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Vintage fashion from Hodson stock

With vintage style all the rage, a new exhibition at a museum in the Black Country is showcasing some of the best fashions of days gone by.

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Clothes and homeware once sold by the locally-renowned Hodson sisters, who ran a shop in Willenhall, are on display at Walsall Museum.

Edith and Flora Hodson opened a shop in the front room of their family home in New Road, selling their wares between the 1920s and 1960s. Their unsold stock now acts as an important testament to the everyday fashions of the people of the Black Country.

Jennifer Thomson, curator of Walsall Museum, said: "People who like vintage fashion will like this as we have got a real mix of items.

"The Hodson collection is huge and just a few bits of it are on show but this is a nice introduction to what people were wearing in the 1920s to 1950s.

"What is nice about the Hodson collection is that people often save their wedding dress or their nice evening frocks and give them to museums but this shows the everyday clothes people wore in the 1920s to 1950s. These kind of shops were so commonplace, but when the big chain stores and shopping centres came along, they disappeared and often no record survived of them."

Colourful tea dresses with their capped sleeves and buttoned-up fronts are among the items on show, along with shoes, hats, gloves, scarves and jewellery

Following the death of Flora Hodson in 1983, the contents of the shop were saved and are now in the possession of Walsall Museum. The Hodson Shop collection display is on show until March 5 and entry to the museum, in Lichfield Street, is free.

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