Everyday Fashion: Interpreting British Clothing Since 1600 9781350232471, 1350232475

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Everyday Fashion

ii

Everyday Fashion Interpreting British Clothing Since 1600 Edited by Bethan Bide, Jade Halbert and Liz Tregenza

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2024 Selection, editorial matter, Introductions © Bethan Bide, Jade Halbert and Liz Tregenza, 2024 Individual chapters © their Authors, 2024 Bethan Bide, Jade Halbert and Liz Tregenza have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xx constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Adriana Brioso Cover image by Anna Katrina Zinkeisen, 1934.(© SSPL/Getty Images) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3502-3245-7 PB: 978-1-3502-3244-0 ePDF: 978-1-3502-3246-4 eBook: 978-1-3502-3247-1 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

List of illustrations  viii List of contributors  xv Acknowledgements  xx

1

Introduction: Negotiating the everyday  Bethan Bide, Jade Halbert and Liz Tregenza  1

2

Counterfeit fashion: An eighteenth-century printed silk handkerchief  John Styles  17

Part I  Approaches to the Study of Everyday Fashion  19 3

Whalebone and fashion in seventeenth-century England: Changing consumer culture, trade and innovation  Sarah A. Bendall  21

4

Sophie Rabin’s blouse  Lucie Whitmore  37

5

‘In want of a capable woman’: Rediscovering blouse designers in the wholesale, ready-made trade in Britain through material culture (1909–20)  Suzanne Rowland  39

6

Wartime swimwear  Ciara Phipps  55

7

Fading from view: Using postcard photographs to reveal the market for female workwear during the First World War  Jenny Richardson  57

8

Rosetta Rowley’s wedding suit, 1952  Natalie Raw  77

9

Making clothes for the older woman: Post-war pattern cutting and dressmaking home instruction in Britain  Hannah Wroe  79

10 A printed summer dress, c.1930–32  Pauline Rushton  97 11 Oral history and everyday fashion  Jade Halbert  99

vi

CONTENTS

12 Bryan’s shoes  Beatrice Behlen  117 13 A pocket history: Interpreting wearer biography in the Francis Golding collection  Cyana Madsen  119 14 Aprons  Lou Taylor  135 15 Learning through wear: Experiencing the everyday vintage wardrobe  Liz Tregenza  139

Part II  Everyday Fashion in Practice  157 16 The fabled Chintz: Global entanglement and South Asian agency in everyday British fashion, 1600–1800  Aditi Khare  159 17 Henry Wardell’s flannel waistcoat  Hilary Davidson  181 18 The everyday in eighteenth-century women’s sartorial life-writing  Serena Dyer  183 19 An open robe gown  Vanessa Jones  199 20 Accidental remainders: Working men’s fashion c.1730–1880 in National Museums Scotland  Emily Taylor  201 21 A Victorian best-day wedding dress  Rebecca Quinton  221 22 ‘Fustian jackets, unshorn chins, blistered hands’: Fabric and political feeling in the Chartist Movement, 1837–48  Vic Clarke  223 23 Dr Fairweather’s ‘Apterna’ progressive shoes  Ruth Battersby-Tooke  237 24 ‘They go around the country making in the homes of the people’: Travelling tailors and shoemakers and the production of everyday clothing in rural Ireland, c.1850–1914  Eliza McKee  239 25 Tailor’s drawing book, 1915  Elen Phillips  253 26 I am an ordinary man: Getting and wearing suits in Britain, 1945–80  Danielle Sprecher  255 27 Two-piece skirt suit by Alexon Youngset, designed by Alannah Tandy c.1970–3  Shelley Tobin  271

CONTENTS

28 À la mode in Maesteg: The fashion cultures of South Wales garment factories, 1945–65  Bethan Bide  273 29 WVS uniform dress  Valerie Wilson  291 30 Wholesaling and everyday fashion in the Black Country  Jenny Gilbert  293 31 An old pair of jeans  Rebecca Unsworth  307 32 To dance in my shoes: Music and the psychological influences of style choices in the London Caribbean diaspora, from Lovers’ Rock to Grime  Rianna Norbert-David  309 33 The Tootal paisley scarf  Christopher Breward  317 34 Conclusion: Common threads  Bethan Bide, Jade Halbert and Liz Tregenza  319 Index  323

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ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures 2.1

Part of a handkerchief, silk with linen threads, Spitalfields, London, c.1750. Twill weave, block printed in red with dark blue borders on a mustard yellow ground. Bibliothèque de la Union Centrale des Arts Decoratifs, Paris, GG 2: ‘Le Livre d’Echantillons de John Holker’, c.1750, swatch no. 85  16

3.1

Crimson satin bodies and stomacher of Elizabeth Filmer (front), c.1640–60, silk, linen, whalebone, gilt braid. English, Gallery of Costume, Platt Hall, Manchester City Galleries, 2003.109/2. Manchester Art Gallery, UK/Bridgeman Images  23

3.2

Thomas Edge, Map of Spitsbergen by Thomas Edge (detail), 1625, etching/engraving. Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, NG–1988–1923  26

3.3

Body-maker’s trade token, c.1648–1673, copper alloy, English, Museum of London, 96.66/624. © Museum of London  28

3.4

Author’s reconstruction of a half-scale Spanish farthingale made with bents, a stiffening material commonly used in clothing before whalebone. (L–R) Freshly picked bents (marram grass), a farthingale hoop made from bents and Spanish farthingale of linen made with hoops of bents  30

4.1

Sophie Rabin’s blouse, 2020.61. © Museum of London  36

5.1

Front view St. Margaret’s label blouse, Manchester Art Gallery, 1961.144, c.1910–1915 [1916]. Photograph by the author  43

5.2

Style 687 St. Margaret voile blouse illustrated in the Spring 1916 brochure. Style 687 features a high lace collar, while Style 687 ½, seen

ILLUSTRATIONS

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here in a faint illustration, was available with a V-neck. 391.00942. STM. Special Collections, De Montfort University, F/009  43 5.3

St. Margaret blouse brochure, 1910. N. J. Corah archive, DE4788. Record Office for Leicestershire and Rutland  46

6.1

Utility Clothing Scheme bathing suit. © Southend Museums, Tessa Hallmann Photography; CC41 Utility Clothing Scheme two-piece bathing suit. © Southend Museums, Tessa Hallmann Photography  54

7.1

‘My First Suit’, Dolly. Photograph: author’s own  58

7.2

Mirry. Photograph: author’s own  64

7.3

Munitionette wearing a triangular ‘On War Service’ Badge. Photograph: author’s own  65

7.4

‘With love, Lizzie’. Photograph: author’s own  69

7.5

‘I went down without my cap. So I spoiled the look of it’. Photograph: author’s own  70

8.1

Rosetta Rowley’s wedding suit, 1952, made by Harella. © Leeds Museums and Galleries, photograph taken by Norman Taylor; Photograph of Rosetta Rowley on her wedding day when she married Michael Noble, 1952  76

9.1

Labour MP Bessie Braddock (on right) as ‘Outsize Fashion Queen’, December 1951. © Illustrated London News Ltd./Mary Evans  82

9.2

‘Six Main Types of the Mature Figure’, from Making Clothes for the Older Woman (1948) by A. M. Miall  85

9.3

Pattern Adaptations for Non-Standard Bodies, Your Pattern Cutting (1950) by E. Sheila MacEwan  88

9.4

For the Matron, Illustrated Book of Draftings, Autumn and Winter no. 29, by Miss F. A. Haslam c.1950  89

10.1 Day dress, retailed by Owen Owen’s, Liverpool, c.1930–1932. Accession number 1967.187.78. © National Museums Liverpool  96

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ILLUSTRATIONS

11.1 Marion and David Donaldson in the kitchen at 158 Hill Street, 1966. © The Marion Donaldson Collection  107 11.2 Marion and David Donaldson at In Gear with ‘Froggy’ dress and sketches, Gibson Street, Glasgow, 1966. © The Marion Donaldson Collection  109 11.3 Marion and David Donaldson in the sample room of the Marion Donaldson factory at 73 Robertson Street, Glasgow, 1975. © The Marion Donaldson Collection  110 11.4 Marion and David Donaldson, Candleriggs, Glasgow, c.1993. © The Marion Donaldson Collection  113 12.1 Shoes by Russell & Bromley, c.1981. Accession number 81.257. © Museum of London  116 13.1 Detail of a letter from Francis Golding to a friend, 20 September 1970. Highlighted sections indicate where Golding discusses his dress and sexuality. © Museum of London  120 13.2 Autobiographical writing by Francis Golding, c.1970. Located in the Francis Golding memorial book compiled by Dr Satish Padiyar. © Museum of London and London College of Fashion  121 13.3 Browns jacket, part of the Francis Golding collection (2016.40/21). © Museum of London  123 13.4 Pocket contents of the Browns jacket, (2016.40/21). © Museum of London  124 14.1 Pinafores, cotton, mid-1950s. Ready-made (top) and homemade with rick-rack trimming (bottom). With thanks to Chris Boydell  134 14.2 Two aprons, made by Lou Taylor, May 2020 with close-up showing pockets matched to pattern of apron  137 15.1 Simon Massey wholesale couture suit jacket. Black wool with velvet accents, c.1952. © Liz Tregenza  146 15.2 Horrockses cotton dress and matching bolero, 1948. Worn here by the author in 2022. © Liz Tregenza  147

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15.3 Alice Edwards dress in cotton with a Calpreta drip-dry sheen finish, 1960. Worn here by the author in 2019. © Liz Tregenza  149 15.4 Sportaville blouse and shorts co-ordinate set in cotton, c.1956. © Liz Tregenza  151 15.5 Jean Varon cotton balloon sleeve blouse, c.1973. © Liz Tregenza  152 16.1 Woman’s jacket (wentke), Chintz: cotton tabby, painted mordants and resist, 1700–1799. Royal Ontario Museum, 962.107.2. Image courtesy of the Royal Ontario Museum  168 16.2 Resist detail of Woman’s jacket (wentke), 1700–1799. Royal Ontario Museum, 962.107.2. Image courtesy of the Royal Ontario Museum  169 16.3 Bird detail of Woman’s jacket (wentke), 1700–1799. Royal Ontario Museum, 962.107.2. Image courtesy of the Royal Ontario Museum  170 16.4 Animals and Birds, Mughal Dynasty, seventeenth century Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C. Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1907.623  171 16.5 Flower detail of Woman’s jacket (wentke), 1700–1799. Royal Ontario Museum, 962.107.2. Author’s photograph reproduced courtesy of the Royal Ontario Museum  172 16.6 Flower drawing, plate 177. William Roxburgh, Plants of the Coast of Coromandel: Selected from drawings and descriptions presented to the hon. court of directors of the East India Company, (London, 1795–1819). Image from the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Contributed by the Missouri Botanical Garden  173 17.1 Flannel waistcoat found on the body of Henry Wardell, Mare Street Baptist Chapel, 2014. © MOLA (Museum of London Archaeology), photographs by Andy Chopping  180 18.1 Ann Frankland Lewis, Morning dress 1791. Los Angeles County Museum of Art  186 18.2 Ann Frankland Lewis, Morning dress 1795. Los Angeles County Museum of Art  187

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ILLUSTRATIONS

18.3 Ann Frankland Lewis, The dishabille of the year 1778. Los Angeles County Museum of Art  188 18.4 Ann Frankland Lewis, Morning dress of the year 1785. Los Angeles County Museum of Art  188 18.5 Appearances of silk, cotton, linen and wool in Barbara Johnson’s album, 1746–1823, arranged by decade  193 19.1 Silk and wool gown, originally made c.1770–1780 and remade c.1830–1840 © Leeds Museums and Galleries. Photographed by David Lindsay  198 20.1 Breakdown of men’s fashion objects dated 1700–1850 contributed by women, men and companies from inauguration to present  205 20.2 A merchant tailor’s notebook bound in green leather, 1737, LIB.2021.15 / SAS Ms 620. © National Museums Scotland  206 20.3 Detail of a man’s livery waistcoat, c.1760s, A.1894.121 A. © National Museums Scotland  208 20.4 Detail of a man’s cotton jacket, c.1820–1850, A.1978.283. © National Museums Scotland  210 20.5 Salt print depicting Willie Liston, a young Newhaven fisherman ‘redding the line’, from a volume of salt prints by David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, 1843–1847, D.2014.2.94. © National Museums Scotland  212 20.6 A pair of leather boots, c.1875, A.1977.307. © National Museums Scotland  213 20.7 Man’s coat in cotton gingham, c.1825–1830, A.1979.113. © National Museums Scotland  215 21.1 Mr and Mrs John Marshall photographed by Archibald Robertson of 37 Glassford Street, Glasgow, c.1866–1867, E.1974.104.2. © CSG CIC Glasgow Museums and Libraries Collections  220

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22.1 Feargus O’Connor (1795[?]–1855), engraving by William Read, 1840. Part of a promotional giveaway of ‘Chartist Portraits’ to subscribers of the Star. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery [NPG D21605]  226 23.1 Dr Fairweather’s ‘Apterna’ Progressive shoes, NWHCM: 1992.204.35. © Norfolk Museums Service (Norwich Costume and Textile Collection)  236 25.1 Page from David Thomas’ drawing book, 1915. © Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales  252 26.1 Two suits in ‘Golden Talisman’ wool made by Hepworths from their Hardy Amies range bought by Raymond Fox, Leeds. Navy striped suit, 1964–1965, and grey herringbone suit, 1971. LEEAG.2015.0047.1–2. © Leeds Museums and Galleries (hereafter LMG)  256 26.2 Stephen Collins’ first suit, made-to-measure by Burtons, 1975. 2012.84/1–2. © Museum of London  259 26.3 Undated Burtons cartoon advertising their made-to-measure tailoring. LEEDM.P.2003.1.1810. © LMG  263 26.4 William Howarth’s Hardy Amies for Hepworth’s lounge suit, 1975. 2005.93/1a–b. © Museum of London  264 27.1 Prince of Wales check skirt suit in wool and camel hair, about 1970–1973. Designed by Alannah Tandy for Alexon Youngset. Image by Malcolm Jarvis. (Private Collection)  270 28.1 Map of Industrial South Wales, c.1940. Author’s own collection  275 28.2 Patricia Ridd (VSW041.5) and friend on a Windsmoor Factory night out. © Archif Menywod Cymry wwwl.lleisiaumenyeodffatri.cymry/ Women’s Archive Wales Voices www.factorywomen’svoices.wales  281 28.3 Anita Jeffery (second from left, VSE043.6) coming second in the ‘Miss Polikoff’ competition. © Archif Menywod Cymry wwwl. lleisiaumenyeodffatri.cymry/ Women’s Archive Wales Voices www. factorywomen’svoices.wales  282 28.4 Laura Ashley ‘Made in Wales’ label. Photograph by the author  286

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ILLUSTRATIONS

29.1 WVS uniform dress, HOYFM.324.1982. © Collection of National Museums, Northern Ireland  290 31.1 A pair of jeans by Gaultier Jeans and a pair of jeans by Warehouse, Birmingham Museums Trust. 2004.1028 and 2004.1012. © Birmingham Museums Trust  306 32.1 Intergenerational family footwear including a pair of Nike Air Max 95s. Photo courtesy of Amy Armstrong  313 32.2 Van-Dal crocodile skin shoes. Photo courtesy of Omolara Obanishola  313 33.1 Tootal scarf in deep peacock blue with a printed paisley pattern of burgundy botehs, golden dots and a black filigree trace. © Christopher Breward  316

Tables 20.1 Men’s fashion (1700–1850) accessions contributor type breakdown  204 20.2 Museum-wide accessions from men’s fashion (1700–1850) contributors  204

CONTRIBUTORS

Ruth Battersby-Tooke is Senior Curator of Costume and Textiles based in the Norwich Castle Study Centre. The collection consists of over 33,000 objects and a specialist library and started life as part of the social history and domestic life museum at Strangers’ Hall Museum. Ruth curated the exhibitions Frayed: Textiles on the Edge at Time and Tide Museum, and Nelson and Norfolk and Textile Treasures both at Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery. Beatrice Behlen studied fashion design in Germany and the History of Dress at the Courtauld Institute before becoming curatorial assistant at Kensington Palace. She then taught at several art colleges and worked at a contemporary art gallery. In 2003 she returned to Historic Royal Palaces, curating and co-curating exhibitions on royal clothes. Since 2007 Beatrice has been Senior Curator of Fashion & Decorative Arts at the Museum of London, and since 2005, associate lecturer at Central Saint Martins. She is the lead curator for ‘Our Time’, the ground floor of the new Museum of London, to open in 2026. She is one half of the Bande à part podcast. Her main interest is how the lives of people can be told through their surviving clothes. Sarah A. Bendall is a Research Fellow at the Gender and Women’s History Research Centre, Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, Australia Catholic University. She is a material culture historian who specializes in the gendered and embodied experiences of dress, as well as the production, trade and consumption of global commodities and fashionable consumer goods between 1500 and 1800. Her current research examines experimental history approaches, the roles of women in the clothing trades during the seventeenth century and the widespread use of whaling products in fashion between the years 1500 and 1800. She is the author of Shaping Femininity: Foundation Garments, the Body and Women in Early Modern England (Bloomsbury, 2021). Bethan Bide is Lecturer in Design and Cultural Theory at the University of Leeds. Her research focuses on the use of material fashion objects and considers the role of fashion in museums, the development of fashion cities and the relationship between materiality, memory and fashion as biography. In 2017 Bethan received her PhD, entitled ‘Austerity Fashion 1945–1951: Rebuilding London Fashion Cultures After the Second World War’, from Royal Holloway, University of London. Prior to this, Bethan worked as a researcher and producer of comedy programmes for BBC Radio 4. Christopher Breward is Director of National Museums Scotland. He was previously Director of Collection and Research at the National Galleries of Scotland and Principal of Edinburgh College of Art at the University of Edinburgh, where he retains a visiting Professorship in Cultural History. Prior to these roles he was Head of Research at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum. He has published and curated widely on the histories of fashion, masculinity and urban cultures.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Vic Clarke is Lecturer in Modern British Social History at Durham University, where she researches political expression in nineteenth-century Britain. She has previously taught on matters relating to nineteenth-century political identity at the Universities of York and Leeds. Her forthcoming monograph, based on her PhD, will offer the first book-length study of the influential Chartist newspaper, the Northern Star (1837–52). Hilary Davidson is a dress historian, curator and archaeologist, Chair of MA Fashion and Textile Studies at FIT, New York, and honorary associate at the University of Sydney. After publishing and teaching extensively in her field, Dress in the Age of Jane Austen came out in 2019 with Yale University Press. Jane Austen’s Wardrobe follows in 2023. Serena Dyer is Lecturer in History of Design and Material Culture at De Montfort University. She is the author of Material Lives: Women Makers and Consumer Culture in the 18th Century (Bloomsbury, 2021) and editor of (with Chloe Wigston Smith) Material Literacy in EighteenthCentury Britain: A Nation of Makers (Bloomsbury, 2020) (with Jade Halbert and Sophie Littlewood) Disseminating Dress: Britain’s Fashion Networks, 1600–1970 (Bloomsbury, 2022) and Shopping and the Senses 1800–1970: A Sensory History of Retail and Consumption (2022). Jenny Gilbert is a Knowledge Exchange Associate in Social Sciences at the University of Sheffield. She previously coordinated the Black Country Studies Centre, a partnership between the University of Wolverhampton and Black Country Living Museum (BCLM). She was also a Researcher at the BCLM. She completed her AHRC-funded PhD in 2016, working collaboratively with Walsall Museum, and has lectured extensively on the history and theory of fashion. In 2019 she received an Honorary Research Fellowship in History from the University of Birmingham. Jade Halbert is Lecturer in Design Studies at the University of Leeds. Her research focuses on the histories of manufacturing and mediation in post-war British fashion with a particular focus on oral histories and other personal accounts. Since completing her PhD at the University of Glasgow in 2018, she has published on illicit production in fashion factories, cultural economies of knitting, amateur retailing in 1960s Scotland and the value of homework in the British handknit sector. She is co-editor of Disseminating Dress: Britain’s Fashion Networks, 1600–1970 (Bloomsbury, 2022) and is a BBC Radio 3/AHRC New Generation Thinker. Vanessa Jones is Assistant Curator of Dress and Textiles at Leeds Museums and Galleries. She was lead curator of the Fast x Slow Fashion exhibition at Leeds City Museum, which explored the consumption of clothes in Leeds from 1720 to 2020. Vanessa is the Northern Representative for the Dress and Textile Specialists network as well as being a freelance historic dress and textile consultant. Vanessa has previous experience at the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Charleston Trust and National Trust. Aditi Khare is a textile historian and designer trained in material culture history, currently a PhD candidate at the University of Alberta. Her dissertation, Decolonising the understanding of the Indian textile network and its entanglement with British systems: A material culture analysis, c.1750–1860, focuses on a decolonial understanding of the South Asian legacy in global material culture history and beyond. Her doctoral work is generously funded by the Killam trusts, through the Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Scholarship 2022. She is also a recipient of the Sir Winston

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Churchill Research Graduate Award in History (2022), the Alberta Graduate Excellence Award (2020–1) and the 2021 Research Fellowship at Winterthur Museum, Delaware. Since receiving her MA from the History of Design programme at the Royal College of Art, London, UK (2017/18), she has been actively researching and publishing on eurocentrism in textile history, early modern trade networks, material culture entanglements and visual culture. Cyana Madsen is a curator and PhD candidate researching the relationship between worn garments, biography and curatorial practice. She has worked with clothing collections and archives at The Contemporary Wardrobe Collection, Fashion and Textile Museum, London College of Fashion, the Museum of London, Huntsman and has curated exhibitions at the Museum of London, London College of Fashion, OXO Bargehouse and The Horse Hospital. Eliza McKee is a social and dress historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland at The National Archives. Her research interests include the dress of the lower classes, the workingclass clothing trade, vernacular culture and folklore sources. In 2022, she completed her PhD at Queen’s University Belfast on non-elite clothing acquisition in nineteenth-century Ulster. She is currently developing her thesis into a monograph. Eliza has published in Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America, Journal of Dress History and Archives and Records. Rianna Norbert-David is an Assistant Curator, textile artist and activist. With much of her practice centring decolonization and reparative justice, she has worked on projects both within the Museum of London and independently that highlight the stories of and give voice to those from marginalized communities. Her Caribbean heritage and background in fashion and textiles continue to drive her research as she explores the relationship between culture, design, making, function, psychology and spirituality. Elen Phillips is Principal Curator of Contemporary and Community History at Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales where she has been employed in various curatorial roles since 2006. Her research interests include activist museum practice, contemporary collecting methodologies and craft-based employment schemes in Wales during the 1930s Depression. Ciara Phipps is an author, curator and the Director of Southend Museums overseeing the care, interpretation and research of all collections across the service, including a significant and varied Fashion and Textiles collection. Curating annual collection-based exhibitions, Fashion and Textiles continues to be an essential collection within Southend Museums programming. Rebecca Quinton is Curator of European Dress and Textiles at Glasgow Museums, UK, and Honorary Senior Research Fellow in History of Art at the University of Glasgow, UK. She was Chair of the Dress and Textile Specialists 2016–21. Publications include Patterns of Childhood: Samplers from Glasgow Museums (2005) and Glasgow Museums: Seventeenth-century Costume (2015). Natalie Raw is Curator of dress and textiles for Leeds Museums Galleries. The collection at Leeds is designated as being nationally and internationally significant. It is a large collection detailing the history of what people have worn from high fashion to everyday dress and the textiles they have used for their clothing, furnishings and decorating their homes.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Jenny Richardson is Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at the University for the Creative Arts,  Rochester. Her AHRC-funded PhD, ‘Female Munition Workers’ Workwear in Britain, 1914–1918: A Visual and Material Cultural Analysis’, revealed little is known about the manufacturing and retailing of workwear. As part of the ACORSO research group she focuses on women’s tailored workwear of the First World War. Suzanne Rowland is Lecturer in Fashion and Dress History in the School of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Brighton. She is a material culture scholar and interdisciplinary theorist with a background as a costume maker in film and theatre. Her PhD investigated the design and wholesale manufacturing of women’s fashionable blouses in Britain during the 1910s. Chapter publications include ‘Fashioning Competitive Lawn Tennis: Object, Image, and Reality in Women’s Tennis Dress 1884–1919’ in The Routledge Handbook of Tennis History, Politics and Culture (2019). Pauline Rushton is Head of Decorative Arts and Sudley House, the former home of merchant family the Holts, at National Museums Liverpool. She is responsible for the collections of Western European fashion and textiles, ceramics, glass, metalwork, furniture and musical instruments. Her publications include Mrs Tinne’s Wardrobe, A Liverpool Lady’s Clothes, 1900–1940, first published in 2006. Danielle Sprecher is Curator of the Westminster Menswear Archive at the University of Westminster. Her research and curatorial practice explore everyday men’s dress with a focus on object-based research, material culture and exhibitions. She collaborated with Leeds Museums and Galleries for her PhD research into the Leeds tailoring industry and British men’s fashion in the post-Second World War period. She has extensive experience as a curator of historic dress and textiles in museums and other collections in the UK. John Styles is Professor Emeritus in History at the University of Hertfordshire and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum. He specializes in the history of early-modern Britain, especially the study of material life, manufacturing and design. His most recent books are The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England (2007) and Threads of Feeling: The London Foundling Hospital’s Textile Tokens, 1740–1770 (2010). He is currently writing a book on fashion, textiles and the origins of Industrial Revolution. Emily Taylor is Assistant Curator of European Decorative Arts at National Museums Scotland, specializing in fashion and textiles before 1850. Her primary research area is the dialogue between fashion and cultural identity construction, c.1700–900. She holds a PhD from the University of Glasgow and recently contributed to Material Literacy in Eighteenth-Century Britain: A Nation of Makers (2020). Lou Taylor is a dress historian and Professor Emerita of the University of Brighton where she lectured for thirty years. She is co-editor with Marie McLoughlin of Paris Fashion and World War Two – Global Diffusion and Nazi Control (Bloomsbury, 2020), Heather Fairbank, Woman of Fashion 1900–1920, with Jenny Lister and Cassie Strodder-Davis (2014) and The Study of Dress History (2002).

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Shelley Tobin is a dress historian, curator and author based in Devon. She is Curator of Costume for the National Trust at Killerton House and Assistant Curator specializing in textiles and dress at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter. Liz Tregenza is a fashion and business historian. She is a lecturer at the London College of Fashion and is working on a Business of Fashion, Textiles and Technology post-doctoral research fellowship at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Liz also runs her own vintage fashion business. Liz has previously worked as a museum curator. She completed her PhD at the University of Brighton in 2018, and her book Wholesale Couture: London and Beyond, 1930–1970 will be published in 2023 by Bloomsbury. Rebecca Unsworth is Research Assistant for the Decorative Art collection at Birmingham Museums Trust. She has a PhD from Queen Mary University of London and the Victoria and Albert Museum on the circulation of news about men’s fashion in early modern Europe. Valerie Wilson has a background in design for needlework and is the Curator of Textiles at the Ulster Folk Museum (National Museums NI) with responsibility for a major collection of Irish dress and textiles dating from 1760 to present day. The collection includes fashionable and everyday dress, transport uniforms, costume accessories, Irish lace, embroidery and linens from flax to fabric. Lucie Whitmore is the Curator of Fashion at the Museum of London. She has Masters in Dress & Textile Histories and was awarded her PhD from the University of Glasgow in 2019. Her thesis was titled ‘Fashion Narratives of the First World War’ and explored the impact of war on British civilian women’s dressing habits. She has published articles on the subjects of First World War mourning dress, austerity dress and the material culture of conflict. She is currently working on a research project exploring the contributions of Jewish fashion makers to London’s dress and textile trades. Hannah Wroe is Senior Lecturer in Fashion at the University of Lincoln where she specializes in pattern cutting. Originally trained in made-to-measure womenswear, she completed her MA at Nottingham Trent University researching pattern cutting and construction methods 1935–60. Current research interests include the history of British fashion education, historical needlework and pattern cutting texts, First World War dress economy practices, London couture dressmakers 1920–60s, alongside remaking practices and object-based approaches to dress history research. Since 2015 she has been involved with the Costume Society and currently serves as a trustee.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This volume would not have been possible without the contributions and generosity of everyone who attended the Everyday Fashion conference at the Universities of Huddersfield and Leeds in June 2019. We are especially indebted to the conference’s four keynote speakers: Beatrice Behlen, Christopher Breward, John Styles and Lou Taylor, not only for their wonderful papers but also their long-standing mentorship and encouragement to us and to generations of dress, fashion and textile historians. Thanks are also due to the Pasold Research Fund for supporting the conference in the first instance and facilitating the research that has led to many of the contributions in this book.

1 Introduction: Negotiating the everyday Bethan Bide, Jade Halbert and Liz Tregenza

In June 2019 a group of historians, researchers and curators came together at the Universities of Huddersfield and Leeds for a conference entitled Everyday Fashion: Extraordinary Stories of Ordinary Clothes. Over two days, many theories were posed about what exactly ‘everyday fashion’ was and how it could be defined. Although no set meaning was agreed on, the conversations themselves revealed the importance of reflecting on what counts as ‘everyday’ in order to interrogate the way we think about what counts as ‘fashion’, who gets to create and participate in it, and who, what and where is excluded from any definition. These conversations raised the importance of orientation and process as key ways of conceiving of the everyday.1 For example, while high-end, bespoke and designer fashions lie beyond what many would consider to be everyday, even the most expensive bespoke garment might be experienced as everyday by the specialist maker who is intimately familiar with the garment’s materials and how they need to be manipulated as a result of repeated acts of making; or for the designer salesroom assistant who fits numerous clients in luxury fashions every day when they come to work.2 That the everyday is not a question of content but perspective is well established in the field of material culture. Ben Highmore considers the everyday not as category of things but as ‘a form of attention that attempts to animate the heterogeneity of social life, the name for an activity of finding meaning in an impossible diversity’.3 It is in this diversity that Daniel Miller finds material culture’s potential, excited by the possibility that its interdisciplinarity, inclusivity and tendency towards experimentation and originality offer. For Miller, it is these very qualities that empower material culture’s ability to draw us back from universalism, towards the diversity, complexity and messiness of everyday lived experience.4 Judy Attfield more explicitly considers the value of everyday processes in the study of material culture, highlighting how objects and their meanings are transformed throughout their biographical journeys. For Attfield, looking at material culture allows us to examine the process of consumption by which individuals transform material goods into ‘the stuff of everyday life that have a direct involvement with matters, both literally and figuratively, of identity’.5

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Exploring the connections between material culture and the everyday practices of life in a consumer society reveals the transformative power of the everyday. As Michel de Certeau argues, it is through the everyday practices of life in a consumer society that we find agency to individualize mass culture (which is to say, personalize and meaningfully interact with the hegemony of mass culture), and through this take ownership and create change within that society.6 This volume is inspired by Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre’s calls to resist the temptation to view the everyday as boring, repetitive and inauthentic, but instead as a powerful force that demands attention.7 As Lefebvre reminds us, just because something is familiar to us through regular encounters does not mean we necessarily know it, and there is much to learn from looking again and critiquing the structures that direct our everyday existence. This call to look again at the everyday and what it does has been widely heeded and in recent years there has been a growing interdisciplinary interest in the transformative power of the everyday. It has been widely discussed in studies related to modernist literature, which calls attention to the relationship between daily routines and the ordinary, highlighting the way the everyday is made special by the attention paid to it by modernist authors.8 The everyday has also been a growing subject of interest in geography disciplines, which have seen trends towards exploring emotion and effect through everyday routines and spaces.9 Many of these studies foreground proximity and intimacy using this focus to explore how researching the local everyday can illuminate our wider understanding of the global.10 This volume picks up on these themes and further demonstrates the value of embracing the interdisciplinary possibilities of paying attention to our everyday practices and encounters with fashionable things. Conceptualizing the everyday as practice rather than category demands an approach that also considers fashion as practice. In recent years, fashion theorists have drawn from sociology to explore the relationship between fashion, society and the physical body. As Merleau-Ponty argues, if the body is the medium through which we experience the world, then in societies where dressed bodies are the norm, that experience is shaped and mediated by what we wear.11 Phenomenological perspectives on fashion as a ‘haptic experience’ have led scholars – most notably Joanne Entwistle – to call for a recognition that dress is an embodied practice.12 Agnès Rocamora has further explored how Pierre Bourdieu’s Field Theory provides a framework for understanding how practices of fashion are interrelated, connecting the material and symbolic production of fashion objects and discourses in order to highlight how meaning is made from this field of production.13 Furthermore, as Entwistle indicates, to understand fashion we must look at the relationships and indeed networks between ‘different bodies operating in fashion: fashion colleges and students, designers and design houses, tailors and seamstresses, models and photographers, as well as fashion editors, distributors, retailers, fashion buyers, shops and consumers’.14 Yet in spite of these calls to consider the interconnected practices that construct fashion more broadly, much fashion research still centres around the narrow activities of designing, selling and consuming expensive clothes. This reflects broader cultural prejudices that have ascribed the value of fashion to certain types of labour deemed to be creative, as exemplified by Angela McRobbie’s research into the way trainee fashion designers rejected the commercial in favour of the artistic in their practice.15 Much of the work which set the boundaries of creative fashion so narrowly has been explicitly undertaken in order to exclude particular individuals and processes from our understanding of what counts as fashion, and in doing so has ensured that certain groups are not credited for their contribution to creating fashion and fashion cultures.16 In order to challenge this it may be helpful to further interrogate the distinctions between that which is understood as ‘fashion’ and that which is understood as ‘dress’.

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Fashion versus dress There are various ways we might describe the garments that cover our bodies, from clothing to costume, dress to fashion. In this book, we have chosen to use the word ‘fashion’ over ‘dress’. Fashion is a mutable word, and its various meanings can in some ways operate in opposition to one another. The word ‘fashion’ may be used to imply a popular style, or the processes of making (the verb ‘to fashion’), or even more broadly as a descriptor of the system within which all clothing emerges and circulates. The editors of this book are all twentieth-century specialists, a century defined, encompassed and awash with fashion – in this century (and indeed, the twenty-first century) it is easy to understand fashion and the everyday as happy bedfellows. However, studies that concentrate on garments produced prior to this period will often use the term ‘dress’ instead of ‘fashion’. We are not suggesting that ‘dress’ is a misnomer in this context, rather, that the same qualities we understand in twentieth- and twenty-first-century everyday fashion can also be understood in earlier styles too. We reject, for example, Elizabeth Ewing’s 1985 argument for privileging ‘dress’ over ‘fashion’: Fashionable dress […] has always been the style of dress favoured at a certain time and place by a privileged group of class proclaiming its special identity by its choice of clothes. Such clothes were valued and treasured and often kept for posterity […] relatively few people through the centuries in any country have worn fashionable dress, or been able to do so.17 Ewing’s work posits a fairly typical idea that ‘fashion’, until the nineteenth century, was the preserve only of the rich and elite. Yet, certainly by the mid-nineteenth century – thanks to rapid industrialization and the increased availability of clothing (particularly ready-made) – fashion was something accessible to a broader spectrum of society. Ewing’s view is outdated, and when we consider the individual stories of men and women across the class system, we can see an engagement with fashionable practices long before the nineteenth century. During the sixteenth century there was a change in the way the word ‘fashion’ was understood; it transitioned from meaning the process of shaping material objects to a word that encapsulated change. This fluctuating use of the word ‘fashion’ occurred alongside a related linguistic shift in meaning of the word ‘consumption’, which transitioned between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries from a term related to destruction through use and the production of waste, to a word associated with creative possibility.18 In the evolution of the meaning of ‘fashion’, English found a simple word to define a complex thing, and in trying to define ‘everyday fashion’ it might be useful to return to this shift in language and ask: what is the relationship between fashion and fashioning? Fashion as a term has oxymoronic qualities. What is ‘fashionable’ is inconsistent and forever changing, but also fixed in time, implying something is specific to a period. Typically, ‘fashion’ has been defined in relation to change, but this book suggests it can perhaps better be understood as a feeling of being ‘in the moment’. The chapters in this volume suggest that fashion is about pleasure and power, that fashion implies excitement – little luxuries and clothes that bring us joy. This pleasurable feeling associated with clothes is one that can be seen long before the nineteenth century. Most importantly, this book demonstrates that fashion is deeply enmeshed with personal experience, often the most visually obvious way a person might perform their identity. Ultimately, what is, or what is not ‘fashion’ or ‘fashionable’ is a personal judgement, subject to deemed aesthetic value and taste. Furthermore, as Fred Davis makes clear, fashion

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is ‘context-dependent’. He suggests that ‘what some combination of clothes or a certain style emphasis “means” will vary tremendously depending on the identity of the wearer, the occasion, the place, the company and even something as vague and transient as the wearer’s and the viewer’s moods.’19 Indeed, fashion, as Yuniya Kawamura argues, provides ‘extra added values to clothing, but the additional elements exist only in people’s imaginations and beliefs. Fashion is not visual clothing but is the invisible elements included in clothing. Fashion encompasses the value added to clothing’.20 Examining how clothes are consumed, used and produced every day collapses the distinctions between dress and fashion. While it is arguable that not all dress is fashion, there is much to learn from questioning where the line might be, and how the distinction has been used to exclude certain people and places from fashion. ‘Dress’ has typically been used as a less loaded term. But the exclusion of non-western clothing from the ‘fashion’ narrative is, unquestionably, deeply problematic. As Heike Jenss writes, One indicator which also points to the idea of the exclusiveness of fashion to Euro-modernity was the avoidance of the use of the temporality- and change-implying word ‘fashion’ or ‘mode’ in relation to non-Western (and nonurban) contexts, and instead the use of the apparently more neutral, or universal term ‘dress’ – to describe the human practice of adorning the body.21 The more we interrogate the boundary between fashion and dress, the more apparent the importance of the storytelling process for the production of fashion becomes. The way we talk about what is and what is not fashion, and where we look for those stories has, as Agnès Rocamora argues, a powerful gatekeeping function. But if fashion is indeed both a ‘material and discursive reality’, then we have the ability to re-write those exclusionary stories.22 As a starting point, this book asks: what is the impact on equality in fashion if we create a more expansive understanding of what fashion is and how fashion practices shape cultures, societies, economies and material experiences?

Everyday fashion and Britishness The very concept of ‘British fashion’ is contentious. It is not easy to pin down what the phrase means and in attempts to articulate its characteristics we often reach for semiotic shorthand and take comfort in the well-known and self-congratulatory signs, symbols and signifiers of what fashion histories have traditionally defined as ‘British fashion’. These can include (in no particular order and of course representative of our own personal cultural positionings): anarchy, eccentricity, neatness, tweed, creativity, bohemia, tailoring, rebellion, insouciance, cashmere, street style, elegance, inventiveness and individuality. These are familiar tropes, rather like the lazy clichés of French fashion (trench coats, red lipstick, silk scarves, marinière tops), but what is interesting is the sheer volume and variety of signifiers associated with ‘British fashion’ and furthermore, that – unlike the unmoving semiotic pillars of French fashion – they seem curiously unfixed and potentially mutable. This shifting character, this mutability makes ‘British fashion’ an exciting starting point from which to explore the constant flux of everyday fashion because it provides space to challenge the familiarity of semiotic tropes that determine fashion as a fixed culture associated with national identities rather than as an evolving culture associated with the chaos of ordinary life and individual personal style.

