Professor Amy De La Haye

Biography

Amy de la Haye MA (RCA), RSA, is a curator and writer and tutor. She is Professor of Dress History & Curatorship and a member (former joint founder and director) of the Research Centre for Fashion Curation at London College (LCF) UAL. She is Associate Exhibitions Reviews Editor at SHOWstudio; Resident Curator at the Fashion Textile Museum (2025-28) and consultant curator for the Museum of British Folklore.

She is a course tutor on LCF’s MA Womenswear course and teaches on MA Fashion Curation and Cultural Production, BA Costume for Performance and across other courses. She supervises several (primarily practiced based and led) PhD students. She has 10 completions and has examined 7 PhDs. She has secured and led two NLHF funding bids.

Much of her work is united by an emphasis upon interpreting items of fashion and dress, often imprinted with wear and occasionally completely perished, to tell stories about lives lived. Mostly female. She is fascinated by the craft of haute couture and the ancillary trades, particularly flower making. And, has a major interest in popular and folk cultures and how flowers and the natural world interface with our dressed appearances.

She is currently organising a series of five small exhibitions which variously engage with masculinity and embroidery, PTSD, flower makers with disabilities, sequins’ and sustainability, Caribbean women making clothing from flour sacks and will scrutinise a hand-painted silk garter, dated 1828, with a disturbing hand-painted design.

Most recently, she has worked with Simon Costin and Mellan Robinson from the Museum of British Folklore and co/curated exhibitions Un/Common People: Folk Culture in Wessex (Swindon, Wiltshire, Poole and Salisbury Museums 2025-27), Making Mischief: Folk Costume in Britain (Compton Verney 2023 and at LCF 2024) and Wild & Cultivated: Fashioning the Rose (Garden Museum, 2022). She was lead curator of Ravishing; The Rose in Fashion (with Colleen Hill, The Museum at the Fashion Institute of New York, 2021). At Brighton Museum she has co-authored a Collections Review and co/curated Gluck: Art & Identity (2017), Cinderellas of the Soil; the uniforms worn by members of Britain’s Women’s Land Army (2009) and The Messel Family Dress Collection (2005).

During lockdown she initiated and authored the ongoing ‘Fashion in a Time of Crisis’ video essays and presented ‘SKINS,’ five short films on gaming costumes released April 2024 for SHOWstudio.

In 2024-25 she wrote catalogue essays for exhibitions on Worth (Paris), Chanel (Monaco) and Dior’s garden (for Dior, Musée Christian Dior, Granville). And she is about to start writing a major publication on flowers and dressed appearances for Phaidon. She has written extensively for V&A Publications, including books to accompany the Streetstyle and Cutting Edge exhibitions, portraits of the museum’s Worth and Lucile archives and her children’s book Clara Button and the Magical Hat Day is being translated for a musical play. For Yale University Press she has co/authored Ravishing: The Rose in Fashion, Gluck: Art & Identity and Exhibiting Fashion: Before and After 1971. She has also co-authored books on fashion for Thames and Hudson’s World of Art series and written many texts and edited special issues of Fashion Theory.

Amy studied for her degree in design history at Brighton University, specialising in dress with Professor Lou Taylor and then went on to the Royal College of Art where she was awarded an MA in Cultural History (by thesis). She started her career working at Hove Museum (1987-1991) where she learned the full range of museum and curatorial skills and then as Curator of 20th Century Dress at the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) 1991-98. In 1994 she co-curated the Streetstyle: From Sidewalk to Catwalk and The Cutting Edge: 50 Years of British Fashion (1997) exhibitions at the V&A. She also acquired the famous Vivienne Westwood blue shoes that Naomi Campbell famously tumbled in whilst wearing!