Anne Buck (14 May 1910 – 12 May 2005) was a British cultural historian and curator of dress, who established the Gallery of Costume at Platt Hall in Manchester.
[2][3] In 1938, she joined Luton Museum, a speciality of which was the history of lace-making and straw hat manufacture - both trades formerly commonplace in its environs - and about which she became expert.
[4] There, over the course of 25-years, she established what became a model for the curation and dissemination of information about dress, helping to transform what had been a twee and amateur pursuit into a rigorous academic discipline characterised by well-researched, factual and unsentimental expositions.
She was honoured by publication of a Costume Society journal in 1980 dedicated to her; and in 1997 by a history of dress conference in Manchester marking the 50th anniversary of her appointment at Platt Hall.
[6] Anne Buck's work at Platt Hall, and her approach to the curation of dress, was critiqued at length by Eleanor Wood in her 2016 PhD thesis, Displaying Dress: New Methodologies for Historic Collections, which "examines the traditional display methodologies of historic costume museums, using the [Platt Hall] Gallery of Costume as its primary case study of practice.