Storerooms

Through examples of the Fashion museum of the City of Paris: the Galliera Museum, and the Centre National du Costume de Scène of Moulin (Allier, France), let's see now what storeroom's textile museum look like.

Storerooms are organized to contain the whole collections of the museum in accordance with preservation conditions fix by the ICOM (International Council of Museum): maintenance at 50% of relative humidity and a temperature of 18°C, air filtering to avoid dust and protect pieces in covers and packaging in neutral materials.

They often consist of work space big enough. In the work room, we make the preservation work of textiles, studies and searchs: inventory, marking, dust removal, photography shooting, costumes's preparation for an exhibition, use of mannequins... For these 2 museums, these spaces are on the ground floor of their respective building.

At the Galliera Museum, the building usual to preservation and restoration makes 4500 m2 on 3 levels. In the basement, we find the storerooms. In the CNCS, the storerooms building extend on 1730 m2 and on 3 floors, in these ones are the storerooms.

In the storerooms of a textile museum, furnitures are specific, and the dying of textile pieces change compared with a fine arts museum for example.

At the Galliera Museum, collections are group together by historic period, by volumes, by series, and by label. These pieces are hanging or well tidy at flat according to their fragility. They are in a mettalic furniture and disapear in a lot of row. They are lock up in drawers, in cotton cover ("décati"), protect from light, from dust. These pieces are kept sheltered from looks.

The furniture, specifically designed, is in metal covered with epoxy painting under heat. Open for a best ventilation of works stored, it is divided into 2 systems of tidy: clothes are hanging in the upper part, when they can support this kind of storage, or keep flat in drawers in the lower part when they are too fragile or that their weight and their strucutre don't make possible the hanging.

In the CNCS, it's the same thing. The tidying to preserve collections, can contain around 10 000 costumes (namely more 20 000 pieces). There is a furniture, like compactus (row of wardrobe put on a false floor with rails), made on the scale of preserve pieces.