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This national fashion identity has often been one which is built on the concept of tradition, but as a number of scholars have pointed out, this heritage is manufactured to a point. Stephen Daniels suggests that the idea of Britishness is ‘coordinated around, and often largely defined through, cultural iconography or by representations of legends and landscapes, by stories of golden ages, enduring traditions, heroic deeds and dramatic destinies located in ancient or promised home-lands with hallowed sites and scenery’.23 However, the concept of Britishness has often been, as Alison Goodrum makes clear (following the work of Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger), a ‘product of invented tradition seen to be rooted in the remotest of antiquity, yet actually originating only in the recent past of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century’.24 Traditions, however, are perhaps easier to invent if you construct them from the outside. Some fashion professionals who have most successfully invented British fashion traditions were not necessarily born in Britain. For example, Hans Juda (1904–75), the editor of the influential British trade journal The Ambassador, was, as an émigré, ‘able to take a wider view of what Britain meant to the outsider, to see its strengths and weaknesses’, and thus to construct new, highly potent versions of ‘British fashion’.25 The tensions between these oppositional constituencies in fashion studies (which is to say, the realities and the invented realities) have long inhibited the field. Preoccupation with ‘elite’ fashion consumption and spectacle has meant that the rich seam of potential inherent in the study of the everyday has gone largely unnoticed. This volume recognizes that discussions about diversity in fashion are currently enjoying a resurgence, but often these discussions barely scratch the surface of the complexities of what is understood as diverse in the history of British fashion, and indeed in Britain itself. Focus on diversity often switches between gender, sexuality and race with little attention paid to how these issues intersect with issues of class diversity. This is surprising, given the enduring prominence of class issues in British society. Of course, there are exceptions. John Styles’s superior work on the everyday dress of ordinary people in eighteenth-century England represents a landmark study in this regard; his mastery of unconventional but revelatory sources sheds brilliant light on the everyday fashion practices of people who have traditionally been absent in the historical record.26 Similarly, Vivienne Richmond’s work on clothing the poor in nineteenth-century England highlighted the power of fashion in multiple contexts in shaping our understanding of the everyday in British fashion.27 With respect to class, the work of Rachel Worth provides keen insight into this glaring issue as a structural issue within the history of British fashion, while a growing number of scholars are paying attention to the previously neglected area of mass-market fashion.28 Other authors have also been important. Christopher Breward’s work on London fashion and Englishness in dress has added important new dimensions to our knowledge about the national character and identity.29 Carol Tulloch has challenged the traditional and insular boundaries of ‘British fashion’ in her work on the Caribbean diaspora and its substantial contribution to everyday fashion cultures and, more significantly, to British fashion culture more generally.30 This is important because this volume does not restrict itself either geographically or theoretically to the four nations of the current UK; indeed, as recent politics indicate, and as Raphael Samuel reminds us, ‘The geography and politics of Britain are often out of sync’ and its ‘frontiers are typically porous’.31 Fashion itself has little regard for national identities, borders or frontiers and information about fashion and knowledge about what is fashionable in any given place has always found routes – some clear, others wonderfully complicated – through even the most challenging obstacles.32 Notwithstanding this, the locus of Britain and the historiographical frameworks of British history represent a useful starting point from which to interrogate what is meant by

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Britishness in the context of fashion, because they allow us to range across centuries, colonies, Empires and conflict to arrive at a clearer definition and understanding of Britishness in fashion than has previously been possible. This volume provides that starting point from which to negotiate new critical perspectives on Britishness in fashion by interrogating the everyday through a range of lenses: the four nations of the UK, the violence and turmoil of colonization, the pink creep of Empire and sartorial connections within the Commonwealth to name a few. As Stuart Hall has argued so eloquently and so persuasively, the familiar constant of the everyday has unique power to reveal hitherto unreachable histories and uncomfortable truths hiding in plain sight, whether in our national museum collections, on our high streets, in our own wardrobes or in Hall’s case, in our kitchen cupboards: I am the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea. I am the sweet tooth, the sugar plantations that rotted generations of English children’s teeth. There are thousands of others beside me that are, you know, the cup of tea itself […] Because they don’t grow it in Lancashire, you know […] Not a single tea plantation exists within the United Kingdom. This is the symbolization of English identity – I mean, what does anybody in the world know about an English person except that they can’t get through the day without a cup of tea? Where does it come from? Ceylon – Sri Lanka, India. That is the outside history that is inside the history of the English. There is no English history without that other history.33

How to read this book This book is divided into two sections, each of which follows a broadly chronological order. The first section is a showcase for some of the myriad innovative and creative approaches researchers can take to the study of everyday fashion, celebrating the diversity of sources and methods that can be used to uncover new historical perspectives. In this section, our authors combine more familiar and conventional modes of research commonly used in the study of dress and textiles (archives, visual sources, objects, etc.), alongside imaginative and accessible new approaches especially suited to the study of the everyday as applied to fashion: reconstructive methods; analysis of quotidian but rich sources such as photograph albums, postcards and the instructive accounts of home dressmaking manuals; the practice of oral history; analysis of pocket contents; and the autoethnographic experience of wearing vintage everyday fashion and what that means for our understanding of the history of fashion more broadly. The approaches used in these chapters demonstrate the creativity of researchers working in this field and the accessibility of everyday fashion histories through sometimes unconventional but always imaginative routes. We hope that this section inspires researchers to look beyond the museum and the archive to consider everyday fashion histories in more diverse and accessible contexts; to see, for example, the potential of your grandmother’s wardrobe as a unique and potent record of everyday fashion history just as interesting and valid as any museum collection. The second section of the book considers everyday fashion in practice, redefining and testing our understanding of the everyday and where it is found. Here, our authors look beyond the conventional to showcase the depth and breadth of everyday fashion thereby demonstrating how fashion reaches into everyday lives and illuminating the people involved in the everyday fashion world. Here is de Certeau’s individualizing power in action.

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Woven between the chapters are a series of object biographies. Four of these come from the keynotes who spoke at our original conference: Beatrice Behlen, Christopher Breward, John Styles and Lou Taylor, all scholars who have pioneered studies of materiality and everyday fashionable experience. The others are written by curators and museum professionals. For these, we purposely prioritized regional, social history collections, both due to the historical focus on non-elite clothing in these collections and a desire to decentre British fashionable geographies. We asked each contributor to pick either an item of their own, or one from the collection they work with which, for them, is representative of ‘everyday fashion’. It is striking that the majority of objects chosen were made in the twentieth century and can be understood as mass-produced. This highlights that, typically, twentieth-century everyday fashion is both better represented in museum collections, and also more likely to be documented as ‘everyday’. It also is suggestive of how we might understand everyday fashion and its disruptive qualities in collections. The power of everyday fashion to disrupt stems from the tension between official, universalizing historical narratives and extant material objects, which reveal the messier (and sometimes contradictory) details of individual interactions and processes.34 The object biographies that punctuate the chapters in this book remind us of the ways that objects are transformed through use over time, and that these everyday interactions with things often individualize the mass-produced and alter its meaning. The small material details that mark these processes of transformation are thus capable of subverting and challenging accepted historical tropes, making fashion objects ideal material through which to tell ‘history from below’.35 These encounters with objects invite the reader to participate in the research process by asking how objects might be ‘read’ in multiple ways that reveal the diverse, and even divergent, nature of experiences of everyday fashion. Perhaps more importantly, they also serve as reminders of the inevitably partial nature of this volume, and the many stories still to be told about everyday fashion from different times and communities.

The spaces and places of everyday fashion If fashion is to be understood as an embodied practice, then logic dictates that it must also be situated in place and space.36 With this in mind, it is little surprise that the ability of fashion to provide a lens through which we can build deeper understandings about how people live, work and consume within and between places has been of growing interest to economic, urban and cultural geographers and historians in recent years.37 This work recognizes that fashionable spaces are created from processes of making and performing fashion and that large numbers of individuals – whose labour is usually uncredited – contribute to these processes.38 Place has long been important to the fashion industry. Agglomerations of designers and makers in certain places and times have allowed for skills sharing and the development of new techniques and designs, driving fashionable change.39 Looking at place can help us understand how the fashion industry has changed over time, for example revealing how global fashion capitals have shifted from being centres of production to places which are more symbolically significant.40 Beyond the activities associated with the fabrication of material fashion objects, place is also important for defining fashion. The fashion industry has ‘actively used strategies of association and dissociation’ with certain places to create and maintain symbolic value.41 The rewards for places with high fashion capital are significant – today the small ‘oligarchy’ of global fashion capitals not only support fashion businesses but the broader cultural and

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leisure industries in those cities too.42 But it also conceals the importance of other spaces – often those less-glamorous sites of manufacture – in order to maintain fashionable reputations.43 This place-making is possible because of the dual realities of fashion as both fabricated material objects and the stories we tell about them.44 In this way, fashion overlaps with Doreen Massey’s conception of places as plural and continually in the process of becoming: as she has noted, ‘if space is rather a simultaneity of stories-so-far, then places are collections of those stories, articulations within the wider power-geometries of space’.45 Thinking about the places and spaces of everyday fashion helps us further unpick how the stories around where and by whom fashion is practised are constructed, and who they benefit. We can understand everyday fashion by drawing on non-representational theory, which suggests focusing on the ‘everyday routines, fleeting encounters, [and] embodied movements’ that shaped lived experiences in order to provide a different perspective on a research subject.46 Thinking about these everyday routines and the embodied practices of making, consuming and wearing fashion takes fashion out of the designer’s studio and off the catwalk. It reminds us that fashion is messy and multiple, that it happens in salons and photographers’ studios, but also in back rooms, on kitchen tables and in the space between desire and being on the wrong side of the shop window. As a result, understanding the importance of embodied experience and routine can help us celebrate the contribution that the seemingly everyday makes to innovation and change. As Cheryl Buckley and Hazel Clark have argued in the case of London, it is often ‘the rawness of everyday life’ that inspires innovative fashion.47 This raises significant questions about how the narratives about place and fashion often serve to gatekeep who gets credited as part of fashion’s creative cultures. Focusing on the value of embodied everyday experiences invites contemplation of how objects have been fabricated, circulated and used, and confronts us with the forgotten lives and labour that have shaped them.48 It also invites us to look beyond the urban spaces of fashion. Exploring the everyday practices of making, wearing and consuming fashion has a particular power to materialize the connections between places, showing us that the geographies of fashion are more connected than often described. Following the journeys taken by fashion products and designs reveals that, although contemporary global commodity chains may be longer and more complex than in the past, they are not anything new.49 As Marie McLoughlin and Lou Taylor’s recent edited collection on Paris fashion under Nazi occupation demonstrates, taking a smallscale focus on lived experience and process also has the power to disrupt the nationalist cultural narratives fashion’s stories often serve.50 Using an everyday focus to make connections between urban fashion centres, suburban and rural fashion networks and international commodity chains challenges the narrow conception of what counts as ‘British’ fashion, demonstrating how Britain’s shifting borders over the past 500 years have shaped and reshaped fashion. Although numerous fashion scholars have discussed the need to re-place fashion, this book demonstrates the particular importance of considering how everyday practices – from the fabrication of fashion materials to the wearing of seemingly ordinary clothes – shape wider fashion spaces and, through this, create fashionable places. Looking at everyday practices of fashion and the types of material, archival and oral sources that reveal these allows us to find fashion in a wider variety of places and spaces that are often explored in fashion histories. While the contributions to this book do examine fashion practices in shops and fashion magazines, they also consider what can be learned from turning to spaces that are not usually associated with fashionable practice. In her exploration of how older women catered for their sartorial needs by engaging in home dressmaking in the middle decades of the twentieth century, Hannah Rowe demonstrates the value of asking why certain people feel excluded from the established

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spaces of fashion. She finds that, while many older women felt excluded from fashionable shops and the ready-to-wear fashion industry due to financial barriers and their non-standard body shapes, the act of making fashionable garments in their own domestic spaces gave them considerable fashion agency, and that this agency was facilitated by the producers of home dressmaking instruction kits. Cyana Madsen finds agency in the way clothes can be used to negotiate space and our place within the world by investigating how Francis Golding used the intimate bodily space of the pocket to store and curate the ephemera of his life, from newspaper clippings to ticket stubs. By focusing on space at the micro level of the pocket, Madsen argues that memories can be embodied and made tangible in garments. Golding’s acts of selection and retention transformed everyday disposable ephemera into treasured memento, and his curated pockets became spaces that collapsed the past and present. Now that Golding’s clothes and pocket contents have entered museum collections, Madsen raises questions about how to curate the deeply personal and intimate, bodily aspects of everyday clothing habits in a public space. On a macro level, using the everyday to re-place fashion stretches existing historical geographies of fashion out from global fashion cities to suburbs, regional urban centres and rural areas. Jenny Gilbert asks us to look again at the importance of regional fashion centres, demonstrating how twentieth-century Birmingham wholesalers acted as ‘active agents in the creation, distribution and diffusion’ of fashion, both in Birmingham but also in the workingclass communities of surrounding industrial towns through their networks of independent shop keepers. By highlighting the importance of these wholesalers as disseminators of new fashions in communities that were underserved by department stores and multiple retailers, Gilbert confronts us with how biases towards sources focused on the higher end of the fashion industry have blinded us to the importance of other actors as sources of fashion creation and agents of fashionable change in our lived experience. Eliza McKee’s chapter takes us even further from fashionable metropolitan centres, uncovering how travelling tailors and shoemakers, who moved around the Irish countryside making clothing and footwear in homes, served the fashion needs of rural non-elites. McKee dispels myths that the clothing they produced served purely practical needs, finding that the arrival of these travelling makers and their accompanying outside knowledge was met with considerable excitement. Although the pace of change in the clothing styles they produced was slow, McKee finds evidence that these clothes were understood as fashionable within the class communities and local areas travelling makers serviced. Not only does this chapter demonstrate how fashion happens beyond the borders of what have previously been considered fashionable spaces, it also highlights the importance of considering how movement and the circulations of fashion practices between places shape our lived experience. Aditi Khare makes the case for looking beyond the geographical borders of the British Isles to understand how a long history of global connections has shaped British fashions. By looking at everyday practices of making and consuming Chintz in the seventeenth century, Khare reveals inextricable connections between Indian artisans and British consumers. While noting that these relationships are clearly bound up with colonial power imbalances, Khare argues that examining everyday lived experiences of consumers and makers can help us recognize the complexity of the cultural entanglements between Britain and India and find Asian agency in the global Chintz trade. Khare also notes how the everyday consumption of the ‘exotic’ commodity of Chintz demonstrates how global fashion connections shaped Britain’s understanding of itself through its ability to own and commodify international design cultures as part of its colonial activities. The way that Britain’s colonial history has shaped fashion practices is also discussed by Rianna

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Norbert-David, who considers how successive generations of diasporic Caribbean communities in London since the 1940s have used clothing to negotiate their sense of belonging in space. Members of the community have used practices of ‘dressing up’ as a way to claim legitimacy within the spaces of the city and to carve new spaces for their own community. Norbert-David charts these fashion practices through the liminal spaces of music scenes – from Sound Systems to pirate radio stations – raising questions about what counts as British fashion and who gets to define it.

Production, people and the ‘back-region’ of fashion The production of everyday fashion in Britain has always been multifarious and tied up with notions of place, class, gender and hierarchy. These exist within the very structures of production (whether that be a city, a neighbourhood or an individual building) but also stretch beyond these confines to contain other taxonomies within the ever-expanding and contracting world of mass-produced fashion. Manufacture is a site of contradiction, at once associated with the archaic horrors of the sweatshop and the sleek modernity of the post-war factory, the drudgery of repetitive machine-based manual labour and the pride of the legend ‘Made in Britain’. Of course, these are overly simplistic analyses reliant on stereotype and tabloid understandings, which (although frustrating) is understandable; most well-known accounts of actually making clothes rely on unusual examples made notorious by publicity. For example, the starving garret seamstresses of the nineteenth century, the mercury-poisoned hatters of Belle Époque Paris and the sweated seamstresses of dark Dickensian London loom large in the imagination as powerful tropes warning us about the evils of fashion and consumerist vanity.51 The reality, of course, is much less sensational, but far more interesting; careful analysis of everyday production of fashion has much to add to our knowledge and understanding about things relating to, within and beyond fashion. There are many ways of making clothes but if we take the post-Second World War period when production was at its peak in Britain as an example, there are some clear trends: you could make clothes for yourself or your family at home by hand (sewn or knitted), by sewing machine, from self-drafted pattern or from commercial paper pattern; at home for money (outwork); in a department store; in a tailor’s shop (bespoke, made-to-measure, multiple); in a dressmaker’s shop or in a factory (small cut, make, trim serving myriad clients or larger industrial and verticallyintegrated).52 Since the 1960s the factory has been the dominant locus of everyday fashion production, both in Britain and around the world, and this makes it a compelling vantage point from which to examine the hectic flux of everyday fashion at its point of origin because it is also a site of action and negotiation around which key fashion actors coalesce.53 Here is Erving Goffman’s definition of the ‘back region’ in action, in all its thrilling haste and daring-do.54 Suzanne Rowland’s chapter in this volume is dedicated to the exploration of the back region through the lens of ‘capable women’ – blouse designers in the wholesale fashion trade in the first decades of the twentieth century. Here, she provides critical new context for our understanding not only of class and gender roles in the production of everyday fashion but also the rapid development of mass-manufacturing in this period. This was a time of increased unionization, greater gender parity and expansion of the role of the designer in this mass-production context. Rowland argues that the ‘capable women’ of the wholesale trade were much more than just designers of everyday fashion: they were also mediators and disrupters of design hierarchies, an

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argument that has profound implications for our understanding of the power and autonomy of the ‘back region’ in not only producing everyday fashion, but actually shaping it. Bethan Bide also reveals much about the inner-workings of rich back region activities from the vantage point of the factory floor in her chapter. She uses a precious and unusual source – the voices of factory workers themselves – to consider the agency of garment workers to create fashion cultures in the 1950s and 1960s and thereby challenge our understanding of where fashion happens.55 Here, she argues that everyday labour practices of cutting, sewing, pressing and packing clothes shaped local fashion cultures by influencing the way the women employed to do them used fashion in their own lives. While Rowland and Bide’s chapters argue for creativity as inherent within cultures of production, Sarah Bendall’s chapter shows that the mass-production of everyday garments can galvanize trade, innovation and creative change before the advent of the factory. Drawing on a range of visual, written and material sources, Bendall demonstrates how whalebone became part of everyday fashion in seventeenth-century England. Through this, she argues that increased trade and the expansion of the material world (therefore, availability) and innovation in making practices among artisans stimulated the use of whalebone, turning it from elite matter in the sixteenth century to a central part of everyday fashion within a short hundred years. The production of everyday fashion is of course about more than the act of manufacturing clothes. It is also about the processes of manufacturing meaning and identity through the selection and wearing of everyday garments. In her chapter in this volume, Vic Clarke examines the use of characteristically ‘working class’ fashion cultures as a mode of political persuasion and action in the Chartist movement during the 1840s. Using the example of Feargus O’Connor, the ‘gentleman leader’ of the Chartists and his use of the fustian jacket as a means of crafting a class-bound message of political solidarity, she explores the visual and textual aspects of Chartist material culture as a means of building community and creating intimacy between geographically disparate, but politically alike activists, and thus reveals the power of everyday fashion to produce meaning as powerful as machinery.

Design, dissemination and display The relationship between fashion and design is often represented by stories of the solo ‘genius’ designer. These proliferate in glossy fashion books and blockbuster fashion exhibitions. Although individual designers do indeed participate in fashion practices through their work and lives, it is notable that there are no stories of the solo designer in this book. Instead, we see the designer situated in negotiation with wider fashion networks and the meaning of designed garments remade by those who experience and use them. Stories of co-design emerge as garments are worn and altered over time. Constructions of the everyday are often deeply personal, and thus the relationship between design and everyday fashion is often best understood not only through physical garments themselves, but in conjunction with their associated stories and how individuals chose to consume and wear specific things. This perspective undermines definitions of everyday dress as something necessarily belonging to the working and middle classes, rather than the elite. Serena Dyer’s chapter uses dress diaries from the eighteenth century to explore how elite women experienced everyday dress – that which they wore habitually, rather than on exceptional occasions – revealing how life writing can help us understand experiences of garments which were not preserved and

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collected due to processes of survival bias, which privileged the spectacular and exceptional. Jenny Richardson’s chapter also discusses a type of clothing that rarely survives: the workwear worn by female munition workers during the First World War. Richardson illustrates the power of photographic postcards to capture not just the material details of these lost garments, but the ways munition workers used them in processes of self-fashioning and identity formation. By styling their workwear, posing for the photographs and then circulating them, these women found ways to express the deep friendships and new sense of self they gained from war work. The study of latter twentieth-century fashion can offer opportunities to access the stories of those men and women who designed, disseminated and consumed everyday fashion more directly, through interviews and the collection of oral histories. In her chapter Jade Halbert illustrates the value of using oral history methodologies to collect everyday fashion histories using the example of her own oral history focused study into the Marion Donaldson company. Halbert demonstrates the importance of making space to hear the voices of both interviewer as well as interviewee in order to access multi-layered stories using this methodology. Danielle Sprecher also uses oral history as a methodology in order to advance the discussion of both the design and consumption of men’s suits from the 1950s to the 1970s. This chapter unpicks the way the suit has been perceived as sartorially bland due to men’s everyday routines of wearing it for work, leisure and special events. Sprecher challenges these assumptions through the stories of three men and the everyday and mutable role that suits played in their lives, showing how they enacted fashion through their suit choices and used this as a method of identity construction. The relationship between everyday practices of wearing clothes and identity construction can also be seen in Liz Tregenza’s chapter. Using an auto-ethnographic approach and a wearing methodology, Tregenza explores her own everyday style and considers her intimate relationship with her vintage wardrobe. She explains how the clothes she wears mark her, and how she, in turn, marks them. Reflecting on the power of clothes to affect change – both physically and on our identity – Tregenza highlights the importance of collecting stories of wear as well as objects in order to understand everyday embodied experiences of fashion. The stories not told about fashion provide the subject of Emily Taylor’s chapter. Taylor explains how the stories told about men’s fashion are shaped by limited narratives, such as Flügel’s notorious ‘Great Masculine Renunciation’, and that in trying to find fashionable stories that represent those narratives, studies of masculinity and men’s fashion are typically disconnected from the clothes men actually wore. Focusing on collections held by National Museums Scotland, Taylor looks intimately at everyday working men’s dress of c.1730–880 to reframe the history of menswear and everyday masculinities, revealing the dormant potential of men’s stories in museum collections. Emily Taylor’s chapter demonstrates that little has changed since 2002 when Lou Taylor noted that fashion publications and exhibitions concentrate ‘on the most glamorous levels of clothing production’.56 Although the value of sartorial biographies and non-elite clothes to tell engaging stories is more widely recognized than it was twenty years ago, narratives of the genius designer and the lure of pristine, elite garments are still the foci for most displays and exhibitions about fashion. This book does not necessarily set the everyday practices of making, wearing and consuming fashion in opposition to this, but it does point to the way these intimate and personal stories of engagement can illuminate our understanding of fashion and its ‘star’ designers. This potential was demonstrated by the use of personal stories by curator Jenny Lister in the 2019 Mary Quant exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum. This book also exemplifies the value of imperfections in material objects and the way these can connect us to human stories from the past. This was evidenced especially well in the digital video displays that revealed details of the

INTRODUCTION

13

internal construction and wear of garments featured in the 2022 exhibition In America: An Anthology of Fashion at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Foregrounding the value of everyday fashion practice and how it manifests in material objects has the potential to enrich future fashion collections by showing would-be museum donors the value of their everyday garments. Widening our definitions of where, how and by whom fashion is practised enables fashion displays and publications to engage with new audiences. But it also allows fashion to be more readily engaged with outside of formal academic and curatorial practice. Because everyday fashion can be accessed through domestic wardrobes, charity shops and conversations with family and friends, it provides an accessible way for people to connect with the human stories of the past. The skin-like quality of clothes that are worn, loved, re-used and worn out connects us to our histories. It helps us understand where we have come from and how our communities have used fashion to negotiate identity. By foregrounding a range of different stories that encapsulate the myriad ways people experience fashion, we hope this book will help encourage new scholars who may not see themselves represented in existing studies, exhibitions and collections to explore the field of fashion history without fear.

Notes 1

Sara Ahmed, ‘Orientations Matter’, in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, ed. D. H. Coole and S. Frost (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 234–58.

2

See, for example, Cheryl Buckley and Hazel Clark who propose that extra ordinary fashion can ‘occur in the context of the everyday’. Cheryl Buckley and Hazel Clark, Fashion and Everyday Life: London and New York (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 1.

3

Ben Highmore Everyday Life and Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 2001), 175.

4

Daniel Miller, Stuff (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 8.

5

Judy Attfield, Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 3.

6

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Oakland: University of California Press, 1980).

7

Henri Lefebvre, The Critique of Everyday Life (London: Verso, 1991).

8

Bryony Randall, Modernism, Daily Time, and Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

9

Kamila Klingorová and Banu Gökarıksel, ‘Auto-Photographic Study of Everyday Emotional Geographies’, Area 51 (2019): 752–62.

10 Steve Pile, ‘Emotions and Affect in Recent Human Geography’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 35 (2010): 5–20; Deborah Cowen and Brett Story, Intimacy and the Everyday, in The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics, ed. Klaus Dodds, Merje Kuus, and Joanne Sharp (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013), 341–58. 11 Llewellyn Negrin, ‘Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The Corporeal Experience of Fashion’, in Thinking Through Fashion: A Guide to Key Theorists, ed. Agnès Rocamora and Anneke Smelik (London: I. B. Tauris, 2016), 115–131. 12 Joanne Entwistle, The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 2000); Ellen Sampson, Worn: Footwear, Attachment and the Affects of Wear (London: Bloomsbury, 2000). 13 Agnès Rocamora, ‘Pierre Bourdieu: The Field of Fashion’, in Thinking through Fashion: A Guide to Key Theorists, ed. Agnès Rocamora and Anneke Smelik (London: I. B. Tauris, 2016), 233–250.

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14 Entwistle, The Fashioned Body, 1. 15 Angela McRobbie, British Fashion Design: Rag Trade or Image Industry? (London: Routledge, 1998), 13. 16 Bethan Bide, ‘Class and Creativity in Fashion Education’, International Journal of Fashion Studies 8, no. 2 (2021): 175–94. 17 Elizabeth Ewing, Everyday Dress, 1650–1900 (New York: Chelsea House, 1985), 7. 18 Frank Trentmann, Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First (London: Allen Lane, 2016), 7. 19 Fred Davis, Fashion, Culture, and Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 8. 20 Yuniya Kawamura, Fashion-ology: An Introduction to Fashion Studies (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 4. 21 Heike Jenss, Fashion Studies: Research Methods, Sites and Practices (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 4–5. 22 Agnès Rocamora, Fashioning the City: Paris Fashion and the Media (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009). 23 Stephen Daniels, Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), 5. 24 Alison Goodrum, The National Fabric: Fashion, Britishness and Globalization (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 61; see also Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 25 Annamarie Stapleton, ‘Hans and Elsbeth Juda’, in The Ambassador Magazine: Promoting Post-War British Textiles and Fashion, ed. Christopher Breward and Claire Wilcox (London: V&A Publishing, 2012), 24. 26 John Styles, The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 27 Vivienne Richmond, Clothing the Poor in Nineteenth Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 28 Rachel Worth, Fashion and Class (London: Bloomsbury, 2020); Cheryl Roberts, Consuming Mass Fashion in 1930s England: Design, Manufacture and Retail for Young Working-Class Women (Switzerland: Springer, 2022). 29 Christopher Breward, Fashioning London: Clothing and the Modern Metropolis (Oxford: Berg, 2004); Christopher Breward, Becky Conekin, and Caroline Cox, ed. The Englishness of English Dress (London: Berg, 2002). 30 Carol Tulloch, The Birth of Cool: Style Narratives of the African Diaspora (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). 31 Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory Vol. II: Island Stories (London: Verso, 1998), 45. 32 Lou Taylor and Marie McLoughlin, Paris Fashion and World War Two: Global Diffusion and Nazi Control (London: Bloomsbury, 2020); Judd Stitziel, Fashioning Socialism (London: Berg, 2005); Serena Dyer, Jade Halbert, and Sophie Littlewood ed., Disseminating Dress: Britain’s Fashion Networks, 1600–1970 (London: Bloomsbury, 2022). 33 Stuart Hall, ‘Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities’, in Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity, ed. Anthony D. King (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 48–9. 34 Bethan Bide, ‘Signs of Wear: Encountering Memory in the Worn Materiality of a Museum Fashion Collection’, Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture 21, no. 4 (2017): 449–76. 35 E. P. Thompson, ‘History from Below’, Times Literary Supplement, 7 April 1966: 279–80.

INTRODUCTION

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36 Entwistle, The Fashioned Body. 37 Merle Patchett and Nina Williams, ‘Geographies of Fashion and Style: Setting the Scene’, GeoHumanities 7, no. 1 (2021): 198–216; Christopher Breward, Edwina Ehrman, and Caroline Evans ed., The London Look: Fashion from Street to Catwalk (London: Yale University Press, 2004). 38 Nancy Green, Ready to Wear and Ready to Work (London: Duke University Press, 1997). 39 Norma Rantisi, ‘The Ascendance of New York Fashion’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 28, no. 1 (2004): 86–106. 40 David Gilbert, ‘From Paris to Shanghai’, in Fashion’s World Cities, ed. Christopher Breward and David Gilbert (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 3–32. 41 Louise Crewe, The Geographies of Fashion: Consumption, Space and Value (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). 42 Frederic Godart, ‘The Power Structure of the Fashion Industry: Fashion Capitals, Globalization and Creativity’, International Journal of Fashion Studies 1, no. 1 (2014): 39–55. 43 Christopher Breward, ‘Fashion’s Front and Back: “Rag Trade” Cultures and Cultures of Consumption in Post-War London c.1945–1970’, London Journal 31, no. 1 (2006): 15–40; Philip Crang, Katherine Brickell, Laurie Parsons, Nithya Natarajan, Thomas Cristofoletti, and Naomi Graham, ‘Discardscapes of Fashion: Commodity Biography, Patch Geographies, and Preconsumer Garment Waste in Cambodia’, Social & Cultural Geography 23, no. 4 (2020): 539–58. 44 Rocamora, Fashioning the City. 45 Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005), 130. 46 Hayden Lorimer, ‘Cultural Geography: The Busyness of Being ‘More-Than-Representational’, Progress in Human Geography 29, no. 1 (2005): 83–94. 47 Buckley and Clark, Fashion and Everyday Life, 3. 48 Divya Tolia-Kelly, ‘The Geographies of Cultural Geography III: Material Geographies, Vibrant Matters and Risking Surface Geographies’, Progress in Human Geography 37, no. 1 (2013): 153–60. 49 Ian Cook et al., ‘Follow the Thing: Papaya’, Antipode 36 (2004): 642–64. 50 Taylor and McLoughlin, Paris Fashion and World War Two. 51 See for example, Beverly Lemire, Dress, Culture and Commerce: The English Clothing Trade Before the Factory, 1660–1800 (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 1997); Alison Matthews David, Fashion Victims: The Dangers of Dress Past and Present (London: Bloomsbury, 2015); Christina Walkley, The Ghost in the Looking Glass: The Victorian Seamstress (London: Peter Owen Publishers, 1981). 52 See for instance, Paul Hirst and Jonathan Zeitlin, Reversing Industrial Decline? British Economic Policy in International Perspective (Oxford: Berg, 1988); Annie Phizacklea, Unpacking the Fashion Industry (London: Routledge, 1990); Angela McRobbie, British Fashion: Rag Trade or Image Industry? (London: Routledge, 1998). 53 Christopher Breward, ‘“Fashion’s Front and Back”; Margaret Wray’, The Women’s Outerwear Industry (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1957); Eric Newby, Something Wholesale: My Life and Times in the Rag Trade (London: Picador, 1985). 54 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (London: Allen Lane, 1959). 55 Oral histories collected as part of the ‘Voices from the Factory Floor’ project conducted by the Women’s Archive of Wales. 56 Lou Taylor, The Study of Dress History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 51.

FIGURE 2.1  Part of a handkerchief, silk with linen threads, Spitalfields, London, c.1750. Twill weave, block printed in red with dark blue borders on a mustard yellow ground. Bibliothèque de la Union Centrale des Arts Decoratifs, Paris, GG 2: ‘Le Livre d’Echantillons de John Holker’, c.1750, swatch no. 85.

2 Counterfeit fashion: An eighteenth-century printed silk handkerchief John Styles

‘The young Man that had my Handkerchief, asked me what Sort of a Handkerchief it was and I said, it was a red and yellow India Handkerchief.’ evidence in a trial at the old bailey, london for pickpocketing, 1743.1

‘I am a linnen-draper on Tower-hill. … The prisoner … desired I would shew him an India-handkerchief. I said I had none. He asked me if I had any Irish. I said they, as well as the India ones, were prohibited.’ evidence in a trial at the old bailey, london for shoplifting, 1761.2

The history of fashion, especially popular fashion, is a history of copying, adaptation, mixing and adulteration. Sartorial borrowings have ranged across space, time, identity, design and material. They have been celebrated as inspiration, reworking and bricolage. They have been vilified as plagiarism, appropriation and theft. Nevertheless, they have repeatedly propelled innovation and creativity. The eighteenth-century printed silk handkerchief illustrated here was, at one and the same time, a product of such an exchange and a result of official attempts to prevent it.3 The handkerchief, woven in the Spitalfields area of London and then block-printed at one of the textile printing works on the outskirts of the city, was acquired during the winter of 1751–2 by John Holker, a Roman Catholic exile from Britain who was working as an industrial spy for the French government. Born into a Lancashire Catholic family, in 1745 Holker was a partner in a textile business in Manchester. In the winter of that year, he joined the doomed Jacobite rebel army bent on placing Charles Edward Stuart, ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’, on the throne of England.

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Armed insurrection was an unusual undertaking for a Manchester textile manufacturer, but for Holker it was to be merely the beginning of an extraordinary, sometimes picaresque career of imprisonment for treason, escape, exile, military campaigning, spying, French government service and industrial innovation.4 The handkerchief was acquired by Holker when he returned to Britain on a clandestine industrial espionage mission for his new French employers. Official interest in humble handkerchiefs of this sort arose from European enthusiasm for Indian painted and printed textiles during the ‘calico craze’ of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Government attitudes were ambiguous. To protect their silk and woollen textile industries from Indian competition, the British and French governments imposed prohibitions on the import and use of these exotic fabrics. Yet the two countries’ East India Companies traded huge quantities of textiles from India for re-export. At the same time, their textile manufacturers were endeavouring to copy the superior Indian colouring techniques that made Indian printed and painted textiles so appealing. John Holker’s secret visit to England and his acquisition of the Spitalfields printed handkerchief formed part of the French government’s effort to encourage these endeavours. The Spitalfields handkerchief is woven not from calico, but from cheap, coarse silk. It is a copy of an Indian-woven and Indian-printed all-silk original, designed to fool purchasers into thinking it was Indian. What you see here is only a corner of the handkerchief, which was 34 inches (86 cm) by 34 inches square. It was sold to be worn as a neckerchief. Colourful neck handkerchiefs, woven or printed in cotton, cheap linen or expensive silk, were prominent fashion accessories for working men and women in eighteenth-century Britain, one of the petty clothing luxuries accessible to the poor. Silk versions imported from India, printed or painted with exotic patterns in vibrant colours, though illegal, were especially desirable, due to the superior quality of Indian colouring and the luxurious associations of silk fabric. Their prohibition gave rise to a clandestine market for smuggled Indian imports. English manufacturers responded by making inferior imitations, like this one. In London, gullible purchasers looking for illicit bargains were notoriously easy prey for a type of street seller known as an ‘East-India duffer’. They pretended ‘to sell ignorant people very great bargains of smuggled goods’, particularly imitation Bengal silk handkerchiefs that were actually flimsy counterfeits, made locally from inferior, adulterated materials.5 The Spitalfields handkerchief provides material evidence of the way everyday fashion in eighteenth-century Britain was rooted in copying, adaptation and adulteration, in this case on a global scale. The handkerchief’s makers and sellers boosted its allure as a petty luxury by means of a double deception. Though produced in London from cheaper materials, it purported to be an expensive, high-quality import. At the same time, by pretending to be contraband, evading the British state’s mercantilist restrictions on Indian textiles, it acquired an enhanced appeal as an illicit pleasure.

Notes 1

Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, 24 August 2021), September 1743, trial of Elizabeth Canning (t17430907-33).

2

Old Bailey Proceedings Online, April 1761, Thomas Preston (t17610401–2).

3

Bibliothèque de la Union Centrale des Arts Decoratifs, Paris, GG 2: ‘Le Livre d’Echantillons de John Holker’, c.1750, swatch no. 85.

4

John R. Harris, Industrial Espionage and Technology Transfer: Britain and France in the Eighteenth Century (Aldershot: Routledge, 1998), chapter 3.

5

Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 23 May 1765.

PART ONE

Approaches to the Study of Everyday Fashion

20

3 Whalebone and fashion in seventeenthcentury England: Changing consumer culture, trade and innovation Sarah A. Bendall

At the end of the seventeenth century the consumer landscape of England was vastly different from that of the sixteenth century as new raw materials from around the world made their way into people’s homes and wardrobes. Historians have shown that the diets of fashionable Europeans increasingly contained goods such as sugar, tea and coffee, and their households and wardrobes were filled with colourful porcelain and cotton calicoes. This connected English men and women to a widening world of global trade and consumption, often at the expense of the people and animals that provided such goods. By the eighteenth century, the silhouettes of English women and men were altered with foreign commodities that had come to replace local materials once used to structure fashion. These imported materials included rattan, a type of cane imported in large quantities by the English East India Company, and whale baleen that was sourced from the Arctic and North America. Baleen is the name given to keratinous plates in the mouth of baleen whales that form part of a filter-feeder system. In the early modern period, it was known as whale fin in its raw form and whalebone after being cut for use.1 The unique flexibility, strength and malleability of this natural material made it popular in clothing and other manufacturing right up until the twentieth century. Historians have frequently noted the use of whalebone to structure early modern clothing. However, there has been no extensive examination of the use of baleen in fashionable Western European dress during the seventeenth century, even though this was the century when widespread commercial whaling by multiple European nations began. Previous scholarship has primarily considered the use of this animal material in later centuries.2 Further, there has been little attempt to assess why whalebone came to dominate this role in clothing production during the seventeenth century, so much so that by the middle of the century materials such as bents (reeds or grasses), which had been vital to structure the dress of the sixteenth century, appear to have been rarely, if at all, used in English wardrobes.3 Ulinka Rublack has argued that to

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understand the ‘material Renaissance’ historians must not just address patterns of consumption of finished goods, but also investigate ‘the life and vibrancy of matter itself’; we must ask ‘what ecologies, forms of trade and regulations channelled access to raw materials, what forms of craft innovation were developed to interact with or change the properties of different matter’, and ultimately how these made meaning.4 In other words, why do certain materials become part of everyday life and fashion, while others do not? This chapter responds to this call by drawing on written, visual and object sources from the period to explore the movement and material realities of the raw stuffs that structured early modern English fashion. My focus here is on whalebone and why it became part of everyday – that is commonplace or daily used – fashion in seventeenth-century England. This chapter examines how this material complimented the cultural and aesthetic demands of early modern fashion, its increased trade and availability in the seventeenth century, and, finally, how artisans innovated with it to shape dress during these centuries. In doing so, I also consider the materials of fashion that baleen replaced, namely bents. I use my own reconstruction experiments with bents and those of others who have worked with baleen to inform my understanding of why bents became obsolete and replaced by whalebone, highlighting the value of research methodologies centred on making, reproduction and material knowledge. Rather than simply being a plentiful byproduct of the whaling industry, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century craftspeople and consumers took advantage of the unique properties of this increasingly imported material and used it to turn elite fashions of the sixteenth century into new durable garments that became part of everyday fashion in the seventeenth century.

