The collector: Creative Museum.

The collection: Hair accessories e.g. combs, hairclips, hairbands and crowns.

The story behind the collection...

This is a family collection with three members of our family all contributing. One of us is in charge of buying the products, another restores them and another works on technical aspects such as photographing the objects and publishing them online.

The collection is kept in France, but the content is international and represents many different countries. It is the continuation of a grandmother's collection.

At the beginning of the last century, Leona Petit, wife of a French army captain, collected some hair ornaments whilst travelling through Africa and Asia. She also kept those she used herself.

She could not have imagined that the beauty of those few small objects found in her wardrobe would touch certain members of her family so much. In fact, we became quite passionate about this unexpected legacy and decided to develop and enhance this collection.

Looking for new pieces, documenting them and engaging in their preservation and enhancement was an arduous task, but little by little we began to acquire knowledge and expertise in this field. Thirty years later our wish to share this patrimony led to us establishing a virtual museum where we share all of the information we have uncovered about these objects during the past three decades.

What we like most is the cultural, geographical and historical diversities revealed within the collection. We are also impressed by human creativity, the capacity to make something using local materials and the cleverness of the products sometimes achieved. We have realised that we are contributing to the world patrimony by creating this collection, and it is for this reason that we are dedicated to sharing it on a website (in French and English) free for everyone to view. We also exhibit it in museums or places such as castles or churches.

We have been collecting for thirty years now and have about 2000 items. We only keep a couple of the objects at home. Because most of them are really fragile we keep everything outside our house in a safe.

It is hard to choose favourites. Maybe it is the massive comb in scales sculpted with bird and flower patterns. It is the biggest in the collection at 32.8cm or 13inches. It is beautiful and exceptional and the only one in this genre that we have found in 30 years. We didn't look at the price when acquiring it, even though it was quite expensive.

We are missing the combs of Rene Lalique, almost all his combs are in museums now. We would also like to have pieces from Mucha, Lucien Gaillard... all these fabulous artists from the Art Nouveau movement. Obviously these kind of objects cost a lot of money, which is a problem for us.

Our collection enables us to create a link with people and we are happy and proud to say that our website was visited by people from 87 different countries during it's first year of publication. We called our website Creative Museum because it is meant for creators and arts lovers. It encompasses more than hair accessories - as well as touching upon the worlds of fashion and jewellery it is also of interest from a cultural and ethnographic perspective.

You can visit Creative Museum to view and find out more about the collection at:

http://www.creative-museum.com/en (in English)

http://www.creative-museum.com/ (in French).

All images © Creative Museum and used with the owner and curator's kind permission.