Day in the Life of...A Wardrobe Manager
Historic Royal Palaces Podcast
Historic Royal Palaces
4.6 • 635 Ratings
🗓️ 18 January 2024
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
For the next few episodes, we’re going to be following some of the people who work in our palaces today. We’ll be exploring how these jobs have a historic context to them, and how surprisingly, there are similarities in the work they do now, from the work that was done in the past.
Today we meet Erin, Historic Royal Palaces’ Wardrobe Manager. We step into the treasure trove that is the costume store and contemplate how Erin’s job may have existed in the past. To help contextualise this, Curator Charles Farris will then explore the Medieval world of wardrobe management.
To find out more about the forgotten stories of those who worked at the royal palaces over 300 years ago, a new exhibition is opening at Kensington Palace.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the Historic Royal Palaces podcast. |
| 0:05.0 | For the next couple of episodes we're going to be following in the footsteps of the people who love and look after our six palaces. |
| 0:12.0 | As a charity, we're responsible for the very foundations of the buildings in which we work, as well as telling their histories and stories, and we do this in many different ways. |
| 0:23.6 | But the palaces have always been a place of work for many, and in this series we want to explore the jobs from the past and how to a certain extent they still exist today. |
| 0:33.6 | From the bricks and mortar behind the scenes to how visitors are welcomed at the Tower of London, |
| 0:40.3 | let's explore a day in the life of these historic jobs. |
| 0:48.3 | I'm at Humpton Court today and I think we have the first frost of the year. |
| 0:57.0 | So it's been feeling pretty cold inside the palace. |
| 1:02.0 | But today we're quite lucky we're in the dressing rooms and it's nice and toasty. |
| 1:07.0 | So we are about three flights up and we're looking down into clock court from the, what used to be the Queen's private apartments. |
| 1:15.6 | But it is now the home of the costume collection for historic royal palaces. |
| 1:20.4 | My name's Erin and I'm the wardrobe manager and I cover the Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace, Kensington, sometimes banqueting house |
| 1:28.4 | and wherever else they want to send me. And I'm the manager of everything in the collection, |
| 1:34.3 | so I take care of who wears what, when, and how it's stored and how it's maintained. |
| 1:41.9 | I moved over a year just over a year ago from a theatre in Belfast and I inherited |
| 1:49.1 | this big collection that is now mine and my team's responsibility. It's about 15, 20 years |
| 1:55.9 | old and it was made extremely meticulously from historical references, paintings, anything that could get their |
| 2:05.2 | hands on information-wise. So it is really as accurate as collections come. They're not historical |
| 2:14.1 | costumes. They are replicas in some cases based off portraits or based off any kind of |
| 2:21.1 | historical evidence that we have. But no, these are not actual 500 year old garments. These are |
| 2:27.3 | garments that we've made to create a similar impression. So these costumes are used by lots of different apartments in the |
| 2:37.2 | company and we have schools that use them for school sessions and teaching for primary school kids, |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Historic Royal Palaces, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Historic Royal Palaces and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.