ONE of the latest additions to the Worcestershire museum collections is this fabulous outfit worn by Ginny Lemon, pictured, on Ru Paul’s Drag Race UK.

It can now be seen alongside costume worn on stage by Vesta Tilley in the early 1900s in the new exhibition Captivating Costume at the County Museum at Hartlebury Castle.

Vesta Tilley and Ginny Lemon are both performing artists with strong links to Worcestershire and although their lives, works and personal lives may encompass differences, taken together we can gain an understanding of how fashion, particularly in a performance context and the adoption of stage personae and alter egos allow playful exploration and satirical comment upon gender stereotypes.

The costumes demonstrate ways in which contemporary queer artists can look to the past in order to understand their present and to develop a kind of kinship with trailblazers, innovators and iconoclasts from the past and to bring this energy and iconography into the present.

The costumes each belong to their own contexts and eras, of music hall performers in the 1870s and 21st century reality television.

These environments have much in common and can help us to consider the roles of performance artists subverting gender stereotypes.

Ginny’s Vesta Tilley outfit speaks to contemporary experience and through fashion, acknowledges forms of drag moving beyond female impersonation but to also include drag kings, AFAB (assigned female at birth), trans and/or non-binary identities, personae and creatives.

The use of fashion and costume design is part of this process of playing with gender stereotypes and allowing an audience to revel in this play – sometimes to subvert gender stereotypes – in a way not always possible with day-to-day fashion.

February is LGBT History Month and this is a great time to re/discover exhibits in the County collection which help illuminate, either explicitly or in more coded ways, aspects of queer experience both in the past and today.

Ginny Lemon has also recorded their thoughts on the relationship of fashion and gender which can be viewed on our Museums Worcestershire YouTube page.

To plan your visit to Captivating Costume, and to learn more about our exhibitions and events, visit the website www.museumsworcestershire.org.uk.