The uses of whalebone in seventeenth-century fashion English fashions of the Jacobean court (1603–25) at the start of the seventeenth century were both fantastical and transformative like those of the preceding Elizabethan period (1558–1603), when both men and women’s silhouettes became ‘unbalanced and distorted’ as wide farthingales, ballooning sleeves, stiffened bodices, bombast doublets and large ruffs emerged.5 The meanings of these artificial and ostentatious fashions – and the subsequent criticisms they received – have been previously explored by a range of scholars. It is generally accepted that as well as reflecting wealth and power, this aristocratic body was the result of many different ideas that emerged during the sixteenth century, such as self-control, civility and physical uprightness.6 Due to this, by 1600 the use of whalebone in elite fashions in England was well established. It was used to stiffen the hoops of farthingales (skirt supports) and to structure the sleeves of gowns. Significantly, elite women in England and Scotland now wore busks of whalebone, and whalebone bodies or ‘ballen bodeyis’.7 These garments referred to either the bodices of gowns or a separate boned garment (later known as stays and then corsets) and whalebone quickly became the preferred material used to stiffen these torso-shaping garments in England (Figure  3.1).8 During the early seventeenth century, men’s doublets could also contain whalebone, albeit in smaller quantities than female foundation garments. Several examples from the first two decades of the seventeenth century in the Victoria and Albert Museum contain whalebone stiffening in the belly-pieces or centre front of the garment.9 Although whalebone was initially used by court-dwelling elites, the material became increasingly widespread in England during the first decades of the seventeenth century. In 1608, whalebone was mentioned in a court case from rural Dorchester in which a goldsmith was

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FIGURE 3.1 Crimson satin bodies and stomacher of Elizabeth Filmer (front), c.1640–60, silk, linen, whalebone, gilt braid. English, Gallery of Costume, Platt Hall, Manchester City Galleries, 2003.109/2. Manchester Art Gallery, UK/Bridgeman Images.

accused of defaming a tailor. Contained as evidence were poems written by the goldsmith and one of these poems read ‘I name not french bodies that [with] whale bone are Made’, indicating that this material and its use in women’s fashion were widely known by this time.10 Although bodies had been developed in the courts of Europe to reflect those previously mentioned aristocratic ideas of physical deportment and grace, the desire to wear this garment soon spread among those of the non-elite who wished to visualize advancements in their social status or to simply partake in the fashions of the elite.11 Several recent studies have shown that non-elites were quite receptive to fashionable change during this time and they incorporated fashionable garments, fabrics, trims and other accessories into their wardrobes, in original and modified forms.12 The use of whalebone in England was certainly not immune from these influences. In 1611, an ‘Act for Reformation of Apparel to be worn by Apprentices and maid-servants, within the City of London’ was proclaimed by Sir William Craven, the Lord Mayor of London, and ‘his right Worshipful Brethren the Aldermen of the same City’.13 The act sought to control both male and female dress by outlining what was and was not permitted to be worn by those in service as well as the punishments for transgressing such clothing regulations. The act mentioned that many new and fashionable items of dress such as piccadilly collars, ruffs of excessive size and farthingales, as well as fine linen and silk fabrics above a certain price were not to be worn.

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Significantly, it singled out whalebone, wire and ‘other stiffening’ materials. It forbade maids to wear these in their bodies and sleeves and apprentices in their collars.14 Such an act seems to have been issued in response to the increased consumption of various fashionable goods by male apprentices and female maids in London. Certainly, there is evidence that girls of a similar social status to those who entered into service in London wore whalebone garments at this time. In 1615 an expensive pair of whalebone bodies were procured for Elizabeth Wright, the daughter of a husbandman in St Nicholas-at-Wade in Kent.15 In 1626 Susan Smyth, the daughter of a yeoman of Sussex, was given a pair of ‘whale boane bodyes’ for best wear and another pair of bodies for workwear.16 The consumption of whalebone continued to increase during the middle of the seventeenth century. By 1640, whalebone was criticized for concealing the soft contours of women’s bodies as men who went to embrace their wives found that they were ‘nought but past-board, canvas, & whalebone’.17 At this time whalebone was also used to stiffen the collars of men’s clothing. A linen doublet decorated with corded linen and satin stitch made in London and now in the collection of National Museums Scotland has a collar stiffened with whalebone.18 In 1646 it was recorded that ‘John Stuart and Archibald Moore of Belfast’ were ‘licensed to export from Liverpool to Carrickfergus certain trunks’ that contained ‘silk, buttons, ribbon facings’ as well as ‘certain amount of stuffs, pasteboard, oil, drugs, hats, whalebone, &c, for the Ulster army’.19 While there was likely multiple non-dress uses for whalebone and pasteboard by the army, the leather buff coats worn by cavalry and infantry during this decade were characterized by their tall standing collars that were reinforced with linen and whalebone.20 So, it is likely that alongside hats that were exported to clothe the army, whalebone was too. By the second half of the seventeenth century, whalebone was used in a variety of fashionable goods in England and France such as bodies, busks, parasols, fans, riding rods and in many other products produced by ‘Turners, Joiners, Tailors, cutlers, & other Craftsmen’.21 In England, women and girls from many social groups, from the daughters of husbandmen and tradesmen, as well as the female relations of both Anglican and puritan preachers, wore bodies and stays made with whalebone. I have argued elsewhere that this increased use of whalebone bodies by non-elite women over the seventeenth century went together with changing notions of femininity among the middling sort during this century. For this social group, bodies and stays came to show refinement through tasteful modesty, restraint and good morals, using clothing simply to cover the naked form, not to drastically alter it.22 These new overtones of modesty and polite femininity saw the consumption of this garment increase. Gregory King’s Annual Consumption of Apparel estimated that in 1688 nearly one million ‘Bodyes and Stays’ were consumed yearly in England, thus indicating that these once elite garments made from whalebone were now seen as essential items of the female wardrobe alongside other everyday garments such as petticoats and waistcoats which were also consumed in the same quantities.23 Such consumption situated bodies and stays, and in turn whalebone, as integral to female dress in the subsequent eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The increased trade and availability of whalebone Whalebone went from being a material used primarily in elite fashions at the start of the seventeenth century to one that was commonplace in dress by the end of the century. While a range of social and cultural factors increased demand among a wide range of social groups, the

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widespread use of whalebone in everyday fashion during the seventeenth century can also be attributed to the increased availability of this material. By the middle of the seventeenth century permanent changes to consumption practices occurred in north-west Europe in countries such as England and the Dutch Republic. This growth of consumer demand during this century was associated with broadened consumer choice and shifts in the family economy, falling prices of consumer goods and the economic position of middling sorts. During this period, new types of local and foreign fabrics, including lighter woollen worsted textiles and calicoes, as well as fashionable accessories such as ribbon and lace, became cheaper and popular.24 After 1600, the trade of foreign commodities such as sugar, tobacco and fur from North and Central America increased, and the trade in commodities such as tea, cotton and spices from Asia also increased due to the establishment of the Dutch and English East India Companies. All these goods were increasingly imported in large quantities aimed at the urban middling sorts of people.25 Although increased access to commodities from the East has often been used to demonstrate and explain fashionable change, especially among the middling sorts in seventeenth and eighteenth-century England, whalebone followed a similar trajectory too. During the 1530s, Basque whalers had created the first global commercial whaling industry along the southern shores of Labrador in what is now the Canadian province of Newfoundland. Although whale oil was the primary motivator for the hunt and the main commodity traded, Basque whalers also brought back significant quantities of baleen.26 At the start of the seventeenth century, Basque whalers extended their hunt south along the American coastline to the waters around what is now Brazil.27 At the same time, English companies, with the help of Basque experts, established the Arctic shore-based whale fishery at Spitsbergen in Norway, and French and Dutch whalers soon followed. Bowhead and Northern Right Whales were primary species hunted during this period. In addition to blubber that was rendered into oil, these species also yielded large quantities of whalebone that was cut from their mouths, cleaned and bundled up for European markets (Figure 3.2). Although the English were the first to begin whaling around Spitsbergen, they struggled to maintain a foothold in the region. Instead, it was the Dutch and later Germans who proved themselves to be best whalers of this century and these nations also expanded their fisheries to the Davis Strait around Greenland.28 At the start of the seventeenth century, it appears that most of whalebone used in England was imported by merchants trading to the Basque regions of Spain and France.29 However, in 1613 the Muscovy Company of England (later known as the Greenland Company) was granted sole rights to hunt and trade in whale oil and bone.30 This monopolization led to frequent tensions between independent merchants and the English joint-stock enterprise. Although whalebone has often been treated as a by-product in early whaling ventures, many of these disputes revolved around the importation of whalebone that was destined for the fashion trades. Between 1610 and 1660, at least four proclamations were issued by the King and Protector outlining the rights of the Muscovy Company to be the sole importer of whale-fins into the English Kingdom and dominions.31 This, the Muscovy Company made clear in one of its petitions to the King in 1618, was due to the ‘great store of fins [that] are daily imported by strangers and others’ into England.32 This increasing desire for whalebone to be used in fashionable goods, and the Muscovy Company’s failure to procure it in large amounts, led other Englishmen to petition to import it. In July 1653, ‘John Sandys, merchant of London’ and ‘John Young and Co.’ were permitted to import ‘4 tons of whalebone’ and ‘3 tons of whalebone’ each, without risk of confiscation, by the Council of State.33 A year later, Edmund Manning, a merchant of London, petitioned the Protector to import 50 tons of whale fins because the Greenland Company could not keep

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FIGURE 3.2 Thomas Edge, Map of Spitsbergen by Thomas Edge (detail), 1625, etching/engraving. Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, NG–1988–1923.

up with demand and had not ‘brought in ½ as many whale fins as are yearly expended’.34 In 1659, John Hill, another ‘merchant of London’, petitioned for a licence to import ‘300 tons of oil, and 100 tons of whalebone’ by reason of there being a ‘great want of oil and whalebone’ in the Kingdom.35 Although restrictions were relaxed after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, imports of oil and bone not harvested by Englishmen were still subject to ‘double Aliens Custom’.36 This levy, it seems, did not deter merchants. In addition to those who continued to import whalebone legally and pay customs, others imported significant amounts of pre-cut baleen ‘short-lengths and small parcells’ under the label of haberdashery to avoid paying duties.37 Although state and trade documents show that imports of whalebone were subject to double import taxation, overall, the price of whalebone fell throughout the seventeenth century. While prices could fluctuate depending on the number of whales caught in any given year or by trade restrictions in place, by comparing wholesale prices given in trade and state documents general trends emerge. The Muscovy Company claimed that during the 1610s whalebone had been priced at 2s. per pound (£224 per ton) but by 1624 it cost as little as 2d. per pound (£18 13s. per ton) due to oversaturation of the market with Dutch imports.38 However, from 1650 to 1690, when garments such as bodies became a mainstay of the fashionable female wardrobe, the price of whalebone seems to have stabilized. Surviving sources from this period quote it as

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being sold between £50 and £60 per ton or 6d. per pound.39 Although prices rose again in the 1690s to £400 per ton, due to political and economic turmoil in the Dutch republic that caused supply issues, by 1700, 3706 tons of whalebone were imported into England every year, twice the amount of whale oil.40 The Muscovy Company’s monopolization of the whaling trade during the seventeenth century was ultimately a failure. Generally, the Company was ill-prepared for the whale hunt and could not compete with the Dutch who operated in similar hunting grounds. Years of warfare during the War of the Three Kingdoms (English Civil Wars), 1639–53 and the Anglo-Dutch wars of the seventeenth century (1652–74) also led to shortages in ships and men.41 If we examine only the fortunes of the Muscovy Company, it would seem that commodities derived from whales were hard to obtain in England. Indeed, oil imports did decrease as demand stagnated during the middle of century due to the availability of seed oils which were preferred by English soap and textile manufacturers.42 However, as state, company and trade documents show, the demand for whalebone was consistently high enough by the mid-late seventeenth century for merchants to petition to import it or to circumvent import laws to bring it into England for use in the fashion trades.

Artisans and innovation It is tempting to think that the increased use of whalebone in fashionable garments and accessories was purely the result of supply and demand, that there was simply more of this product on the market during the seventeenth century at cheaper prices and so it was used more and more. However, such a simplification undermines the skills, knowledge and innovations of artisans working in the clothing and textile trades. It also does not account, as Rublack has noted, for the use of other materials such as feathers, why people responded to certain materials at certain times and why they invested ‘energy, money, labour, knowledge, and skill’ into these materials.43 This final section investigates the trades that used whalebone in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and draws on experimental approaches that have used both bents and baleen, as well as examination of raw baleen in museum collections. It does this to understand how and why makers utilized and innovated with this new material in their work and why it came to replace older materials, thus making it an essential part of everyday fashion in the seventeenth century. The materials first used to structure early modern fashion in England were mundane and usually locally acquired: wood, wire, bents, pasteboard, animal glue and bombast (horsehair, straw, cotton or wool). These materials were often employed alongside stiff or thick fabrics such as canvas and buckram to structure garments worn by men and women such as bodices, doublets, sleeves, codpieces, farthingales and collar supports, to name a few. Many materials such as bombast, wire and pasteboard (a stiff and pliable material made by pasting several layers of paper together) continued to be used in clothing production for many years. However, by the early seventeenth century, artisans in London had embraced whalebone and thought it essential to their everyday making practices. A petition from 1607 that voiced opposition to a proposed trade tariff on whalebone came from merchants and those involved in ‘the trade of making Vardinagles [farthingales], Boddyes and Sleeves for women in and about this City [of London]’.44 The artisans in this petition were likely tailors, farthingale-makers and bodymakers. Farthingale-making and body-making (or bodice-making as it was also called) were

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trades established at the end of the sixteenth century in London when demand for farthingales and bodies allowed these artisans to specialize in making these garments.45 These three trades shared similar making knowledge relating to the patterning and structuring of garments and they always had large quantities of whalebone on hand. The farthingalemaker Robert Sibthorpe was the artisan that first used whalebone in the accounts of Queen Elizabeth I and he supplied this material in great quantities to the Great Wardrobe during the final decades of the sixteenth century.46 During the seventeenth century the inventories of body-makers regularly contained this material. The 1665 probate inventory of John Dryver, a merchant tailor of London, contained ‘2 dozen of womens bodies made & 2 dozen unmade’, lace, thread and 28 pounds of whalebone.47 In 1668, the probate inventory of the ‘Bodicemaker’ John Chock recorded a list of ‘Goods in the shop’ including supplies of cloth, thread, leather and whalebone.48 A surviving body-maker’s trade token in the Museum of London also alludes to the importance of this material for this trade. This mid-century token was worth a farthing and was valid for the shop of ‘W.S’ located ‘AT.THE.BODY.MAKER’ in Holywell Street in the Strand. Although the surface of the token has been worn down over the years, grooves that depict boning channels that would have contained whalebone are still visible on the pair of bodies that decorate one side (Figure 3.3). Although the use whalebone in fashion in England likely first came from France where farthingales made of whalebone and ‘French bodies’ (French here denoting the use of whalebone), appear earlier in records, knowledge of how best to utilize this material was also refined in England over time.49 Surviving pairs of bodies from this century show a development in not only the complexity of garment patterning but also in how whalebone was utilized. A pair of

FIGURE 3.3 Body-maker’s trade token, c.1648–1673, copper alloy, English, Museum of London, 96.66/624. © Museum of London.

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bodies that clothed the effigy of Elizabeth I in Westminster Abbey contain whalebone that was crudely cut and not well placed into the stitched channels of the garment. While this could be due to the rushed nature of their production, as the tailor needed to push them into the garment quickly in time for the queen’s funerary procession, it could also be indicative of the early skills of tailors.50 Surviving garments from the middle of the century show a much more sophisticated use of baleen. In these examples, the boning channels that contain whalebone are a tiny 2 mm wide (1/8 inch) and they are tightly packed into the stitched boning channels (see Figure 3.1). These small, thin pieces of whalebone that were placed into such narrow channels required greater skill in both cutting and tailoring, and also a familiarity with different types of baleen and how to work with the material. By the end of the seventeenth century, whalebone was a material familiar to many in early modern England. However, due to the destruction wrought by the whaling industry on whale populations and the marine environment through nearly 500 years of hunting, commercial whaling has been banned in most of the world since the 1980s. Thus, baleen is a material whose appearance and properties are now unfamiliar to most of us. To understand how artisans worked and innovated with such a material during this period, it is vital to examine raw baleen specimens in natural history museums. After being cut from the mouth of a whale, a plate of baleen or whale fin as it was called at the time resembles a palm frond, with a thick smooth plate from which small bristles or hair-like fibres protrude from the sides. Such specimens show that the thickness and length and even texture of baleen can differ between different species of whales. The baleen of a large blue whale, which was rarely caught during this period due to their distribution and speed, would likely not have been suitable for use in fashion. Their baleen plates are quite large and thick and would have been hard to cut into the small sizes required for garments like bodies or doublets. Rather, if acquired it would likely have been more suited for use in decorative arts objects such as mirror frames. On the other hand, the baleen plates of humpback whales are thinner but not as long. Indeed, during the seventeenth century those Arctic species most commonly hunted (Northern Right Whales and Bowhead Whales) provided the type of baleen perfectly suited for use in clothing manufacturing, as the arched shape of their upper jaws resulted in baleen plates that were ‘longer [up to 4.3m], finer and more numerous’ than those found in other species.51 Artisans, especially those working in later periods when many different types of baleen whales were hunted, therefore must have had to be aware of these different types and buy from merchants accordingly. Another way to access making knowledge that has been lost to the past is through experimental history approaches such as historical dress reconstruction. Putting our hands to work as historians, or engaging with other practitioners who do, can yield research insights into making and embodied experiences that are otherwise hard to obtain.52 Abby Cox, an author, content creator and former apprentice milliner and mantua-maker who specialized in reconstructing eighteenth-century clothing at Colonial Williamsburg in the United States, has utilized baleen as part of her reconstructions. She has noted of her experience of cutting a plate of baleen (from a Bowhead Whale harvested by Indigenous tribes in Barrow, Alaska) that it required many hours of boiling of the material so that it softened enough to cut it as desired. This required working quickly and carefully as once the material cooled the process would need to be repeated.53 This mirrors descriptions from the eighteenth century where baleen was described as boiled in large copper baths until ‘they grow soft’, which allowed it to be neatly cut into strips of the desired width.54 Whalebone found in extant seventeenth- and eighteenth-century bodies and stays is only a few millimetres wide and 1–2 mm thick. It was vital that the maker try to keep the width of the boning as consistent as possible for comfort unless more strength was desired

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at certain points of the garment (like centre-front). Cox noted of her experience that achieving this uniformity in thickness was quite difficult due to the varying nature of thicknesses of the plate, and the thicker parts of the plate were harder to cut through than those thinner sections. Varying degrees of thickness within a single baleen plate is something that was observed in museum specimens from a range of baleen whale species. Baleen is often thicker towards the base and middle. Thus, a maker would have had to know what part of the baleen plate were useful for different parts of the garment, accessory or decorative object, with thicker parts of the baleen likely used for the latter. This was something that Cox noted of her experience. To use all this material and avoid waste, thicker pieces of the baleen were used at the centre front or centre back of the garment, where less flexibility or more solid support was required.55 But why did whalebone – a foreign import that was often subject to duties and other restrictions – come to replace those previously mentioned local, more easily and presumably cheaper materials such as bents or wire? Why did, as Rublack has asked of other materials, artisans invest so much time, labour and skill into this material? Reconstruction experiments that I have undertaken using marram grass (Ammophila arenaria), a type of coastal dune grass commonly used in England as bents during the early modern period, can help to shed some light on this. My experiments, which involved making a hooped Spanish farthingale and pair of mid-seventeenth century bodies, demonstrate that although this local material shared many of the same characteristics as baleen – flexibility and support – the plastic-like properties of baleen made it stronger and less likely to break over time. While bents added a surprising amount of flexibility and structure to a garment, they are prone to kinking or breaking when placed under too much pressure. This material seems to have been better suited to use in farthingales, where they were most commonly recorded in English accounts, as bunches of bents were gathered with thick string until they formed long ropes. These ropes were covered in fabric and made into very flexible hoops that were attached to the farthingale skirt and, as experiments demonstrated, quickly spring back into shape when manipulated (Figure 3.4).56 Over time, however, general

FIGURE 3.4 Author’s reconstruction of a half-scale Spanish farthingale made with bents, a stiffening material commonly used in clothing before whalebone. (L–R) Freshly picked bents (marram grass), a farthingale hoop made from bents and Spanish farthingale of linen made with hoops of bents.

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wear and the hitting of these hoops against furniture or other surrounding would eventually have softened the reeds and warped the hoop. This was something evidenced in the accounts of Queen Elizabeth I whose tailors and farthingale-makers frequently replaced the hoops of bents in her farthingales, presumably as they had lost their shape due to wear and tear.57 After 1580, whalebone was always used in conjunction with bents to make the hoops of the Queen’s farthingales. Reinforcing my hoops of bents with synthetic baleen, which mimics the strength and flexibility of baleen, reinforced the strength of the hoop while retaining its flexibility.58 In garments such as bodies, on the other hand, the placement of small bunches of bents into narrow boning channels left them more vulnerable to bending and breaking with the movements of the torso. This is especially true of seventeenth-century English styles that contain tabs or skirts that spread over the hips, as these garments require a continuous length of stiffening that runs from the top of the garment to the bottom of these tabs (see Figure 3.1). While my reconstructed bodies stiffened with bents gave much support to the breasts and upper torso, the bents in my reconstruction snapped or kinked upon the first wear at the pressure points where they were forced to bend at the waist and curve over the hips.59 This may account for why bents are recorded much more in farthingales than in bodies. These experiments, both my own and Cox’s, help explain why whalebone became so widespread in fashion during the seventeenth century and beyond. Quite simply, it was a far superior material to the previously used bents. Its properties mimicked elements of bents and wood, but also gave the durability and strength of plastic, thus allowing it to be used in a variety of ways that pushed fashion innovation further. It is little surprise then that whalebone became a mainstay of tailoring supplies during the seventeenth century.

Conclusion Whalebone continued to be sourced for western fashions during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when it was used to structure a range of everyday goods from corsets and bonnets to parasols and riding whips, as well as in decorative arts objects such as silver punch ladles, snuff boxes and even brushes. By the early twentieth century the effects of unchecked whaling and the introduction of petroleum-based products saw the demand for whale products fall.60 The introduction of steel, elastic and plastic into clothing manufacturing during this century further displaced whalebone from its prominent place, particularly in women’s corsetry, bodices and accessories. However, just as whalebone came to shape the iconic fashions of the past, it also came to shape sewing terminology that is still present in modern fashion and dressmaking. Modern sewing patterns from brands such as Simplicity still use the term ‘boning’ or baleine and ballena (literally, ‘whale’) in French and Spanish to refer to plastic stiffening placed in the bodices of modern dresses.61 Recent corset trends have also seen the term ‘boning’ re-appear in the modern fashion press. In April 2022, The Guardian hailed the return of the corset with a headline that proclaimed, ‘Boning up: the 2022 Grammys red carpet was a festival of corsets’, and the term appears in many other fashion articles referring to the corset trend of 2021–2.62 Boning is now synonymous with corsets, but the origins of this sewing term lie with whalebone that was first used to stiffen clothing in the early modern period. As this chapter has shown, it was the seventeenth century when whalebone truly became part of everyday fashion in England, setting a trend that would continue for over 300 years. This century saw the perfect combination of several factors. There was a widespread social and

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cultural desire for structured dress, especially for women, which had been carried over from the elite fashions of the preceding sixteenth century. There was a rising middling sort with increased buying power and a new global commercial whaling industry that was established by multiple European nations during this century. The desire to create durable structured fashions that could be worn everyday by a larger number of people, and the sudden availability of this animal material with plastic-like properties, propelled artisans to innovate and refine their construction methods. This required an intimate familiarity with baleen and the limitations of the materials it replaced (bents), knowledge that can only be teased out by historians by examining these raw materials and experimenting with these materials. In this case, the ‘life and vibrancy of matter’ such as whalebone in England is intertwined with the story of everyday fashion, and the subsequent social, cultural, economic (often exploitative) and innovative artisanal practices that shaped it.

Notes 1

Whalebone is a misnomer. It does not refer to actual bone, but a material made from keratin (a protein that also makes hair, horn, fingernails and other natural materials).

2

Sorge-English, ‘“29 Doz and 11 Best Cutt Bone”: The Trade in Whalebone and Stays in EighteenthCentury London’, Textile History 36, no. 1 (2005): 20–45; Edwina Ehrman, Fashioned from Nature (London: Victoria & Albert Museum, 2018), 36–40; Beatrice Behlen, ‘The Whalebone Trade in 18th and Early 19th Century London’, in London and the Whaling Trade, ed. Chris Ellmers and Charles Payton (Lavenham: Lavenham Press: 2018), 137–68.

3

Historians of whaling have often noted that this was simply a by-product of the whaling industry, but they have rarely assessed why or how the materiality of the commodity made it so widely used. The most famous studies of English and Dutch whaling rarely focus on baleen in the analysis. See for example, Gordon Jackson, The British Whaling Trade (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005); Cornelis de Jong, Geschiedenis van de oude Nederlandse walvisvaart: Deel een Grondslagen, Ontstaan en Opkomst, 1612–1642 (Pretoria: University of South Africa, 1972).

4

Ulinka Rublack, ‘Matter in the Material Renaissance’, Past & Present 219, no. 1 (2013): 44.

5

Susan Vincent, Dressing the Elite: Clothes in Early Modern England (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 29.

6

Georges Vigarello, ‘The Upward Training of the Body from the Age of Chivalry to Courtly Civility’, in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part Two, ed. Michel Feher, Ramona Naddaff, and Nadia Tazi (New York: Zone, 1989), 151; Isabelle Paresys, ‘Paraître et se Vêtir au XVIe Siècle: Morales Vestimentaires’, in Paraitre et se vêtir au XVIe siècle: Actes du XIIIe Colloque du Puy-en-Velay, ed. Marie Viallon (Saint-Étienne, France: Université de Saint-Etienne, 2006), 11–36; Isabelle Paresys, ‘Corps, Apparences Vestimentaires et Identités en France à la Renaissance’, Apparence(s): Histoire et Culture du Paraître, https://journals.openedition.org/ apparences/1229#entries, 1 (2012); Sarah A. Bendall, Shaping Femininity: Foundation Garments, the Body and Women in Early Modern England (London: Bloomsbury, 2021).

7

The busk was a long piece of wood, metal, whalebone or horn that was placed into a stitched channel between layers of fabric at the front of the garment; Anna of Denmak wore ‘ballen bodeyis’ during her reign in Scotland. National Records of Scotland (NRS): E35/13, (2) f. 64, E35/14, fol. 4r. Many thanks to Michael Pearce for these references.

8 Bendall, Shaping Femininity, 134. 9

Melanie Braun, Luca Costigliolo, Susan North, Claire Thornton and Jenny Tiramani, 17th-Century Men’s Dress Patterns, 1600–1630 (London: Thames & Hudson in association with V&A Publishing, 2016), 16–17.

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10 The National Archives, UK (hereafter TNA): STAC 8/94/17, fol. 12. 11 Bendall, Shaping Femininity, 87–115. 12 Paula Hohti, ‘Dress, Dissemination and Innovation: Artisan “Fashions” in Renaissance Italy’, in Fashioning the Early Modern: Dress, Textiles, and Innovation in Europe, 1500–1800, ed. Evelyn Welch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 152; Danae Tankard, Clothing in 17th-Century Provincial England (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 177–9; Spufford and Mee, Clothing of the Common Sort, 255–61. 13 London Metropolitan Archives (hereafter LMA): COL/CC/17/01/008. 14 The mention of whalebone in the collars of male apprentices does not appear in the version of this act held by the LMA, but does appear in another version of this document transcribed in a nineteenthcentury account of the Worshipful Company of Grocers. John Benjamin Heath, Some Account of the Worshipful Company of Grocers of the City of London (London: W. Marchant, 1829), 87. 15 Cited in Margaret Spufford and Susan Mee, The Clothing of the Common Sort: 1570–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 97. 16 Cited in Spufford and Mee, Clothing of the Common Sort, 142. 17 Richard Brathwaite, Ar’t Asleepe Husband? (London: 1640), 314. 18 Man’s Doublet of embroidered linen and whalebone, c.1640s–1650s, English, National Museums Scotland, Edinburgh, K.2004.283. 19 TNA: SP 63/262, fol.11. 20 Buff Coat, c.1640–50, English, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, T.34–1948. 21 Estienne Cleirac, Us et Costumes de la Mer, Divisées en 3 Parties … (Rouen: 1671), 132. 22 Bendall, Shaping Femininity, 223–5. 23 Negley B. Harte, ‘The Economics of Clothing in the Late Seventeenth Century’, Textile History 22, no. 2 (1991): 293. 24 John Styles, ‘Transformations in Textiles: England, 1500–1760’, in Refashioning the Renaissance: Everyday Dress and the Reconstruction of Early Modern Material Culture, 1550–1650, ed. Paula Hohti (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2023), forthcoming. 25 Jan De Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 44, 122; Beverly Lemire, Global Trade and the Transformation of Consumer Cultures: The Material World Remade, c.1500–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 78–81. 26 Alex Aguilar, ‘A Review of Old Basque Whaling and Its Effect on the Right Whales (Eubalaena Glacialis) of the North Atlantic’, Reports of the International Whaling Commission 10 (1986): 195. 27 Selma Huxley Barkham, ‘The Basque Whaling Establishments in Labrador 1536–1632 – A Summary’, Arctic 37, no. 4 (1984): 515; Thierry Du Pasquier, Les Baleiniers Basques (Paris: Kronos, 2000), 49. 28 John F. Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 597–600; Jackson, British Whaling Trade, 3–22. 29 LMA: COL/RMD/PA/01/002, fol. 299. 30 Jackson, British Whaling Trade, 10. 31 James I, By the King. A Proclamation Concerning the Bringing in of Whale-fins into His Majesties Dominions, c. (London, 1614); James I, By the King. A Proclamation Inhibiting the Importation of Whale Fins into His Majesties Dominions by Any, but the Muscovy Company (London, 1619); Charles I, By the King, A Proclamation Inhibiting the Importation of Whale Fins, or Whale Oil, into His Majesties Dominions by Any, but the Muscovia Company (London: 1636); By the Protector, A Proclamation Declaring the Right of the Fellowship and Company of English Merchants for

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Discovering of New Trades (Commonly Called the Muscovia Company) to the Sole Fishing for Whales … (London: 1658). 32 TNA: PC 2/29, fol. 345. 33 TNA: SP 25/70, fol. 59; TNA: SP 18/44, fol. 1. 34 TNA: SP 18/67, fol. 27. 35 TNA: SP 25/79, fol. 155. 36 Charles II, An Act for the Encouraging & Increasing of Shipping and Navigation (London: 1660), 6. 37 ‘William III, 1697–8: An Act for Granting to His Majesty a Further Subsidy of Tunnage and Poundage …’, in Statutes of the Realm: Volume 7, 1695–1701, ed. John Raithby (s.l: Great Britain Record Commission, 1820), 382–5. British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/ statutes-realm/vol7/, 382–5. 38 The long ton was used for imports and exports during this period; Jackson, British Whaling Trade, 14. 39 TNA: HCA 3/46 fol.199r; TNA: 13/71, fol. 479r; Charles Wolley, A Two Years Journal in New York, and Part of its Territories in America, ed. Edmund B. O’Callaghan (New York: 1680), 39. 40 ‘House of Commons Journal Volume 10: 10 January 1693’, in Journal of the House of Commons: Volume 10, 1688–1693 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1802), 773–4. British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/commons-jrnl/vol10/pp773–774; Jackson, British Whaling Trade, 28, 32–3. 41 Jackson, British Whaling Trade, 13–21. 42 Ibid., 17, 20. 43 Ulinka Rublack, ‘Befeathering the European: The Matter of Feathers in the Material Renaissance’, The American Historical Review 126, no. 1 (2021): 22. 44 LMA: COL/RMD/PA/01/002, fol. 299. 45 Bendall, Shaping Femininity, 118–24. 46 Sarah A. Bendall, ‘Whalebone and the Wardrobe of Elizabeth I: Whaling and the Making of Aristocratic Fashions in Sixteenth-Century Europe’, Apparence(s), https://journals.openedition.org/ apparences/3653, 11 (2022). 47 LMA: CLC/313/K/C/009/MS19504/007/077. 48 ‘Chock, John, Bodice-maker, St. Thomas, 1668’, in Bristol Probate Inventories, 1657–1689, ed. Edwin and Stella George, vol. 57 (Bristol: Bristol Record Society, 2005), 38–9. 49 TNA: LC 5/36, fol. 133. 50 Janet Arnold, Jenny Tiramani, Luca Costigliolo, Sébastien Passot, Armelle Lucas, and Johanne Pietsch, Patterns of Fashion 5: The Content, Cut, Construction and Context of Bodies, Stays, Hoops and Rumps c.1595–1795 (London: School of Historical Dress, 2018), 35. 51 Chelsey W. Sanger, ‘“Oil is an Indispensable Necessity of Life:” The Impact of Oscillating Oil and Baleen (Bone) Prices on Cyclical Variations in the Scale and Scope of Northern Commercial Whaling, 1600–1900’, International Journal of Maritime History XV, no. 2 (2003): 152. 52 Hilary Davidson, ‘The Embodied Turn: Making and Remaking Dress as an Academic Practice’, Fashion Theory, Special Issue on ‘The Making Turn’, eds. Peter McNeil and Melissa Bellanta 23, no. 3 (2019): 329–62. 53 Abby Cox, private correspondence via email, 9 November 2021. 54 R. Campbell, The London Tradesman (London: 1747), 225. 55 Abby Cox, private correspondence via email, 9 November 2021.

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56 Sarah Bendall (@sarahbendall_fashionhistory), ‘Testing the Flexibility of “Hoops of Bents”’, Instagram, 25 March 2022, https://www.instagram.com/p/CbgTdCsBQoP/. 57 Bendall, ‘Whalebone and the Wardrobe of Elizabeth I’. 58 Cox has noted that while there is a subtle difference in rigidity between real baleen and synthetic whalebone, it is a good substitute; Sarah Bendall (@sarahbendall_fashionhistory), ‘My Farthingale Hoop Made from “bent roopes”’, Instagram, 7 February 2022, https://www.instagram.com/p/ CZqN9ymBqYr/. 59 Sarah Bendall (@sarahbendall_fashionhistory), ‘Bents vs Synthetic Whalebone in a Pair of Mid-17th Century Bodies’, Instagram, 5 April 2022, https://www.instagram.com/p/Cb8lQ27B_jU/. 60 John McCollough and Henry F. Check, ‘The Baleen Whales’ Saving Grace: The Introduction of Petroleum Based Products in the Market and Its Impact on the Whaling Industry’, Sustainability 2, no. 10 (2010): 3142–57. 61 These terms are all used in modern dress patterns that refer stiffening from pattern companies such as Simplicity, such as pattern S8876. 62 Alyx Gorman, ‘Boning Up: The 2022 Grammys Red Carpet was a Festival of Corsets’, The Guardian, 4 April 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/apr/04/boning-up-the-2022grammys-red-carpet-was-a-festival-of-corsets; Diandra Malivindi, ‘Hear Ye, Corsets Are the BreathTaking Must-Have to Elevate Your Wardrobe Post Haste’, Elle Australia, 29 March 2022, https:// www.elle.com.au/fashion/corsets-25651.

FIGURE 4.1  Sophie Rabin’s blouse, 2020.61. © Museum of London.

4 Sophie Rabin’s blouse Lucie Whitmore

Like so many museum objects, 2020.61/3 – a chiffon blouse with crochet insert in the Museum of London collection – is elusive with its history. It offers clues, contradictions and dead ends, both revealing and concealing stories about its maker, its wearer and the society in which it was created. Nonetheless it could be the starting point for countless fruitful avenues of research. To give context, it can be situated in the social, cultural and economic changes that affected women’s dressing habits in the early twentieth century. During the First World War, the blouse affirmed its status as a staple for women of all classes; a lightweight, front-fastening garment to be paired with a skirt, pinafore or ‘tailor-made’ suit.1 The blouse was versatile, worn for evenings at the theatre and manual labour alike, and was particularly associated with women’s move into clerical work. Suzanne Rowland’s research demonstrates another reason for the increased popularity of the blouse; the ease of manufacture made them a lucrative business option as the demand for ready-made clothing increased in the early years of the twentieth century.2 This meeting of supply and demand, comfort and convenience, ensured that the blouse retained its popularity for the decades that followed – a ubiquitous everyday fashion object. Perhaps this particular blouse is better placed as a means to examine the life of its owner, Sophie Rabin. Family memory suggested that this was one of the garments made by Sophie for her own wear. Sophie, born Sophia Neshaver, was a Jewish dressmaker who started her career working in blouse manufacture around 1916. She had arrived in London from Poland aged twelve and received two years of schooling before moving into employment. Sophie married in 1925, perhaps gaining more skills while living over her father-in-law’s Islington tailoring shop at the start of her marriage. She became a dressmaker in London’s West End, and also worked as a window dresser and a ‘gown saleslady’ at various points in her career. Sophie worked in blouse manufacture in the mid-to-late 1910s, an era when the unmarried daughters of Jewish immigrants were increasingly finding employment in London’s garment trades. As noted by Susan L. Tananbaum, women’s incomes were vital to most Jewish families, and the ‘growing demand for ready-made clothes fuelled industry expansion’.3 While many women were only involved in garment finishing or the repetitive subdivision of labour known as the ‘task system’, it is clear from other garments made by Sophie that she developed strong

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design skills and was proficient in all aspects of garment manufacture.4 In this context the blouse functions as a window into this world of manufacture – an intersection between the early twentieth century demand for simple and practical garments, the commercial viability of the ready-made blouse, the career opportunities for London’s young Jewish women and the creative skill of an individual. But the blouse has one final card to play – the stump of a label sewn into a side seam, cut-off for reasons of aesthetics or comfort. This label, for practical reasons discovered late in the process of writing this object biography, suggests that this may not have been a garment made by Sophie for herself as previously believed – leaving a void in the story of manufacture. This is a less satisfying conclusion, but one that reflects the realities of working with fashion objects when they have lost their context, no longer worn but boxed or hung in climate-controlled stores, handled with great care by gloved hands. The narratives of museum objects are often reliant on the tiniest fragments of historical facts, snippets of family memory or a lucky coincidence. Supported by research, we bring these together in a way that will engage museum audiences, but sometimes have to recognize that objects will not always fit within the stories we want to tell. The bias of the curator is an unavoidable influence too, and perhaps it is because this garment is so nearly the perfect story, and because it lies at the intersection of my own research interests, that I continue to follow the paths it presents. This multi-layered story is valuable despite the obvious gaps, because it can nonetheless function as the means through which to tell the story of Sophie as maker, as wearer and as a representative of a group of women who are so often left out of the London fashion narrative.

