Page 333 - The Secret Museum

AFTER I LEFT SCHOOL I lived in India to ‘teach’ in a school in a village in Himachal

Pradesh. I loved it. The village was filled with fantastic characters, the countryside
around it was lush and green and the children were adorable. At the weekends my
friends and I would jump on a bus and head to Dharamsala, home of the exiled Dalai
Lama. The town was full of monks dressed in their robes, walking the streets, sitting
in cafés talking about Tibet and showing photographs of themselves on their travels.
We could walk up to their temple to watch them meditating and chanting. It was

heaven for me, even though I wasn’t into meditation then.
Anyway, meeting Tibetan monks during those months in India is probably the

reason I fell for a Tibetan costume and picked it out from the epic swathes of
costumes from every era and every continent stored in the Victoria and Albert
Museum.

When I saw it, it lived in the Asian costume storage room inside the museum itself
where the museum keeps its vast collection of textiles and paintings that are light
sensitive and can’t be on permanent display. But by now it has probably been moved
to the V&A Museum’s storage rooms in Blythe House. When I visited, the V&A was
planning to move the entire Asian and western textile collection to new storage

rooms there, called the Clothworkers’ Centre for Textiles and Fashion Study and
Conservation, due to open in 2013. There the garments will be stored according to
type of clothing, rather than geography so that the researchers, artists and designers
who ask to delve into the storehouse can easily find the clothes they’d like to see.

As they packed the costumes in preparation for the move, the curators told me that
they are uncovering new things all the time. They had just found some wall hangings
that had once belonged to Marie Antoinette.

John Clarke, a curator who looks after Himalayan, Burmese and Thai treasures,
offered to show me the Tibetan costume.

After he had buzzed me through into a study room behind a wooden door just at the
end of the café, I found myself in a high-ceilinged room. Two people were working

on the costumes up on a mezzanine level and, down below, where John and I stood,
there were shoes laid out on racks. He explained that a jewellery designer who likes
shoes had just been in to study different styles for a collection she was working on.

He took the costume out to show me and laid it carefully on a table. It is a Tibetan
abbot’s costume made up of several different pieces: a heavy woollen skirt; a jacket
with a museum number sewn into it showing it came into the museum in 1930; a pair
of red velvet boots with woven soles; a wonderful yellow headdress, the colour of
the Dalai Lama’s sect of Buddhism; a monk’s robe, which is wrapped around the

body; a vibrant red over-jacket beautifully tailored with red cotton and wool and a
ceremonial water bottle. The whole lot is stored, like so many hidden treasures,
inside a grey box with its catalogue number on it, and kept on a shelf.

This costume hasn’t ever been on display, because the museum owns another,