ONLY THE BEST: The Tonie Lewenhaupt collection

Röhsska museum has a stunning fashion collection with many important designers’ creations. The fashion collection contains pieces from the 18th Century until the present day, and many of the 20th Century premier fashion designers are represented with creations of high artistic quality. The collection also includes a variety of accessories like shoes, handbags and jewelry. Today, the Röhsska fashion collection contains about 450 objects. 

Toni Lewenhaupt was born in Stockholm in 1937 and ever since she was little she knew that she wanted to work with clothes and fashion in some way but was not quite sure how. Beginning her education at Konstfack, a Swedish university for art, crafts and design, in advertising she soon changed her major to the newly started course in Fashion illustration. The fashion education was a new subject at the time and Lewenhaupt became one of the first students with a decree in the discipline. After school Toni Lewenhaupt got a job at the Bonnier monthly magazine and got the chance to go to the fashion capital of the world, Paris. Her task was to report back to the Swedish readers about what was happening at the big fashion houses and to make drawings of the shown garments to illustrate the latest trends. After years as a fashion reporter she suddenly grew tired of the trend oriented and fugacious fashion world and started her education in art history. She started to connect the two worlds and got more and more fascinated by the idea that fashion is just as an important witness of a time and a society as art, design or architecture. Her interest led her to become one of Swedens most renowned costume historians and to start her own collection of clothes. Together with her late husband, the photographer Cläes Lewenhaupt, she came to wright several books illustrated with Cläes pictures and the two worked as a close team until he passed in 1990.   

After the passing of Cläes Lewenhaupt Tonie decided to donate parts of her collection to the arts and crafts museum of Sweden, The Röhsska museum, to make sure they were well taken care of and were given eternal life. Many of the garments and accessories that were donated to the museum came from Stina Paccini-Ohlsson. Paccini-Ohlsson owned the fashion store Ohlsson at Stortorget in Malmö which sold haute couture garments from Paris. Stina bought the best and most typical seasonal garments from the most influential fashion houses such as Dior and Givenchy each year to wear while working in the store. The haute couture garments are from the 1940s and 1950s and represents an important part of the haute couture era. Paccini-Ohlsson is not the only private contributor to Lewenhaupts collection and some of the garments were acquired at auctions, including some pieces from the turn of the last century that previously belonged to the prominent costume historian Nancy Bradfields and which is also mentioned in her book, Costume in detail 1730 - 1930.