CAMBRIDGE — It’s 1974. Cher holds the hand of glowering American composer Henry Mancini as they walk up the steps onto the Academy Awards stage. She kicks out her ankles just a little with each step. Henry has worn the customary tuxedo. There is nothing standard about Cher. She is – once again — radiant in a Bob Mackie original, a “floral sarong-style dress skirt with scant wrap-tie bralette.”
Nearly 30 years later, I am looking at the dress. It is behind a glass wall inside the Cambridge Fashion History Museum in a row of seven Bob Mackie outfits worn by Cher during her decades-long performing career.
So how did a piece of Hollywood history end up in Cambridge, Ontario?
Jonathan Walford's personal collection of items forms the core of the museum’s collection. (VIcky Mochama)
Housed in a former post-office building, the Fashion History Museum is a repository of clothes, shoes, and accessories representing hundreds of years of fashion art and history; the oldest item in the collection is a 3,500-year-old piece of Egyptian cotton. When Canada Post decommissioned the building in 1993, it was purchased by a local resident who, in 2016, rented out the first floor and basement to the burgeoning museum.
The museum combines the expertise of Kenn Norman, a longtime museums professional, and Jonathan Walford, a fashion historian and the founding curator of Toronto’s Bata Shoe Museum. For Norman, the museum began as a homework assignment in a life-coaching course. “The idea just took hold,” he says, seated across from me in the museum’s café, where handkerchiefs commemorating the 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II are mounted on a grass-green wall. For Walford, it has been a lifelong passion project; his personal collection of items forms the core of the museum’s collection.
The idea — to showcase Walford’s extensive collection in an independent Canadian institution — now faces an uncertain future. Last week, the museum received a letter from the City of Cambridge notifying it that it would be receiving only a portion of a grant it had applied for. The museum requested $96,000 — $79,825 of which would have covered the rent on the building and the commercial-property tax and the rest of which would have gone to cover facility costs like the heat and insurance — but was offered $45,000.
From left to right: Kenn Norman, Jonathan Walford, and museum employee Rachel Behling. (Vicky Mochama)
According to a city spokesperson, in 2023, the Community Grants program “received a total of 49 applications totaling, $994,706, compared to the approved Community Grants budget of $361,900.” In the previous year, the grant program received “50 applications totalling, $1,028,773 compared to the approved Community Grants budget of $354,800.”
“With requests exceeding the budget by almost [three times], the Grants Review Committee had to make some difficult decisions and tried to ensure that a variety of groups received some funding from the City where applications aligned with our strategic priorities,” reads the emailed statement.
It’s not the first time the grant hasn’t worked out for the museum. In 2020, it received $45,000, but federal emergency rent subsidies, as well at the pandemic-era CEBA loan program, helped stave off the situation it now finds itself in. That same year, the city bought the red-brick post-office building for $1.2 million from the museum’s former landlord, who then lived on the museum’s second floor. When the city bought the building, she moved out, and the museum became a tenant of the entire building. According to Norman and Walford, the money they’ll be getting this year will effectively cover the cost of the rent to the city — which they’re hoping can be negotiated if their portion of the grant isn’t increased.
“Our issue is with the rent, not with the city,” says Norman.
The Fashion History Museum is a repository of clothes, shoes, and accessories representing hundreds of years of fashion art and history. (Vicky Mochama)
Cambridge mayor Jan Liggett says there’s an “abundance” of groups who are looking for city-owned spaces to lease. “At our lower-tier level, our money has to go to infrastructure,” she said by phone on Friday. “We’re not the funding body in the region.”
A provincial grant, the Community Museums Operating Grant, once yearly doled out $4.9 million, but it has been closed to new applicants since 2016.
Ontario Museums Association interim executive director Robin Etherington says by email that the challenges faced by the small community museums, like the Fashion History Museum, point to the need for an “updated, upgraded National Museum Policy” that would both streamline how museums apply for grants from all levels of government and provide “sustainable operating funding.”
“Fundamentally, small/community level museums expend a great deal of time, energy, and resources applying for grants in order to be sustainable.”
Supporters say the city should consider the benefits the museum brings to the region. “As Toronto overpopulates itself and prices itself out of the realm of affordability for a lot of people, you have a lot of people moving into the satellite communities in the Golden Horseshoe and into southwestern Ontario,” says Ian Drummond, who sits on the museum’s board and is also the owner of the largest costume-rental business in Canada. “Those regions need a cultural identity, too. They need museums; they need theatre.”
The museum began displaying items in the decomissioned Canada Post building in 2016. (VIcky Mochama)
And, he adds, the museum plays an important role in Canada’s fashion ecosystem. Torontonians have access to the Royal Ontario Museum’s collection and the Bata Shoe Museum. In Quebec, there’s also the McCord Stewart Museum, which houses a 27,000-item collection of clothes worn by Montrealers and manufactured locally. But, says Drummond, “there are almost no collections in the public realm for people to see.”
And items from the museum’s collection have been viewed by many who’ve never visited its bricks-and-mortar home.
Joanna Syrokomla is out shopping for award-show gowns when I call. She’s the costume designer for the historical detective TV show, Murdoch Mysteries. The Fashion History Museum has opened its collection and archives to her for inspiration.
“It’s always wonderful to be able to see historical garments and how they’re constructed,” she says. She points out that the museum also often functions as a clearing house for 20th-century items that she uses on the show. “It’s all incredible research that is not available online as everyone seems to think it is.”
Fashion writer Isabel Slone, who covered the museum for the now-defunct Racked, says the situation is “a huge disappointment and an institutional failure.” She says the museum “could be a cultural hub for the province, but it’s not, because it doesn’t have enough funding from the government, and there’s not a wealthy patron who’s agreed to take it on. If the Jeff Bezos of Canada, [someone like] Galen Weston, wanted to add some value to his legacy, he could fund this museum in perpetuity — nobody’s stepped up.”
Joanna Syrokomla, costume designer Murdoch Mysteries, has taken inspiration from items at the museum. (Vicky Mochama)
Norman and Walford aren’t done fighting. They’re planning to take their case directly to city council, which will hear deputations on the budget on March 28. They’re hoping councillors will hear their plea, opening up a chance to renegotiate the lease or to come up with another option.
When I ask Norman and Walford whether they anticipated navigating so much small-town politics when they selected Cambridge as the city to house Walford’s then-3,000-piece private collection of fashion history, they laugh.
“We were naive,” says Walford.
The day I visit, Kenn tells the story of Canadian fashion designer Pat McDonald, whose archives are held in the museum’s library, on the second floor. Her personal records reveal a few tough financial seasons in her 60-year fashion career.
Walford quickly interjects with “you’re only as good as your last dress.” Kenn agrees, adding, “Don’t think it’s all about the glamour and design. You have to think as a business person as well.”
Ontario Hubs are made possible by the Barry and Laurie Green Family Charitable Trust and Goldie Feldman in Memoriam.
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