Emily Tinne... the original fashion shopaholic

Emily Tinne

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The original 'Queen of the shopaholics' was not Coleen Rooney or Alex Curran but another Liverpool woman who lived almost a century before the soccer WAGS.

Dark-haired Emily Tinne was a doctor's wife who amassed an amazing secret wardrobe of more than 700 dresses, coats and hats... yet wore hardly any of them.

The original fashion magpie, Mrs Tinne made her purchases between the two World Wars, and was even known to buy several identical copies of the same garment.

Her daughter Dr Alexine Tinne said she was really a 'Plain Jane' who became one of the first members of the middle class to embrace the idea of "retail therapy".

The collection was stored in wardrobes and 52 packing cases in the attic of the Tinne family home in Aigburth, Liverpool.

Now the youngest of Emily's seven children, Alexine has donated the whole collection to Liverpool museum service and it is on display at the city's Sudley House gallery.

She said: "She had all these fantastic clothes but most of them simply lived in the wardrobe.

"It was more the buying than the wearing she enjoyed. I think she just liked the idea of having lovely things.

"If you look at photos of my mother you can see she was often very drab.

"She wore black an awful lot. As children, my five siblings and I had only two sets of clothes, our school outfit and our weekend outfit.

"She saw shopping as a form of philanthropy. In those days, the shop assistants didn't get a salary but were paid commission.

"I think my mother just wanted to help them out, because it was hard for them during the Depression.

"Judging by the size of the collection my mother must have gone shopping almost every day."

Alexine considers that her mother was the trend-setter for later generations of women, since she used shopping to overcome the boredom of her role as a middle-class matron.

She added: "She was definitely a shopaholic. She went every day, it was an obsession for her. When she died I cleared 52 tea chests full of dresses, shoes and hats from the attic of her house.

"They were time capsules. You could open any one and think, this is from a particular year. It was like reaching out and touching history.

"She was extremely intelligent and very well read, and was very bored by going to tea parties and the like.

"My Mother was frustrated intellectually and in a different era she would have done different things.

"A generation later she would have probably had a career."

And while Coleen and Co have their own personal shoppers, Emily had her own dressmaker to rustle up something in the ultimate fashions.

Instead of 'Fendi B' bags and city shorts, dresses with 'dropped waists' and beading were the order of the day.

She visited the fashionable forerunners of today's 'Cricket' and 'Vivienne Westwood' on Liverpool's Bold Street, known at the time as the 'Bond Street of the North.'

Mrs Tinne's forty-year-long shopping spree, fuelled the wealth of her husband Phillip, was brought to an end by WWII rationing.

Some of huge collection of Tinne family letters from the 1920s to the 1950s are also on display at the Sudley House gallery in Mossley Hill.

Family members wrote to each other frequently, showing a close and loving relationship between parents and children: Elspeth, Ernest, Bertha, Helen, Alexine and Philip.

They reveal that Mrs Tinne herself made dancing clothes for the children. She wrote to Ernest in 1935: "The dancing show is next Thursday. I wish it was over. I am getting very weary of it all. The sewing is rather a plague. I sometimes feel I cannot put up with it all."

Dr Tinne wrote to his son: "Another Watts Display shortly and Mummie will have another 8 dresses or so to make. They seem a lot of trouble for a 5 minutes dance. They also cost a bit."

Exhibition curator Pauline Rushton said: "These letters give a rare insight into family life during a period of great social change.

"It is very exciting to read these intimate accounts of the everyday life ofthe Tinne family which help reflect the clothes they wore."

Emily Tinne owned more 300 dresses, 50 coats, 30 of which were fur, 150 hats, 200 bags, and 270 other accessories.

The average price of a dress in the 1930's was roughly 1 pound and 15 shillings, which equates to £80 per dress in today's money.

Although the most expensive dress in her collection was a blue ribbed silk dress which she paid 12 pounds- £448 pounds in 2009.

She paid 14 pounds and 10 shillings for a Scottish Mole skin stole which equates to £640 in 2009.

Having owned more than a thousand items we can expect that Emily Tinne spent in the region of £90,000-100,000 on her wardrobe.

Pauline rushton added: "Emily ceratinly did know how to spend.

"Eventhough she owned 30 fur coats she was never seen wearing one once.

"Her children only ever saw her in her trademark black outfits."


* The Tinnes were originally Dutch sugar merchants and shipowners who settledin Liverpool in 1813. In the 19th century they made a great fortune importingsugar, molasses, coffee and tropical hardwoods.

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