Notes 1

Lucie Whitmore, ‘Fashion Narratives of the First World War’ (PhD Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2019).

2

See Suzanne Rowland’s chapter in this volume.

3

Susan L. Tananbaum, Jewish Immigrants in London, 1880–1939 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2014), 150–6.

4 Ibid.

5 ‘In want of a capable woman’: Rediscovering blouse designers in the wholesale, ready-made trade in Britain through material culture (1909–20) Suzanne Rowland

Good-class Blouse manufacturer in Scotland is in Want of a capable Woman, who can Design best style and finish in medium and high-class Blouses. Able to Buy Materials, and Superintend the Making-up. Commencing salary £200 to £250. Permanent Situation and good prospects to suitable person.1 As this advertisement from 1917 illustrates, the ‘capable woman’ – skilled in designing multiple ranges of wholesale blouses, purchasing materials and keeping a watchful eye on the workforce – was dearly sought after. In the classified sections of the weekly trade journal The Drapers’ Record, and in daily newspapers including the Manchester Evening News, her status and salary indicate the value manufacturers placed on women of this calibre. This chapter investigates the role of ‘capable’ wholesale designers in the lightweight, ready-made blouse trade in Britain in the 1910s. In doing so, it aims to provide an under-explored context for understanding the rapid development of everyday fashion manufacturing during this period. In conjunction, it visualizes and articulates working-class female designers as mediators of everyday fashion. Acknowledging wholesale designers as innovative contributors to everyday fashion, importantly, disrupts hierarchies of design knowledge in this period. In popular and scholarly histories of fashion, designers for the ready-made trade have not received the same attention as designers for the elite market. Thus, as the wholesale blouse trade has not previously been documented, its female designers are also unknown.2 This chapter recovers the stories of these creative working women who are missing from fashion history and awaiting reinstatement. Given that these stories have long gone untold, it

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is perhaps unsurprising that there are barriers to research including a lack of obvious primary documentation. As such, this chapter makes use of material culture research methods to uncover and unpack fragments of evidence from objects, printed materials and business archives. The Drapers’ Record, for example, is read against the grain by resisting the dominant narratives of men and business so prevalent in editorial features and instead focusing on the smaller classified advertisements wherein blouse designers were sought and designers searched for work. In tandem, the object-focused research yields clues to the ready-made blouse designer’s ability to translate key fashion trends by making them suitable for multiple reproductions. The designer is a ghostly shadow in business archives where examples of her work can be viewed in trade brochures and yet she is never referred to by name. With so many gaps and silences in research materials, material culture analysis offers a tangible and multidimensional approach to mapping the emerging roles and responsibilities of blouse designers in the 1910s. But first, the following section introduces the wholesale blouse industry in this period.

The rise of the wholesale blouse trade From the early 1890s, the blouse, worn with a plain skirt, was a fashionable and useful garment worn by a variety of women from across the British class system, from members of the royal family to campaigning Suffragettes and office workers. Even the plainest and cheapest blouse could be a young worker’s first foray into the world of fashion and as such is important, as Cheryl Buckley and Hazel Clark note, as an example of a hidden everyday fashion practice.3 In particular, increased demand for cheap blouses came from those involved in clerical work where job opportunities had been rising steadily since the early 1880s. As the economic historian Gregory Anderson confirms, between 1881 and 1911 there was a 25 per cent increase in the number of women employed as office workers in the civil service, most notably as telegraphists and telephonists in the Post Office.4 By 1921, the overall number of female office workers had increased significantly to 46 per cent.5 Known as ‘white-blouse work’ – a reference to the anonymized blouse and skirt adopted as practical office attire – the employment of female clerks was most prevalent during the First World War when roles previously occupied by men, for example, in banks and insurance offices became available to women. Cheap, ready-made blouses were acceptable signifiers of femininity and respectability in these busy office spaces. Writing in The Girl’s Own Paper in 1915, the feature writer Norma May Hanshew advised that the business girl or the school teacher could not ‘possibly do with less than four or five [blouses], principally for the reason that she is wearing them all day, and in consequence they soil so much quicker than they would otherwise do’.6 Of significance here is the purchasing of multiples of a singular item of fashion by working women which undoubtedly contributed to the success of the blouse industry. Although, in part, the rise of the ready-made blouse industry in the 1910s was consumer-led, the increased growth of factory manufacturing was also significant. London-based wholesale manufacturers J. Cowen & Co. claimed to be one of the first to specialize solely in blouse production.7 In the early 1890s they employed a handful of workers in a modest rented room. To illustrate the shift to larger-scale operations that occurred during the 1910s, by 1914 Cowen’s employed nearly 1,000 workers in a modern purpose-built factory. Although the volume of Cowen’s production is unknown, in the same year wholesale drapers Spencer, Turner & Boldero advertised 645 dozen (7,740) front fastening ‘Crepoline’ blouses in

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a single style.8 Three key factors enabled the blouse industry’s growth in factory production. Firstly, a shift in fashionable tastes which heralded the simplification of blouse styles from around 1910. Then, as Andrew Godley has acknowledged, the adoption of standardized sizing based on a proportional set of measurements.9 The introduction of pattern drafting and grading systems was also a contributing factor although this had been an early nineteenth-century development.10 The final element was innovation in handheld cutting machines combined with high-speed sewing machines.11 The bandsaw, prevalent in high-volume ready-made tailoring, proved unsuitable for cutting lightweight blouses. Ideally, for the light silks, crepes and muslins favoured by the blouse industry, handheld cutting machines enabled the operator to cut a lay quickly without manoeuvring the cloth. The consequent increase in economies of scale enabled manufacturers to participate in a recognized circuit of fashion by producing twice-yearly, seasonal collections for spring and autumn, supplemented by some manufacturers with smaller additional lines.12 Two basic blouse types were produced: the tailor-made shirt and the blouse. In style and shape the blouse followed prevailing fashion trends. Some blouses were ‘adorned’ with decoration and ‘ideally adapted for restaurants or theatre wear’, while others were simple and practical.13 The tailor-made shirt remained largely static, aesthetically, from the 1890s onwards, but with minor changes to the width of the sleeve and shape of the collar. Adapted from men’s shirts, this versatile garment was never at the forefront of fashion, rather its functionality for everyday wear kept it as a constant in the working, sporting and scholarly wardrobe. Most wholesale manufacturers produced women’s shirts alongside other blouse styles and did not distinguish between the two forms in their promotional literature. Here, the term ‘blouse’ is used to refer to both styles, unless otherwise indicated. As with the man’s shirt, the blouse was sized by the collar using a system of measurements proportional to the circumference of the chest. Small square labels were usually stitched to the nape of the collar and the average range of blouse collar sizes measured from thirteen to fifteen inches, including half sizes.14 Yet blouse sizing was idiosyncratic and particular to each firm. While a 15-inch collar for one company was part of their usual range, for another this was classed at an outsize with some manufacturers advertising this service as a speciality. How available outsize blouses were to the public is called into doubt by a letter appealing for blouses and robes in larger sizes in 1912 which asked: ‘Why should there be a difficulty in buying an O.S. [outsize] blouse robe? We occasionally come across one in 14 ½, but such a thing as 15 in. is quite out of the question.’15 Further evidence of the proportional method was discovered in the archive of Leicester blouse manufacturer William Baker.16 A large notice, once pinned to the factory wall, instructed machinists to check the measurements of their blouses as they sewed. This notice was also a useful aid in understanding how a designer worked within a proportional system. For a blouse with a 14-inch collar, the designer knew to make the length of the centre front 22 inches, the armhole 18 inches in circumference, with the measurement across the bust being 15 inches. This ratio of measurements was used to ensure the shoulder, across the back and sleeve length, for example, were in proportion to each other for each size. The waist was not included because most blouses had straight side seams or were shaped at the waist through gathering. Sizing was of prime importance to blouse manufacturers. Many companies, including Corah’s of Leicester, privileged a ‘good fit’ over fashionability, and further staked their business reputation on achieving accurate sizing. Size labels were also a useful aid for female shoppers, especially with shirt-style blouses. Evidently, for manufacturers and retailers, the numerical quantification of the female body through standardized sizing was firmly in place by the 1910s. Yet for the

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consumer, this could not have been a wholly accurate way to understand the sizing of the looser, T-shaped Magyar or kimono-style blouses of the early 1910s, or the loosely fitting jumperblouse popular at the end of the decade. Before focusing on the role of designers in classified advertisements, the following section reflects on the process of material culture research and interpretation used to uncover this lesser-known occupation.

Material gaps and interpretative opportunities in the archive Searching through materials in the archive for clues to the past is a subjective experience. As Michelle Caswell argues, evidence does not simply exist, rather, select information is chosen and interpreted by the researcher and is therefore contextual.17 Caswell’s field of critical archive studies demands that the researcher acknowledges the temporal act of creating an archive to understand whose voice was collected, and whose was not. Here, Caswell argues, we should also acknowledge the professional role of the skilled archivist to select or reject items, and to interpret significant fragments into metadata that, ideally, aids the researcher. Unfortunately, historic business archives in Britain that have survived the two world wars of the twentieth century are often a haphazard collection of fragments.18 The business archives of two regional Leicester-based blouse manufacturers presented at least some opportunities for researching blouse designers. Although these archives contain no specific references to blouse designers, as with my reading of The Drapers’ Record, evidence was gathered through the interpretation and analysis of text and images. N. Corah & Sons were primarily manufacturers of hosiery and knitted goods who branched out into blouse manufacturing, while William Baker started as a blouse manufacturer and then diversified into knitted goods. Corah’s main archive is based at the Record Office for Leicestershire, with a smaller collection of materials held in the Special Collections at De Montfort University. William Baker’s archive of printed materials and garments can also be found at De Montfort University.19 Additional information about Corah’s blouses came through the object-focused research of a blouse in the collections at Platt Hall, Manchester Art Gallery. Making connections between two surviving Corah objects – a brochure of their illustrated St. Margaret label blouses and a St. Margaret blouse – from two different archives, ignited a spark of research joy. The blouse, originally identified in Manchester Art Gallery’s records as dating between c.1910 and 1915 is front fastening and made from white cotton voile, with high lace collar, narrow sleeves and a pouched front waist (Figure 5.1). With its small and faded illustrations, a facsimile brochure dating from 1916 was discovered in the Special Collections at De Montfort University (Figure 5.2). Comparisons between the museum blouse and its brochure illustration show how closely they match in terms of proportion and the placement of decoration. Not only does this link demonstrate that Corah’s blouse brochures are an accurate indication of their final products but it also yields clues to the designer’s working practice. The blouse was offered with two collar choices – the high, boned version of the museum’s blouse, and a V neck style. Both collar types were worn with elegant fullhemmed, below-calf-length skirts, popular from 1915.20 Further clues to the designer’s process were revealed by close examination of the extant blouse where unnecessary manufacturing processes were omitted. The labour-intensive stitching of a traditional placket and cuff was

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FIGURE 5.1  Front view St. Margaret’s label blouse, Manchester Art Gallery, 1961.144, c.1910–1915 [1916]. Photograph by the author.

FIGURE 5.2 Style 687 St. Margaret voile blouse illustrated in the Spring 1916 brochure. Style 687 features a high lace collar, while Style 687 ½, seen here in a faint illustration, was available with a V-neck. 391.00942. STM. Special Collections, De Montfort University, F/009.

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replaced with two rows of ready-made frilling sewn to the end of a sleeve. The back of the blouse is plain, apart from a central band formed of nine tiny tucks whereas blouses from the mid-Edwardian period, made in small workshops or the home, were as decorative on the back as the front. In 1916, in the profit-driven era of wholesale factory produced blouses, machine-embroidered ornamentation was now restricted to where it was most impactful by an ingenious designer, who, in only a short period of time, had learned to adapt to the restrictions of factory production. Searching for manufacturing clues in old clothes is an established aspect of an objectbased approach to research. As Bethan Bide clarifies, ‘it is possible to read multiple narratives of fashionable production in old clothes since these extant objects contain evidence of the numerous different processes that transformed their materiality as they moved from sketch to final product.’21 For example, Alexandra Palmer’s study of a Tom Ford-designed Yves Saint Laurent evening dress demonstrates how ‘overlapping fish-scale iridescent sequins’ are revealed through close analysis in the archive and yet they are absent from the flat surface of the photograph; thus, the skills of both the designer and the maker, which would otherwise have remained hidden from view, become tangible through the archive encounter.22 As Lou Taylor has noted, much scholarly focus has fallen on the glamour of couture rather than the apparent ordinariness of the everyday.23 For everyday, ready-made fashion, which has not been explored to the same extent, a material culture approach offers possibilities for understanding the skill of the ready-made designer in interpreting trends and making them viable for mass manufacturing processes. Under-researched ready-made blouses, in the main, lie dormant in museum archives. Conceivably, their apparent ordinariness condemns them to obscurity. In any case, due to this lack of interest in blouses there are several difficulties in conducting museum research. Firstly, there is a lack of online documentation, or, when it exists, it is brief and often with broad date ranges covering upwards of twenty years. Visiting in person is the best option, and fortunately all museums with dress collections contacted in initial enquiries had at least one box of blouses. In regional collections, blouses are typically stored by date range or cloth type with several blouses packed into a single box. Documentation within the box tends to be brief and limited to accession numbers, dates – some are accurate and others approximate – and sometimes indications of cloth types and a manufacturer or retailer’s label. Although I took basic worksheets to ensure the same information was recorded from each blouse, my archive research was mostly reactive and determined by whatever was found once a box was opened.24 By following key indicators of factory manufacturing – machine stitching, a manufacturer’s label or a separate size label – I allowed the blouses to lead the research. If a blouse had evidence of factory production then I photographed it and made brief notes on the worksheet to return to when a fragment from another archive highlighted its significance (as in the case of the blouse and brochure in Figures 5.1 and 5.2). Often in material culture analysis, as Tim Ingold argues, little attention is actually paid to materials and their properties with cultural meanings taking precedence over materiality.25 Although beyond the scope of this chapter, the manufacture of cotton voile cloth, used to make Corah’s St. Margaret label blouse, for example, relied on a network of spinning, weaving, bleaching and dyeing, which potentially connects the blouse to a global network of cotton picking and extremely poor labour practices. By thinking about the creation of the blouse, its actors – the designer, maker, finisher, inspector and packer – are also brought into this dialogue. Thus, through the interpretation of material culture, the blouse is reunited with its creators and, with reference to this chapter, the designer’s skilled practice becomes visible.

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Rediscovering blouse designers in the classifieds The trade journal, The Drapers’ Record, is a further useful resource for discovering the role of blouse designers through classified and wanted vacancies. Catering solely for the manufacturing, wholesale and retail sectors of the drapery trade, the paper was read by factory owners seeking employees, and workers seeking employment. Although some issues contain an index, I found that the most productive way to research The Drapers’ Record was to turn every page and photograph relevant information to be studied in detail later. This included editorials, anonymous articles, letters from readers, advertisements for blouses and the employment sections, which all have helped build a profile of the blouse industry and its designers in the 1910s. Basic details of the working lives of blouse designers were documented on a weekly basis during 1909–20 through the ‘Situations Vacant’ and ‘Situations Wanted’ sections of The Drapers’ Record, and in classified sections of regional newspapers. Additionally, manufacturers presented their designer’s creative work in glossy brochures and in advertising campaigns, although they did not credit them by name. Figure 5.3 shows a page of blouses from Corah’s St. Margaret label, designed by someone to suit the mid-range sector of the trade. Although designers were unacknowledged, job advertisements show that their skills were highly valued, and that ‘capable’ women were offered decent wages and working conditions. In addition to being capable, manufacturers often specified that the designer must be ‘smart’ – this appears to have referred to intellect as well as appearance. During the 1910s ‘smart’ was a term loaded with class implications. Most usually associated with well-bred women of financial means, it had latterly been adopted by the working classes, leaving The Girl’s Own Paper to complain that it was the ‘most overworked word in the feminine vernacular’.26 For the middle-class writers of The Girl’s Own Paper, at pains to impart improving advice to young working-class women, ‘smart’ was a problematic term because it blurred class boundaries, as the following illustrates: ‘It is the one adjective of the assistant in the milliner’s showroom; [and] it is the term the customer employs when wanting something that shall compel the awed wonderment of her neighbours.’27 Thus, even though designers were near the top of the hierarchy on the factory floor, in comparison with London’s court designers and dressmakers, divisions along class lines remained. Although ‘smart’ was used across the classes, as Angela McRobbie argues, in fashion, divisions were inherent within the word ‘trade’.28 For those wishing to become a designer, there were three possible routes into the profession. Firstly, through technical courses, like the dressmaking course at The Shoreditch Institute in London where girls were taught to design and make specifically for entry to the clothing trades.29 Secondly, for those without access to formal further education, skills were passed on through informal apprenticeships within blouse factories, in which instance a maker could be promoted to a designer.30 Thirdly, entry to the trade could be made through family connections evidenced through letters exchanged between a fictional Manchester-based draper and his school-leaver niece in The Girls’ Own Paper, where he offered to ‘introduce her to a suitable opening as an assistant in the designing and cutting room of a good class-blouse factory’.31 Despite training, the responsibilities of a designer’s role were not yet universally agreed within the trade. In addition to design duties, a designer might also have been called upon to be a pattern cutter, to calculate costings, purchase cloth and to act as forewoman, or factory manager. To better understand the wholesale designer’s role throughout the 1910s, the following sample of classified advertisements provides an overview of the expectations of employers which has been used as evidence for the kinds of responsibilities expected of a designer. In the

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FIGURE 5.3 St. Margaret blouse brochure, 1910. N. J. Corah archive, DE4788. Record Office for Leicestershire and Rutland.

majority of advertisements, employers omitted their name or address, and instead candidates were invited to apply to a coded post office box. Where a location was indicated, for the most part jobs were clustered in the main textile and clothing-producing areas of London, Glasgow, Belfast, Manchester, Nottingham, Leicester and Leeds, but smaller factories and workshops were scattered around the country. The capitalization of certain words or letters was used to stress the specific requirements of an employer, such as: ‘QUICK Designer Wanted for Blouses and Robes, Medium Wholesale trade, City-Address’.32 Speed was considered essential because a slow and under-experienced employee would slow down production which negatively impacted on profit. Advertisements show that designers were required to create graded ranges of blouses from ‘low’, to ‘medium’ to ‘best’ and ‘super’ qualities. These terms were in common use and understood by those in the trade to refer to the quality of fabrics and trimmings, which determined the end price, rather than quality of sewing. For example, ‘best’ or ‘super quality’ blouses were made from fine spun silks, while ‘low’-quality blouses were made from the cheapest weight of imported Japanese silk that was liable to inconsistences in the weave. Knowledge of cloth types was an essential quality desired in a designer with many entries specifying specific cloths, as this example demonstrates: ‘Blouses – Smart Designer Required for medium trade, Crepe de Chine

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and Japs’.33 While some advertisements stated particular types of fabric, others included a second type of garment, for example, a central London-based manufacturer of crepe blouses, required a ‘Designer, Cutter and Forewoman’ who could also produce ‘Sports Coats’.34 Certainly, a designer was required to understand multiple roles within the factory, which might also include factory management as the following example demonstrates: ‘FOREWOMAN Wanted in highclass Provincial Blouse and Robe Factory. Must be good Cutter, and capable of introducing own styles’.35 This employer needed only to glance at the wanted section of the same issue where an ideal candidate offered her skills as a forewoman, cutter and designer.36 Financial skills were considered a necessity for a medium-class wholesaler who sought a ‘competent’ designer and pattern cutter able to do costings.37 The term ‘competent’ used in relation to pattern cutting referred to the reliability of patterns to fit the body. Few job advertisements in The Drapers’ Record included salaries, although a salary of £200 a year was offered to a designer of high-class blouses with the stipulation that ‘Only those who are competent to Make Designs suitable for West-End need apply’.38 As the advertisement at the start of this chapter also suggests, around £200 seems to have been the accepted rate for a wholesale designer. In the Manchester Evening News, a designer was sought by a local manufacturer Cowley Bros with experience of ‘up-to-date’ shirts and cotton blouses with a salary of 30 to 40 shillings a week, dependent upon experience.39 At this same Manchester firm blouse makers were offered 25 shillings a week demonstrating that a designer’s wage was significantly higher than a maker’s wage. As already established, designers were required to be capable and adaptable which were useful skills when it came to the practice of copying.

Design piracy and design agency Design piracy was rampant in the ready-made blouse trade during the 1910s. Department store Debenham & Freebody, for example, viewed the copying of Paris model blouses as a distinct selling point; as the trade journal Draper explained: ‘the copied [have] all the chic of the original at half or less than half of the price.’40 Paris models were the most often copied but some manufacturers also looked to the New York shirtwaist industry for references. In general, Paris was feted for chic, finely detailed blouses, while New York was respected for blouses and shirts in looser cuts, although my museum analysis has revealed that American blouses were similarly decorative. Based in London’s East End, wholesale blouse manufacturers Dobell & Co. advertised wool, silk, poplin and lace blouses copied in style from both cities.41 Upmarket manufacturer and retailer Marshall and Snelgrove preferred to stress their designer’s skill in adapting, rather than mere copying, stating, ‘our blouses are of a particularly dainty and refined character [and are] adapted from exclusive Paris Models by our own workers.’42 W. M. Hollins, manufacturers of the famous Viyella [blended wool] cloth, advertised for a ‘smart Young Lady, either English, French, or Belgian’ in 1915 which suggests that they required a designer with language skills, able to buy and copy French or Belgian blouses.43 Those subjected to being copied heartily disapproved of this practice, as The Drapers’ Record noted: ‘In Paris the originators of fashions complain bitterly regarding the depredations of the design pirates, who seize upon the latest creations for reproduction. The law, apparently, affords the dressmakers but inadequate protection’.44 The Drapers’ Record reported the unsatisfactory nature of British law for policing design piracy in 1914, clarifying, ‘unless the design is copied line for line, it is useless to bring an action’.45

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Veronique Pouillard suggests that the copying of couture increased from 1910 onwards in line with the seasonal introduction of fashion shows in Paris which enticed the press and buyers.46 Corporate buyers purchased haute couture pieces alongside reproduction rights which suggests a consensual agreement at the high end of the market.47 Writing about the American market, Elizabeth Ewing asserted that textile manufacturers bought original Paris models and allowed makers-up to copy as long as they placed substantial orders of material.48 Much is now known about the copying and licensing of Paris models in the interwar years.49 Yet copying before this time is still a mysterious practice, especially in the British ready-made trade. While many firms alluded to generic Paris model blouses, Debenham & Freebody advertised a copy taken from the Paris couturier Jeanne Lanvin in 1913. Lanvin was a shrewd businesswoman but at this early date there is no evidence of a licence with Debenham & Freebody to make copies of her work.50 It seems unlikely that such an agreement was in place given that the French organization, established by Paul Poiret and others, to control the process was not in existence until 1914.51 Although copying was widespread, designers demonstrated creative agency as they swiftly discovered how to adapt model blouses by stripping back surplus features to ensure copies were suited to mass-production runs. This can be observed in two blouses from the collection at Platt Hall in Manchester with comparable labels.52 An original French label, ‘Modèle de Paris’ appears to have been copied and translated into English as a ‘Paris Model’ label. Certainly, as Nancy Troy has explained, there was a thriving trade in counterfeit labels in New York, so feasibly this might also have existed in Britain.53 Looking beyond the labels, close analysis of both blouses reveals how the cheaper copy differs slightly from the original. The ‘Modèle de Paris’ – labelled blouse is made from fine quality cotton and is decorated with delicate details and finished with a generous hem, while two clusters of crocheted buttons with long shanks signify exemplary hand-finishing. The Paris Model copy retains the same blouse shape, but it is made from a poorer quality cotton and is finished with a scant hem to economize on material. However, the copy has the addition of machine-made lace insertions which suggests that the designer and interpreter of the original was not merely copying but rather employed a small degree of creative agency, conceivably reflecting her knowledge of the British market. Design agency was also evident in job advertisements where original ideas were often highlighted as a desirable quality, for example: ‘Blouse designer wanted […] must be able to produce original styles.’54 Individuality allowed companies to become distinct from competitors. Trademarks and advertising slogans were seen as important signifiers of quality, respectability and reliability for many blouse manufacturers. Consequently, designers were expected to create blouses to fit in with the ethos of a particular brand. Leicester-based Wolsey, for example, known for their knitted hosiery and vests, produced only shirt-style blouses aimed at the ‘New Woman’, evidenced by marketing materials featuring a college girl in a shirt and tie framed by motifs associated with university life – books, punting on the river, tennis and cycling. Traces of Wolsey’s designers linger in these observations, but their identities remain a mystery.

Profile of wholesale designer Gertrude Wilson In 1920 The Drapers’ Record featured its first profile of a wholesale blouse and blouse-robe designer, Gertrude Wilson, who was head designer at a business that carried the name of her husband Charles Wilson.55 A grainy black-and-white photograph shows Gertrude Wilson

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wearing a dress, or blouse-robe, with panels of decorative spotted embellishments enhanced by a deep V white organdie collar, which fits in with the ethos of her design work, known for being artistic and ‘up to date in conception’ yet wearable. I suspect that Gertrude’s blouse-robe is decorated with sequins but unlike Alexandra Palmer’s richly textured archive experience with the sequined Yves Saint Laurent gown, I am unable to corroborate by making a comparison with the original which, it can be assumed, was one of the firm’s own Charles Wilson-labelled productions. The article further reveals that Gertrude Wilson’s route into the trade was spurred on by reduced economic circumstances which saw her draw on her interest in designing and making her own clothes, rather than through a formal design training at a trade school. Interestingly, an earlier article in 1918 omitted reference to Gertrude and instead highlighted Charles Wilson’s practice of purchasing Paris models for copying to sell ‘at accommodating prices’.56 In addition, Mr. Charles Wilson, the article claimed, designed ‘scores of desirable new garments, which cleverly reflect all that is newest and best from Paris, but which are skilfully adapted to meet the needs of British women and those […] in Canada, Australia, India, [and] South Africa’.57 Conceivably, the omission of her name as head designer irked Gertrude but it is in keeping with the practice of the trade paper of suppressing women’s voices in the 1910s. In contrast The Drapers’ Record deemed Gertrude Wilson newsworthy in 1920 which suggests a recognition by the patriarchal paper of the rising status of women in a post-First World War society, exemplified in part by the 1918 Representation of the People Act which gave women like Wilson the right to vote.58 As a married woman now with some legal rights, Wilson was profiled in The Drapers’ Record as a professional designer and legitimate businesswoman. There are no surviving business archives or extant clothing to substantiate evidence found in The Drapers’ Record, although Census records provide further clues to the Wilson household. The 1901 Census lists Gertrude and Charles Wilson as blouse manufacturers based in Manchester. By 1911 Charles Wilson was still listed as a blouse manufacturer, with Gertrude, now joined by her sister Mary, merely ‘Assisting in the Business’.59 This seems at odds with a surge in advertising by the firm in 1910 to publicize the establishment of Charles Wilson in London which shows that this sizable and successful company marketed themselves at the upper end of the wholesale trade. Advertisements show that by 1913 Charles Wilson had established showrooms in Great Titchfield Street, in the heart of the wholesale trade in London’s West End. Further showrooms were established in Manchester, Dublin and Glasgow for the distribution of stock, while additional manufacturing workrooms in Macclesfield and Belfast provided buyers at home and abroad with a steady supply of goods. A photograph in The Drapers’ Record reveals the ornate showroom at Great Titchfield Street with its white tiled floor and Ionic columns framing darker plush velvet drapes. By situating their showrooms in the West End the Wilson’s were part of a larger migration of ready-made wholesalers who were helping establish this part of London as a centre of everyday fashion. Throughout this chapter, material culture methodologies comprised of object-focused analysis and textual interpretation have been used to uncover previously hidden aspects of distinctive and creative working-class female labour. The hybridization of observations made of the material object and theoretical interpretations, as Giorgio Riello notes, ‘generates an interpretive richness in which fashion is just one of the object’s many attributes’.60 Thus, liberated from the classifieds of trade and regional newspapers, blouse designers for the ready-made trade have been shown to be multitaskers able to design, copy, cut, manage and maintain a brand’s ethos while keeping an eye on profit. Reimagined in this chapter as arbiters of everyday sartorial style, ‘smart’ and ‘capable’ wholesale designers were at the vanguard of everyday, lightweight, ready-made mass fashion manufacturing in the early twentieth century. In creating designs that were fashionable,

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functional, practical, therefore appealing to retailers and consumers alike, blouse designers ably demonstrated a newly discovered tacit design and manufacturing knowledge. Without material culture analyses, these clever and capable translators of trends would still be hidden from fashion’s history and their important contributions to the rise of the lightweight, everyday ready-made fashion industry may have remained unacknowledged.

Notes 1

Original capitalization. ‘Situations Vacant’, The Drapers’ Record, 18 August 1917, 265.

2

Suzanne Rowland, ‘The Role of Design Technology, Female Labour, and Business Networks in the Rise of the Fashionable, Lightweight, Ready-made Blouse in Britain, 1909–1919’ (PhD thesis, University of Brighton, 2021).

3

Cheryl Buckley and Hazel Clark, Fashion and Everyday Life in London and New York (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 9.

4

Gregory Anderson, The White Blouse Revolution: Female Office Workers since 1870 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 4.

5

Jane E. Lewis, ‘Women Clerical Workers in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’, in The White Blouse Revolution: Female Office Workers Since 1870, ed. Gregory Anderson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 34–5.

6

Norma May Hanshew, ‘The Clothes Calendar’, The Girl’s Own Paper, 1917, 121.

7

‘To Blouse & Gown Buyers’, The Drapers’ Record, 26 September 1914, 549.

8

Advertisement for blouses: ‘7,740 Magyar-Style Blouses’, The Drapers’ Record, 27 June 1914, [Supplement].

9

Andrew Godley, ‘The Development of the Clothing Industry: Technology and Fashion’, Textile History 28, no. 1 (1997): 4–6.

10 See Winifred Aldrich for a history of grading, especially Winifred Aldrich, ‘The Impact of Fashion on the Cutting Practices for the Woman’s Tailored Jacket 1800–1927’, Textile History 34, no. 2 (2003): 134–70. 11 See Rowland, ‘The Role of Design Technology, Female Labour, and Business Networks’, 2021. 12 N. Corah, Leicester based manufacturers of St. Margaret label blouses, produced an additional range of forty muslin blouses for spring 1910, no.391.00942 STM. Special Collections, De Montfort University, Leicester. 13 ‘Fashion’s Forecast’, The Queen, 16 December 1916, 878. 14 Listed by London wholesalers Stafford Northcote and Sons. ‘The Buyers Guide’, The Drapers’ Record, 17 September 1910, 828. 15 ‘Letters to the Editor’, The Drapers’ Record, 27 July 1912, 188. 16 ‘Notice’, uncatalogued William Baker archive, Special Collections, De Montfort University, Leicester. 17 Michelle Caswell, ‘“The Archive” Is Not an Archive. Acknowledging the Intellectual Contribution of Archival Studies’, Reconstruction 16, no. 1 (2016): 5. 18 See: Carolyn Steedman, Dust (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001). 19 N. J. Corah archive no.DE4788, Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland, Long Street, Wigston Magna. Leicester, LE18 2AH, and 391.00942 STM, Special Collections, De Montfort University.

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20 The Ladies Tailor cites the new skirt shape of 3 ½ yards in width as an early 1915 development. Cited in Norah Waugh, The Cut of Women’s Clothes 1600–1930 (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, [1968] 1987), 287. 21 Bethan Bide, ‘Getting Close to Clothes: Using Material Objects to Rethink the Creative Geographies of Post-War London’, Area 51 (2019): 35–44. 22 Alexandra Palmer, ‘Looking at Fashion: The Material Object as Subject’, in The Handbook of Fashion Studies, ed. Amy de la Haye, Joanne Entwistle, Agnes Rocamora, Regina A. Root, Helen Thomas, and Sandy Black (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 270–1. 23 Lou Taylor, Establishing Dress History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 1. 24 Worksheets recorded measurements, seam type, fastenings, collars, cloth types, decorative details, labels and any unique features such as pockets. Mida and Kim’s worksheets are far more comprehensive. Ingrid Mida and Alexandra Kim, The Dress Detective: A Practical Guide to Object-Based Research in Fashion (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 216–21. 25 Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London: Routledge, 2000), 340. 26 ‘So Very Smart’, The Girl’s Own Paper, 1915, 30. 27 Ibid. 28 Angela McRobbie dates formal fashion design training from the emergence of The Barrett Street Technical College (now London College of Fashion) in 1915. The class divide was evident as trade schools provided skilled manual workers whereas art schools provided a more cerebral experience for the middle-classes. For more see Angela McRobbie, British Fashion Design: Rag Trade or Image Industry? (London: Taylor and Francis, 1998), 31–2. 29 The Shoreditch Institute opened in 1906 as a trade school to teach the design and making of clothing, including for the ready-made trades. For more see Clementina Black, ‘Trade Schools for Girls’, The Economic Journal 16 (1906): 454. 30 ‘Situations Vacant’, The Drapers’ Record, 30 September 1911, 860. 31 ‘Supposing You Aspire to Own a Blouse Factory? Have You Any Idea How to Set to Work?’, The Girls Own Paper, September 1919, 145. 32 The Drapers’ Record, 30 September 1911, 860. 33 ‘Situations Vacant’, The Drapers’ Record, 12 May 1917, 259. 34 ‘Situations Vacant’, The Drapers’ Record, 24 May 1919, 487. 35 ‘Situations Vacant’, The Drapers’ Record, 6 July 1918, 23. 36 ‘Situations Wanted’, The Drapers’ Record, 13 January 1917, 82. 37 ‘Situations Vacant’, The Drapers’ Record, 22 May 1915, 848. 38 The Drapers’ Record, 25 October 1913, 217. 39 ‘Classified’, Manchester Evening News, 20 July 1916, front page. 40 Draper, 19 September 1908, 895. 41 Blouses were manufactured at Dobell’s premises in Wood Street, E. C., London. The Drapers’ Record, 17 September 1910, Supplement. 42 Advertisement for ‘Dainty Blouses’ retailing at 29/6, The Queen, 1916, 3. 43 ‘Situations Vacant’, The Drapers’ Record, 2 October 1915, 41. 44 The article reported that the introduction of legislation to prevent copying was being contemplated in New York, while in Britain limited and unsatisfactory protection was provided by the Patents and Design Act, 1907. ‘Design Piracy’, The Drapers’ Record, 11 July 1914, 57.

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45 Ibid. 46 Veronique Pouillard, ‘Design Piracy in the Fashion Industries of Paris and New York in the Interwar Years’, The Business History Review 85, no. 2 (2011): 323. 47 Ibid. 48 Elizabeth Ewing, History of 20th Century Fashion (London: Batsford: [1974] 2005), 72. 49 See Nancy Troy, Couture Culture: A Study in Modern Art and Fashion (Massachusetts: MIT, 2003) and Pouillard, ‘Design Piracy in the Fashion Industries of Paris and New York in the Interwar Years’. 50 Lanvin joined other couturiers in seeking to prevent design piracy by setting up associations to organize reciprocal agreements in 1923. See Dean Merceron, Lanvin (New York: Rizzoli, 2007), 220. 51 Poiret’s trip to the United States in 1913 opened his eyes to the availability of counterfeit labels. In 1914, alongside other prominent designers and industry associates, he founded ‘Le Syndicat de Défense de la Grand Couture Française et des Industries s’y Rattachant’ (the Syndicate for the Protection of the Great French Couture and Related Industries) with the aim of obtaining copyright protection for French couturiers. Troy (2003) 268–81, 330. 52 Museum records show that both blouses were donated by the same source. The ‘Modèle de Paris’ blouse is not listed with a place of purchase whereas the suspected ‘Paris Model’ copy is listed as purchased in Manchester. ‘Modèle de Paris’ no. M/C CAG 1962.175 and ‘Paris Model’ no. M/C CAG 1962.17, Manchester Museums. 53 Troy, ‘Poiret’s Modernism and the Logic of Fashion’, in Poiret, ed. Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 22. 54 ‘Situations Vacant’, The Drapers’ Record, 9 January 1909, 123. 55 This article stresses Gertrude Wilson’s original approach, stating ‘Mrs. Wilson is training her Irish peasant embroiderers to execute more original and more varied designs in place of the stereotyped varieties that are so general,’ yet she was also aided by assistant designers, although as the article was at pains to point out, she was uniquely responsible for the ‘best and most original designs. “A Gifted Designer”, The Drapers’ Record, 29 May 1920, 535. 56 ‘Mr. Charles Wilson’, The Drapers’ Record, December 1918, 295. 57 Blouses in georgette and crepe were described as ‘Novelties of Singular Charm’, The Drapers’ Record, December 1918, 295. 58 Women over the age of thirty who met a property clause, like Gertrude Wilson, were granted the right to vote on 6 February 1918 in the Representation of the People Act. 59 1911 Census | UK Census Online (accessed 1 August 2019). 60 Giorgio Riello, ‘The Object of Fashion: Methodological Approaches to the History of Fashion’, Aesthetics & Culture 3, no. 1 (2011): 6.

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FIGURE 6.1 CC41 Utility Clothing Scheme bathing suit. © Southend Museums, Tessa Hallmann Photography; CC41 Utility Clothing Scheme two-piece bathing suit. © Southend Museums, Tessa Hallmann Photography.

6 Wartime swimwear Ciara Phipps

Working with a fashion and textiles collection is a privilege; working with a collection containing examples of everyday fashion, worn by everyday people is particularly special. Whilst the allure of haute couture can be enticing for most fashion curators, it is the significance of everyday fashion and the stories these garments possess that I find most intriguing. For me, two such 1940s garments from the extensive fashion and textiles collection held at Southend Museums Service are very interesting for a number of reasons pertaining to their ‘everyday’ nature. The first is a pale green, heavy and considerably itchy woollen one-piece bathing suit decorated with a cartoonlike design of starfish, shells and swimming fish. The suit contains two labels, one of its maker, Capstan, alongside a CC41 label, illustrating that it was produced under the British government’s wartime Utility scheme, which regulated the supply of cloth. This bathing suit can be dated to the early to mid 1940s, the soft and fairly unstructured fit typical of styles from this period. The second garment, which is also a piece of swimwear, is a matching two-piece bathing suit in a darker shade of teal with a similar cartoon-like pattern of crabs. Despite some visual differences (the patterns are slightly different, as are the colourways), it seems likely that these were produced by the same manufacturer. The two-piece is particularly interesting, as it contains the same CC41 label, but is missing the ‘Capstan’ brand label. There are some features of this two-piece that suggest it started life as a one-piece bathing suit similar to the first example discussed. The 1940s were a period of intense shortages, which saw many repurposing existing garments instead of buying new. This bathing suit may have been adapted to become a high wasted two-piece, perhaps in the latter half of the 1940s when such two-piece bathing suits were extremely popular. This might account for the missing brand label, likely lost in the remake. The somewhat uneven hand stitched waistline, as well as the considerately reshaped bra top of the two-piece suit, tells a story about its owner, or possibly owners. They were clearly interested in the current styles of swimwear of the time and were mindful of reusing where possible given the limited number of clothing coupons they would have had access to. Rationing was introduced in 1941, and initially every adult had an allocation of sixty-six coupons meant to last one year. However, as the war progressed, this allocation reduced considerably, reaching its lowest allocation between September 1945 and April 1946.

