Our History

Until the 1980s fashion exhibitions were rarely mounted by museums, but as they began to attract audiences, the clothing treasures that languished in the basements of major institutions began to see the light of galleries more often. Popularity grew until by 2020, three of the top ten most visited exhibitions ever held at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art were about fashion. These shows kept company with blockbuster shows including Tutankhamen.

While most of the world’s great museum collections resulted from decades of carefully considered acquisitions by curatorial connoisseurs, a few came together quickly from individual collectors with passionate obsessions. These are usually specific object-type collections and often come with the benefit of ample funding by the collector. FHM co-founder Jonathan Walford was fortunate to experience this second model when Sonja Bata hired him in 1987 to transform her shoe collection into the Bata Shoe Museum, which opened to the public in 1995.

After leaving Bata in 1999, Jonathan and his partner Kenn Norman pursued a freelance career of independent curatorial work, including developing travelling exhibitions. Jonathan authored six books on various aspects of fashion history, from paper dresses to shoes, and the two worked as dealers and appraisers of antique and vintage clothing. However, many of their best finds ended up in collections scattered around the world and they mused about creating their own museum, starting with the collection Jonathan had been acquiring since the 1970s for developing lectures. 

There was a growing interest in vintage fashion around the turn of the millennium. Old clothes became a hotly collected commodity and experienced a rapid rise in auction and online sale prices. There were more buyers vying for the best pieces that came onto the market and fewer good pieces were showing up.

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In 2004, Jonathan and Kenn registered the name Fashion History Museum (FHM). The next step was for the FHM to become a non-profit corporation with a governing board. In March 2009 the Canadian government granted the FHM charitable status; this allowed the FHM to give tax receipts for donations - a crucial step for a collection to be created without the benefit of a large acquisitions budget. The museum now had to make itself known. Exhibitions were created to be hosted by museums around Ontario and abroad. A shoe exhibition was especially popular that even travelled to Hong Kong and Bahrain.

After considering Toronto and other locations, the Waterloo Region was considered a likely place to locate the museum. The area was at the heart of industrial 19th and early 20th century Canada where textile and clothing production were leading industries. In 2013, an opportunity for a pilot gallery in a renovated mill in Cambridge became available, and a five month exhibition brought in over 8,000 visitors. The following spring another exhibition created by the FHM about fashion and architecture at the nearby Waterloo Regional Museum brought in 24,000 visitors in nine months. The region looked like a good fit for the FHM.

In late 2014 a five year lease was offered to the FHM for the old post office of the former town of Hespeler - home to what had been the largest woollen mill in the British Empire in the 1920s/30s. The Hespeler post office was built in 1928 by Thomas William Fuller (1865-1951), the Chief Dominion Architect from 1927 to 1936, in an Art Deco/Italianate style. The building had been the centre of the Hespeler community until it was decommissioned in 1993 and sold to a private buyer.