Eleri Lynn

Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces

Eleri is an experienced curator, award-winning author, and recognized expert in her field. She specialises in the history of fashion, image-making, and the communication of power through textiles and dress. Her research interests include the intersection between fashion and power/politics, the creation of the royal image through dress and textiles, early modern global expansion and the textiles trade, the performance of magnificence at the Tudor court, and the history of haute couture clients and their social networks. She is also interested in championing the value of curatorial practice-based research.

Eleri gained her expertise as a curator over the course of 10 years at the Victoria and Albert Museum (2003-13), where she worked on several major fashion exhibitions, gallery redisplays and capital projects. During her time there she curated the international touring exhibition, Undressed: 350 Years of Underwear in Fashion and project managed the refurbishment of the Fashion Gallery and the Clothworkers’ Centre for the Study and Conservation of Textiles and Fashion. She was also on the curatorial team for The Golden Age of Couture, Savage Beauty: Alexander Mc Queen, and Fashion in Motion, the museum’s live catwalk events.  

In 2013, Eleri joined Historic Royal Palaces as a Curator of Collections, with special responsibility for the Royal Ceremonial Dress Collection. As well as caring for the collection of 10,000 items of royal, court and ceremonial dress, Eleri curated several exhibitions including Fashion Rules Restyled and Diana: Her Fashion Story (Kensington Palace, 2017) with Libby Thompson. She also curated the exhibition, The Lost Dress of Elizabeth I at Hampton Court Palace (2019) showcasing her research on the identification of the Bacton Altar Cloth, a rare survival of Elizabethan court dress.

In early 2021, Eleri became Head of Exhibitions and International Touring at Museum Wales, where she was responsible for leading exhibitions and programming across the museum’s portfolio of seven national sites. She was also responsible for developing the museum’s international touring strategy and establishing a programme of community co-produced exhibitions. 

She has presented at numerous academic conferences, including as keynote speaker, and as a guest lecturer at several universities. She is the author of several monographs: Fashion in Detail: Underwear (V&A Publications, 2010), Tudor Fashion (Yale University Press, 2017), Tudor Textiles (Yale University Press, 2020), and is a contributor to Floral Culture in the Tudor and Stuart Courts (Amsterdam University Press, 2024) and The Golden Age of Couture: Paris and London 1947-1957 (V&A Publications, 2007).  Tudor Fashion won the Historians of British Art prize for ‘scholarship pre-1600 in a single-authored work’ 2017-18. 

Eleri holds an MA in Interdisciplinary Late Medieval Studies from the University of York and an MA in Museum Studies from the University of Leicester. She recently completed a PhD by Prior Publication from the University of Kingston on the use of textiles and dress in the projection of magnificence at the Tudor court, 1485-1603. She is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and is a Trustee of the Royal School of Needlework. She is also regularly interviewed by the press and for TV as an expert contributor, including the BBC2 Art That Made Us series and BBC1’s Elizabeth: Fashioning a Monarch.

Eleri is from South Wales and is a fluent Welsh speaker. She is passionate about public engagement and inclusion within the heritage sector.