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A bathing suit was unquestionably a non-essential item, and it would have been challenging to justify buying a ‘new’ one in this period. This saw an increase in homemade versions, or as with this example, adapted and remade ones. Swimwear manufacture in the UK, however, was minimal when compared to the huge demand for bathing suits in America. Leading up to the Second World War in England, less sunshine and limited beach life meant the British swimwear market was conservative. In America from the 1930s onwards Lastex swimsuits increasingly came to dominate the market. Latex was an elastic yarn which could be blended with other fibres to create swimsuits which hugged the contours of the body. Knitted swimsuits stayed popular for much longer in the UK, as this bathing suit and two-piece are testament to. These examples of swimwear from Southend Museums Service’s collection are particularly special given the interesting and somewhat mysterious adaptation to the two-piece bathing suit. Whilst it is very common to find everyday fashion with numerous adaptations and mends, it is always exciting to find something you can clearly map to its original design, and in particular a garment that would have been worn less than daywear. I find the patterns of these bathing suits to be really fun and playful, an ideal antidote to the challenging context that they would have been made and worn in.

7 Fading from view: Using postcard photographs to reveal the market for female workwear during the First World War Jenny Richardson

The First World War has been seen by commentators and historians as a pivotal moment for change in twentieth-century British history.1 Thus, received wisdom views the period as a Rubicon and a series of ‘firsts’. Although this may in reality be hyperbole, it does go some way to explaining the inscription on the reverse of the postcard depicting a photograph of Dolly (Figure 7.1). Dolly’s simple inscription reads ‘My first suit’, conveying notions of work and gender. The language suggests that she recognized that the outfit she wears is masculine and the use of the word ‘first’ signifies this is her first job. This is pertinent to this chapter as these words express the importance she is placing on her work, as the use of the word ‘suit’ acknowledges the formalization of her employment. Dolly’s use of the word ‘suit’ implies a moment of gender transgression, a foray into the adult world of work, but it also conveys a playful recognition of the lack of regimental grandeur of her outfit. Moreover, the phrase acknowledges the transition of women into certain masculine occupations and the unusual attire required to carry out this war work. This photograph may also be indicative of Dolly’s class, as many middle and upperclass women were required to enter the workplace because of the war, which up until this point would have been frowned upon by their social peers. Above all else this short sentence acknowledges that she was aware of her changed appearance, brought about by the clothing she wore for work. This photographic postcard is far from unique, and the clothing Dolly wears was worn and sold nationwide for many occupations. The postcard is one of a collection, purposefully accumulated by the author to form a resource of images from which to analyse the workwear worn by female munition workers during the First World War. This chapter documents the journey and development of the methodological approaches taken in the formation and use of

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FIGURE 7.1  ‘My First Suit’, Dolly. Photograph: author’s own.

this private collection and demonstrates how the evidence that it eventually provided as a whole contributes to our understanding of how women fashioned their everyday working personae during the conflict.2 Drawing on Gillian Rose’s assertion that photographs are not neutral in their content, this chapter reveals how the examples in this collection of photographic postcards contain explicit displays of patriotism, friendship and fashion in addition to providing evidence of everyday clothing worn in the workplace.3 Moreover, the chapter highlights the rich potential of visual materials that lie outside of official archives and collections for the telling of everyday fashion histories. It demonstrates the value such sources have for reframing our understanding of how people experienced clothing, the relative accessibility of many of these materials and the importance of drawing these sources into the historical narrative. Today we accept that clothes worn every day for work are different to those worn for pleasure. There are now acceptable and tangible markets for garments designed for different occupations and activities. However, this has not always been the case. The appearance of female factory workers in workwear during the First World War was deemed simultaneously extraordinary and ordinary, representing the everyday expectations of duty, service and work

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for the Empire. Female munition workers’ dress between 1914 and 1918 became a potent symbol of women’s war work. Their unusual appearance in their distinctive workwear was the subject of much comment about their appearance and their contribution to the war effort, but equally and concurrently, about the changes in the relationship between the sexes and classes. The type of workwear on which this chapter focuses was designed with utilitarian activity in mind and the type of enterprise for which it was worn resulted in the fabric becoming impregnated with dirt, grease and toxic chemicals, lessening the desire for conservation after the First World War.4 It is because these garments have none of the recognizable insignia associated with certain professions, such as nurses, postal delivery or bus conductors, or the quasi-military organizations of the time such as the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry or the Women’s Royal Navy Service, that they have been overlooked by historians analysing the uniforms of this period.5 To garner support for the war, and to unify workers, this clothing was referred to by contemporary authors and journalists as ‘uniform’, painting a picture of a workforce unified in appearance and mission for propaganda purposes. However, the research presented here demonstrates the need to consider the term ‘uniform’ more carefully when considering the supposed uniformity of such garments, and suggests that the term ‘workwear’ is more appropriate. It is the inherent and contradictory ‘ordinariness’ of these garments worn in extraordinary circumstances that merits appraisal. The chapter begins with a discussion focussing on my reasons for collecting the photographic postcards and the methodologies selected to do this, considering the fluidity of the methodology and how certain images were identified and collected. Following on from the formation of a methodology, I then explain how these photographs were used alongside advertisements to demonstrate the extent of the market for factory clothing in Britain and the outlets where these garments could be obtained during this period. Key to the arguments discussed in this chapter is the contribution that this research makes to our understanding of quotidian clothing despite the non-extant nature of this range of workwear. These women actively fashioned their self-identities incorporating fashionable items, styling their workwear to mirror the fashionable silhouette of the time and adding personal mementoes, such as sweetheart brooches or war work badges. This chapter discusses the disparity between the ubiquity of these practices as evidenced in photographic postcards, and the material traces that have been left behind.

Resolving a methodological conundrum Initial searches for images of munition workers in the archives in the Imperial War Museum, London, the Liddle Collection held in the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds and The Devil’s Porridge Archives, Dumfries, Scotland revealed substantial numbers of photographic postcards picturing female munition workers, many anonymous, wearing their utilitarian garments. Whilst undoubtedly extensive, the visual records of women’s war work (in particular munition workers) in these public archives relate to two of the largest munition factories: the Woolwich Arsenal and Gretna.6 As a result of this narrow scope, these collections have, therefore, reinforced the notion of there being a uniformity of design in munition workwear. However, it became apparent that there was a discrepancy between the contents of these archives and the images for sale on the public auction site eBay, leading me to develop an alternative collection of First World War ephemera.

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On the face of things, an online auction site may seem an unlikely place to begin researching for workwear; however, as the images included in my collection demonstrate, it has proved an extremely useful resource. I realized immediately when I began searching eBay for these objects that, because of their popularity, I needed to develop a methodology to search by and a rationale for what I was collecting. Amy de la Haye considers one definition of collecting practice as being purposeful, a definition which resonates with my own collection practice.7 I purposefully and systematically created parameters which I adjusted and continually reassessed. Initially I began my endeavour with a simple set of criteria – that the photographs of female munition workers should feature the women wearing trousers. I therefore set up several saved searches which included a cross section of terminology in order that items would not be missed. These search terms were telling for how female munition work is understood. They often included, for example, ‘suffragette’ and similar terms, showing that the sellers had identified an area of potential interest among collectors, and that these items carried the same associations. I was particularly interested in the gender debates attributed to the wearing of these masculine garments by these women workers. As my collection started to grow this simple criterion posed its own problem which manifested in the seemingly repetitious images of women wearing trousers. But as my knowledge and collection grew, the diversification of design and styles became apparent, and the organization of the collection began to take around a focus on geographical locations. Prior to 2014 I was unaware of the market for postcard photographs of female munition workers on eBay, but certainly since this time there has been a plentiful and easily accessible market for this type of portraiture and visual representation. It seems likely that the monetary value of postcard photographs of female munition workers, especially those pictured wearing trousers, may have risen significantly due to the commemorations of the centenary of the First World War. But there is also a premium for photographs of female munition workers wearing trousers, which were listed with higher opening bids than other female First World War workers and regularly fetched amounts between £35 and £50. The price of female munition workers wearing gowns or overalls and skirts had lower initial values when listed and consistently sold for lower prices, approximately £17–£20. Interestingly where soldiers, female munition workers and shells were depicted together, the price the postcard fetched was incrementally higher because of the explicit visual association with the war. It became quickly apparent that my collecting practice had to become a reactive endeavour dictated by the market forces of eBay. The fluctuating space of online auction sites is explained by Selina Todd as a ‘fluid chaotic cabinet of curiosities’.8 Todd’s analogy is pertinent, as it is impossible to be sure of what will be available, or when, whether the categorization by the seller is accurate, or how much interest an object will generate. Initially my collection was stored in three portable postcard albums that held 100 postcards each but as my collection outgrew these albums, I invested in museum archive boxes and acetate free postcard sleeves. This collection, built up over five years, comprises 186 comic postcards, 387 photographic portrait postcards, 1 original factory magazine, The Georgetown Gazette, 3 complete newspapers and a magazine from the First World War period. I have also acquired twenty-eight press cuttings, which sellers have cut out of publications such as the Graphic or The Sphere. Added to these examples are newspaper clippings, which have been sold individually and do not include information regarding the date, the name of publication, or page number; these were examined alongside broader reference to newspaper citations on the subject of female munition work. All these items were purchased because they contained illustrative or photographic images of female munition workers, often in trousers.

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One aspect of beginning a collection from scratch, which proved problematic, was to resolve the purpose or narrative for the collection – what was the reason for the collection and what did it say as a whole about society and women’s part in the war? As a collection grows so does the collector’s knowledge, as they too begin a voyage of discovery. At the outset of my research into the clothing worn by female munition workers, I was struck by the haunting photographs of these long-since departed women and the struggles they no doubt faced on a daily basis during the First World War. I questioned some of the sellers as to where they acquired the postcards, and all answered that they were bought from other sellers. Some of the postcards I have purchased have remnants of scrapbook paper on the reverse, suggesting they had been glued into an album of sorts. Some photographs have blurred faces where a subject has moved before the camera shutter closed and I wondered whether these photographs were rejected by the subjects because of this and were perhaps part of left-over photography studio stock. Perhaps some of the postcards had once been part of an album of other postcards, which had been disassembled by a postcard trader to increase their sales revenue. It was with these questions and thoughts in mind that the sage words of Gerritsen et al. rang a cautionary note underlining the importance of treating objects that have survived with too much reverence suggesting that, ‘We should, whenever possible, consider the objects we have in light of the objects we do not have and ask how representative existing objects are of the much larger number of similar objects that have not reached us’.9 The consideration of the postcards as objects in their own right prompted a more in-depth analysis of their materiality. Thus, my focus moved from the front image to include details on the reverse of the postcard comprising any dedications by those photographed, and possible names and addresses of the photographer’s studios. The inscriptions reveal the market for exchange and raise questions about the possible subjectivity that may or may not have been felt by the sitter. A material cultural approach tells us that objects contain traces of lives lived.10 I was hoping that my postcards would reveal people’s thoughts about the war, their work, their appearance or their clothing. Traditionally, collectors tend to look for pristine examples in their original state, but I wanted used items that contained traces of engagement with the First World War and signs of people’s opinions on the conflict and their role within it. One such example featured a group of munition workers with the moniker ‘Happy Munition Workers’. Close inspection revealed the word ‘happy’ had been underlined and a question mark added. It is not clear whether the writer was passing comment on their happiness (or lack thereof) with the work, the war, each other or the conditions, but it provides an important counter perspective to the flag-waving propaganda disseminated by the press. The reorganization of my collection by location highlighted regional variations reflecting the geographical complexities of workwear supply, design and purpose. This allowed me not only to see the similarities but also to hear the narrative that my collection was now articulating. By grouping photographs together by regional location, the differences of design within relatively small geographic areas demonstrated the wide range of available designs and suppliers of workwear, as well as the need to differentiate rank, role or area of the workforce. Mapping the location of factories, photographic studios and drapers who advertised workwear has demonstrated that these garments were widely available across the country and suited all different budgets. The organization of the collection in this way allowed for appreciation of the scale and breadth of the women’s workwear industry and its connection to a vast group of munition workers.

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Disseminating the ‘everyday’ image of the ‘Munitionette’ Ben Highmore considers the ordinary as a repetitive, endless syncopated rhythm but one that is constantly shifting in meaning. He also acknowledges that the everyday has alternate meanings to individuals, generations and sexes and that it is outside of the ordinary that persons learn new things which eventually also shift into becoming quotidian.11 Buckley and Clark also subscribe to the view that the ‘everyday’ is a fluid and shifting concept when studying fashion. They argue that extra-ordinary fashion can ‘occur in the context of the everyday, thus enabling transformations in appearance and identities’.12 Crucially, the clothing worn by the Munitionette for her ‘new’ industrial endeavour was deemed extra-ordinary enough to be widely debated and disseminated. Inevitably, if we are to follow Highmore, Buckley and Clark the extent of images in circulation – whether between family, friends, sweethearts or in the public domain – rendered the image of the Munitionette wearing trousers or overalls an everyday image of a woman working for the war effort. However, the garments that at first sight seem uniform are, in fact, anything but – they show how clothing was used to negotiate a changed identity on the part of these women. The image of the patriotic Munitionette supporting the war effort in a drive for victory, uniformed in purpose and clothing, was used to express and symbolize the unity of the British people. The reality was a more complex struggle between classes, genders and generations. Workwear represented women’s negotiations and clashes with established class expectations and understandings of femininity. Similarly, the appearance of women was also more nuanced and varied than depicted. As their workwear no longer exists, these photographic records are critical to understand more about how fashion practices were shaped by a range of clothing considered essential, available nationwide and seen every day during the conflict. The number of women involved in the munition industry peaked at over 1,000,000 in 1917 at the height of munitions production.13 The importance of munitions to the war effort and the fact that so many women were involved in this previously male-dominated industry meant the image of the female munition worker was particularly visible, recognizable and widely discussed. The essential ‘patriotic’ work of the ‘Munitionette’ appeared in newspaper articles, novels, memoires, songs and plays.14 They were also the subject of paintings, informational films, advertisements for cigarettes, beauty products and health remedies, satirical cartoons and postcards. However, the proliferation of these images of nationally reported events, such as Royal visits to factories, where lines of female munition workers marched or greeted the visitors wearing identical garments, has encouraged the misapprehension of a uniformed workforce.15 The repetition of stance and the bright, clean garments suggests a cohesive workforce wearing a common ‘uniform’. The reality was that workwear worn everyday within factories was much more diverse, due to the need to distinguish ranks and according to the nature of the work undertaken. Thus, if one looks at photographs of workshops published in factory magazines, where women carry out similar duties, their workwear might at first seem identical, but closer analysis of photographs clearly shows the range and diversity of workwear worn within the same factory. Factory magazines were another mode of disseminating the work and image of the female munition worker both to the public and back to the workforce themselves. An issue of Bombshell, the factory magazine for Thomas Firth and Sons Ltd., records a gala parade through Sheffield, where the National Filling Factory was situated. The caption reads ‘Shell Inspectors’, and the photograph shows lines of women carrying identifying placards grouped by their different workshops or divisions.16 The variety of workwear worn within this one company suggests

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that some of the women purchased their own garments but that dress was used to differentiate ranks and roles within the factory. However, the range of choices workers made about what to wear and how to style it can be more clearly seen in portrait photographs, which capture a more personal glimpse of the sitter’s involvement in the war effort. Photographic studios featured prominently on high streets across the country and with the introduction of postcard backing, effectively turning the photograph into a postcard, the price of having a portrait taken became much more affordable. During the war itinerant photographers would also visit firms and larger factories in order to generate business. An article in the Yorkshire Evening Post from 31 October 1916 details the ‘new craze’ among female munition workers to have their photographs taken. Reporting that female munition workers ‘see in the new and cheap photograph a means of obtaining a permanent record of how they “did their bit” in the great war’.17 The article goes on to report of one Leeds photographer charging 1s 3d for the initial photograph and 1s 9d for a dozen copies implying that friends may have clubbed together to share the cost of a sitting. Having a portrait taken and exchanging cards was clearly common practice. The portraits were disseminated widely among family, friends and sweethearts at the Front. They were also kept as souvenirs and, through this practice, have become a vitally important resource for understanding the clothing practices of these workers.

The supply and construction of workwear The structure of the munition industry affected the variety of workwear distributed throughout the war and was one reason for the lack of a uniformed appearance. At the outbreak of war, production was carried out by a mixture of three government-controlled factories and a handful of privately owned businesses fulfilling government contracts.18 This set-up had been established long before the war and had been able to sustain the modest small arms production required by the army and navy. The First World War quickly developed into an entirely different type of warfare, one of attrition on a scale which had not been anticipated nor experienced before by military leaders. By 1916, there were ninety-five national factories under the direct control of the government and over 4,000 contracted establishments involved in the production of munitions.19 As well as government-controlled factories, smaller garages and metalworks assisted in the manufacture of cartridges and smaller shell casings. Munition production was partly organized as a large form of batch production so that engineering factories primarily made the large guns, the large shell casings and the component parts. These shells and cartridges were then transported to the network of filling factories where they would be filled with the explosive chemicals such as TNT.20 As Jerry White has described, the scale of these operations meant that the whole country partook in some form of the munitions manufacturing process.21 Women were either provided with or purchased workwear. There were three main basic garments, depending on the work being done. The first was an ankle- or calf-length overall which was worn over everyday clothes for less dangerous or dirty tasks such as packing cartridges. The second outfit, comprising of tunic and trousers, was worn in areas where the work was more strenuous, or on overhead cranes or to offer more protection against dangerous chemicals. The third design, a boilersuit, would have been worn in the more dangerous and dirty areas. The fabric used was mostly stout canvas, and was produced in assorted colours including khaki, navy blue, brown, green and pink. These variations have been documented in official paperwork, memoirs and advertisements. The stout drill or canvas material used for the

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garments was probably imported from America.22 Once woven it would most likely have been sent by goods train to clothing factories located primarily in Leeds and Manchester, as happened in the Second World War.23 Clothing companies who manufactured uniforms for the forces may also have produced the workwear and outfitters and distributors located around the country advertised ‘uniforms’ for war workers, including trousers for munition workers. Garments were also provided by the Department of Explosives, part of the Ministry of Munitions, and would have been purchased by companies carrying out the larger of Government contracts. The larger factories, such as those at Woolwich Arsenal and, provided garments for its workers made on site. Mrs Kathleen Bunn recalled making workwear for women workers during the First World War in the Tailoring Shop at the Woolwich Arsenal where she was the forewoman in charge of the large workforce of 800 girls.24 Evidence of clothing being handed out at the ‘uniform distribution point’ at Gretna can be seen in photographs held in the Devil’s Porridge Archives. The fabric used in the workwear worn by Gretna munition worker Mirry (Figure 7.2) seems to be obviously heavier and thicker than that worn by the Woolwich munition workers. This could be because of the colder climate in Scotland to that of London, or the type of munition manufacturing process, or even the access to local fabric. But the pictures are evidence of the variations between these two factories.

FIGURE 7.2  Mirry. Photograph: author’s own.

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Further evidence of the material construction of workwear can be found in three extant garments that were ‘rediscovered’ in the collections of the Imperial War Museum, London, during work undertaken as part of the 2014 centennial commemorations of the First World War and the refurbishment of the First World War Galleries.25 However, although these garments are extremely valuable for what they tell us about the construction and fabric used, they cannot be deemed as representative of the millions of articles worn between 1914 and 1918 because they were purchased from high-end department stores and would have been out of the financial reach of many female munition workers. The ‘boiler suit’ described by the Museum is, in fact, a pair of beige trousers only. These were purchased by the Museum in 1919 from Dickins & Jones, and there is no material evidence they were ever worn.26 Comparing them to the photographic postcards also shows that they were unusual in their design, featuring a curved hem at the front of the trouser leg that covered the foot and protected the leg from exposure to harmful chemicals. In the entirety of my eBay searching I have only come across two images showing a similar design, including one showing a Munitionette wearing a triangular ‘On War Service’ Badge, given to munition workers and which I have used to firmly identify them as working in munitions (Figure 7.3). This photograph, along with a similar example, has served to verify the

FIGURE 7.3  Munitionette wearing a triangular ‘On War Service’ Badge. Photograph: author’s own.

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trousers held by the Imperial War Museum as munition workwear, but also demonstrate the dangers of using a small number of extant material objects as examples of munition workwear and the importance of the photographic postcards as a source.

The workwear market and its geographies Considering the provenance of the existing Imperial War Museum garments led me to search for workwear advertisements in newspapers. These showed that companies were exploiting the burgeoning workwear market. Advertisements particularly suggest the suitability of garments for certain roles that were occupations suitable for the upper classes. In 1917 the ‘Ashford’ was advertised by Dickins & Jones as being suitable for ‘work on the land or in the garage’.27 The whole outfit, including frock coat, lace breeches and cap cost £32 11s, and would have certainly been beyond the financial reaches of working-class women.28 The revelation that workwear was being sold in these high-end establishments demonstrated a larger variety of workwear was available than had previously been suspected. Matching the advertisements with the photographic postcards based on the geographical location of the photography studio enabled me to further develop my recognition of areas, factories and whether the sitter was a munition worker. There was clearly a significant market for workwear. Documents held in the Devil’s Porridge Archive state that clean ‘uniforms’, in their parlance, were distributed twice a week to the Gretna workforce.29 As the factory employed approximately 20,000 women it would be reasonable to assume that at the very least there would have been 40,000 pairs of trousers and the same number of tunic tops in this factory alone. The estimated number of 1,000,000 women being involved in munition production during its peak in 1917 suggests the number of garments in circulation was certainly significant. Unfortunately, there is little corroborating evidence to support whether some factory owners as opposed to the employees purchased workwear, or whether female munition workers employed by smaller garages or engineering workers bought these overalls in order to protect their everyday clothes. An advertisement for Lewis’ Department store in Birmingham featured ‘Coveralls for Women Workers’, which offered ‘A complete and comprehensive range of Coveralls of every kind, including Overalls, Combination Suits, Knicker Suits (trouser and smock separate), with caps to match.’30 These garments are described as neat and practical, and it is noted that they come in a range of ‘strong serviceable prints and khaki cloths’ with useful and serviceable pockets. The combination suits priced at 7/6 were advertised specifically for women, who worked close to machinery meaning that skirts were neither practical nor safe.31 Interestingly, the language used emphasized the neatness of the garment, which lent an air of respectability to the utilitarian outfit. Coveralls were also advertised with spotted or striped collars or plainer shades of nut-brown, grey or fawn. The prices ranged from 2/6½ for a striped print overall to 4/11½ for overalls suitable for government workers and inspectors. Free paper patterns of overalls were also offered to newspaper readers to be made at home.32 Although it has not been possible to find data to support whether such offers were successful or how many patterns were requested, a photograph in my collection of a Birmingham-based munition worker holding a shell that rests on a plant stand offers an indication that some workwear may have been homemade. The sitter wears a loose smock dress, which has been belted and is unusually short. The fact I have not come across another example as short suggests that it

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may have been a one-off piece. Since the use of the shell as a prop clearly identified the woman with munition work, this exemplifies how researching these photographs for inconsistences and differences adds diversity and complexity to our definitions of what was classed as workwear for these women war workers.

Identifying occupations As my collection and knowledge grew I realized that the only definitive way in which to recognize female munition workers was by their ‘On War Service Badges’ because of the generic utilitarian design of workwear. In 1916, the Ministry of Munitions approved the production and distribution of ‘On War Service’ badges to government-controlled factories involved in munition production.33 A memorandum written in 1917 by one Mr F. R. Lovett describes that originally badges had been issued to men involved in essential war work to prevent abuse for not having attested.34 Lovett wrote that the demand for official recognition first came as early as 1915 from women employed at the Woolwich Arsenal. These badges were distributed to the female munition workers because: [A]part from sentimental reasons, a badge enables its wearer to obtain cheap travelling facilities by rail … and secures … preferences on crowded trams … [and] it will be useful as a protection to women. They have often to travel distances at night back from their work and an official badge will help to secure them from annoyance.35 The badges became, to a certain degree, symbolic of patriotism and loyalty to the country. They also presented a gendered understanding of war work. The language used on the badge and in the descriptions of the work carried out by women emphasized their ‘service’ and duty in assisting men. As such, their work, however crucial to the war effort, was always articulated in feminine terms. Articles such as ‘Women Serve the Country in Munition Factories’ contained praise for the work of female munition workers but articulated as supporting men.36 Photographs suggest that some women also recognized and used this language themselves, for example a photograph where the sitter has written ‘On War Service’ on the front of the image. In this way the wearing of the badges can be understood to symbolize the gendered complexities of women’s work during the First World War. Although the ability to identify munition workers has been vital for this research, the academic focus on specific types of war work, such as munitions, may also have concealed the work and workwear of other women workers during the First World War. However, comparing the photographs of munition workers with other types of women workers reveals similarities in the overalls of the various workers. A postcard of ‘Lady Window Cleaners from Nottingham’ clearly demonstrates the similarities in the design of garments worn for practical and modest reasons. Crane drivers in munition factories wore trousers as they worked above male colleagues to protect their modesty and trousers were certainly worn for the same reasons for climbing ladders in such a public manner. Another group of women photographed in a line have identified themselves on the reverse as ‘Dairy Drivers, Harefield’ and wear similar generic trousers and tunics to the munition workers shown throughout this chapter. As such, these photographs help us understand how the clothes of munition workers formed part of a larger change in women’s workwear during this period.

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Choreographing photographs and commemorating friendships As with all portraiture, in whatever media it is produced, the viewer must consider the inherent choreography and possible self-fashioning. The women photographed during the First World War, as was also the case in earlier Victorian Cartes-de-Visites, would have been guided by the photographers’ artistic preferences of stance and props. Props were used to help associate the sitter and their occupation, or a desired status or respectability. The studio sets featured painted backdrops depicting landscapes or garden settings, carved wooden furniture and thick fur rugs, which were traditional, even classical, in appearance and suggested the wealth and respectability the sitters wished to convey. However, as Deborah Thom has noted, the traditional dressing of the sets for photographs jars with the issue of modernity communicated through the depiction of the female sitter in masculine workwear, indicating that these photographs signify a shift in visual representations of women. Thom acknowledges the widespread practice of recording one’s image, noting that: ‘Photographs were as important a part of the history of women in war as they were for the experience of the soldier.’37 For some women, engaging with war work was the first time they defined themselves as individuals rather than daughters, wives or mothers, and thus part of the process of sitting for a photograph was to claim for themselves a part of the war, the experience of work and the friendships made. The choreography of these photographs confirms the notion that they had multiple purposes. On the one hand, they could serve as visual records of unusual appearances and work experiences, and the exchange of these images was a way to communicate to family members the direct and important contribution these women were making towards the war effort. On the other, they also commemorated friendships and could be exchanged within familial circles, expressing love and best wishes. Figure 7.4 provides an example of how friendship and individual identity were commemorated in these photographs. Three friends stand close together and contains the moniker ‘With love, Lizzie’ and the date 18–10–1918 on the reverse. The overall jackets are very loose and shapeless with deep pockets, fabric belts and button fastenings centre front. All the women wear their jackets open in a ‘V’ shape. Two have them fastened with their brass ‘On War Service’ badges, whilst the worker in the middle has a small brooch fastening her overall open. The outer two women are wearing necklaces, one a locket and one possibly a cross. The fact they have chosen to wear such decorative adornments, which sit incongruously against the workwear, suggests their desire to accessorize their dress to look smarter, more attractive, perhaps to display emotional tokens. The date on the reverse of the card reveals that this photograph was taken a month before the Armistice, indicating that it may have been taken because the women were aware that their time in munitions was coming to an end and wished to record their work and friendship.38 Some photographs explicitly contain acknowledgment of self-presentation by the women themselves. One of the women in Figure 7.5, who unfortunately remains unidentified, has written on the reverse ‘this is the one I liked best’ and another ‘capless’ woman annotated that she forgot to take her mob cap with her to the photography studio and ‘spoiled the look of it’. A photograph of a certain Billie W, who worked at the Woolwich Armoury, joked in her dedication to her ‘Ma and Pa’ on the reverse of her portrait postcard that she had just finished her shift but was not ‘tired enough to break the camera’. These annotations highlight the many examples of fashionable styling that can be seen in the photographs. Many of the women

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FIGURE 7.4  ‘With love, Lizzie’. Photograph: author’s own.

pictured, whether in studio photographs or in the workplace, wear blouses, fashionable during this period underneath their workwear.39 Mirry (Figure 7.2) has folded the front of her tunic top under to form a ‘V’ neck and allow her blouse to be seen. Although the blouses could be worn for a number of reasons, such as a mixture of additional warmth, protecting the bare skin from the rough fabric or to associate the sitters within accepted notions of respectability, femininity and attractiveness, it is likely that the blouses worn in photographs taken in the workplace were put on precisely because the women were being photographed, or in some instances filmed, causing the women to style their appearance for the occasion.40 Propaganda stressed that the role of these women was vital to the war effort. There was a recognition of the desperate need for increased production of accurate and reliable munitions following the Shell Scandal of 1915, which had revealed the army’s desperate shortage of ammunition. Around this time female munition workers were publicly praised and many may have chosen to record their role in the war, their altered appearance, their acceptance of duty, their patriotism and the friendships they made out of a sense of pride. Although, as Thom

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FIGURE 7.5  ‘I went down without my cap. So I spoiled the look of it’. Photograph: author’s own.

argues, female munition workers identified more with the personal and group photographs than the government-commissioned propaganda photographs, these visual representations of women in workwear are a record of the success of the government’s tactics to galvanize the public and women into supporting the munitions drive.41 These photographs featuring groups of friends, workshops, flags and dates of service thus serve as commemorative objects. Although the women are pictured wearing utilitarian clothing with few distinguishing regalia beyond official brooches, the choreography and styling of these commemorative photographs blur the boundaries of the everyday. These ordinary garments worn every day in the pursuit of essential and crucial war work are rendered extra-ordinary, as are the women wearing them. These women likely previously worked in the narrow range of undervalued occupations considered acceptable of their sex, wearing their usual domestic clothes protected by aprons. As well as providing a record of the developing design and use of workwear within the workplace, the dissemination of these commemorative photographs thus records a moment in women’s lives where their work and appearance had been elevated to that of national importance and their workwear was symbolic of this.

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Conclusion As Gillian Rose notes, photographs should be seen ‘as cultural documents offering evidence of historically, culturally and socially specific ways of seeing the world’.42 The postcard portraits featured in this chapter thus not only form a snapshot of workwear from the period but also record understandings of femininity, friendship and self. As shown in this chapter, women’s war work was extremely visible and widely discussed. Photographs appeared in newspapers and in factory magazines depicting women in workwear participating in events ranging from national processions to local gala days in small towns. Photographic postcards ensured the widespread dissemination of images of women in their workwear through displays in photography studio windows, in homes or in the hands of sweethearts at the Front. Yet little written documentation or material evidence still exists as to the plethora of working overalls, tunics and trousers worn by women during this period. Without the vast body of photographic portraiture, research into the varying types of workwear and what wearing it meant for women would not be possible. The close scrutiny of black-and-white photographs has revealed aspects of the differing types of fabric and construction but it has also highlighted the difficulties in identifying the variety of occupations of those women wearing similar workwear if no identifying badges or relevant props were used. Thus, the lost detail of their work has contributed to the invisibility of their wartime contributions. However, detailed analysis of this collection of photographs has revealed the greater variety of workwear designs across Britain than has been previously considered. The national market for workwear grew rapidly during this period, and while the garments themselves offered – arguably – little protection as workwear, they were associated with certain occupations and recognized as valuable within the war effort. This chapter has shown how the grouping together of disparate photographic souvenirs of altered appearances, friendships and service in essential war work can capture glimpses of the individual experience within the collegiate. It establishes that not only was the design of ordinary utilitarian workwear diverse, but that engagement with these everyday garments was nuanced and commemorative. When using photography in the study of dress one must acknowledge the appearance within a photograph may be choreographed. The women pictured in this chapter styled aspects of everyday fashionable clothing such as blouses and brooches with their workwear to present themselves in attractive ways to memorialize their appearance, work and friendships made. This shows the autonomy of ordinary working women recording their individuality within the collective workforce. Since the First World War arguably represents the point at which workwear for women became a distinct category of garment worn for certain occupations, the way that it has been styled and manipulated by wearers to emphasize or create a fashionable appearance highlights that they are worthy of inclusion in the study of fashion. To place workwear outside of any discussion about fashion is a reductive approach as it overlooks their design and fashionable influences, not to mention the development of fibres and technology and societal attitudes to work, dress and gender. The inclusion of clothing worn in the everyday pursuit of work expands our understanding of the definition of fashionable quotidian clothing. However, as my collection demonstrates, it is sometimes necessary to look beyond institutional records and formal archives in order to collect evidence of this.

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Notes 1

Most notably Arthur Marwick, The Deluge: British Society and the First World War (Reissued 2nd ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); as argued by Gail Braybon, Evidence, History, and the Great War: Historians and the Impact of 1914–18 (Oxford: Berghahn, 2003), 93.

2

Documents from the period describe these women workers as female munition workers rather than the more modern version of munitions workers. This chapter will use the First World War adjective.

3

Gillian Rose, ‘Practising Photography: An Archive, a Study, Some Photographs and a Researcher’, Journal of Historical Geography 26, no. 4 (2000): 555–71, 2.

4

Once the war was over, discussions detailed what to do with surplus stocks of clothing. Sir Reginald Brade advised that ‘the stuff that has been in wear for six months should be burnt outright and that what has been in wear for three months should be dealt with in such a way.’ See the Minutes of The Committee into the Disposal of Surplus Stocks. Ministry of Munitions Archives, National Archives, London, Document reference: MUN 5/147/1122/54, 7. Towards the end of the war receipts of the disposals board show the total value of items sold from all departments under the auspices of the Ministry of Munitions in ‘textiles, leather and equipment as £23,951,102’. ‘Receipts of Purchases 1919–20 to be disposed of.’ Ministry of Munitions Archives, National Archives, London, Document reference: MUN 5/147/1122/60.

5

See Jane Tynan and Lisa Godson, eds., Uniform: Clothing and Discipline in the Modern World (London: Bloomsbury, 2019).

6

The Imperial War Museum lists approximately 5,000 photographs relating to women’s work during the First World War; approximately 800 of these refer to female munition workers; the Liddle Collection houses 317 individual files within the Domestic Front sub-collection, including 170 files of written or recorded recollections, with an additional Domestic Front General Aspects sub-collection of an approximate similar size. However, research has yet to be carried out into the numbers of photographs contained within these files. Email correspondence Matthew Dunne, Special Collections Team Assistant Special Collection, Leeds University Library, 20 July 2018. The curators at the Devil’s Porridge Archive estimate that they have approximately 300 photographs in their collections related to the First World War. This collection began in 1996 and public donations continue to contribute to the Archive. Email correspondence Judith Hewitt, Museum Manager, The Devil’s Porridge Archive and Richard Brodie, Chairman of the Trustees, The Devil’s Porridge Archive, 11 September 2018.

7

Amy de la Haye, ‘A Critical Analysis of Practices of Collecting Fashionable Dress’, Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture 22, no. 4 (2018): 381–403; Jennifer Richardson, ‘Female Munition Workers’ Workwear in Britain, 1914–1918: A Material and Visual Cultural Analysis’ (PhD Thesis, University of Brighton, 2019).

8

Zoe Todd, ‘Reading eBay: Hidden Stores, Subjective Stories, and a People’s History of the Archive’, in Everyday eBay, ed. Ken Hills, Michael Petit and Nathan Scott Epley (London: Routledge, 2006), 79.

9

Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello, eds., Writing Material Culture History (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 8.

10 de la Haye, ‘A Critical Analysis of Practices of Collecting Fashionable Dress’, 396. 11 Ben Highmore, Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday (London: Routledge, 2011), xiii–5. 12 Cheryl Buckley and Hazel Clark, Fashion and Everyday Life: London and New York (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 1. 13 Gail Braybon and Penny Summerfield, Out of the Cage: Women’s Experiences in Two World Wars (London: Pandora, 1987), 34.

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14 The nickname ‘Munitionette’ first appeared in print in The Sphere in 1915; books include A Girl Munition Worker by Bessie Marchant, Munition Mary by Brenda Girvin; sheet music appeared in factory magazines such as Bombshell, which had its own factory song The Templeboro Munition Song; the Woolwich Arsenal featured in a song She Works at Woolwich Arsenal Now by Robert Donnelly, 1916. 15 The Illustrated London Evening News, 26 May 1917, 602–3. 16 Bombshell, Volume 2, Issue 2, 1 April 1918, 17. Courtesy of IWM. 17 ‘The Girls’ Record of their War Work. Photographs in Munition Suits.’ Yorkshire Evening Post, 31 October 1916, 5. 18 The largest government-controlled factories were the Royal Ordnance Factory located at the Woolwich Arsenal, Greenwich, The Royal Gunpowder Factory, Waltham Abbey and the Royal Small Arms Factory, Enfield. Independent firms such as Armstrong Vickers and smaller firms such as R. A. Lister and Co. in Gloucestershire and George Kent Ltd. Luton supplemented production. 19 Gordon Routledge, Miracles and Munitions (Cumbria: Arthuret Publishers, 2003), 50. 20 T.N.T. is the acronym for trinitrotoluene, a compound used in dynamite. 21 Jerry White, ‘London in the First World War: Questions of Legacy’, London and the First World War Conference, Institute of Historical Research and Imperial War Museum, London. 20–21 March 2015, Plenary Lecture. 22 On an order document listing the purchase of raw materials by the Ministry of Munitions for 1916, over 84¼ thousand tonnes of raw cotton were recorded as imported. Imports for1916, MUN 5/71/324, National Archives, London. 23 Amy de La Haye, Land Girls: Cinderellas of the Soil (Brighton: The Royal Pavilion & Museums, 2009), 46. 24 Kentish Independent, 24 March 1977, 17; Domestic Front 1914–1918, The Liddle Collection (First World War), Brotherton Library, University of Leeds. 25 The existence of surviving examples of female munition workers’ dress did not come to light until after the opening of the First World War Galleries at the IWM in 2014, despite many previous enquiries about their holdings. According to one of the current archivists this may have been due to the ‘different priorities’ of previous archivists, and certainly the change of emphasis within the new gallery. Interestingly as recently as 2010, the Imperial War Museum insisted none of these garments survived the war. 26 The museum’s object file for accession number UNI 9157 states: ‘Protective clothing for work among machinery. Approved by the War Office. Boiler suit and cap. Purchased from Dickins and Jones, 14 September 1919’. 27 The Bystander, 28 February 1917, 410. 28 Working-class female munition workers earned approximately £1–£3 per week. 29 File 48, Factory Gretna, 2, Devil’s Porridge Archives, Dumfries. 30 The Birmingham Daily Post, 14 June 1917, 8. 31 Ibid. 32 A pattern for a munitions uniform to be made at home included in The Gloucester Journal, 20 April 1918, front page. 33 Issue of War Service Badges to Women. Memorandum by Mr F. R. Lovett. 26.2.17. MUN/5/347, Ministry of Munitions Archives, National Archives, London. 34 In the eight months following May 1916 when the issue of badges for women was approved, over 270,000 had been issued. Concern had been expressed over firms issuing private versions of the badge and eventually the issue of these badges was extended from the Government controlled factories.

