When Chicago’s Driehaus Museum booked the exhibition “Dressing Downton: Changing Fashion for Changing Times” for early this year, executives knew it would arrive during the sixth season of “Downton Abbey,” the hit PBS historical drama that has delighted and frustrated viewers in almost equal measure.
What they didn’t know, a couple of years back, was that the sixth would be the last season, the final lurching steps into modernity for the Crawley family of the titular estate.
“Oh, that’s terrible, but …” museum director Lise Dube-Scherr recalls thinking.
And then she started preparing for a very proper, very polite onslaught. The costume exhibit culled from the show has been a major hit at previous stops, beginning last February at the Biltmore in North Carolina, even without the added boost of the curtain closing on this glimpse into lives of the British gentry at the beginning of the 20th century.
Now it’s the turn of the Driehaus, the elegant River North museum housed in a Gilded Age mansion and devoted to architecture and design of the past.
Figuring on as many as 35,000 visitors during “Dressing Downton’s” three-month run — almost equal to recent annual attendance of about 39,000 — the 13-year-old museum has rented an adjacent, attached small auditorium to serve as temporary gift-shop headquarters, as a sitting room while patrons wait for their time of exhibition entry and as the venue for the museum’s thrice-daily, “Downton”-inspired afternoon tea service.
Arriving in period costume is, of course, encouraged, although whalebone corsetry is strictly optional, especially for gentlemen. And the tablecloths at tea, rest assured, will not resemble the one at the end of the formal meal in Sunday’s fifth episode, the third to last in “Downton’s” long, slow denouement.
With member previews set to begin Thursday and a public opening Tuesday, “Dressing Downton,” which displays three dozen outfits from the series’ first four seasons, was mostly mounted by Wednesday morning, and staff seemed excited.
In the museum world, “there really is nothing like it right now that crosses the line between the artistic and popular culture,” Dube-Scherr said. “Maybe ‘David Bowie,’ ” a reference to “David Bowie Is,” the exhibition that was a 2014 blockbuster for the nearby Museum of Contemporary Art.
Dube-Scherr said her museum has sold 12,000 tickets for “Downton” (with admission boosted to $25 from the regular $20) and membership has more than doubled.
So will all this anticipation be rewarded?
The answer, I am pleased to report, is “yes,” and that affirmative comes from someone who watches the show but is no longer much of a fan of the show. In recent years, I’ve grown weary of the plodding pace, the numbingly frequent reminders that the times are a-changing, and the heavy-handed script maneuvers such as Sunday’s dinner visit to Downton by future Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain at which he — guess what? — appeased and appeased and then appeased some more.
But amid my exasperation, I have, I must admit, continued to care about the characters, and I’ve greatly admired the period detail and especially the clothing. Just as you can watch the Oscars primarily to see what people will wear, you can watch “Downton” for a crash course in high-end women’s fashion in and around the flapper era. It’s pretty cool stuff, as designers were casting off restrictive foundational garments and discovering a more natural female figure.
Indeed, some of the clothing looks downright modern. Lady Sybil’s velvet maternity dress or Virginia Woolf’s silk-net embroidered dress in the exhibit’s very first room, for instance, were the bohemian style of the day but wouldn’t look out of place in a contemporary college-town shop.
Best represented among the characters, unsurprisingly, is Lady Mary Crawley, Sybil’s sister and the show’s resident clotheshorse. Visitors will see her riding outfit (and sidesaddle) and dress after flowing dress. Visitors will also marvel at the tiny little waists; actress Michelle Dockery, from the look of it, is a few sandwiches short of a size 0.
(Because the exhibition only goes up to the fourth season, we don’t see some of Mary’s more “mannish” recent outfits, including neckties and such, as she’s taken on the role of managing the estate. Similarly, we don’t see the more modern, colorful garb the show’s costumers put on the third sister, Lady Edith, as her life shifts toward London and running a magazine.)
Also well represented in “Dressing Downton” — crafted by the Minnesota firm Exhibits Development Group — is their mother, Cora Crawley, with clothes perhaps more conservative but also supremely elegant.
Although the show’s most reliably interesting character has been Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess, the sisters’ grandmother, she is most evident in a great purple two-piece day dress seen frequently during the early years. This is a battleship of a garment, commanding you to yield.
There are a handful of representations of servants’ outfits and a decent selection of menswear, although, let’s face it, men’s clothing is so much less variable through the years that the reaction is muted: Oh, a linen suit. Oh, white-tie evening wear. The most remarkable of them is the bright-red military get-up worn by patriarch Robert Crawley, Lord Grantham, and by the beloved Matthew Crawley. “Downton” devotees will likely enjoy Matthew’s sartorial resurrection, at least, through this exhibition.
Seeing these clothes occupied by headless mannequins is something of a relief. You can focus on the clothes for longer — some of these ensembles had only fleeting moments in the show. Without the actor in Mrs. Hughes’ tidy wool work dress, for instance, you don’t have to think about how much her romantic storyline owes to “The Remains of the Day,” Kazuo Ishiguro’s great 1989 novel about the English serving class.
And the Driehaus gives the exhibit plenty of room to breathe. The outfits are spread throughout the rooms of the mansion’s three floors, no more than a few per room in most cases. This allows for a perusal not just of “Downton” wear but of the roughly period-appropriate setting, a high-status city mansion, richly detailed in its construction materials and decorated with Tiffany lamps, for instance, from the Driehaus Collection.
Not only is this exhibit rich in nostalgia for old England and old Chicago, but it also speaks to the way television used to be. When, after “Downton,” are we again likely to see the phrase “PBS hit”? Revel, a little, in that, and remember that not every textile associated with public television has to be a tote bag.
Twitter@StevenKJohnson
‘Dressing Downton’
When: Tuesday through May 8
Where: Driehaus Museum, 40 E. Erie St.
Tickets: $25; 312-482-8933 or driehausmuseum.org
