What V&A objects have you been searching for in 2017?

For your holiday reading, we present the 20 most common searches on our Search the Collections site this year (as of today – this post will be updated in the new year with final numbers). As noted last year, this list is of searches where visitors have typed the word directly into the search box and doesn’t include those Search the Collections links from our Collections pages such as Photographs, South Asia and China. Also, variations in spellings and capitalisation will affect the statistics (e.g. “westwood”, “Westwood”, “Vivienne Westwood”, will all be counted as different searches). With all that said, the 20 are:

1. Dress
2. William Morris
3. Fashion
4. Embroidery
5. Corset
6. Wallpaper
7. Balenciaga
8. Chair
9. Toys
10. Jewellery
11. Shoes
12. Art Deco
13. Furniture
14. Textiles
15. Ceramics
16. Kimono
17. Sculpture
18. Art Nouveau
19. Clothing
20. Tapestry

In comparison with last year, whilst much of the list remains the same, some of the searches relate to events specific to this year, such as our current Balenciaga exhibition, whereas last year the 150th anniversary of Beatrix Potter caused a spike in searches.

Spikes in Traffic

With over a million objects online the great joy for us is when one object has its own brief moment of internet fame. Here are some from through the year:

• January – Discussion of billionaires’ basement extensions in the Guardian led readers onto this design for a chimney piece.
• February – Atlas Obscura readers discovered the vizard (‘face mask’) – a 17th century form of protection from sun-burn via this rare dolls version in our collection.
• March – Readers of The Verge discovered that smart locks have been around a long time, with this 17th century ‘detector lock’ that records every time the door’s been opened.
• April – Persephone Books featured a perennial favourite, the Frankfurt Kitchen, on their blog.
• May – A Dazed Digital article about the Comme des Garçons show at the Met discussed this jumper.
• June – The opening of our new Exhibition Road Quarter entrance lead many Guardian readers to the original proposed plans for the entrance.
• July –  The Manchester Tiara was celebrated by the Court Jeweller site.
• August – This AskHistorians thread on Reddit gave some background on the different styles of clothes worn in the 19th century, with this gown given as an example.
• September – A detailed analysis of costume films at Frock Flicks brings in our stays and busk for comparison.
• October – One of the earliest objects in our collection, ‘False Principle No 16‘ was popular with users of the Chinese search engine Baidu, shortly before V&A at Design Society in Shekou opened.
• November – Popular on Facebook was this late 19th century Sunflower knitting needle case.
• December – Reddit users discovered the ideal festive gift just in time – a pair of Grape Scissors. And users searching Google for a Robin Hood/Christmas cross-over will have been pleased to find this card:

Merry Christmas!