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35 Mr. F. R. Lovett, ‘Issue of War Service Badges to Women’, Memorandum 26 February 1917, 4–5 MUN/5/347, Ministry of Munitions Archives, National Archives, London. 36 ‘Women Serve the Country in Munition Factories’, The War Illustrated, 8 May 1915, 280. 37 Deborah Thom, Nice Girls and Rude Girls: Women Workers in World War I (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998), 11. 38 Talk of peace becoming a reality was beginning to circulate: The Bedfordshire Times and Independent, 11 October 1918, 6. 39 See Suzanne Rowland’s chapter in this volume. 40 https://film.iwmcollections.org.uk/news/7 footage of women working at Chilwell Munitions Factory, 1917 shows evidence of blouses being worn under workwear. 41 Thom, Nice Girls and Rude Girls, 89. 42 Rose, ‘Practising Photography’, 2.

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FIGURE 8.1  Rosetta Rowley’s wedding suit, 1952, made by Harella. © Leeds Museums and Galleries, photograph taken by Norman Taylor; Photograph of Rosetta Rowley on her wedding day when she married Michael Noble, 1952.

8 Rosetta Rowley’s wedding suit, 1952 Natalie Raw

Rosetta Rowley (1929–53) grew up in Bradford, West Yorkshire, and lived through the Second World War and its aftermath. In 1952 Rosetta married Michael Noble, and she wore a purple wool Utility suit made by the ready-to-wear company Harella. Sadly almost exactly a year after her marriage Rosetta, who was four months pregnant, was taken to hospital with pneumonia and died aged just twenty-four. Following her death, Rosetta’s mother insisted on keeping her daughter’s wedding suit along with a number of other garments. This collection of clothing, mainly ready-to-wear along with some homemade garments, was given to Leeds Museums and Galleries in 1977 by Rosetta’s sister along with details about her life. Rosetta was part of a working-class family; she grew up near Bradford with her parents and younger sister. Her sister described their childhood as ‘quite deprived’ as both parents were out of work for most of the 1930s due to the Great Depression. When her parents did find work, they were in low-paid jobs. Her mother worked in one of the many wool spinning mills which dominated Bradford at the time and her father as a cleaner at Bradford Technical College. Rosetta left school aged fifteen and went out to work. She had a number of different jobs from making costume jewellery in a factory to working in Farmer Giles’ ice-cream parlour and for a while she worked in the despatch department in the warehouse of Grattan, a well-known Bradford-based catalogue company. When she was seventeen she left home to volunteer for the Women’s Land Army, to support the war effort. Working as fruit picker in Kent, Rosetta, like all Land Girls, would have had to work long hours for very low pay.1 Although the Second World War had ended by the time Rosetta married in 1952, many of the shortages and restrictions placed on clothing were still in place. For her wedding day, Rosetta, like many women, chose not to wear a one-off white gown but instead opted for a smart, yet practical, tailored suit which could be worn again. The suit was made by Harella, a successful ready-to-wear women’s tailoring company which manufactured many of its garments in Halifax. The distinctive CC41 label found inside the jacket shows it was produced under the  Utility scheme. Running from 1941 to 1952, the scheme was set up by the British Government to control the manufacture of cloth used for the garment industry to ensure ‘value-for-money clothing in price ranges affordable by almost all’.2 Rosetta’s suit is well-made and stylish. The

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fabric specification code, X209D, under the CC41 logo indicates ‘X’ in the that this was a ‘Super Utility’ item. This label is typically associated with high quality garments. This specification was introduced after the removal of government subsidies in January 1948, marking higher-priced Utility clothes.3 The fullness of the pleated skirt and the slightly softer lines of the jacket over the hips and shoulders show Rosetta to be following the changing fashions seen at the end of the 1940s, as a more feminine silhouette returned to popularity. Rosetta’s wedding suit along with her other garments offer a glimpse into the fashions worn by working-class women during the years following the Second World War. Her clothes are simple yet stylish and reflect the increasing accessibility of good-quality ready-to-wear fashion to working women at this time.

Notes 1

Family history from Eileen Pugh, sister of Rosetta Rowley. Initial information provided in 1977 when the clothes were acquired by Leeds Museums and Galleries, with additional information given in 2017 when some items from the collection were displayed in the ‘Fashionable Yorkshire’ exhibition, Lotherton, Leeds.

2

Geraldine Howell, Wartime Fashion – From Haute Couture to Homemade, 1939–1945 (London: Berg, 2012), 79.

3

Research notes from Lucy McConnell (2018), ‘Construction of Fashion under the Utility Scheme in Leeds, 1941–1945’, MLitt dissertation, University of Glasgow.

9 Making clothes for the older woman: Post-war pattern cutting and dressmaking home instruction in Britain Hannah Wroe

The idealization of youthfulness as the sustained cultural hegemony, reflected in fashion being promoted and designed for the young, is not just a contemporary experience.1 Women’s Own art editor, Ira Morris in her 1947 fashion guide The Glass of Fashion, noted that, In France and America, your clothes and your make-up engage the designer’s liveliest inspiration; but in this country the woman who is wise enough frankly to acknowledge middle-age is all too often relegated to the clothes category known as O.S. [outsize], which might well stand for Old-fashioned and Shapeless. Even if you have kept your slim figure, the clothes, and especially the hats, offered to you in many shops as being ‘suitable’ are homely to say the least. What to do – until fashion manufacturers catch up with the modern fact that there are women past the age of elegance?2 Although 37 per cent of women in Britain were over the age of forty-five in 1951, this exclusion of the older woman and her sartorial experiences in post-war British fashion was reflected in the limited range of mass-produced garments specifically designed for and marketed to her, reinforcing the idea that fashion was exclusively for the young.3 Thus, the experiences of older women have been largely overlooked within current fashion history scholarship, with the focus being on elite luxury fashion rather than the production, consumption and use of everyday clothing.4 Furthermore, with many garments from this period being remade or worn out, there are few traces within archives and collections.5 The sartorial needs and experiences of the older British woman, therefore, have remained unobserved and in some cases entirely hidden from the record. Developments throughout the twentieth century in ready-to-wear clothing resulted in fluctuating sizing of ‘off the peg’ garments.6 The process of mass-production often caused

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poor-fitting and limited availability of clothing specifically for the outsized or the non-standard ‘older woman’. The additional fitting required for older women who often had non-standard bodies was available to those who could afford custom-made and fitted garments, and for those with more limited budgets, opportunities to develop their own pattern drafting and dressmaking skills enabled them to custom sew their own wardrobe. These were diverse skills which included adapting, remaking, remodelling, designing, pattern drafting and home dressmaking. Much homemade clothing – especially everyday clothing for the older woman – has not survived. There is, however, a rich cultural record of home dressmaking practice in the postwar period which can be analysed through home instruction texts. This chapter examines a range of revelatory sources including the original published works of Agnes M. Miall and E. Sheila MacEwan, alongside material from the home dressmaking correspondence course the Haslam Dresscutting System in order to recover this important history of everyday sartorial practice. With paper patterns considered to be a significant medium by which fashion became part of the everyday lives of women, these texts connected older women to fashion.7 Domestic making practices were practices of everyday life as older woman engaged with their wardrobes through re-making, altering, designing and fitting their clothing – all part and parcel of everyday living, through which the older woman constructed her image and identity. These instruction manuals offered skills and guidance to negotiate the terrain of dressing as an older woman, enabling the reader to become a producer of her own everyday clothing, rather than a passive consumer of inadequate standardized, mass manufactured clothing. As historical texts, these sources offer rich analytical possibilities in the study of the everyday. They highlight this marginalized group’s experiences of the challenges of the ten years of rationing and the limited provision of outsize ready-to-wear manufacture and standardization of everyday clothing. They also offer practical answers to the complexities of accessing everyday clothing for older women: the dilemmas of the older body, the limitations of ready-to-wear clothing and the importance of well-fitting clothes as a way to regulate and normalize the changes women faced in the ageing journey. They also reveal a deeper contextual understanding of how gender, class and age shaped older women’s experience of dress and the role home dressmaking home instruction texts offered in facilitating agency through everyday fashion. This chapter will argue that home dressmaking offered this demographic of women the opportunity to access desirable, well-fitted everyday clothing that enabled them to express their personal identities. With some skill and dedication, they could become their own ‘personal dressmaker’.

Ready-to-wear provision for older women Ready-to-wear had, in part, democratized fashion through extending both the availability and affordability of clothing.8 Although the Utility scheme had raised manufacturing standards, ‘ready-mades’ during the inter-war period had the reputation of being of poor quality, made from low-grade materials.9 The resulting standardization of sizing required for the mass manufacture of clothing often led to poorly fitting clothing for anyone outside of a ‘standard’ size. The journalist Muriel Segal described how ‘the term “off the peg” has the ring of doom for women who are not built according to the clothing manufacturers’ conception of the female’, and that ‘the buying public wastes times and money, not to speak of nervous energy, on the eternal search for a good fit’.10 Unlike in America, where standardized sizing had been widespread from

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the 1940s, in Britain inconsistent sizing for adults remained ubiquitous.11 Despite the British Standards Institution establishing the standard size chart based on direct body measurements in 1953, this was not utilized by manufacturers.12 For the older woman who desired both flattering styles and well-fitting clothing, accurate sizing and fit were imperative. The fit of clothing was historically an affirmation of class and status, with wealthier women having access to either a dressmaker or a couturier.13 High-end custom-made clothing was available for those who could afford bespoke fitted garments. There was significant disparity of experience for older women defined by class and economics, which determined access to well-fitting clothing, with opportunities for bespoke clothing afforded only by the upper and aspiring upper-classes.14 This need for well-fitting clothing was additionally necessitated by the close-fitting designs in this period and the structured fabrics available. Throughout the 1930s, the Country Life journalist Catherine Hayter wrote features for the older woman. In her article ‘Summer fashions for the older woman’, Hayter describes older mothers, often ‘hidden away’ in country houses, who relied on clothing ‘run up by a little woman in the village’, which would have been custom-made.15 To take a more active part in the social season, these women needed ‘some gowns beyond the scope of the village dressmaker’.16 The lack of fashion provision for older women and the need for well-fitting clothing were a long-standing struggle across all classes, although healthier finances afforded more opportunities. Alterations were an additional cost the non-standard and outsized woman faced.17 This need for larger sizes was recognized by department stores (such as Harrods and Selfridges in London) which offered specialist outsize service in their women’s departments from the 1920s to enable better fitting of their ready-to-wear lines.18 Many women still made and altered clothing themselves within the home, affording them more autonomy in both design and fit of their clothing. From the 1920s, additional market lines were developed for a range of non-standard sizes. In 1955 The Times reported that Customers are departmentalized, by shape, size, and income, until the mind reels under the impact: Outsize, Tall Girls, Under Five Foot, Over Eighteen Guineas, or Under Seven Pounds threaten to stock sizes as extinct as coelacanths were at one time thought to be. To beg that another special section should be added might seem to be confounding confusion, willingly. And yet, there is a category that is largely overlooked – the elderly woman.19 This article goes on to suggest the need for comfortable chairs, restful interiors and lifts and escalators for easy access to departments. In her letter to the Editor, however, the writer and advocate Vera Brittain refuted this portrayal of the older woman as frail and a ‘wilting invalid’.20 This illustrates the diverse range of attitudes and perceptions regarding the needs of the ‘older woman’, especially when defined within such a wide age range.

Women’s outsize (O.S.) provision The lack of availability and choice within ready-to-wear clothing was not a new issue for ‘outsized’ women who often had to rely on dressmakers and their own home dressmaking skills to dress fashionably.21 Outsized (O.S.) ranges catered for women with hips between fortysix inches and sixty inches. Current literature on early twentieth-century outsize markets pays particular attention to the American ‘stoutwear’ market, which was established from the early 1900s as part of the development of ready-to-wear provision.22 Lauren Downing Peters explains

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in this context that American large-scale garment design and manufacturing, although initially developing out of the limitations of the standardization of graded sizes, also was ‘discursively undergirded by the principles and conventions of standardization and figure flattery’.23 Designs offered aesthetics which moralized socially acceptable ways to present fat bodies. The ‘cult of the slender body’ and the resulting preoccupation with slimness in the West have an established history.24 Likewise, the British wholesale manufacturer, The Smart Outsize Dress Co. Ltd., sold models in-store at their London showroom, alongside selling direct to outsize women through their mail-order catalogue.25 In their 1958 Spring/Summer catalogue they advertised the ‘highlights of the season’s fashions, so elegantly styled in first class material and all so carefully cut and planned to create a more slender and youthful YOU’. Outsize fashion lines were marketed to both slenderize women’s bodies and enable them to appear younger. The narrative was that to be fashionable was to be youthful and could be attained through the correctly chosen outsize dress. 1950s Pathé films featuring outsize womenswear all presented the outsize customer as an older woman.26 Liverpool labour MP Mrs Bessie Braddock, an activist for the post-war ‘outsize woman’, spearheaded the national campaign to widen outsize women’s provision. Having an outsize frame of fifty-inch bust, forty-inch waist and fifty-inch hips herself, Braddock was named the ‘Outsize fashion Queen’ in 1951.27 Figure 9.1 shows Braddock modelling alongside Miss

FIGURE 9.1 Labour MP Bessie Braddock (on right) as ‘Outsize Fashion Queen’, December 1951. © Illustrated London News Ltd./Mary Evans.

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Elizabeth Fry at the Dorchester Outsize Fashion Display in London in 1951. The same year, Braddock was featured in the Pathé film titled ‘Outsize Fashion’ showcasing her campaign for the development of ideal-shape outsize mannequins based on real women. Hailed as the climax of Braddock’s campaign ‘for more generous treatment for more generous proportions’ the film ends with a Norman Linton fashion show.28 Although not exclusively campaigning for older women’s fashion, Braddock embodied the outsized older woman. Having identified neglect from both designers and manufacturers which resulted in poor choice and high prices – Braddock’s slogan ‘Better clothes for the bigger woman’ – highlighted the additional costs faced by outsized women. This was a campaign focussed on developing fashionable, colourful provision for larger figures with ‘small to medium incomes’.29 The historic issue of limited availability of outsize stock had been exasperated by the war.30 In October 1952, following the end of the Utility scheme, Braddock raised the issue of outsized women being required to pay higher purchase tax to The Board of Trade. This public campaigning resulted in Braddock becoming founder member and president of the ‘Outsize Person’s Association’ in 1952. This group campaigned throughout the 1950s for legislative and industry change for outsized women’s fashion, demonstrating the growing acknowledgement of the neglect of the non-standard body within post-war readyto-wear production, and the increased confidence these consumers had in advocating for an expansion of choice.

The ‘Mrs Exeter’ ideal: An inspiration for the mature woman A rare example of the older woman being visible in post-war fashion magazines was seen in Vogue through the creation of the fictional character, Mrs Exeter. Originating in American Vogue in the summer of 1948, this character was swiftly introduced in British Vogue from March 1949, recreated with a backstory to reflect the life of an upper-class British socialite who followed the social calendar of the London season.31 Mrs Exeter was symbolic of the white upper-class privilege which Vogue promoted to its audience. Through regular features, Mrs Exeter offered lifestyle and sartorial advice addressing some of the complexities and challenges faced by older women. Presented as a well-groomed, well-dressed woman of slender build around the age of sixty, Mrs Exeter embodied the idealized life of the economically and socially privileged upper classes. She promoted investment dressing, although her budget was significant and not reflective of the economic challenges most older women faced.32 From 1952, the British Mrs Exeter was represented by older model Margot Smyley and the character featured on two Vogue covers.33 This use of an older model was not in itself without precedent as throughout the 1930s Country Life used older models within its older women’s fashion features.34 However, this promotion of a singular fashion icon who represented the idealized older woman was new. Mrs Exeter offered instruction on how Vogue’s more mature readers could use dress to navigate their place within the public sphere. For example, Mrs  Exeter promoted investment buying, always having an eye for longevity of her purchases. In November 1954 when standing by the fireplace at a party (noting the flattering lighting conditions), Mrs Exeter claimed to have just four dinner dresses in her wardrobe and how ‘given the right dress, women of our age group are at their best in evening clothes’.35 Although Mrs Exeter’s homilies were focused on the older woman, evening wear was not a necessity for most women in their everyday wardrobes.

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Lynn Mally has suggested that although not a brand as such, Mrs Exeter’s influence within the fashion press moved beyond the pages of Vogue.36 Representing the ideal older woman, American manufacturers used Mrs Exeter within promotions to endorse designs identified for the older woman.37 The influence of Mrs Exeter on the British home dressmaker is evident as she was used to market Vogue dressmaking patterns from 1953. Although an American company, Vogue had an international reach and used the reputation of their fashion magazine to promote its patterns ‘as the most fashionable high styles’.38 These Mrs Exeter ranges offered the home dressmaker ‘age appropriate’ styles. Despite the character herself retaining a slim silhouette, a feature of these pattern ranges was the larger size range (up to forty-four-inch bust) and in later years the flexibility of half-sizes. The height of distribution was a ten-page Mrs Exeter feature in October/November 1958 Vogue Pattern Magazine.39 These patterns were sold at one shilling and sixpence, a premium price in contrast to other dressmaking patterns, such as those advertised in the Daily Mail, which sold for sixpence.40 Between 1956 and 1967, Vogue’s counter catalogues had an identified Mrs Exeter section, an acknowledgement of the older woman home dressmaking market. Additionally, women’s magazines and newspapers offered mail order patterns as a way to engage women readership.41 For example, the Daily Mail’s ‘Women’s Page’ featured ‘Designs for the older woman’ with mail order paper patterns available with up to a forty-eight-inch bust at the cost of six shillings.42 The emphasis was on older women with the strapline ‘You can look smart’. Although these pattern lines offered wider nuanced sizing, to achieve well-fitting clothes women would have needed the skill to fit these standard-sized patterns to their own personal requirements. It is within this niche that Agnes M. Miall’s Dressmaking for the Older Woman offered instruction.

Agnes M. Miall, Making Clothes for the Older Woman (1948) Agnes M. Miall (1892–1977) was a prolific writer and journalist who authored plays, poems and children’s adventure books alongside writing for publications such as The Quiver, Women’s Magazine and Wife and Home. Throughout her career she published over a dozen books on needlecraft and domestic homecraft.43 She was considered ‘one of the best known and respected writers on practical matters for the home with many years of experience as a journalist and writer and an everyday knowledge of the problems and economics of the British home’.44 In 1948, Miall published Making Clothes for the Older Woman which was sold for seven shillings and sixpence (equivalent to around £11.70 today).45 It was promoted as ‘an invaluable guide to the home dressmaker who must be up-to-the-minutes in styles and colours. Here are the tricks of a popular and often very necessary hobby’.46 Miall identified the demographic of the ‘older woman’ to range from forty to her late-seventies and noted that perhaps we all know that we are ‘getting on’ when we can no longer buy ready-made clothes that are a passable fit. Dress shops are systematically slighting to outsizes and we are almost all outsized, in one measurement at least when we are fortyish.47 Although advice on style and body shape was a topic often covered within dressmaking texts of the period, Miall’s book was unique in considering the sartorial impact of women’s ageing bodies, identifying changes in body shape, weight distribution, as well as changes in skin completion which impacted women’s experiences of their ageing bodies and presented sartorial challenges.

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FIGURE 9.2  ‘Six Main Types of the Mature Figure’, from Making Clothes for the Older Woman (1948) by A. M. Miall.

Miall’s text explored a range of women’s body shapes through a series of ‘typical’ characters which are illustrated in Figure 9.2.48 Leonora, who was short and slim, was under 5ft 2” with sloping shoulders, thin arms and a salt-cellar neck. Penelope – tall and medium – was 5ft 7” or over, with square shoulders, slightly stooped, with a flat low bust and sway back. Juno – tall and stately – had a generous build, broad back and a dignified straight-backed stance. Editha – short and stout – was under 5ft 3”, with a bust of 40 inches or over, with large thighs and legs. Marianne – the ‘busty’ type – was of average height, with a thick neck, and bust as large or larger than her hips. Finally, there was Augusta – the ‘hippy’ type – of average height, hips at least three inches larger than her bust, often having large thighs. The reader, having identified their own body type – or combination of body types – was guided through the chapters to specific fitting adaptations, style advice and relevant construction processes. Miall offered instruction for each body type on how to alter and adapt commercial patterns to ensure the best fit. The text also included chapters on buying ‘ready-mades’ to alter for better fitting, and instruction on how to remodel existing clothing. Miall presented the home dressmaker developing these skills as a way for the older woman to be an active participant in fashion, attaining individual fitting and styles. She argued that

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the older woman who makes her own clothes is a dressmaker for one person – herself. She can concentrate on her particular figure and needs. Thus, she soon becomes an expert in this field and will get a far better fit than would be obtained even in a made-to-measure garment from a shop.49 Miall also highlighted specific difficulties experienced by older women through the war and during post-war austerity. Clothing rationing lasted for eight years from June 1941 until March 1949 and older women often donated coupons to younger family members.50 Miall details the disadvantages faced by older women, often without a large family, including their inability to pool coupons and resources. Additionally, for those with an outsized body there was limited scope in cutting down other garments. Larger bodies led to the need for extra expense in sourcing, affording and collecting the required coupons for larger pieces of fabric.51 Despite these challenges, dressmaking was an economic way to clothe yourself with cloth costing three coupons for 33–39-inch-wide fabric or four-and-a-half coupons for 54–57-inch wide compared to the seven to ten coupons required for a ready-to-wear dress.52 Miall defined remodelling as ‘rehabilitating a garment by the addition of parts from another or of some new material’ and considered it the best method of ‘stretching’ precious coupons.53 Her text offers real insight into the practical struggles faced by post-war older women and includes useful advice such as investing in a two-piece (matching dress and coat) which could later be remodelled into another combined garment. She wanted her readers not just to extend the life of a garment, but to create something individual and considered individuality was ‘the most precious achievement of the older home dressmaker. It is one in which she can never be rivalled by the mass producer of ready-made clothes’.54 This call for individuality is a reoccurring theme across all dressmaking texts. Utility fashion design had simpler lines with straight skirts in shorter lengths, which did not always flatter the older woman. As noted in a 1944 article titled ‘Austerity Frocks are Going’, ‘Older women are anxious to see the end of these restrictions on skirt styles, chiefly because the austerity skirt is unkind to the fuller figure and quickly “seats”’.55 Additionally, newspapers reported wartime shortages of outsize stock which necessitated more alterations being needed. Despite the anticipation of the end of clothing restrictions, clothing rationing (although on a reduced scale) continued until 1949, presenting ongoing challenges for older women. Agnes Miall’s book therefore met a demand for the non-standard sized older woman whose sartorial needs were not easily met by existing ready-to-wear or standardized patterns.

E. Sheila MacEwan, Your Pattern Cutting (1950) E. Sheila MacEwan (b. 1895) was primarily an educator; she both studied and worked for forty-three years at Hornsey School of Art, London, later Hornsey College of Arts and Crafts, where she set up and managed the Department of Women’s Crafts until her retirement in 1956.56 Part of this department’s provision was an extensive range of night-classes, which included dressmaking and pattern-cutting classes run by MacEwan.57 In 1950, she authored Your Pattern Cutting with the Sylvan Press under their Your Home Crafts Series. This series aimed to support home craft education for those who were unable to attend night courses. MacEwan made clear in her preface that affordability had been significant motivation in planning her text with her decision to produce a ‘small very tightly packed text book within the range of every pocket’.58

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Your Pattern Cutting offers a comprehensive flat-pattern system through the creation of custom-made foundation blocks, ideal for those such as older women requiring individual fitting patterns. This system was based on the creation of foundation pattern ‘blocks’ – basic pattern templates made in card – which once fitted, could be manipulated and adapted into different styles for which MacEwan offered instruction. Her first lines were that ‘This little book is planned to help the reader to cut patterns to fit the individual figure, for any style, past, present or to come, by an up-to-date method of flat pattern drafting’.59 This direct measurement system was created by taking individual body measurements to create accurate patterns. Although this text is not aimed directly at the ‘older woman’, the system enabled the home dressmaker to create well-fitting and individually-designed clothing, which could be made within her budget. This was a personalized experience which could accommodate any fitting requirements, enabling women to overcome the limitations of British standard sizing and financial barriers to affording bespoke custom clothing to attain made-to-measure garments. This text offered women the opportunity to learn these specialist skills for themselves to become their own ‘personal dressmaker’. Despite these being complex skills to learn, and the significant challenge of learning within the home, readers could be empowered through knowing and catering to their own bodies and sartorial needs. One section specifically addresses fitting adaptations for ‘Difficult and Abnormal Figures’. MacEwan advises how the foundation pattern blocks can be altered for acutely round shoulders, an extremely prominent bust, prominent abdomens, hollow backs and one-sided figures – all familiar ailments of the ageing body. She identified that both fitting and choice of style were issues when pattern cutting for the abnormal figure and noted that the standard approach was to ‘ignore abnormalities; my own long experience in cutting for a very difficult case has convinced me that far from exaggerating them, as some suggest, it is possible, by working from a carefully fitted block, to disguise it to an extraordinary degree’.60 MacEwan’s focus on fitting the foundation blocks (Figure 9.3) shows the adaptations recommended to accommodate spinal curvature. When discussing appropriate designs she states that ‘it is quite unnecessary to condemn the abnormal figure to the shapeless and “old lady” cross-overs so often advocated; neither is it necessary to fit with exaggerated looseness, though styles dependent from their effect on very close body fitting are best avoided.’61 The text does not identify specific design styles for ‘abnormal bodies’ but advocated choosing styles with seam lines where fitting could naturally occur and that skirts should be mounted onto the bodice rather than to a waistband. This text offers instruction on design principles rather than final identified designs, this ‘timeless’ approach once mastered enabled the reader to create any design to fit. The final section titled ‘How to Use Fashion Drawings, photographs, etc.’ discusses how to interpret fashion illustrations and photographs. The implication is that the reader would be directly copying designs from high-end fashion magazines (MacEwan preferred them to be French) by tracing onto cellophane over photographs to create a pattern sketch. She acknowledged the diversity of women’s bodies which did not align with the elongated slimline fashion illustration template and suggested ‘if you are designing for a short figure, take a small tuck across the knee level – lack of height is usually in the legs rather than in the body; if your subject is heavily built, draw a little outside the lines’.62 Her system represented the ultimate dressmaking ‘hack’: circumventing established issues in altering standard-sized commercial dress patterns and readyto-wear clothing (Miall’s approach). Her philosophy was to design and make garments with longevity through being well-fitting, well-made, with an understanding of materials, and which had good proportion and style.63 This system demanded the reader use their ‘critical faculties’ to differentiate what was good design.64

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FIGURE 9.3  Pattern Adaptations for Non-Standard Bodies, Your Pattern Cutting (1950) by E. Sheila MacEwan.

The Haslam System of Dresscutting The ‘Haslam’ System of Dresscutting was a bi-annual publication issued between 1920 and 1960 by Bolton dressmaking lecturer Miss Grace A. Haslam (1876–1960) and her sister Florence (1884–1968), a trained mantle maker. Each book provided pattern instruction for fashionable seasonal styles which could be drafted with the ‘Haslam’ chart – a kidney-shaped card pattern drafting tool – to plot patterns to individual measurements. The reference ‘Table of Proportionate Measurements’ size chart ranged from thirty-four-inch bust with thirty-six-inch hips to forty-six-inch bust with forty-eight-inch hips. Grace Haslam toured the country demonstrating this system in town halls, recruiting students to her twelve-week sewing, pattern cutting and tailoring course, run by one of her

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teams of trained dressmaking tutors. This was a national project with classes being held across Scotland, Northern Ireland and England. The system promised a perfect fitting pattern without the necessity of trying on.65 It was promoted as a miraculous tool: The ‘Haslam’ chart. Just a few holes, lines, and curves, and yet it will give you the pattern of any garment you wish to make. It is easy to use, and pattern making to one’s own measurements is within the reach of all.66 This system did not stand alone and was supported by a text-book, local classes and/or a postal correspondence course at a cost of three guineas, where you sent in your draft for personalized written feedback from Grace Haslam.67 In 1930, a pupil was quoted as saying that ‘During the course of 12 lessons, I made two tailored coats; a costume; four dresses; and a jumper’.68 Ease of use, accuracy of fit and economy were all selling points for this pattern system. Haslam pattern books from the late 1940s identified designs ‘For the Matron’, idealized models of an indeterminate age (Figure 9.4). Styles featured structured collars to frame the face, extenuated hip pockets to draw the attention to a reduced waist, button-down (often

FIGURE 9.4  For the Matron, Illustrated Book of Draftings, Autumn and Winter no. 29, by Miss F. A. Haslam c.1950.

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double-breasted) bodice fronts and, mid-calf skirts often with inverted back pleats for ease. These were elegant yet comfortable day dresses which could be easily fitted. By the early 1950s, non-standard figures were also being offered the Illustrated Book of Drafting Specially Designed for Fuller Figures contained current fashionable styles designed for both ‘FULLER FIGURES [while] several are also suitable for the older Matron or smaller build’.69 Additional adaptations for the foundation patterns allowed for fuller busts, thicker backs and stooped figures. The Haslam system, like MacEwan’s, required readers to create a standard foundation block to their personal measurements. Once created this could be used to create specific fashionable styles of the period. The first Illustrated Book of Drafting Specially Designed for Fuller Figures published in the early 1950s offered a complete wardrobe of twenty-seven designs for the ‘fuller figured’ woman. This included thirteen dresses (both day and evening), one jacket, one dress coat, three suits, four coats, two slips, a nightdress, pair of French knickers and a house coat. Each design was easily adaptable for the fuller figure and non-standard body. For example, waisted dresses enabled bust and hip disparities and sway backs to be accommodated. All designs (except the two swagger coats) were body-fitting and required foundation garments to create a smooth silhouette. Dresses were designed with vertical princess seams which could be sculpted to the body. Designs focused on shoulder and waist detail, with an identified waist with flared mid-calf skirts. Decorative statement collars and hip details such as peplums or large hip pockets were key features. Dropped shoulders and kimono bodice dresses were both fashionconscious and disguised shoulders and upper arms. Two-piece tailored costumes such as dresses with co-ordinating coats and jackets offered opportunities to layer. Known to ‘camouflage’ problem areas, pleats and asymmetrical wide wrap over skirts were used to hide larger hips.70 Additionally, advice on suitable materials – ‘bold checks or stripes, also heavy tweeds should be avoided’ and printed and diagonal checks often suggested.71 The printed crepe and silk fabrics recommended could easily drape over bodies. Designs had slimming lines and many of the patterns offered zig-zag pattern markings to indicate where extra volume could be added. These design strategies aimed to accommodate the mature figure where necessary and disguise it where possible. As opposed to MacEwan’s system, which enabled women to create their own designs, the Haslam system offered flexible templates for examples of fashion-conscious designs. Mixing and matching designs was encouraged with alternative skirts from other pattern books identified.72 Suggested materials such as crushed erminette or velvet, coatees lined with silk and velvet inside collars, suggest that these were intended for women with significant budgets, the skills to effectively work with often slippery materials and a formal lifestyle (all designs were styled with the appropriate co-ordinating gloves, shoes and hats).73 Although marketed as a fast and accurate pattern system, the process of drafting and making these patterns would have required a significant investment of time and skill. Prior sewing knowledge was necessary, as brief text-based pattern and construction instructions were often short at around 180 words. These texts were not intended to be used in isolation, but as an extension the Haslam twelveweek community course. It is important to note that all three of these authors were themselves ‘older women’ when they published their texts. In 1948, MacEwan was fifty-five, Miall was fifty-six and Grace Haslam was seventy-two. Mid-century sewing educators have largely been unacknowledged, in part due to the domestic nature of their authorship.74 Although coming from different backgrounds (journalism, teaching and dressmaking entrepreneurship respectively), each offered technical and stylistic home instruction to women of their own generation, catering for their peers. All would

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have experienced first-hand the frustration of the social, political and economic constraints within post-war Britain which shaped and hindered older women’s access to desirable, flattering and well-fitting clothes. Unlike the Mrs Exeter marketing phenomenon, the three books are examples of accessible practical solutions to access better-fitting desirable clothing, something MP Bessie Braddock advocated in her national campaign for improvements in outsize ready-towear provision for a predominantly older group of women.

Dressmaking as empowerment The desirable twentieth-century older woman was ‘graceful’, ‘wise’ and ‘charming’ and chose dignified clothes which did not reveal her age.75 Vogue suggested the aspiration for the older woman was to ‘present a calm exterior, unruffled by small fussy detail: large, roomy bags, superbly plain shoes and gloves’.76 These ‘plain shoes’ were evident in all of the Haslam illustrations. Illustrations presented the older and outsize woman in well-fashioned interiors – on terraces, in libraries, music rooms and on smart town streets – all promoted a decorative leisured older woman. Within these texts the older woman is being asked to conform to the fashionable aesthetic of the period, in ways that were appropriate for her body shape, yet at the same time aim to erase her physical differences as much as possible. She was encouraged simultaneously to have an attractive appearance but be inconspicuous. This design approach reinforced the underlying cultural discourse that women’s mature bodies were problematic. Armed with the tools given by Miall, MacEwan and the Haslams, however, the older woman could work to overcome the shame attached to her outsize, ageing body. These texts document post-war domestic making practices which offered the older woman the opportunity to create her own clothing, either through alteration, adaptation or pattern drafting. Part of the post-war publishing boom within amateur domestic craft instruction, they also reflect the longer do-it-yourself craft moments within the twentieth century, which promoted learning making skills to ‘fight back’ against industrialization and mass-production.77 The limitations of ready-to-wear clothing for both outsize and older women in relation to fit, affordability, desirability and availability all required a more personalized individual solution which dressmaking offered. Such dressmaking manuals were not necessarily used in isolation. Both MacEwan’s night classes and the Haslam twelve-week programme illustrate how texts were used as an extension of local dressmaking education provision. By the 1950s there were also developments in television dressmaking programmes, such as the BBC series For Women: About the Home which featured Making a Dress with Hilda Hincks. All cemented pattern drafting and design as an established part of the home dressmaker’s skillset. It is clear, however, that certain demographics of these home dressmakers such as the older and outsized woman had more need for the texts than mere hobbyists. Cheryl Buckley argues that dressmaking practices are political and that ‘the process of making and designing, the clothes themselves, and the ways in which they were worn, reveal aspects of women’s identity’.78 With access to fashion integral to the participation in everyday life, through developing these dressmaking skills older women were able to create and perform their own aged experience.79 In considering older women’s experience of fashion, however, what is apparent is that age and fashion do not exist within isolation; experiences, body size, class, economic power and location are all intersectional. Dressmaking texts must be contextualized

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within class-making and age-making practices, while acknowledging the multiplicity of the older woman’s experience. The instruction manuals analysed in this chapter offer valuable documentation of post-war domestic making practices, illuminating deeper understandings of the older and outsized British fashion consumer. In the post-war years, women did have the opportunity through these texts to develop the skills and knowledge to create clothing for themselves. These instruction manuals reveal that through the development of everyday domestic dressmaking practices of remaking, remodelling, bespoke patternmaking and dressmaking the older woman could self-fashion her identity, making well-fitting, affordable and fashionable clothing. These instruction manuals reveal that the sartorial circumstances of ageing women were being considered, and this was part of a wider cultural awareness of this demographic in postwar Britain. One in nine women being outsized (two thirds of whom were over forty years old), therefore, this was not a homogenized group and despite small markets being available, their approach reveals underlying ideologies towards older and outsized women.80 What is apparent is that the needs of the older woman and those with non-standard bodies had been left behind within commercial offerings of ready to wear clothing, therefore excluding these women from participating in the conventional cultures of sartorial expression. Learning these skills enabled the ‘older woman’ to move beyond passively consuming a limited number of available patterns or ill-fitting ready-to-wear lines. Instead, they were offered an opportunity for self-expression, to understand the relationship of garments to their own bodies and to become more active participants in shaping and creating their own wardrobes.

Notes 1

Julia Twigg, Fashion and Age (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 1.

2

Ira Morris, The Glass of Fashion (London: The Pilot Press, 1947), 116.

3

Table 17, Ages (individual years) by Marital Condition in National Census (London: National Archives, 1951), 60–3.

4

Cheryl Buckley and Hazel Clark, Fashion and Everyday Life: London and New York (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 1–2.

5

Mary M. Brooks, ‘Patterns of Choice: Women’s and Children’s Clothing in the Wallis Archive, York Castle Museum’, in The Culture of Sewing: Gender, Consumption and Home Dressmaking, ed. Barbara Burman (Oxford: Berg, 1999), 171.

6

Winifred Aldrich, ‘History of Sizing Systems and Ready-to-wear Garments’, in Sizing in Clothing, ed. Susan Ashdown (London: Elsevier Science and Technology, 2007), 41–3.

7

Buckley and Clark, Fashion and Everyday Life, 102.

8

Rachel Worth, Fashion and Class (London: Visual Arts, 2020), 93.

9

Geraldine Howell, Wartime Fashion: From Haute Couture to Homemade, 1939–1945 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 11.

10 Muriel Segal, ‘Sizing You Up’, Britannia and Eve (London) February 1951. 11 Aldrich, ‘History of Sizing Systems and Ready-to-wear Garments’, 36. 12 Ibid., 43. 13 Worth, Fashion and Class, 97.

