The Queen’s University Collection of Canadian Dress and the Heritage Quilt Collection are two important, regionally-based decorative arts collections within the Canadian Historical Art Collection. The Collection of Canadian Dress comprises over 2500 fashion items that span the late 1700s to 1970s, offering a compelling material-based avenue to understanding the social and economic history of the period, as well as the evolution of fashion aesthetics, domestic life and textile labour. The Heritage Quilt Collection contains more than 80 quilts with outstanding variations on nineteenth- and twentieth-century traditional patterns, emphasizing the rich production of Eastern Ontario.
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Above: Zandra Rhodes, Dress, 1973–1976, silk. Gift of Sylvia Gillespie-Keyl, 1999 (C99-001.01). Photo: Bernard Clark