Installation of Noble Rot at Como House Wedding dress 1875
Bodice, overskirt, skirt, silk, cotton, shattered, faded, stained underarms National Trust of Australia (Victoria ) Costume Collection

It is hardly a secret that the business of period home- cum -house museum thrives on a very particular kind of nostalgia. The term's usual meaning suggests a yearning for one's younger days so as to disavow present qualms and concerns. The nostalgia embedded in period homes, however, is usually for other people's lives, for periods not experienced oneself but rather second-hand, through the mediations of cinema, photography or literature. The sensation upon entering such homes is consequently a curious one: of intimacy verging on voyeurism, of crossing the threshold from everyday reality into an environment more like a film set, of seeing the normal unravelling of time calcified in a residential museum.

Such sensations and expectations frame Noble Rot , an exhibition of late-eighteenth to early-twentieth century fashions staged within one of Melbourne 's grandest period homes, Como House. Spearheading the arts component of the 2006 L'Oréal Melbourne Fashion Festival, Noble Rot presents garments from the National Trust's extensive collection scattered through virtually every room in the mansion. While the tendency in such heritage houses is to show recently restored and surprisingly pristine relics against equally impeccable drawing rooms, Noble Rot takes a starkly different turn. Each garment is soiled, torn, rust-stained or exhausted; the decay is explicitly noted in the brief room texts that accompany the displays and treated as important as the materials comprising the objects or the dates of their creation. Corsets and jackets appear to have been recently and casually draped over beds, silk ball gowns trail from coat hangers and await their owners' return and stockings seemingly hang out to dry in bathrooms.

The effect is clever, reframing Como House's usually immaculate presentation - one that can sometimes border on freeze-dried sterility - by making the museum seem homely once more, as though time were regaining its ordinary course of haste and mess. But if the traces of apparently slapdash gestures - of hanging and discarding clothes - ultimately humanises these opulent and distant lives, the feeling of trespassing on someone else's privacy is heightened to an almost disturbing degree. This is one of the many 'double effects' that pervade Noble Rot . The modishness of fashion is played against the ephemerality and wear-and-tear of the clothes themselves. Mourning gowns and petticoats made of exquisite black silk haunt a young boy's bedroom. Discarded underwear and nineteenth-century wedding dresses lie strewn across a breakfast room in a manner that would have been shamefully impolitic in Victorian era Melbourne .

If these implications of recent activity assert a canny feeling of homeliness, they also suggest the unhomely, the uncanny or the unsettling. Bodices are puffed out with packing paper as though breathing back to life; a purple wedding dress is similarly plumped with material and rests in an armchair in a pose of anthropomorphised fatigue. The lack of visible limbs or a head, however, makes for a strange presence at once recognisable yet perversely incorporeal. Other forms of almost-embodied movement are also implicit throughout Noble Rot . A green silk skirt trails its train down a back staircase, the body of its wearer hinted at yet hidden as 'she' is caught in the process of escape. Lurking behind a doorway and wandering up another stairwell stand two degraded petticoats, their spectral forms torn straight from gothic suspense narratives set in empty mansions. If period homes frequently evoke cinematic stages, the eternal moment of photography and the presence of sculpture, it is an evocation reinforced - and made curiously disquieting - by these particular tableaux.

As for the clothes themselves, they rarely match the delicacy (let alone the wit) of their display - though there are exceptions. Splayed across the lavish bed in the main bedroom are pieces of silk trim intricately embroidered with flowers and leaves but which remain unfinished. A pair of fabulous forty centimetre-high boots presents skilful contrasts of brown leather and, when laced, would make a fetishist wince. Yet even these objects are effectively secondary to their display: the unfinished off-cuts do not adorn the seamstress' studio but 'pollute' the master bedroom; one boot stands upright in a washbasin like a Surrealist advertisement by the French fashion photographer, Guy Bourdin. The impression is that the garments were chosen primarily because they best represented themes like transience and decay, rather than for their importance and impressiveness as individual objects. Viewers seeking such qualities may be disappointed, especially when compared with some of the magnificent examples of textiles and design shown concurrently in Melbourne , such as those in the RMIT Gallery's exhibition, Threading the Commonwealth .

Yet to focus on specific objects in this way would, to a large extent, miss the point of Noble Rot , which is to see an important curator at her most sophisticated. Robyn Healy has relied on her many years of experience as the head of Fashion and Textiles at the National Gallery of Victoria by re-using one of the gallery's most interesting curatorial techniques: the 'intervention'. This usually means inserting a contemporary artwork, often by an indigenous artist, into a room filled with master landscape paintings (so as to set colonial assumptions against postcolonial critique). Healy's interventions, however, are much more site-specific, pertinent and effective. They cleverly trade on the connotations of class, dead time and intimacy associated with period homes while simultaneously presenting, as the exhibition's subtitle proclaims, 'an alternate view of fashion'. The consequence is a timely and crucial intervention in the usual expectations and presentations of fashion, period homes and museology itself.