It’s that time of year again when we get to dig into our stats and reveal what you’ve been popping into our website search box during 2018.
Welcome to the V&A’s 2018 Top 20 Search Terms!
But first a couple of caveats:
These are the results as of today – I’ll be updating this post with the final rankings early next year. As noted last year, this list is of searches where visitors have typed the word directly into our search box and doesn’t include direct links to our Search the Collections pages from our Collections pages. Also, variations in spellings and capitalisation will affect the stats (e.g. ‘photography’, ‘Photography’ and ‘photos’ will all be counted as different searches).
With all that said, here are the top 20:
- dress
- Sèvres
- william morris
- corset
- fashion
- embroidery
- jewellery
- ceramics
- toys
- chair
- wallpaper
- shoes
- balenciaga
- mantua
- india
- art deco
- furniture
- textiles
- kimono
- glass
Collection spikes
In now an annual tradition (for the second year anyway), we present our ‘Objects of the Year’ – those objects from our collection that had a sudden surge of love due to some topical event, anniversary or just because…
- January – Reddit users pinned down images of two Parisian dancers, a Can-Can poster in our collection and the Crazy Horse dancers
- February – In advance of the opening of the Maqdala display, this photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron of Prince Dèjatch Alamayou got a lot of attention
- March – The Manchester Tiara proved popular again with visitors to the Court Jeweller blog, perhaps sparked by the ‘Victoria Revealed’ exhibition opening at Kensington Palace
- April – Johnny Vegas’s 60 second teapot continues to stir up interest
- May – The wedding of Price Harry and Meghan Markle in this month lead visitors to this incredible wedding dress by dressmaker to the Royals, Norman Hartnell
- June – A Beatles photograph proved very popular with viewers of the Dutch late night talkshow RTL, a little in advance of the opening of our new Photography Centre
- July – World Cup fever lead many visitors to this Eric Cantona poster (and perhaps in honour of Gareth Southgate they also went on to discover our extensive collection of waistcoats as well!)
- August – Who doesn’t enjoy a bone marrow scoop? Discqus users definitely do! Perhaps modern members of the ‘Edinburgh Marrow Bone Club’?
- September – An article in the Guardian on designer Michael Anastassiades’ home, lead many readers to this Postmodern classic – the Super Lamp
- October – The Guardian reported on the planned refurbishment of William Morris’s Kelmscott Manor, which led to the ever popular Strawberry Thief furnishing design (our number one viewed object of the year!)
- November – The 100th anniversary of the Women’s Vote this year caused a surge in visitors to this ‘Vote’s for Women’ Suffragette poster
- December – Appropriately for this time of year is this foot-warmer that Google directed visitors to.
Merry Christmas!
Thrilled to see the Footwarmer from the Europe Galleries display on Dutch Gold Age Interiors as the December object. The wind off the North Sea can be extremely biting!