Fashion Museum Bath has announced that Tim Blanks, editor-at-large for The Business of Fashion, will select the Dress of the Year 2024. Each year, the Museum invites a leading figure from the fashion industry to choose an outfit that captures the spirit and style of the past year. The selected design is then added to the Museum’s exceptional Collection.
Established in 1963 by the Museum’s founder Doris Langley Moore, the Dress of the Year initiative has become a cornerstone of the Fashion Museum Bath Collection – and features pieces by designers such as Jean Muir, Ossie Clark, Karl Lagerfeld, Alexander McQueen, Donatella Versace, Vivienne Westwood, and Simone Rocha.
Blanks brings a wealth of experience and insight to this year’s selection. A leading voice in fashion journalism since 1985, he began his career as host of CBC’s globally syndicated Fashion File. He later served as editor-at-large for Style.com and has contributed to publications including Another, Interview, The New York Times, Fantastic Man, and System. His books include Dries Van Noten 1-50 (2017), The World of Anna Sui (2018), Versace Catwalk (2021), and Dior by Raf Simons (2023). In 2013, he received the Council of Fashion Designers of America’s Media Award, the industry’s highest honour for fashion journalism.
Speaking about his role as Dress of the Year selector, Tim Blanks said:
“There’s nothing quite like a Hall of Fame to set my pulse racing, so to be offered the opportunity to select something as significant as the Dress of the Year for the Fashion Museum is a glorious challenge, especially given the nature of the year in question.
2024 was tumultuous for all the right and wrong reasons and, given fashion’s innate ability – and responsibility – to reflect its time, anything I choose to embody the year will inevitably have a fascinating tale to tell. Well, here’s hoping, at least.”
Elaine Uttley, Collections Manager of Fashion Museum Bath, added:
“It’s a real pleasure to welcome Tim Blanks as our Dress of the Year selector for 2024. His deep knowledge of fashion and his ability to interpret its cultural significance make him the perfect person to capture the mood of the past year. As we look ahead to the Museum’s future, Dress of the Year continues to be a powerful way to document the story of fashion as it unfolds.”
Recognised globally as one of the most significant fashion collections, the Fashion Museum Bath Collection spans five centuries—from the late 16th century to the present day. From exquisite couture to everyday wear, the Collection celebrates clothing as a powerful expression of creativity, culture, and identity.
Although the Museum is currently closed to visitors while it undergoes an ambitious transformation and prepares to relocate to a new home in the heart of Bath, its work continues behind the scenes. The Collection is still growing and evolving, with the Dress of the Year remaining a vital way to document and reflect the changing face of contemporary fashion.
Councillor Paul Roper, Cabinet Member for Economic & Cultural Sustainable Development, Bath & North East Somerset Council, said:
“The Dress of the Year is a brilliant example of how Bath continues to play a leading role in celebrating global creativity and culture. Even while the Fashion Museum is closed to visitors, its work remains vibrant and internationally relevant. We’re absolutely thrilled that Tim Blanks will be making the 2024 selection—it’s a real honour for the city and a testament to the Museum’s global reputation.”
The Dress of the Year 2024 will be unveiled in October and added to the Museum’s permanent Collection, continuing a legacy that reflects the ever-evolving world of fashion.
About Fashion Museum Bath
Fashion Museum Bath will bring fashion to life for local and global audiences. It will be located in the Grade II listed Old Post Office in the centre of the UNESCO World Heritage city of Bath. The Museum will champion fashion’s transformative power as a global industry and expression of creativity, culture and identity.
Saving world-class heritage, Fashion Museum Bath will be a catalyst for change, revitalising its Designated Collection in a new museum that will be an exemplar of environmentally sustainable retrofit in a listed building. The museum will inspire and challenge through fashion, exploring it as an artform and global industry, whilst celebrating the creativity of designers, makers, and wearers, and providing learning, skills, digital and wellbeing programmes.
Fashion Museum Bath will appeal to tourists and locals alike, driving socio-economic change and placemaking and supporting and facilitating the creative industries through championing craft, skills, learning & future talent, and creating pathways to jobs and opportunities. It will be a place of community and opportunity for fashion lovers, culture seekers, local audiences, the fashion industry and next generations. Additionally, it will support communities across the region with a range of programmes addressing barriers to access for people who are generally underserved by heritage. It will be a welcoming and accessible space for all.
The new museum will:
- Provide flexible exhibition spaces to display more of the internationally renowned Fashion Museum Bath Collection than ever before.Â
- Showcase a changing programme of exhibitions from our own Collection and other major museums.
- Reveal dedicated and accessible spaces for innovative learning and engagement including lectures, workshops, events, school visits, and residencies.
- Offer café and retail areas.
- Offer commercial venue hire opportunities outside of core public hours.
- Support the creative industries by offering career pathways, talent development pipelines, and partnerships.
- Be an exciting and accessible welcoming space for all – the ‘Museum on the High Street’ relevant for all ages and reducing barriers for those who have not engaged with heritage before.
- Establish a landmark cultural asset, free to local residents and uniting local, national and international communities through creative activities linked to fashion.
Fashion Museum Bath Collection: Fashion Museum Bath holds one of the world’s leading collections of fashion, spanning 400 years of human creativity, from 1600 to the present day. Founded in 1963 as the Museum of Costume, the original collection was gifted to the city of Bath by collector, writer, and dress historian Doris Langley Moore in 1959. Designated as a collection of outstanding national significance, it has since grown to 100,000 items, with strengths in European, especially British, fashionable dress and accessories. It also encompasses sketches, fashion magazines, fashion photography and designers’ archives.
The Collection includes many of the best examples of fashionable dress in worldwide collections. It is the variety and extent of the collection, accessible in a single museum, that sets it out as rare and unusual on an international scale.
The Old Post Office: The Old Post Office is one of only a few listed 20th century buildings in the centre of Bath. The project will bring back to life this key heritage and civic building that has fallen into disrepair and will be designed as an exemplar of environmentally sustainable retrofit. The Old Post Office offers up to 3500sqm of space for the Museum, a transformational change in scale to showcase more of the Collection.
Timings: It is anticipated that construction will start on site in 2027, and that the new museum will open in Autumn 2030.
Milsom Quarter Masterplan: The museum is a key part of Bath and North East Somerset Council’s regeneration plan to reimagine central Bath to create a destination for fashion and culture. The Fashion Museum Bath will be an anchor element of the Milsom Quarter Masterplan to make the area a great place to live, work and socialise.
For more information on the Milsom Quarter Masterplan, and the other projects underway see our video and website.