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14 Howell, Wartime Fashion, 8. 15 Catherine Hayter, ‘Summer Fashions for the Older Woman’, Country Life (London) 25 May 1935. 16 Ibid. 17 Anonymous, ‘No More “Outsize.”’, Answers (London), 17 March 1928. 18 Anonymous, ‘London Retailers Report Successful Introduction Of “Outsize” Service”’, Women’s Wear, 30 March 1922, 19. 19 Anonymous ‘Clothes for the Older Woman’, The Times (London), 21 November 1955, 11. 20 Vera Britton ‘“Clothes for the Older Woman’: To the Editor of The Times”, The Times (London), 24 November 1955, 11. 21 Carmen Keist, ‘Stout Women Can Now Be Stylish’, Dress 43, no. 2 (2017): 100. 22 See for example, Ibid., 99–117; Lauren Downing-Peters, ‘Flattering the Figure, Fitting In: The Design Discourse of Stoutwear 1915–1930’, Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture 23, 2019, no. 2: 167–87. 23 Downing-Peters, ‘Flattering the Figure, Fitting In’, 190. 24 Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), 114. 25 The Smart Outsize Dress Co. Ltd., ‘Spring & Summer 1958’, London, 1958. 26 ‘Colour for Slimming’ (London, British Pathé), 2 May 1955; ‘Outsize Fashion’ (London, British Pathé), 13 April 1953. 27 Anonymous, ‘Mrs Bessie Braddock in Her Role as “Outsize Fashion Queen”’, The Sphere, 15 December 1951, 430. 28 British Pathé, ‘Outsize Fashion’, 1953. 29 Mary Ventris, ‘They’re Catering for the Outsize Figure’, Liverpool Echo, 5 December 1951, 2. 30 Anonymous, ‘Britain Throw an Orchid at U.S for out Sizing Adaptations’, Women’s Wear Daily, 4 May 1945, 17. 31 Lynn Mally, ‘The World of Mrs Exeter: The Older Woman of Fashion in Mid-Century America’, Clothing Cultures 4, no. 3: 257–8. 32 Ibid., 256. 33 Zillah Halls, ‘Mrs Exeter – The Rise and Fall of the Older Woman’, Costume 34, no. 1 (2000): 108. 34 For example, Catherine Hayter, ‘Some Evening Gowns for the Older Woman’, Country Life, 2 May 1936, lviii. 35 Anonymous, ‘Mrs Exeter: After 50, after 8:00’, Vogue, 1 November 1948, 152. 36 Mally, ‘The World of Mrs Exeter’, 258. 37 Ibid., 258–9. 38 Joy Spanabel Emery, A History of the Paper Pattern Industry: The Home Dressmaking Fashion Revolution (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 113. 39 Mally, ‘The World of Mrs Exeter’, 259. 40 Anonymous, ‘Made to Flatter the Over-Forties’, Daily Mail, 12 June 1939, 19. 41 Mally, ‘The World of Mrs Exeter’, 259. 42 Anonymous, Daily Mail,19. 43 For example, Home Dressmaking; Every Woman’s Practical Guide to the Art of Making Smart Clothes (London: Pitman & Sons, 1933, 1944); The Everyday Embroidery Book (London: Pitman & Sons, 1946); Making Clothes for Children (London: Pitman & Sons, n.d.); Make Your

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Own Soft Furnishings (Curtains, Pelmets, Loose Covers, Cushions etc.) (London: C. Arthur Pearson, Ltd London, 1954). 44 Agnes M. Miall, Make Your Own Soft Furnishings (Curtains, Pelmets, Loose Covers, Cushions etc.) (London: C. Arthur Pearson, Ltd London, 1954), dust cover. 45 https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency-converter/ 46 Anonymous, ‘For Bookshelves: Proud Zulu-the Lusty Saga of Vivid Days’, Western Daily Press, 19 April 1949, 2. 47 Agnes M. Miall, Making Clothes for the Older Woman (London: John Gifford Limited, 1948), 5. 48 Ibid., 14–15. 49 Ibid., 5. 50 Wilson and Taylor, Through the Looking Glass, 116–17. 51 Maill, Making Clothes for the Older Woman, 149. 52 Howell, Wartime Fashion, 141. 53 Miall, Making Clothes for the Older Woman, 163. 54 Ibid., 168. 55 Anonymous, ‘Austerity Frocks Are Going, but Only Slowly’, Daily Mail, 20 October 1944, 3. 56 Clive Ashwin, A History of Century of Art Education (London: Middlesex University, 1998), 29. 57 Hannah Wroe, ‘An Education in Pattern Cutting c.1950: The Work of E. Sheila MacEwan’, in Making History & Theory, ed. Jennifer G. Moore (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 35. 58 E. Sheila Macewan, Your Pattern Cutting (London: Sylvan Press, 1951), Preface. 59 Ibid., 7. 60 Ibid., 118. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid., 125. 63 Wroe, ‘An Education in Pattern Cutting’, 46–7. 64 MacEwan, Your Pattern Cutting, 122. 65 Anonymous, ‘The “Haslam System” System; Dressmaking Demonstration in Bristol’, Western Daily Press, 5 October 1936, 10. 66 G. A. & F. A, Haslam, The ‘Haslam’ Practical Guide to Dressmaking and Tailoring, 4th edition (No publisher listed, n.d.), 71. 67 Ibid., 71–3. 68 Anonymous, ‘Dressmaking, Tailoring and Pattern Making!’ Evening Herald, 23 September 1930, 9. 69 Miss G. A. Haslam, Illustrated Book of Drafting Specially Designed for Fuller Figures (Bolton: No publisher listed n.d.), inside page. 70 Anonymous, ‘Young for Her Years’ British Vogue, 5 April 1939, 77. 71 Haslam, Illustrated Book of Drafting, inside front page. 72 Ibid., inside back page. 73 Ibid. 74 Wroe, ‘An Education in Pattern Cutting’, 50. 75 Anonymous, ‘Clothes That Won’t Tell Your Age: An International Problem’, Vogue, 26 July 1933, 42–3. 76 Anonymous, ‘Young for Her Years’ British Vogue, 5 April 1939, 77.

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77 Wroe, ‘An Education in Pattern Cutting’, 39. 78 Cheryl Buckley, ‘On the Margins: Theorizing the History and Significance of Making and Designing Clothes at Home’, Journal of Design History 11, no. 2 (1988): 157. 79 Buckley and Clark, Fashion and Everyday Life, 1. 80 Betty Lowry, ‘Fashion for the Over-50s’, Belfast Telegraph, 5 October 1961, 9.

FIGURE 10.1 Day dress, retailed by Owen Owen’s, Liverpool, c.1930–1932. Accession number 1967.187.78. © National Museums Liverpool.

10 A printed summer dress, c.1930–32 Pauline Rushton

When, sometime between 1930 and 1932, Liverpool doctor’s wife Emily Margaret Tinne (1886–1966) bought this everyday summer dress in one of her favourite local department stores, she can scarcely have imagined how, nearly a century later, her entire wardrobe would be so popular.1 At more than 700 items, it is the largest collection of one person’s clothes and accessories held in a British museum. Her buying of clothes on this scale was made possible only by the fact that, in 1910, Emily, the daughter of a moderately prosperous Scottish Presbyterian missionary based in Calcutta, India, married into the seriously wealthy Tinne family. Originally from the Netherlands, the Tinnes had made their fortune in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries from sugar plantations worked by enslaved African people in Demerara, in what was  then Dutch Guiana. They later founded a shipping line to carry goods and passengers around the world. Emily’s doctor husband, Philip, while not directly involved in his family’s business, benefited from it financially as a shareholder and his income paid for Emily’s extreme shopping habit. Emily’s dress is made from a mixture of cotton and rayon, printed with a small, stylized flower and leaf design in green, yellow, orange and white. It is typical of many such readymade garments, as supplied to department stores by wholesalers during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Its V-shaped neckline, with soft fall collar and insert of silk crepe, finished with four small plastic buttons, was a feature found in many ordinary day dresses of the period. The original sale label is still pinned to one cuff, printed OWEN OWEN LTD, LIVERPOOL, Stock No. Q25, Dept No.51, Style 4041 Size OS, Price 12/6, indicating that Emily never wore it. In the centre back, the OS, 48 label, for Out Size, reflects the fact that, by the time she bought the dress, she had experienced seven pregnancies. Owen Owen’s originated as a drapery and haberdashery store at 121 London Road, Liverpool. It was opened in 1868 by the Welshman Owen Owen. By the early 1920s, the shop’s advertising described the business as ‘the shopping centre for Lancashire, Cheshire and North Wales’, and boasted that they were ‘constantly sending their buyers to the best markets in the world, including London, Paris, Lyons, etc.’.2 Despite such claims, Owen Owen’s was far from the top of the retail pecking order in the city. Rather, as evidenced by the cost of this dress, at

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twelve shillings and sixpence, in terms of quality and pricing they were in the mid-ranking of fashion stores. In 1925, Owen moved the business to a new building in Clayton Square in the city centre. It was from these premises that Emily bought her dress. She sometimes bought multiple examples of the same dress, in the same colourway. Like this example, many of these garments still bear their original sales labels and went unworn, leading us to speculate about Emily’s motivation for buying so many similar garments.3 In museum collections, in which dresses for special occasions often predominate, the value of this dress lies in its very ordinariness. Its survival from a time when such dresses were usually worn out, made into dusters and finally discarded, makes it all the more significant.

Notes 1

Pauline Rushton, Mrs Tinne’s Wardrobe, A Liverpool Lady’s Clothes, 1900–1940 (Liverpool: National Museums Liverpool, 2019, 3rd edition). The Tinne Collection has also been the subject of four exhibitions, at the Walker Art Gallery and Sudley House, in 2006, 2009, 2012 and in 2019–20.

2

Butterick paper dress pattern, February 1923.

3

It is possible that Emily was exhibiting the symptoms of Compulsive Buying Disorder. For a discussion of her shopping habits, see Pauline Rushton, ‘Mrs Tinne’s Wardrobe, a Liverpool Lady’s Clothes, 1910–1940’, in Culture, Costume and Dress: The Proceedings of the 1st International Conference, held at Birmingham City University, ed. Anne Boultwood and Sian Hindle (Birmingham: Gold Word Publishing, 2018), 26–31.

11 Oral history and everyday fashion Jade Halbert

In 2003, the Cultural Studies Department at the London College of Fashion introduced a new oral history elective as a way of engaging undergraduate students in more traditional academic modules. Led by Geraldine Biddle-Perry, the oral history elective was intended ‘to offer undergraduate students the opportunity to engage in their own primary research by conducting oral history interviews and, through their interpretation and analysis, demonstrate the relevance of such research to the wider study of fashion and dress’.1 It was a success, largely because it transformed the way often hostile fashion students (who Biddle-Perry describes as ‘theoretically timid’) approached and participated in Cultural Studies modules.2 I know this because I was a student in that original cohort and it stands out in my memory as a revelatory learning experience. It showed me that fashion was more than just glossy magazine fodder; it was something with depth and meaning and relevance to real life that warranted study far beyond the general narratives of the sleek coffee table books that had informed my knowledge until that point. I knew from those books that Yves Saint Laurent and Thea Porter had been important fashion designers in the 1970s; what I learned through oral history research in an interview with my mother about fashion in the 1970s was what (if anything) those designers had meant to her and her friends, where she shopped and what she wore on Saturday nights in post-industrial Glasgow where style and glamour were prized as central elements of the city’s vibrant fashion culture. In the years since that formative experience, both fashion history and oral history have risen to new prominence in scholarly settings but despite this, oral history as a methodology in fashion research remains curiously underdeveloped and underused.3 In this chapter I make the case for oral history by shining new light on its still-untapped potential as both a research method and primary source in the study of everyday fashion. I first present an overview of existing fashion-focused oral histories – concentrating particularly on those that reveal what Geraldine Biddle-Perry has described as the ‘invigorating synergy’ between the two disciplines – before moving on to demonstrate my own approach using the example of my doctoral research on the Scottish fashion business, Marion Donaldson, as a case study.4 Here I explain (very much influenced by Lynn Abrams’s powerful work in this area) how oral history theory and practice

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came together in that project, from first contact to final transcript and beyond, which I hope will provide some insight and perhaps encouragement for other researchers.5 As we set out in our introduction to this volume, the history of quotidian fashion cultures is only now emerging from the more prominent shadow cast by histories of haute couture and elite fashion; exploring this uncharted history of the everyday using the full multiplicity of approaches already established in the study of dress gives us an opportunity, finally, to bring oral history to the fore.6

Oral history in fashion Oral history is much more than just interviewing someone about something, recording it and producing a transcript. It is a multi-step collaborative process between an interviewer and a narrator wherein practice (the dialogic process of interviewing) and theory (thinking about and interpreting what is said and how it is said the interview) are interwoven and operational across a range of communicative modes, both verbal and non-verbal. As Lynn Abrams explains, Conducting an interview is a practical means of obtaining information about the past. But in the process of eliciting and analysing the material, one is confronted by the oral history interview as an event of communication which demands that we find ways of comprehending not just what is said, but also how it is said, why it is said and what it means.7 Oral history draws on the verbal storytelling tradition that gives voice to the past; in this way, it has often been credited as ‘democratic’ and used as ‘recovery history’, a way of accessing histories that traditionally have existed in the spaces between more conventional sources, which of course, in most cases naturally favour the powerful in one way or another. Most ordinary people do not leave their clothes to museums, nor do they commission portraits, nor do they write autobiographies or find themselves the subject of biographies, and therefore it has often been the case that the experience of those outside that privileged sphere goes unrecorded. But all people hear and tell and re-tell stories about themselves and others, and these stories are the cornerstone of oral history. In fashion terms, oral history represents an opportunity to challenge historiographical orthodoxies that are grounded in analyses of often visually spectacular elite style and taste. Because the focus on special clothes and public personalities (about which and whom plentiful information survives) has persisted across the centuries we have missed out on an important swathe of critical perspectives about the everyday histories of dress, textiles and fashion. Some historians have overcome these obstacles to the study of everyday fashion in ingenious ways – John Styles, Vivienne Richmond and Rachel Worth in particular – but in contemporary contexts we are still too often neglectful (or forgetful) of oral history as a means of recording the history of fashion in living memory, particularly as this relates to ordinary, everyday fashion and clothing.8 There are, happily, some notable exceptions. Stand-out studies incorporating or based upon oral histories include Alison Slater’s work on working-class style and everyday dress, Shaun Cole’s studies of gay men’s style, Barbara Burman’s sensitive work on gender and the culture of sewing, and Carol Tulloch’s work on home dressmaking in the Jamaican community in post-war England.9

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Oral history research differs from other modes of interview research (semi-structured interviews, questionnaires, participant observation and so on), in that the tangible outputs of the oral history interview – audio, video, transcript – are often deposited in archives (increasingly, digital) and made freely available for public consultation. This reflects what Abrams describes as the ‘democratization of the output’ in oral history, whereby the ‘authority’ over the interview and its creation is acknowledged as shared between interviewers and narrators.10 In fashion studies, several dedicated oral history collections are available for consultation online, and they warrant some attention here. Among these, the most relevant in everyday fashion contexts is An Oral History of British Fashion, a collection of detailed oral history life stories narrated by noted figures of twentieth-century fashion.11 Interviews were carried out for this project between 2003 and 2006 by researchers at the London College of Fashion working in association with National Life Stories and in partnership with the British Library. Among the eighteen fashion luminaries who recorded their life stories for the project are the public relations supremo Percy Savage (1926–2008), the journalist and costume designer Marit Allen (1941–2007), the designer Betty Jackson (b. 1949) and the Savile Row tailor, Angus Cundey of Henry Poole & Co. (b. 1937). The project aimed to cover lives spent in the fashion industry and thus emphasize the ‘importance of recording the craft skills and business techniques of the ever-changing British fashion industries’.12 The collection represents a diverse and far-reaching overview of British fashion providing intimate and fascinating insight into various fashion industry sectors. The interviews are available to listen to via the British Library online Sounds catalogue, and for most interviews the associated transcripts are also available to download as PDF documents.13 This makes for interesting oral history analysis – listening to interviews is an entirely different experience to reading transcripts. For one, listening to a full life history demands hours of time and attention, whereas transcripts are more often rifled for key words and skim-read for pertinent information. But so much is lost in that hasty information-gathering approach; using oral history as primary source demands time and careful attention whether in listening to stories or reading transcripts. Take, for example, Manny Silverman’s oral history, which covers several decades and goes on for some thirteen hours and five minutes, or 308 pages of transcript.14 Silverman (b. 1932), a clothing manufacturer, retailer and Chief Executive of Moss Bros between 1980 and 1987, is a loquacious narrator and tells his story to the interviewer Anna Dyke with wit and confidence; listening almost feels like eavesdropping, so natural is the dialogue between the narrator and interviewer. His is a true fashion odyssey and comparing the story as told to the transcript as written (which although a precise reflection of the audio cannot fully capture Silverman’s narrative style) makes for a compelling reminder that oral histories deserve our absolute attention, and that we must commit to listening or reading as fully as we can. Also impressive, although on a much smaller scale, is Tailored Stories, a collaboration between the London College of Fashion and Kensington and Chelsea College in association with the Museum of London. Led by students, the project focused on the tailoring trade of London’s Savile Row and was intended as a celebration of ‘the history and skills of the men and women in the industry with candid stories of pride and hardship, working conditions, conflict and camaraderie and brushes with the famous and powerful’.15 Interviews were filmed and extracts posted on the dedicated project website; a short film was also compiled from the interviews and is available to view online.16 It makes for an excellent example to introduce oral history to students, but also offers a history of Savile Row truly ‘from below’ which is to say,

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a history from and of the workroom (usually below stairs), rather than a retelling of the more familiar history of Savile Row’s illustrious clientele, reminding us of the power of oral history to scratch beyond the glossy surface of fashion to the world below.

The Marion Donaldson story My first encounter with oral history was a stand-out moment of my undergraduate experience, but it had little impact on my subsequent career which charted an uneven path from fashion journalism to styling and eventually to the sourcing and retail of antique and vintage clothing and textiles. Many years later, however, when I embarked on doctoral research it had a profound impact. My thesis, ‘Marion Donaldson and the Business of British Fashion, 1966–1999’, used the example of the Scottish fashion design and manufacturing business, Marion Donaldson, as a way of understanding the dialogue between the creative and commercial sectors of the British fashion industry in the post-war period.17 It used a range of conventional primary sources including objects, business records and other documentary material mostly drawn from the private Marion Donaldson collection and Glasgow Museums’ collections.18 Crucially, however, it also involved extensive oral history research with the owners of the business, Marion (b. 1944) and David Donaldson (b. 1943), as well as some of their former employees and business associates. This meant I was given an irresistible opportunity to go much further than piecing the Marion Donaldson story together from a hodgepodge of disparate sources strewn across archives and collections. I was invited to hear the full story first-hand, able to turn to its protagonists and ask ‘and then what happened?’, or ‘what did you think of that?’, or ‘tell me more about this …’. These human encounters through oral history liberated and enriched the research and served to ‘thrust life’ into the Marion Donaldson story, enabling me, as Paul Thomson puts it, to think of myself as the publisher and ‘imagine what evidence is needed, seek it out and capture it’.19 What follows is how I did that. I have organized my method roughly chronologically from first contact to final transcript and within this offer discussion of the main theoretical issues that simultaneously challenged and shaped the research. I have also restricted discussion here to focus mainly on my interviews with Marion and David Donaldson, although I do mention interviews with others where relevant. Oral history is not science (no two oral histories can ever be the same) but I hope that by deconstructing and setting out my own approach I can offer some basic guidance and a useful example for other fashion historians considering a first foray into this most exhilarating and rewarding mode of research.

Encounters and connections My first meeting with Marion and David Donaldson was in early November 2014. We had spoken briefly beforehand to confirm the details of our appointment, and they were aware that their fashion business was the subject of my research, but they were noncommittal about how much access to their collection they would be willing to grant me and reticent about the possibility of any oral history interviews. Fortunately, that meeting was a success; over tea they listened to my ideas and plans for the research and asked questions about how I had come to do

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a PhD after so many years in the fashion industry. They were very polite, and I remember being worried that I had not impressed them very much and they were not interested in participating and that I would have to carry on without their input. An email from David Donaldson sent a few hours after that meeting dispelled my concerns: ‘It was really interesting to meet you today, and I am sure this will be a fascinating project. We are really looking forward to working with you’. Our second meeting was to be an exploratory dive into their collection of Marion Donaldson ephemera: boxes of papers, photographs, fabric and garments that had been stored in a cupboard since the closure of their business fifteen years earlier and were largely unorganized. I arrived in the afternoon and after a quick cup of tea all the formality and residual awkwardness from our first meeting fell away; we all three of us talked over and interrupted each other as we clamoured to examine the collection, which was piled up high in bundles across the long dining room table and in boxes underneath. Within an hour we had established a dynamic working relationship which was characterized by excitement about and enthusiasm for the project. I was thrilled to be there looking at their collection and learning about the history of their fascinating business, and they were delighted to race down memory lane and pull me along with them. There was, almost immediately, a sense that we understood each other, that they did not have to explain things to me that they may have had to explain to someone who did not have knowledge of the fashion business or of Glasgow. This set the tone for the duration of the research, which lasted three happy and invigorating years from 2014 to 2017. While on the surface the formation and development of this relationship may seem straightforward, in deeper analysis it gets to the heart of oral history practice because it reveals the central importance of subjectivity, which in this context refers to the role of the self in the research; in other words, who we (interviewers and narrators) are as people and how we shape and influence each other and the interview. In this case, our subjectivities coalesced around a shared identity that drew on our similar social, cultural, professional, linguistic and urban backgrounds. We were similar people with similar lives and professional backgrounds, living in the same city, speaking the same language with the same accent and so our relationship was initially founded on those commonalities. Because of this, the research benefited from an easy and compatible intersubjectivity, a term which, as Lynn Abrams explains, ‘refers to the relationship between the interviewee and the interviewer or, in other words, the interpersonal dynamics of the interview situation and the process by which the participants cooperate to create a shared narrative’.20 We were lucky because our subjectivities were so compatible (in other words, we got on well) and the resulting intersubjectivity (the friendly dynamic) provided the ideal conditions for the production of oral histories. We trusted each other and so we felt able to speak freely and frankly – interviews flowed easily and consistently for the duration of the research; I felt confident asking questions, and was sure, mostly, of the right questions to ask, and they felt safe answering them. Things did not always go so smoothly; there were other occasions interviewing other narrators associated with the history of Marion Donaldson in which the intersubjectivity was a bit ‘off’. Sometimes it was easy to work out why: age, gender, race, class, politics and religion all play their part in our subjectivities and can thus influence the interview dynamics. Other times, it was more difficult to pinpoint the exact reason. In all cases, however, as the interviewer I was acutely aware of my own subjectivity and its influence over narrators and the stories they told me. When things worked well, as they did with Marion and David, I was pleased and felt like a capable researcher and likeable person with the competence to elicit important and

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coherent narratives, but when things were strained or awkward as they sometimes were with other interviewees I found it difficult not to take that personally as a private failure, a reflection of myself and my abilities and the strength of my project. We must accept that subjectivity is human and unpredictable, and intersubjectivity is complex and contingent, and – crucially – we must resist any urge to shy away from oral history because of it, but instead see it as an opportunity to learn.

Memories and stories One of the most tiresome accusations levelled at oral history is that because it is based on memory and memory is fallible and sometimes frail it follows that narrators are unreliable, and consequently oral histories are of limited value as historical documents. Accusers forget, of course, as Lynn Abrams reminds us, that ‘many other historical documents are also produced from memory to a greater or lesser extent: minutes of government meetings, legal records, journalistic reportage, published memoirs and diaries’.21 Narrators’ reliance on memory should not be a barrier to oral history research, and it certainly should not prejudice researchers against it. Memories are subjective and produced within a narrative that is influenced by the intersubjectivity created between the narrator and interviewer – the ‘active’ role of memory in this process is part of the magic of oral history as a research practice; misremembering is every bit as important and significant in our analyses as remembering. In oral history, the perception of the past matters because therein are cultural truths. From our first meetings, and before any interviews were recorded, I recognized that Marion and David are confident and eloquent conversationalists, willing and able to talk at length about almost any subject related to fashion and their business. Furthermore, because they had worked in the same business but performed two distinct (albeit occasionally overlapping) roles, their memories converged and diverged in interesting ways. As such, I quickly realized that if I restricted them to a static interview regime I would be severely limiting memory and thus limiting the potential of the story. After all, I was interviewing them because they had been there (in the thick of the British fashion industry for more than thirty years) and I was desperate for them to tell me about it. It would not make sense for me to impose narrative boundaries restricted by my own limited knowledge; it was essential to give memory enough space to roam freely and respond as appropriate. It seemed obvious that the most effective way of doing this would be to give them a general topic, let them tell me a story and to allow the focus of the story to shift naturally with memory, from one thing to another depending on the narrative being produced. One week we might focus on manufacturing, with narrative following memory naturally from this to sales and mediation, and so the next interview would focus on fashion agents and the narrative would follow memory again, from there to retail, and so on until we finally reached the end, at which point we decided to start at the beginning again and record a short potted history of Marion Donaldson, the narrative of which was very much influenced by previous interviews. In this way, it felt like instead of recording a series of stiff, individual interviews, we had carried on a relaxed conversation for more than two years and produced an organic, connected narrative. At the conclusion of the research we had (in audio and transcript form) an enthralling story centred on but not restricted to life in the post-war British fashion industry, with a whole cast of characters providing insight into multiple fashion and textile sectors and their shifting

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fortunes across a turbulent few decades for the UK and all Western economies more generally. This was far beyond and far better than I would have imagined possible at the start of the project and reinforces my belief that as oral historians we must suspend our own expectations and give our narrators the space to tell their own stories in their own way and in their own time. In this way, we are able to produce shared narratives and thus share authority with our narrators.

Collecting histories Oral history, as Lynn Abrams explains, ‘is a mutable genre, meaning it starts out as one thing but may become something else’.22 Spoken stories are inconstant, ephemeral and intangible and their mutability only stops, according to Abrams, ‘when the recorded speech is turned into words on a page’.23 Debates about transcription and the duty of the historian to faithfully reproduce the spoken interview as a written text are ongoing. On one hand, there is a school of thought that urges precise and accurate transcription of every tic, stammer, stutter and swear word. Raphael Samuel, for example, sets out an argument that seeks to convince us that ‘the role of the collector of the spoken word … is that of the archivist as well as historian’.24 This is an admirable but ultimately idealistic position, because on the other hand, a transcript can never accurately convey all the multiple complex layers of communication going on in an interview context: the interruptions, the jokes, the gestures, the emotions and the things communicated but left unsaid. As such, as Abrams argues, ‘it is more realistic to accept that there can only be a semblance of similarity – a verisimilitude – between the narrative as told and the narrative as written down’.25 For my own part, I was at pains to be absolutely accurate in transcription, as far as possible, not only because I felt such a sense of duty towards my narrators (especially Marion and David) but because I wanted to be able to put my full trust in the transcripts when it came to the interpretative stage. I must confess, that although I recognize that for many historians the audio recording of the interview is closer to the reality of the event than the transcript, I find listening back frustrating; it is difficult to concentrate on what is being said because I am always too impatient to get to the next bit. For me, listening to audio recordings was a poor imitation of the live interview because in that event I had enjoyed being fully absorbed in the narrative; I never take notes or allow myself to be distracted during interviews because I think it removes me from the immediacy of the story, but I also think it is rude not to give narrators my full attention. As such, I made it a habit to transcribe interviews immediately, no later than twenty-four hours after the interview, so as to be able to communicate as accurately as possible what was said and to retain as much of the ‘spirit’ or ‘mood’ of the interview within the transcript and not have to rely on the audio recording. Some oral historians place little importance on transcripts beyond a record-bearing function and therefore outsource transcription to others, or use software to transcribe the audio automatically. Every oral historian must find their own way, but in my experience investment of time and care in transcription pays dividends for interpretation, and furthermore, acts as a mark of respect for the process: few people will ever listen to the complete audio of an interview, but many will consult transcripts and more will read interpretation based on those transcripts. Thus, I consider transcripts almost sacred and consider myself honour-bound to produce transcripts carefully, accurately, in good faith and with the best of intentions.

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In the case of the Marion Donaldson project, there was an added layer of complication in transcription. Unlike a typical one-to-one interview situation, Marion and David were always interviewed together and their speech was sometimes chaotic, full of the interruptions and simultaneous finishing of sentences characteristic of people who have spent fifty years living and working together. Because of this it was sometimes difficult to transcribe their words accurately, but I was careful to indicate their verbal breaks and tics without sacrificing the integrity of the transcript. It is generally accepted, as Abrams notes, that ‘all narrators adopt a performance style’, and so I feel I must comment on how narrative performance affected the transcripts.26 Marion and David’s performance style was enormously humorous; they are natural comedians, and often descended into fits of laughter during interviews. I indicated this in transcripts with as much propriety as possible, usually by including a perfunctory ‘Ha!’ at the end of any sentences in which Marion or David or both was laughing. In addition to this, both have very distinctive ways of speaking. David, for example, is a much more deliberate speaker, his pace is slow and measured and he peppers his speech with long ‘ahs’ and ‘ums’ and the phrase ‘you know’, while Marion is a lively speaker who speaks quickly, often exaggerates for comedy effect and is fond of the word ‘actually’, which she repeated frequently in interview. David’s long ‘ums’ were replicated in transcripts by ‘…’, while his repetition of ‘you know’ was recorded faithfully. Marion’s use of ‘actually’ was also accurately documented, while her comedy exaggerations were usually represented by words in capital letters. As I have already explained, I feel a strong sense of responsibility and obligation in transcription and have tried, as Abrams advises, to be true to my narrators and produce transcripts that replicate the words they said in the way that they said them without adding ‘a layer of linguistic notation’.27 This chapter concludes with the transcript of an oral history interview with Marion and David in which they recounted the potted history of their business. I include it because it is much more than a just record of the interview or evidence that the interview took place – in my approach to oral history, the transcript is the legacy of the interview, the source that marks the interview as a historic document and I believe it is important to emphasize that here by dignifying the transcript with space of its own.

Conclusion As I argued earlier in this chapter, oral history is not science and there is no fool-proof or guaranteed method for successful oral history research. Notwithstanding this, the intellectual and practical issues I have highlighted here demonstrate the ease with which oral history can be approached and used by researchers from across the spectrum, from undergraduate to postgraduate and beyond. Oral history is about stories, and I hope that this chapter has also demonstrated the power of oral history research to get under the skin of fashion to tell the stories that would otherwise go untold. Through oral history we can access accounts that represent entirely new histories or new dimensions in the history of fashion. This, surely, is an exciting prospect for the study of everyday fashion as it develops beyond the pages of this book. As an example, I leave you here with Marion and David Donaldson who have a story to tell about fashion and business in post-war Britain. I hope you enjoy it and I hope you learn new things, but mostly I hope it inspires you to try oral history for yourself.

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Interview with Marion and David Donaldson, 14 February 2017, Hyndland, Glasgow David - David Donaldson (narrator) Marion - Marion Donaldson (narrator) Jade - Jade Halbert (interviewer) Jade: So today is 14 February 2017 and I am [in the dining room] as usual with Marion and David and today we are recording the potted history of Marion Donaldson in Marion and David’s own words. So, I’ve heard this story 300 times, but let’s hear it again! So, how do you get started? Marion: Well we got started because we didn’t actually want to be employed by anybody ever again, that was the big decision we made when we gave up our jobs immediately after we got married when we were in London. And we thought we’d do something on our own, where we didn’t have to do a nine-to-five job. Yes. David: Basically, the business plan – if you could call it that – is, we’re married but we have to get out of London. Getting out of London means quitting our jobs and getting back to Glasgow. And that’s as far as it went. So basically it took three months to get out of London, so that takes us to Easter [1966]. Marion: And we were very lucky, because Katy, David’s mother, phoned us and said would we like to rent the flat that [the artist] Alasdair Gray had been living in? Which was fantastic, it was a huge five-room flat at the top of Hill Street [(Figure 11.1)]. For

FIGURE 11.1 Marion and David Donaldson in the kitchen at 158 Hill Street, 1966. © The Marion Donaldson Collection.

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peanuts. So that made it easy to start a life in Glasgow where we didn’t actually have to do much because the rent was … £1.50 a week! Ha! Plus rates, which were peanuts as well. So our costs were tiny and that gave us the freedom to think, ‘Right, we’ll do something, we’ll go to the Barras [market], make things, sell them …’. David: But basically we do it quite simply. I mean, again, there’s this happy coincidence. We get off the train from London, sleep … I don’t know where! Then, the next day, we drive over to Gibson Street – we’d heard there was this boutique opening – we stop outside this boutique, which was to become In Gear. The owners were in painting it, getting it ready for the opening … Marion: That’s right, and we knocked on the window – it wasn’t even open – we knocked on the window and said ‘Hello! We’re designers from London, we were wondering if you would like some of our clothes?’ And they went, ‘Eh, yes!’ Because they were actually even greener than we were. Or maybe as green as we were. And I remember Anne kind of looked at us and said, ‘Well, actually, these purple bell bottoms that you’re wearing, do you do things like that?’ And I said, ‘Yes, sure, of course!’ So, ‘We’ll have some of them!’ And it was actually … as simple as that. They were looking for people who could actually supply clothes, because they had actually bought things from Ossie Clark and various other really expensive designers in London. And they hadn’t a clue, actually, what they were going to sell. And that was it, we actually said, ‘Yes, we can do that’. David: We nipped down to Arnott’s [department store] and bought curtain fabric and brass zips, you know, big ring-pull zips. You know … basically, we must have moved into this empty flat and plugged in your sewing machine. Basically, literally, we run out and buy some fabric and make up these trousers. Marion: Yes, half a dozen pairs or something like that. And, they sell, and they say, ‘Right, what else can you do?’ So that was when I did all the drawings of the sort of things I could do, and put them all on the wall in In Gear, and we took orders from that, and that proved an absolute nuisance [(Figure 11.2)]. That proved an absolute disaster because people were far too fussy and we thought, ‘Right, this is no good. Why don’t we just make things we like, give them to you, Anne, you can put them on the rails of your shop, and if they sell you can give us a percentage of the cost?’ We invented sale or return! We didn’t know it was called sale or return! David: Anyway, the thing snowballs, I mean, basically what we’re making is selling within days at that point, and we both had temporary teaching jobs to finance ourselves. So we’re making as much as we physically can and selling out, selling out. And we’re thinking, ‘Right, this is pretty good, it’s enough to live on, actually’. The main thing is sourcing fabric, actually, we had no idea and were buying retail and so on. Basically that goes on right up until the summer, and these were temporary teaching jobs so we’re full-time as it were in the summer, and we weren’t really keen to continue the teaching. Obviously this is doing extraordinarily well, and this is when we make the leap to Edinburgh, because we felt a loyalty to In Gear who’d got us started, so we weren’t going to look for anybody else in Glasgow, but Edinburgh is like another country, ha! That’s ok! So, we go to Edinburgh, and that’s when we get this enormous order, so that’s like about August of 1966. We get this gigantic order for about sixty or seventy garments from this shop Togs that’s just newly-opened, and that sells out within a week, and that’s the point where, you know, our physical … even working full-time, 24/7, we cannot manufacture enough to meet that demand, and that immediately propels us into subcontracting. So we’re manufacturing through subcontracting, using local

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FIGURE 11.2  Marion and David Donaldson at In Gear with ‘Froggy’ dress and sketches, Gibson Street, Glasgow, 1966. © The Marion Donaldson Collection.

factories from that point onwards. From that point on we never have to make another garment, other than samples, we don’t do the manufacturing from that point on. The Togs experience propels us into full-time, full-scale business. The turnover is enormous. And that really only lasts about six or eight months before they hit serious financial troubles through over-expanding, and so by then of course, we’re quite established and well-known, so finding new customers is actually relatively easy, so we have to diversify, and that diversification – finding new customers – that snowballs, and snowballs out of control, to the point where, you’re talking about a couple of years later, 1968 or 1969, we realize that we cannot design, manufacture, and sell. It’s beyond our physical capacity and that’s the point at which the sheer work pressure forces us to take on an agent. Marion: And of course by that time I was pregnant as well! David: Yes, and that limits your ability to run around in a car and sell stuff! So, taking on Stan [redacted] our agent, he’s an established agent with a huge connection and that sort of propels us up to the next level, because there’s a huge increase in volume just from that, which we weren’t looking for, but which we get anyway. And, a side effect, he’s so … Stan was so exhilarated and obviously making a lot of money out of us … so we said, ‘You can sell wherever you like’, and he starts selling our stuff in London. And that takes us into Richard Shops. Marion: Marjon Shops, Richard Shops, Top Shop, Peter Robinson, Selfridges …

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David: Yes, but Richard Shops is the one that’s working in like, ‘We’ll have 200 of that, we’ll have 200 of this …’ But, basically, that plus the phenomenal success of what was the maxi-dress, that takes us up to sort of undreamt-of volumes. So by the 1970s we have staff, we have office premises and everything. A sort of substantial and growing, if very undercapitalized company. That’s the point where one of our main subcontractors, the one that’s doing the bulk of our work, Jack [redacted], who happened to be quite close by, turns around and says, ‘I can’t be bothered, I’ve got easier work, I’m not doing your work.’ And we have a full order book. And that’s the point where we open our own factory. As I say, well, what were we going to do? There was an empty premises next door, let’s open a factory! As you do! Marion: As you do when you’re young and innocent and don’t realise how difficult it might be! David: So you go the good old Bank of Scotland and say, ‘Can you help us?’ And they, as they always did, said, ‘No, sorry, we don’t do that sort of thing, you must be mistaking us for a bank.’ So, Stan says, ‘Right, you can delay paying me commission’. Marion: Because it was in his interest as well, obviously. David: And that finances the factory and we open the factory [(Figure 11.3)].

FIGURE 11.3  Marion and David Donaldson in the sample room of the Marion Donaldson factory at 73 Robertson Street, Glasgow, 1975. © The Marion Donaldson Collection.

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Marion: How many machines did we start with? David: I think six or eight and then cutters and specialists and so on. Probably a staff of about twelve. Marion: We opened it so quickly, I mean, extraordinarily quickly. Got the staff, everything. David: And then of course you find other sources of work within Glasgow, of course, because all through the 1970s we are expanding – apart from a pause from the miners’ strike and the three-day week and so on – we’re expanding at just a phenomenal rate, all the way through right up until you come up to the oil shock and the crash in 1979, by which time we’re up to about £1million turnover. It’s huge. Then the whole trade drops off a cliff at that point, and there’s utter devastation. We suffer enormous losses in turnover, all of Ireland, everything. This is an enormous financial shock. Marion: It happened so suddenly, that was the extraordinary thing, everything seemed to be going so well. It just literally hit a wall. It was quite, quite extraordinary. David: So the early 1980s is a period of extreme adjustment, both in our personal lives as well because we’ve had a third child by then, Marion’s dad has died, I get very ill. Marion: Which was probably stress-triggered. David: And then by 1982 the fire in the building. Our place is caught between two fires and wiped out. So by that point it’s all about survival. So basically we sort of camp out and move to Candleriggs, actually expecting as it were, a slow death, because the trade had been terrible, and we think that effectively the fire will have wiped us out and we’ll have lost credibility. But in fact, the business takes off again. Marion: And that was actually extraordinary, because there was a moment when we actually thought, ‘Shall we take the insurance money and run, and do something different?’ But basically our insurance company more or less made us stay in business because you don’t get loss of profits unless you continue, so it was sort of, ‘We’ll struggle on because we have to.’ And for some reason or other, we actually produced a really, really good range and the whole thing just went woosh! Away again! And the fabric manufacturers, everybody, pulled out all the stops to give us all the fabric we’d lost. I mean, it was quite incredible. But, obviously, they needed our business as much as we needed their fabric, and they really did pull out all the stops, and I think it’s quite miraculous that the whole thing took off again. David: Yeah, but you’re coming out of the recession and at the same time of course we’re facing the new competition: the opening up of Europe, even the little people are buying direct from Germany. So you’re facing the beginning of low-cost competition, the rise of the very well-resourced, integrated design chains like Next and so on. I mean, Next grows like fury and the little individual shops are buying directly from high-quality sources like Germany. It’s a very, very different world and we’re having to try and adapt to this as best we can. One of the ways we do this is by teaming up. Liberty approach us; they’re trying to set up regional shops, so we start working with Liberty, thinking, ‘This gives us access to town centres.’ So we become shop-in-shop retailers as well as manufacturers. Somewhat reluctantly, because the two don’t tend … I mean, it can be done, but nobody does it … if you had a choice you wouldn’t. You’d either be a retailer or a manufacturer. Doing both is tough. But basically that carries us right through the 1980s with a steady growth, right up until we hit the 1990s. Now, then you get the next huge recession and we’re doing really well … Marion: Despite everything, we’re doing really well!

