Biltmore offers a Vanderbilt House Party

Elegant fashions recreated by Oscar-winning designer John Bright will fill the Biltmore House when Biltmore’s newest exhibition, A Vanderbilt House Party – The Gilded Age, opens Feb. 8.

In collaboration with Biltmore curators, Bright and his team at Cosprop, his London costumier company, meticulously recreated fashions favored by the Vanderbilts and their guests at turn-of-the-century celebrations known as house parties.

Bright has received 12 Academy Award nominations and a win for Best Costume Design in 1985 for A Room with a View, which starred Maggie Smith, Judi Dench and Daniel Day-Lewis.

“This exhibition is unlike any we’ve ever done before,” said Leslie Klingner, Biltmore’s curator of interpretation. “You will get a sense of what life was truly like at Biltmore.”

 That sense of the Gilded-Age era is enhanced by a new audio guided tour that combines innovative 360-degree sound techniques with stories told from the perspectives of those who lived and worked at Biltmore in the early 1900s. 

Klingner and Ellen Rickman, Biltmore’s director of museum services, traveled between London and Asheville over the course of two years to work with Bright to recreate the Vanderbilt wardrobe, researching fashion magazines of the era and studying archival photography and portraits from Biltmore’s collection in great detail in order to create the designs found in the exhibition.

“To bring these photographs that have been in black and white for more than a century into vivid, living color representations has been incredible,” Klingner said.

“This exhibition is like we’re replacing a piece of the collection that was missing,” said Dini Cecil Pickering, great-granddaughter of George Vanderbilt, who was Biltmore’s founder.

The Biltmore-Bright collaboration dates back to a selection of costumes Bright created for Downton Abbey, the popular PBS series. Biltmore hosted the premiere showing of Dressing Downton: Changing Fashion for Changing Times in 2015. The exhibition then traveled to several U.S. cities.

 A Vanderbilt House Party is included in Biltmore daytime admission, and runs through May 27. The new premium audio guided tour is free to those who purchase tickets online, or can be purchased onsite for an additional fee.

Find more information here or call 800-411-3812.