Textile Tours at Chatsworth

Join our expert Textiles team for an overview of ongoing remedial and preventative conservation of the collection.

13th October: Preventative Conservation & Remedial Care 

This tour explores the vital role of the textiles team and the Chatsworth House Trust charity in caring for and protecting the historic textile collections. These objects are an important resource for learning and continue to inspire contemporary designers, craftspeople, and those interested in dress, interiors, and social history. The tour highlights how the team work to balance access with preservation, making often extremely fragile objects safe to display, study and enjoy while ensuring their survival for the future.

Through examples of both remedial and preventative care, visitors will see how conservation decisions are made in practice. The polonaise chintz bed is used to demonstrate conservation versus reproduction of cloth and trimmings, and to explore when and why a soft furnishing might be retired. The tour also examines preventative care through the house’s storage practices, showing how careful packing and protection guard against insect damage and atmospheric risks, supported by examples from the historic clothing collection.

13 October: Commissioning and the Contemporary Textiles Collection 

The Devonshire Collection continues to grow, shaped both by the house’s life as a home and its role as a source of inspiration for contemporary designers. This tour explores commissioning and the contemporary textiles collection, bringing together soft furnishings, carpets, clothing, and accessories that reflect personal taste, creative collaboration and modern interpretations of historic design. Each object reveals something about the person or family member who commissioned or bought it, or the modern designers who are inspired by Chatsworth and its collections.

The tour includes the Scots Bedroom, where contemporary commissioning by the current Duchess is explored through a carpet designed by Hugh Henry, collaborations with Richard Humphries Weaving and Brian Turner trimmings and a Gucci couture dress created to mark the three-year partnership between Gucci and Chatsworth. In the Scots Dressing Room, historic textiles are shown as a continuing source of inspiration, including the Erdem collaboration inspired by Duchess Deborah, garments and furnishings developed from the historic textile collections, and a contemporary Gucci slogan jumper referencing historic examples, all set alongside the Scots bed dressed in historic chintz.

For full details please see here.