Lady Lever exhibition is a bobby dazzler

Dazzling evening gowns and jackets from across the decades are going on show at the Lady Lever Art Gallery.

Bedazzled, which opens on Saturday, features 20 outfits from the 1920s to the 1980s, with much of the brightly coloured later clothing coming from the wardrobe of the late Leila Potter and donated to National Museums Liverpool by her family.

It also features a selection of eye-catching, diamanté-embellished accessories.

And the display explores the history of changing fashions through the 20th Century, particularly following the First World War, and information of how these exquisite evening items were crafted, from beaded eveningwear made in Paris in the 1920s to sequinned jackets crafted in India in the 1980s, with many of them involved hours of painstaking hand-stitching to achieve their glittering designs.

Among the frocks on show are a silk georgette dress embroidered with silk and coloured glass bugle beeds circa 1924-28; a silk and net evening dress from 1928-9 embroidered with gold sequins and imitation pearls; a full-length gown of cotton net embroidered with sequins from the early 1930s and which belonged to Jane Moreton, daughter of Titanic chief officer Henry Tingle Wilde, and a French-made sequinned evening cape dating to around 1930.

Above: A gallery slideshow of gowns and jackets from the new Bedazzled exhibition at Lady Lever Art Gallery

Meanwhile the exhibition also highlights a selection of colourful evening jackets from the 1980s, 1990s and ‘noughties’ which were owned and worn by businesswoman and campaigner Leila Potter who lived in Bunbury in Cheshire.

Potter, whose father owned a large business within the leather industry in Liverpool, grew up in Wirral and attended Birkenhead Girls’ School.

She later moved to Cheshire with her husband George and became a parish and district councillor, school governor, and award-winning campaigner – both on local issues and on trying to secure an equal number of women representatives at Westminster.

A talented tennis player and pianist, she was particularly enthusiastic about fashion, being recalled by family members as “flamboyant and full of joie de vivre”.

“She was the most amazing, eccentric woman, very tall and always glamorous,” recalls niece Judi Potter who offered the archive of evening wear to the museum after her aunt’s death two years ago. “She would walk in and stop a room. She was a tour de force.”

Above: Judi Potter and Sarah Green with two of Leila Potter’s sequinned and embroidered evening jackets.

And Potter’s daughter Sarah Green adds: “She was always dressed up, no matter what. She had a whole room with racks of clothes. When I was a child, she would also make all her own and then make me a little outfit from the remnants.

“Later she would buy a dress she liked and add to it.”

Lady Lever Art Gallery head Pauline Rushton says: “Bedazzled is a riot of beads, sequins and sparkle – bringing a real dose of colour and glamour to the gallery over the festive period.”

Speaking about the Leila Potter bequests, she adds: “When Judi brought a selection of things to show me, I knew right away there were items I’d love and which filled a gap in our collection. They were perfect.

“Glitzy styles from this period were likely to have been influenced in part by popular American television programmes such as Dallas and Dynasty, where sequins and shoulder pads were synonymous with some of the leading female characters.”

Bedazzled is at the Lady Lever Art Gallery from October 26 to January 26.