford Courtenay.