Kickshaw Productions brings extensive experience to exhibitions, collection management, textile and costume research, identification, and evaluation. The Managing Director, Kenn Norman began his career in financial management and is a certified Life Coach. He founded Kickshaw Productions in 1988 as a business venture that offered freelance services including product development, marketing and management for small museums and non-profit institutions. Historical fashion expertise entered the list of services offered by Kickshaw when Jonathan Walford joined as Artistic Director. Jonathan holds degrees in history and has been working in the museum field since 1977, including eleven years as the founding curator of the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto. Jonathan began collecting antique clothing in the late 1970s; the collection has now grown to over 8,000 pieces and has been used for creating travelling exhibitions as well as augmenting other institution’s displays ranging from ‘La Belle Epoch’ at the Vancouver Museum to ‘Deco Mode’ at Montreal’s McCord Museum.
The oldest piece in the collection is an Egyptian textile fragment from about 1200 B.C. The next oldest artifact is a shoe from about 1660 and possibly worn in the Dutch colonies of New Amsterdam (now Manhattan). This shoe could be the oldest extant article of North American fashionable dress. The collection is solidly represented from the mid 18th century to the present and includes a wide array of designers from Adrian to Zandra Rhodes, as well as clothes worn by celebrities, including Ginger Rogers and Evita Perone.
Kickshaw Productions has worked with authors, collectors, curators, designers, costumers, educators, conservators, and dealers from across North America, Australia and Europe. We have worked on all kinds of projects from dating ancestral portraits for family historians and researching hairstyles for movie stylists to working with conservators restoring 18th century dresses and creating one night displays for gala events. We have also assessed costume inventories, appraised donations, written catalogues and worked with new museums to develop mandates and policies. Our clients have included:
The Royal Ontario Museum; The Art Gallery of Ontario; Brooklyn Children’s Museum; Costume Museum of Canada; University of British Columbia; Seneca Fashion Resource Centre; Edmonton Art Gallery; Canadian author Timothy Findley; and many more…