When Fashion Met Puppets: “Clangers, Bagpuss & Co” @ The V&A Museum of Childhood, London |

In previous posts on this site we often looked at the possibility of making connections between puppet theatre productions and fashion, at times suggesting readers to spend some time in dedicated institutions such as Glasgow's Museum/Research Centre The World Through Wooden Eyes, that organises workshops and preserves the collection of pupper master John M. Blundall.

Yet, while puppets can inspire fashion, it is also true that real clothes can inspire puppet makers. These are the main reasons why if you're a fashion designer/design student or work in animation, you shouldn't dismiss the possibility of visiting a toy or a childhood museum to get inspired, while keeping your mind also focused on very original fashion creations.

Later on this week the V&A Museum of Childhood in London launches the event "Clangers, Bagpuss & Co", a major retrospective curated by Alice Sage dedicated to the cult creations of Smallfilms, writer, animator and narrator Oliver Postgate and modelmaker and illustrator Peter Firmin's production company.

Oliver Postgate's voice and Peter Firmin's puppets brought to life new characters on British TV in the '70s, renewing children's shows with unique storytelling and engaging stories.

The event includes original puppets, archive footage, sets and storyboards, photos, scripts and filming equipment, all set in a playful recreation of the producers' film studio, and there's also the chance to admire Postgate's stop-motion film camera, adapted using a small motor and bits of Meccano. The exhibition will also go behind the scenes of some of Postgate and Firmin's other creations, including Pogles Wood, Noggin the Nog and Ivor the Engine.

Tablets will allow visitors to animate characters and learn the language of the Clangers that mainly consisted in whistles, since, according to their creators, living in vacuum, the Clangers did not communicate by sound, but by a type of nuclear magnetic resonance, which was translated to audible whistles for the human audience.

Where's the fashion connection in all this? Well, the more you look at cute striped Bagpuss, the more Mia Farrow's striped pink Pierre Cardin ensemble in Anthony Mann's A Dandy in Aspic (1967) comes to your mind.

Could this be where Bagpuss's fur comes from? That's actually not so improbable as the wife of one of the creators, Joan Firmin, knitted and dressed The Clangers, creating the armour-like costumes not after seeing images of Roman soldiers as you may think, but with Twiggy dressed in a Paco Rabanne design in mind. Known as the "Metal Worker", Rabanne employed metal or aluminum plates, leather and plastic sections linked together with metal rings to create armour-like mini-dresses.

The armours weren't supposed to be fashionable (though they went pretty well with the theme of Space Age and futuristic fashion) but had a function since they protected The Clangers against the space debris that kept falling onto the planet, lost from other places.

Beware, though, as the event at the V&A Museum of Childhood, may contain a deeper message for fashionistas as well: The Clangers lived in peace and the central themes of the series included working out problems, inventing and discovering new things and meeting unexpected visitors, while the Bagpuss character encouraged to mend and love things.

Fashion may have inspired the costumes for these cute cult characters, but the industry could actually get a few messages from them, such as collaborating towards friendly solutions for a healthier fashion system without competing to destroy each other, while discovering new things and encouraging people to learn to mend and genuinely love their garments and accessories.