THE latest community news from around Aberystwyth.

Ceredigion Museum

ANDREA De Rome, collections officer at the museum, curated a show of fashion that highlights issues related to the social and physical changes of women’s fashion through time.

She said: "This exhibition explores the changing silhouette and social role of women. As the definition of femininity has evolved, so have the fashions used to express it."

While Andrea has been keen to include as many different major trends as possible there has been a focus mainly on the fashions which tell a story.

“Today, fashion can be whatever you want it to be. Women’s shapes and clothing have endured so many changes. Now we accept that different styles and interpretations are normal, but that has not always been the case.”

The exhibition illustrated the link between fashion and society.

For centuries, looking feminine meant letting your clothes contort your body into an idealised shape. Just as fair-skinned bodies implied wealth and finery 300 years ago, a sun-kissed body came to suggest modern luxuries such as air travel.

The examples of clothing on show are mainly from Britain, but they do show how American cinema, jazz music and youth culture influenced the changing face of fashion.

Andrea added: “For many years, a woman’s style was also defined by whether she was a wife, a widow or single. At the French court in the 17th century women painted on beauty spots in different places depending on their marital status.”

Choral Society

AFTER its very successful year, Choral Society choristers are enjoying the long summer break before rehearsals for the 2016/17 season start in the Old Hall of Old College on Tuesday, 13 September.

Conductor David Russell Hulme has decided that the work to be performed for the Christmas Concert is Sir Michael Tippett’s secular oratorio, A Child of Our Time.

It is a work which has not been sung by the society before; it was composed during the early years of the Second World War and is an impassioned protest against persecution and tyranny, with an overriding message of peace.

The oratorio uses a traditional three-part format based on that of Handel’s Messiah and is structured in the manner of Bach’s Passions.

Tippett uses in it American spirituals in the way Bach used Chorales, because these songs of oppression possess a universality absent from traditional hymns.

A Child of Our Time was well received on its first performance in London in 1944, and since then has been performed all over the world in many languages.

The BBC National Orchestra and chorus of Wales with four soloists performed the work at the Prom concert on Saturday, 23 July, with many Choral Society members having their first taste of the work.

New choristers will be warmly welcomed at the first rehearsal in September.

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