Costume Couture: Sixty Years of Cosprop curator Keith Lodwick discusses the multi-award winning Merchant Ivory classic with the Fashion Film Club founder Sarah Bailey.

This adaptation brings the novel by E.M. Forster to dazzling life in the Florentine countryside and in the well-appointed homes of the English Edwardian upper classes. A comedy of manners with a quick wit and impeccable comic timing, A Room With A View is also a portrait of the quiet solitude that lies beneath Forster’s characters, and of the need for human connection in a world of rigid convention.

The young Englishwoman Lucy Honeychurch (played by Helena Bonham Carter), arrives in Florence on a Baedecker-style grand tour with her aunt Charlotte Bartlett (Maggie Smith). Through a series of events involving English expatriates Miss Eleanor Lavish, an unflappable novelist (Judi Dench), and the Emersons, a free-thinking father and son (played by Denholm Elliot and Julian Sands), Lucy’s life is changed forever under a loggia in Florence and in the Tuscan countryside. (Merchant Ivory)

Curator of Costume Couture: Sixty Years of Cosprop at The Fashion and Textile Museum, London (until March 8th), Keith Lodwick is an expert on costume in Merchant Ivory films. A writer, curator and historian, Lodwick was formerly Curator of Theatre and Screen Arts at the V&A.