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David: Until about 1992, I can’t remember when … Marion: When did we start doing all our Scandinavian … ? David: Probably about 1992. Basically, what we’re looking at then is the kind of logical conclusion of what had happened in the 1980s: these retailers, the sort of market town retailers who had done extraordinarily well, they began to lose hope. Also they’re getting older, so they’re closing. They’d been closing steadily the whole time. And they’re not being replaced like for like, or anything like it, they’re being replaced by non-fashion retailers, so you can see the customer base is constantly shrinking. And you can also see at the same time, what we’re doing, if you like, is relatively formal, although, we’re not doing formal wear in the strict sense of the word, but casual dressing is becoming increasingly dominant. So you’re thinking, we’re not addressing this market. The market we are addressing is both ageing and shrinking. Marion: And it even started happening in Scandinavia as well. So you go to Scandinavia and even the very dressed up people there weren’t looking so formal and all of a sudden you had youth there wearing trainers and shaved heads and things like that and you thought, ‘Oh-oh! It’s coming here as well!’ This complete wave of almost anti-fashion, anti-dressed up, anti-fashion. And you could sort of see that the writing was on the wall, even there where you had very formal dressed up people all the time. At that stage you were thinking what else can you do to make things actually work? And that’s when we started our partnership with the Russian company. David: Well that was because it was increasingly difficult … I mean, finding good-quality work [manufacturing] was never easy, you know, the sources were drying up in Scotland. Marion: But I mean, they had huge factories over there without enough work. It was actually the Scottish Apparel Centre who introduced us to our Russian partners. He wanted to manufacture stuff and he also wanted to sell some of the stuff he was manufacturing and he had a lot of property and it actually sounded like maybe a very interesting thing to do. Again, if we hadn’t been that desperate to keep going we’d have probably thought ‘this is just far too much work’, because it was a complete nightmare doing it. This must be about 1993 [(Figure 11.4)]. David: 1993, 1994. But, I mean, the [Berlin] Wall’s come down, Russia is like the wild west, all the Western companies are piling in. Russia is enormously hungry for anything from the West, anything. I mean, this guy bought some of our stuff, put it in his shop, it sold really well, he came and paid us in dollars, which I think were forged, we didn’t know that, we were still green, even then! But the lure was this thing of high-quality manufacturing, they had really good skills there. Against that is that shipping the stuff was a total nightmare, because you had to supply everything and you had to document everything. Marion: Every thread, every label, they had nothing. David: They couldn’t source anything, if you forgot it, they didn’t have it. A nightmare. Marion: Everything, for whatever the docket was, you had to supply everything. And David had to spend hours doing all the paper work. And we shipped it over with Playtex bras that were cut in Glasgow but were manufactured in Russia. I mean, it’s fascinating! David: Yes, bras were being cut in Port Glasgow and manufactured in St Petersburg and we were piggy-backing on to that container. But basically that was more of a bizarre episode, it more indicates … no sane person would have done that if things hadn’t been so difficult. So we were facing a situation where no one has trained to be a machinist for twenty or thirty years, the workforce is ageing, the people that run these little units are ageing and there’s no replacement coming up. The customer base, the independent shops, for our market are shrinking steadily and inexorably, so both sides of the equation are

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FIGURE 11.4  Marion and David Donaldson, Candleriggs, Glasgow, c.1993. © The Marion Donaldson Collection.

shrinking. Plus, fashion itself is getting really, really difficult to read. You can tell even when the fabric people don’t even know where they’re going. Marion: There was total uncertainty, you could feel … David: You could sense a complete, ‘We don’t know what to do’ … Marion: Yes, you could feel the depression over the entire trade. Fabric, you know, Première Vision. And all the time we’re thinking, ‘What else can we do now to keep the thing going?’ Worrying about whether the factories are going to have enough staff to actually manufacture the stuff, because if you buy all this fabric and you’ve got nobody to make it then what do you do? You write off the fabric, you can’t sell it anywhere. You could just feel the pulse getting slower and slower. It’s a bit like shipbuilding, tie manufacturers, glove manufacturers! You could just feel the whole thing … Then there was the famous time we went to Première Vision in Paris. We got off the ‘plane and straight to Première Vision, just to have a quick look around, without even doing any sample buying that day – we were going to go back the next day – we just walked around the entire thing and you could feel the gloom, the depression. Even our favourite manufacturers seemed to have lost all hope. Nothing was good. The designs weren’t good, there was nothing new, there was nothing fresh, there was nothing to actually make you, as a designer, want to do anything with it. We walked around, in almost silence, looked at all our favourite people, then we looked at each other and went, ‘Fuck it. Let’s give up.’ I mean, it was such an intense feeling. David: We dogged off the next day! Marion: That’s right, we had the most wonderful day in Paris, went to the Picasso

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Museum! Sat out in outdoor cafes … enjoyed Paris, went to museums, wandered around and thought, ‘What are we going to do with the rest of our lives? I don’t care!’ This was just a decision that had to be made. It took a while to actually wind the whole thing down, but that was it. Stopping while we were actually still very successful. David: It’s euthanasia. It takes courage. The easy way out is just to soldier on and die a slow death. God knows … I’m sure we could have kept it going in a reduced form, although I don’t know how we would have got manufacturing, that was bound to go. It had to go. Marion: We’d have ended up with me sitting at a sewing machine again, saying, ‘This is not on!’ It was actually a euphoric weekend in Paris, that big decision. You know, we never really thought we’d give up as young as we did, but we had a really, really good innings. We did amazing business for such a long time, and I still think it was the right thing to do to actually stop. It was the end of the rag trade as we knew it at that point. And look what’s happened since, you’ve got Primark. We never thought that things would get so cheap or so shoddy or so, you know, buy it, wear it once and throw it away. It’s just a different … a different business, now. David: But okay, even the very top-end is made in China, you’re talking the £1000, £2000 top stuff isn’t made here. So, I don’t know. I mean, I think, I didn’t keep track but I don’t think the manufacturing lasted more than a few more years than we did. I mean, in a sense I think we were keeping it alive, and I don’t mean that in any great, ‘We should get a medal for this’ kind of thing, but, you know, I think it was us as a reliable local source, they could trust us, we could trust them. It was a mutual thing. And we kept them going. But after that … I mean, the other factor was actually, basically that feeling that you’re swimming against the current to stand still and eventually … we were facing extreme exhaustion, both physical and mental. I mean, we were in our mid-fifties; how much longer can we sustain this extreme pressure? And I think that was certainly a factor. Marion: Yup, because I reckon we were extremely good at working with what we had, and we were also extremely good at going on to the next stage, and if that didn’t work we were good at going on to the next, but eventually we ran out of ideas, we ran out of options. We actually just ran out. And it was us and just about everybody else in London, at the same time, who had businesses like us, they all just went. Because it was just a new wave, it was like a tsunami. The whole thing just went woosh and we were all just swept away and that was it. Just like the shipbuilding and … it was really sad, because it was a brilliant time. But I’m not sorry we’re not doing it now!

Notes 1

Geraldine Biddle-Perry, ‘Stimulating Critical Thinking in the Theoretically Timid: The Role and Value of Oral History Assignments within an Interdisciplinary Context’, Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education 4, no. 2 (2005): 85.

2

Biddle-Perry, ‘Stimulating Critical Thinking’, 89.

3

Lou Taylor, ‘Fashion and Dress History: Theoretical and Methodological Approaches’, in The Handbook of Fashion Studies, ed. Sandy Black (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 62.

4

Biddle-Perry, ‘Stimulating Critical Thinking’, 92.

5

Lynn Abrams’ Oral History Theory (London: Routledge, 2016) is a beacon of clarity in the field – no historian should be without it; there is not scope here to cover all the practical and technical challenges of doing oral history research but there are a wide range of free resources online to guide

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researchers in this aspect – I recommend the Oral History Society website as an excellent starting point: https://www.ohs.org.uk/ (accessed 25 June 2021). 6

For an essential guide to and full assessment of the plethora of methodological approaches in fashion and dress history please refer to Lou Taylor’s important work, The Study of Dress History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002).

7 Abrams, Oral History Theory, 1. 8

John Styles, The Dress of the People (Yale: Yale University Press, 2007); Vivienne Richmond, Clothing the Poor in Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Rachel Worth, Fashion and Class (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).

9

Alison Slater, ‘Wearing in Memory: Materiality and Oral Histories of Dress’, Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty 5, no. 1 (2014): 125–39; Shaun Cole, Don We Now Our Gay Apparel: Gay Men’s Dress in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Berg, 200); Barbara Burman, Home Dressmaking Reassessed, Oral History Project, Wessex Film and Sound Archive, Hampshire Record Office, Sussex Street, Winchester, Hampshire, 1995; Barbara Burman, ‘Home Sewing and “Fashions for All”, 1908–1937’, Costume, no. 28 (1994): 71–80; Carol Tulloch, ‘There’s No Place Like Home: Home Dressmaking and Creativity in the Jamaican Community of the 1940s to the 1960s’, in The Culture of Sewing: Gender, Consumption and Home Dressmaking, ed. Barbara Burman (Oxford: Berg, 1999), 111–26.

10 Abrams, Oral History Theory, 173. 11 British Library Sound and Moving Image Archive, C1046. 12 http://sami.bl.uk/uhtbin/cgisirsi/?ps=trDp7arfR7/WORKS-FILE/265390086/9 (accessed 5 July 2021). 13 https://sounds.bl.uk/Oral-history/Fashion (accessed 5 July 2021). 14 British Library Sound and Moving Image Archive, C1046/11. 15 https://www.tailoredstories.org.uk/ (accessed 20 July 2021). 16 https://www.tailoredstories.org.uk/film.html (accessed 20 July 2021). 17 Jade Halbert, ‘Marion Donaldson and the Business of British Fashion, 1966–1999’, PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2018. 18 This collection was not consciously generated by the Donaldsons, rather, it represents the surviving ephemera of the business. There is a temptation to refer to it as an ‘archive’ but that would not be accurate – it has not been archived. Even today, the Marion Donaldson Collection remains largely as it was found in 2014: in glorious disorder. That does not mean that the materials are neglected or uncared for; on the contrary, every scrap of paper, photograph and swatch of fabric is treasured by Marion and David and they can pinpoint the exact location of each individual item. 19 Paul Thomson, ‘The Voice of the Past’, in The Oral History Reader, ed. Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson (London: Routledge, 2016, 3rd edition), 24–8. 20 Abrams, Oral History Theory, 54. 21 Ibid., 23. 22 Ibid., 24. 23 Ibid. 24 Raphael Samuel cited in Abrams Oral History Theory, 13. 25 Abrams, Oral History Theory, 13. 26 Ibid., 22. 27 Ibid., 14.

FIGURE 12.1  Shoes by Russell & Bromley, c.1981. Accession number 81.257. © Museum of London.

12 Bryan’s shoes Beatrice Behlen

I often wondered why the shoes had been collected. Questioning their right to be in the museum always made me feel bad. Like parents with their children, I believe curators should love all ‘their’ objects equally. Maybe it was their colour. Or maybe it had to do with the competition. In the cupboard, the pair is surrounded by brightly hued 1970s men’s platforms, the beige lace-ups forming an island of ordinariness in a sea of conspicuous display. Maybe I had just never really looked at them properly. Had I practised what I sometimes preach: close object reading, I might have noticed the care that had gone into the shoes’ design and construction. Half-way between a shoe and a low boot, they are a variation on the theme of chukkas, usually intended for casual wear. Made of what the original cataloguer imaginatively described as ‘stone-coloured’ leather, the shoe-boots have woven laces to match, threaded through four pairs of eyelets. Twin lines of self-coloured stitching emphasize and strengthen seams and divide the padded cushion collar into three. The shoes appear to be Goodyear welted, their soles consisting of several layers with the reddish-brown welt and the orange rubber outsole introducing if not flashes, then at least discrete hints of colour. The object number indicated that the pair had come to the museum in 1981. According to handwritten notes in the object file, the shoes – purchased from Russell & Bromley no less – had indeed been part of ‘a man’s casual outfit’ assembled by Bryan Bale, designer for the upmarket fashion retailer Austin Reed ‘in his thirties’. Initially intended for a ‘“Red Party”, Christmas 1978’, it was later worn ‘as general town outfit’ until the ‘donor moved into new fashions’. Imagining a gathering of Marxists, I asked colleagues whether ‘red parties’ had been a thing in 1970s England. I also contacted Vanda Foster, the author of the notes and the Museum of London’s Senior Assistant Keeper, Costume & Textiles between 1979 and 1981. Foster thought the connection with Bryan Bale might have been made when she organized a display of historic gloves in the Austin Reed store on London’s Regent Street to celebrate the company’s managing director, Barry Reed, becoming Master of the Glovers’ Company. To solve the party enigma, Foster sensibly suggested checking the other parts of the ensemble. This turned out to be a two-colour symphony composed of a beige Clydella shirt, worn over a scarlet Wolsey T-shirt, tucked into red corduroy trousers by Bobos, accessorized with a red

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cotton handkerchief with white micro dots and beige Marks & Spencer socks. The blouson by Dubtex cleverly combines both colours: the red fabric peeping through two welt pockets on its front foreshadowing the scarlet lining. The important role of colour co-ordination and accessories for the donor’s apparent quest to create a total look is borne out in another outfit: a tomato-red flying suit by Victor Herbert worn with very thick, off-white wool socks and beige Dunlop sneakers customized with red laces. Searching for Bryan Bale online, I saw that in 2017 he had been the subject of a short film by Angela Clarke. Its title, Bachelor, 38, refers to the coded language used in personal advertisements placed in The Times when homosexuality was illegal. The interior of Bale’s home and the manner in which he narrates the sad story of the love of his live display the same attention to detail as his ensembles. When we spoke on the phone in 2019, Bryan explained that he had known the museum’s Curator of Costumes Kay Staniland since the 1970s, and that he had employed his skills as Austin Reed’s display coordinator – not designer – in the museum’s 1981 royal wedding dress exhibition. Staniland asked Bryan to donate clothes for an everyday dress gallery she was planning, despite him self-identifying as a ‘rather privileged guy’. Bale provided the last piece of the party puzzle: his outfit had been assembled not for Christmas, but to celebrate Canada Day on 1 July, the same day we happened to talk. I should have known better than judging an object by a quick glance at its surface. While they might not spark love at first sight, unspectacular objects deserve to be given time, too.

13 A pocket history: Interpreting wearer biography in the Francis Golding collection Cyana Madsen

But what if, in a notebook filled with aphorisms, we find a reference, a reminder of an appointment, an address, or a laundry bill, should this be included in his works? Why not?1 Slip your hand inside your nearest pocket. What do you find there: a grocery receipt, a note to yourself, your mobile phone (keeper of all information), perhaps … nothing? In that assemblage, did you tuck those objects inside for safekeeping, to remind you of something, or were they simply placed there until you could reach the nearest trashcan? If someone were to sort through your pockets in your absence, what could they divine about you from what they found? This chapter looks inside one of the most workaday and intimate aspects of a garment, the pocket, for clues in interpreting the biography of the wearer. Arising from the discovery of objects in the pockets of garments in the Francis Golding (1944–2013) collection of worn twentieth- and twenty-first-century menswear, this chapter proposes that pocket contents are a meaningful and integral part of the garment and that their material analysis can provide a valuable tool towards understanding both the public and private dressed self. The close examination of worn garments is a tool in dress-based research used to reveal information about the life lived in the stains, alterations and what material culture researcher Ellen Sampson calls signs of ‘wornness’.2 Whether tantalizingly specific mementoes or seemingly mundane ephemera, I suggest that the objects we keep in our pockets are a form of material memory on the dressed self, and therefore require a closer look. This chapter examines objects from the Golding collection, acquired in 2016 by the Museum of London and the London College of Fashion Archives, approximately three years after his tragic  death in a bicycling accident. In the absence of Golding’s own testimony, analysis of his pocket contents seeks to understand how these retained mementos might have documented his public and private selves. To achieve this, a brief description of Golding’s biography is provided and his status as an avid lifelong collector is established. Theories on authorship and

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the dressed self frame analysis of his and other comparative collections of pocket contents, demonstrating that the seemingly-everyday practice of retaining pocket contents acts as a tangible form of materialized biography.

The Francis Golding collection To frame the interpretation of pocket contents found in garments from the Golding collection, the following brief overview of his life is provided, establishing his biography through testimony of those who knew him, and in his own words. Born in Cheshire in 1944, Golding grew up an only child in Macclesfield. After taking his examinations in English, Architecture and Fine Arts as an undergraduate at Clare College, Cambridge University he successfully completed the Civil Service exam and joined the Ministry of Public Building & Works in 1967. Golding was posted to Singapore, then to London where he continued to build a successful career, moving from the Civil Service to organizations including the Royal Commission on the Press and English Heritage. By 2013, the year of his death, Golding had become a respected independent architectural, planning and conservation consultant who contributed to notable London projects including the ‘Gherkin’ at 30 St Mary Axe and the Chelsea Barracks. Golding had an evolving sexual identity in his lifetime, referring to himself as a ‘bi sexual libertine’ in a letter to a friend in 1970 (Figure 13.1), and was described as gravitating ‘to

FIGURE 13.1 Detail of a letter from Francis Golding to a friend, 20 September 1970. Highlighted sections indicate where Golding discusses his dress and sexuality. © Museum of London.

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FIGURE 13.2 Autobiographical writing by Francis Golding, c.1970. Located in the Francis Golding memorial book compiled by Dr Satish Padiyar. © Museum of London and London College of Fashion.

homosexuality’ in an anonymous piece of writing from the same period, which he retained in his possession (Figure 13.2). He would later form a long-term relationship with art historian Satish Padiyar, and the two became civil partners in a 2006 ceremony in Islington, London. Based on testimony provided by Padiyar at the time of the Museum of London acquisition, Golding identified as gay for the majority of his adulthood.3 As Golding lived through both pre- and post-Sexual Offences Act England, he thus directly experienced the impact of changing government legislation and wider social acceptance on his personal life.4 Golding began to collect antique Chinese ceramics around 1970, while stationed in Singapore.5 It was the beginning of a collection that would continue to grow for the rest of his life. After his death, a number of his collected pieces sold at auction through Christie’s and a Jin to Yuan dynasty stoneware bottle from his collection was acquired by the British Museum. Insight into Golding’s thoughts on the pleasure and meaning of his collections is revealed in two pieces he wrote shortly before his death. In a 2012 article for the Glass Circle News he contemplated that his motivations for accruing objects were ‘reasons that are buried quite deep’,6 an idea he explored further in a draft chapter titled ‘On Collectors and Collecting’. He wrote: When sitting next to a famous psychoanalyst at dinner and describing my interest and collecting I was handed the insight, obvious when you think about it, but still not realised by me for nearly forty years, that these objects represent to me freedom and life, not deadening possessions.7

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This impulse to collect extended to Golding’s clothing. In the same letter from 1970 where he described himself as ‘bi sexual’, he described how he ‘tracked down’ a pair of black patent boots he desired and sketched into the margins the complete ensemble he hoped to wear them with (see Figure 13.1). In the 1981 Over 21 magazine feature ‘Men of Distinction: it shows in their homes’, Golding posed for a photoshoot in an orange shirt, pink sweater and matching trousers while offering in the accompanying interview that never throwing anything away was his solution for always having the right thing to wear.8 Golding not only acquired clothing for wear, but retained pieces long after their functional use. Analysis of the garments acquired by the Museum of London and London College of Fashion evidences how Golding’s body changed size over the course of his life and he outgrew his clothing, yet he preserved these garments fitting the slimmer physique of his youth. Additionally, he inherited and wore his father’s clothing, including a tuxedo jacket from Liverpool tailor John Bell commissioned in the early twentieth century and an Aquascutum coat originally worn by the elder Golding during the First World War, suggesting his connection to departed loved ones through their worn clothing. Reviewing this textual and material evidence demonstrates the lifelong enthusiasm and deep attachment Golding had to clothing. Holding onto garments that had required his time and effort to assemble and which had helped materialize his specific vision of himself, and garments which represented those dear to him, suggest that for Golding his collected garments became an important site of self-documentation and memory.

Francis Golding’s pockets In 2015, Padiyar offered the Museum of London and London College of Fashion Archives the possibility of acquiring pieces from the collection, much of which had remained in situ just as Golding had left it at the time of his death. As a whole, the collection comprised hundreds of individual garments, ranging from high street to designer purchases, worn by Golding over the span of his lifetime. Containing bold patterns and colours, garments purchased during his travels and distinctive tailored pieces, the Golding collection reflects his interest in global and British fashion, and is representative of a man who was known as an ‘original’ dresser to colleagues and friends.9 Offered as part of the acquisition were photos of Golding wearing a selection of the garments, illustrating how he put together his ensembles, where he wore them and his posture and gesture when dressed. I became involved with the Golding collection in 2016, after its arrival at the Museum of London. Under the guidance of curator Timothy Long, I worked as a collection volunteer with a team that assisted in the object analysis, cataloguing and photography of Golding’s garments. During the close examination of the garments it became evident that the pockets of many pieces of the collection, particularly jackets and coats, contained additional objects. Rather than the expected pocket detritus of lint and illegible fragments of packaging, they included items such as train tickets, a seashell, ticket stubs from the opera, a photobooth portrait of Golding, an airplane boarding pass and a used book of matches from a hotel in New York. The seemingly specific and well-kept nature of the pocket contents indicates a purpose to their presence, that Golding used his pockets to retain meaningful things over detritus. This begs the question of why Golding might collect and retain these particular items. Subsequent analysis of both the pocket contents and his garments compared with testimony from Padiyar and textual evidence from Golding himself indicates an intentional accumulation and retention of mementos. One of

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FIGURE 13.3  Browns jacket, part of the Francis Golding collection (2016.40/21). © Museum of London.

the distinctions made in this chapter is the word ‘memento’ to describe those objects which seem to indicate specific, meaningful moments in the life of the wearer, whereas ‘ephemera’ implies those objects of daily, disposable use, like a shopping receipt. A notable example is a brown check wool blazer-style jacket from London shop Browns (Figure 13.3) which contained a significant number of mementos in the pockets (Figure 13.4) and exhibited a marked difference in signs of stretching and wear to the pockets when compared against the rest of the garment. Analysis of the jacket and of photographs of Golding suggests that he might have incurred this wear through use of the pocket as storage space rather than as a place to tuck his hands. The photographs in the Museum of London acquisition record cover a wide date range, from Golding’s childhood until shortly before the end of his life, both candid and posed. In reviewing these photos, only in two instances (a photograph from his civil partnership ceremony in 2006 and the Over 21 magazine photoshoot from 1981), does Golding have his hands in his pockets. Though etiquette could be considered as a possible explanation, Golding was raised in an era where keeping one’s hands in their pockets could still be perceived as ‘poor deportment, lack of

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FIGURE 13.4  Pocket contents of the Browns jacket (2016.40/21). © Museum of London.

restraint and degeneracy’; based on the number and nature of contents found in garments from his collection it could also be argued that Golding did not consider the pocket a place of gesture, but a private area of storage.10 The mementos in the pocket of the Browns jacket are varied, and their analysis indicates that Golding used his pockets as a cursory place of storage as he moved through public life: travelling, eating, attending events. On closer inspection of these objects, it is the details which pinpoint Golding’s location in place and time, and through the act of retaining them, allow a glimpse of his private self. An inventory and analysis of the Browns jacket pocket contents illustrate this: ●●

Photo booth photograph of Golding wearing spectacles, suit and tie. Image analysis against other photographs of Golding indicates it to have been taken some time in the 1970s. (Exterior chest pocket)

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Novelty press pass, issued for the Daily Planet newspaper, undated. (Exterior right pocket) Single journey transit ticket, undated. (Exterior right pocket) Two tickets to the Royal Opera House performance of Sleeping Beauty, seated next to each other. Based on performance date, dated to Saturday, November 11, 1978. (Exterior right pocket) Two tickets to the Royal Opera House performance of L’Elisir D’Amore, seated next to each other. Based on performance date, dated to Thursday, January 1, 1981. (Exterior right pocket) Matchbook from the International Hotel, Jamaica, New York, undated. This hotel is believed to be a part of the Knotts chain, purchased by British investors in 1977 and subsequently remodelled.11 (Exterior right pocket) Business card from The Bond Street Antique Centre, undated. (Interior right chest pocket) Dried leaves and twig, undated. (Exterior left pocket) London transport ticket for London bus route 30, undated. (Exterior left pocket) Half of a ticket reading ‘THANK YOU! COME AGAIN’, undated. (Exterior left pocket) British Overseas Airways Corporation plane ticket stub, identified by British Airways Archivist Jim Davies as a Heathrow to New York flight in the early 1970s. (Exterior left pocket) Slip of white paper, possibly from a fortune cookie, printed with the words ‘The way to get things done is by yourself’, undated. (Exterior left pocket) Terry’s Waifa chocolate wrapping, undated. (Exterior left pocket) Paper packet of McDonald’s salt, undated. (Exterior left pocket)

The pocket contents seem to range in dates from the British Airways boarding pass in the early 1970s to the two separate sets of Royal Opera House tickets for performances in 1978 and 1981. This is in keeping with the measurements of the jacket, which correlate to the slim physique of Golding apparent in photographs from the 1970s and 1980s. The jacket reveals discolouration in the lining around the armpits, embedded evidence of the garment having been worn somewhere close and warm. When read together with the tickets, this analysis evokes the image of Golding wearing the jacket in a crowded theatre or on a long transcontinental flight. The corresponding dates demonstrate that Golding retained mementos over time, adding to the contents as he wore his clothing. Logic dictates that Golding would pocket these tickets during the performance or flight, but after the curtain fell and the plane landed, what immaterial aspect of these temporal objects made them difficult to part with? An answer might be found in the clearly articulated joy and meaning Golding associated with his actively collected ceramics and clothing, associations which could be extended to the retained objects from his everyday life. By preserving these contents for years after their functional use in the garments he attended these events in, what was once functional ephemera became elevated to the status of memento. In line with this status, the pocket contents from the Museum of London Golding collection have been retained and are now linked in the collections database to the garments detailing known information about the event and where on the garment Golding had stored it.

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Pocket context To frame how Golding might have understood and experienced the pockets on his garments, it is worth considering the time he lived in and the type of clothing he wore, as well as examining comparable documented cases where the pocket contents of noted collectors have been documented and retained after their garments were acquired in absentia. Western dress scholarship has identified the design, construction and evolution of the pocket, and the influence of gender and class upon its function and contents.12 This research has established that the pocket was a design convention in twentieth- and twenty-first-century menswear, and would have been taken for granted as a place of safekeeping for Golding’s possessions. Although dress scholarship agrees that the pocket has traditionally been a functional space on clothing, extant examples of pocket contents in situ on garments acquired into public collections are rare, leaving little opportunity for analysis. This scarcity may be attributed to most donations and acquisitions of garments passing through several hands, including those of the wearer, prior to entering the public collection. However, where surviving pocket contents exist, there is great potential for analysis which enriches interpretation of wearer biography, particularly when used in conjunction with other methods of research. Examples which illustrate this potential include the pocket contents studied by Benjamin Whyman in the clothing of historian and landscape designer Sir Roy Strong (1935–) and art collector Mark Reed (1971–), acquired by Fashion Museums, Bath and the V&A, respectively. Both Strong and Reed are thoughtful about their everyday dress and collected and donated their worn clothing with an eye to long-term interpretation of their lives.13 Strong had contents such as business cards and gardening wire in his pockets, supplemented with handwritten notecards outlining biographical detail about wear (dates, events, preference) placed in his garments at the time of donation.14 Whyman found a piece of sheet music in one of Reed’s pockets and was able to interview him about the object, which Reed testified was representative of his interest in performing and an active social life.15 These two men, who could be considered contemporaries to Golding in dress and collecting habits, provided direct testimony which supports the argument that what they retained in their pockets could provide key evidence to interpret their private and public lives without their own accounts. The Library of Congress in Washington DC holds two excellent examples of pocket contents acquired without accompanying testimony from the wearer, which reveal intimate aspects of their biography. First, are the pocket contents of President Abraham Lincoln (1809–65) from the night of his assassination.16 In the assemblage, alongside everyday items such as his spectacles and watch, are eight flattering newspaper clippings about the President, and oddly perhaps, a Confederate five-dollar bill. These mementos survive as material evidence of how Lincoln might have privately perceived events which he was publicly, and centrally, involved in. A second example is the mementos once held in the exceptionally roomy pockets of designer Ray Eames (1912–88), which she had specifically constructed in her signature A-line skirts to accommodate her pocket contents.17 Over 300 of what Senior Archivists Tracey Barton and Margaret McAleer dubbed ‘packets’ of objects were discovered during the archival curation of the personal and professional effects she donated to the Library of Congress.18 A natural collector throughout her adult life, Eames would accrue mementos such as greeting cards, design sketches and notes-to-self jotted onto cigarette wrappers in her pockets, subsequently moving the assemblages into vessels ranging from silk scarves to envelopes for long-term storage.19

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Though she did not provide accompanying testimony about the mementos, the care with which she retained them demonstrates what Barton and McAleer term ‘a conscious selection, a careful bundling of items, on Ray’s part’.20 As with signs of stretch and wear to Golding’s pockets, Eames’s bespoke garments indicate her use of the pocket as a site for storing memory on her dressed body and her pocket contents as those memories materialized. Inventories of pocket contents can also illustrate less well-documented lives. Historian Hallie Rubenhold used pocket contents to highlight the precarity of life for working women in Victorian London, through police inventories of objects found on the bodies of four of the women murdered by ‘Jack the Ripper’: Mary Ann ‘Polly’ Nichols (1845–88), Annie Chapman (1840–88), Elizabeth Stride (1843–88) and Catherine Eddowes (1842–88). The lists revealed objects these women kept close both for daily personal care and for pawning or selling, illuminating aspects of their biography through what they deemed necessary to keep close for survival.21 With the women and their objects now absent, these inventories detailing items such as combs, spoons and tea are now the lasting testament to their day-to-day lives. When the original wearer is no longer able to articulate the experience of their day-to-day life, as in the case of Golding, it is evident from these above examples that material analysis of what they choose to keep on their dressed self can act as a powerful interpretative tool. Even if, as in the case of Strong and Reed, they can elaborate in their own words, close examination of pocket contents might further flesh out this testimony.

Object biography The concept of object biography provides a useful lens through which to frame analysis of Golding’s pocket contents. As anthropologist Igor Kopytoff observed, studying what things people choose to surround themselves with (particularly with objects which have reached the end of their ‘functional’ life as with the mementos retained by Golding) can do much to illuminate the user’s own story. When the wearer of a garment is unavailable to provide direct testimony themselves the ‘biographies of things can make salient what might otherwise remain obscure, with their clothing revealing intimate aspects of their biography in their place’.22 Particularly with contents found in arguably the most private space on a dressed person, the pocket. The concealing nature of the pocket is inextricable from its functional purpose of carrying everyday essentials and this dual capacity can serve all of the iterations of the dressed self in the world: what Joanne Eicher has termed the public, private and secret selves.23 Eicher’s theory that the conscious self is materialized through dressing the body is key in understanding how pocket contents, when considered as extension of the garment, can appear as both everyday detritus to the outsider yet be profoundly meaningful mementos to the wearer. Applying this theory to Golding’s pocket contents allows a deeper reading of the objects: an old ticket stub is not just trash to the attendee, but a tangible reminder of a specific moment in his life, held close to his body. Regarding pocket contents as integral to the whole of the garment, and therefore equally as representative of us, engages with the concept in dress studies that our clothing can act as an extension or totality of our bodily self.24 We are, as Peter Stallybrass continues, ‘there in the wrinkles of the elbows … in the stains of the jacket … in the smell of the armpits’.25 Collecting and keeping objects close to our bodies through storing them in our pockets reinforces this materialization of self. As the edge of the pocket shows wear or sags with the weight of its

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meaningful contents, the fabric becomes shaped in a sense to our memories. Our clothing, and pocket contents, can endure long after our lives have ended, and leave meaningful messages about our identities in our wake. Extending this concept of embodied memory in the materiality of clothing to pocket contents helps when speculating on the volume of mementos within the Golding collection. Did the weight, the sight, the ability to reach into his pocket and feel those objects make his own memories more tangible? The motivation for Golding to keep mementos close to his body is only hypothesis without his explicit testimony. However, when considering his possible motivations for collecting and retaining pocket contents, it is worth considering his thoughts on his clothing, framed within the life writing tradition of the ‘egodocument’ (also ego document). Coined by Dutch historian Jacob (Jacques) Presser in the 1950s, the term encompasses autobiographical writing which specifically centres the author’s feelings and experiences.26 What has typically been included within this term are diaries, journals, letters; with the focus of the document being the lived experience of the author, rather than wider contemporaneous events. The intimate, autobiographical nature of the egodocument is reflected in Golding’s written association of self through his clothing, and I posit that it could also include the contents of his pockets. A comparable example of life-writing through documentation of clothing can be found in the sixteenth-century Klaidungsbüchlein (‘book of fashion’) compiled by Matthäus Schwarz (1497–c.1574). A bookkeeper in the employ of the powerful Fugger merchant dynasty in Renaissance-era Augsburg, Schwarz created one of the earliest surviving documents of the dressed masculine self. Throughout his lifetime Schwarz commissioned detailed full colour renderings of his ensembles, marking the drawings with handwritten notes on contemporaneous affairs both public and private, and bound them into a single unpublished volume. It is clear that he took an interest in making his dressed body a public site of discourse: his style of dress was as flamboyant as sumptuary laws at the time would allow, and his ‘book of fashion’ documents his wearing of elaborate ensembles to participate in public life. More than four centuries later, Golding used his own sartorial choices as a means of self-expression in relatively conservative environments such as the civil service and commercial architecture. Schwarz’s book has been situated in the wider study of masculinities; his processing of historical events located in his documentation of his ensembles. His book demonstrates what historian Gabriele Mentges identifies as a ‘process of coming to grips with himself and the world’ and she argues that his book is a form of egodocument.27 Consider the letter Golding wrote (see Figure 13.1) about his own identity in relation to examples of Schwarz’s writing, which demonstrate how Schwarz used his garments as material embodiment of his temporal experience: ‘October 11, 1515, when Francesco, king of France, rode into Milan after the battle, master Ambrosio clad me in this way, not from silk’.28 And again, ‘On 2 December, 1521, during the plague in Augsburg. The gown with a velvet trimming, the bonnet embroidered with velvet, the lining of the best marten fur’.29 Schwarz marked time through documenting the specific items of clothing he was wearing, making his experience of life inextricable from his dressed self. In view of the similarities between the two men born centuries apart; both successful, urbane men with a documented interest in dressing to affect, could the framework of the egodocument also be applied to Golding’s dressed body? Historian Rudolf Dekker asks, ‘to what extent ego documents were of a private nature, and whether the authors had a certain audience in mind’.30 As with Schwarz and his unpublished yet meticulously kept ‘book of fashion’, this question could equally be asked of Golding’s pocket contents. During one of curator Timothy Long’s research visits to their home, Padiyar

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shared with him a hand-written addendum Golding had made to his will, which indicated specific objects he wished to give to his friends and the donation of the stoneware bottle to the British Museum. This evidences an awareness and possible additional motivation for Golding to retaining his accumulations: that his objects would hold meaning to those closest to him in his corporeal absence.31 If Golding did use his garments, and his pocket contents, as a form of life writing, were they retained only for reading by others? Golding was a prolific letter writer and left thousands of pieces of correspondence behind after his death in addition to publishing professional articles during the course of his career.32 He did not seem to have issues articulating himself publicly and he was a self-identified collector who assigned objects with personal meaning of ‘freedom and life’. Yet Golding was living at times and in places (pre-Sexual Offences Act England; Singapore) where being gay was illegal and it could be argued that this may have impacted the presentation and performance of his public self. He writes in the letter from 1970 that ‘any deviation at all from the bourgeois sexual norms [was] a very bad sign indeed’ (see Figure 13.1). Framed in this way, Golding’s dressed body can be viewed as an extension of his private self in the public world. By selecting tailored masculine dress to wear in his professional life, Golding reinforced his perceived ‘maleness’ and it could be argued, was able to move through that sphere with relative ease. Yet the garments he selected were distinctive and deviated from standard office suiting, differentiating himself from his peers and establishing Golding as a type of creatively-minded ‘dandy’. In Don We Now Our Gay Apparel, Shaun Cole examined this type of performance and the construction of the ‘gay space in the midst of, yet invisible to, the dominant culture’ through the dressed body.33 He writes of signifiers in twentieth-century dress which allowed gay men to identify and interact with members of their community while minimizing or avoiding detection by the ‘outside’ world. These signifiers tend to specific elements of dress: a grey suede shoe or perfectly broken in pair of Levi’s jeans. Although sexuality is not simply a pair of shoes one can remove at the end of the day, Cole points out that gay men who knowingly engage with semiotics through their clothing may do so not only to engage with other men, but also to disengage, having ‘no desire to announce this either to other gay men or to straight society through their dress’.34 Golding came of age in the mid-twentieth century, when these sartorial codes were still firmly in use and textual evidence (as in Figure 13.1, the letter from 1970) indicates that he understood and could effectively control his presentation of sexuality through his dress. The mementos Golding collected and retained in his pockets are material evidence of how adroitly he used his clothing to navigate his daily, public life.

Conclusion Having established pocket contents as an integral part of the garment, and a valuable research tool when analysing worn clothing, one might question the focus on reading those objects which could be understood as meaningful mementos, versus ephemera. I return to the question posed by Michel Foucault at the beginning of this chapter. He asks, ‘Assuming that we are dealing with an author, is everything he wrote and said, everything he left behind, to be included in his work?’35 For researchers examining biography, the form can be as important as the content when considering pocket contents, by virtue of the fact that it was retained at all. For example, Dekker’s research of the life of nineteenth-century apothecary Hendrik Keettell led him to ‘little

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more than a collection of scraps of paper’, requiring him to sift through over 2000 sheets of tissue paper on which Keettell wrote his diary.36 For Dekker, the tissue paper became as integral to materializing the life of the writer as the content written therein, as it became emblematic of Keettell’s daily occupation. Even the chocolate wrapper that did not quite make it to the rubbish bin might illustrate Golding’s everyday and locate important moments in his life. While research to this point has focused on the items (plane and theatre tickets) which are clearly identifiable as notable experiences in his life, further study of the seemingly more ephemeral pocket contents could reveal fascinating new insights into his experience of life in twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury London. The discovery of pocket contents in the collection of Francis Golding has raised questions about how he might have documented his experience of everyday life. The absence of explicit testimony from Golding has created a space for curatorial interpretation and to make connections between his biography, and to those of other collectors through history. Ultimately without Golding’s own testimony, speculating at how he regarded his pockets and their contents is just that: speculation. In order to attempt an understanding at wearer motivations, the researcher must draw on as many available sources of information as possible to construct the wearer’s biography: oral testimony, photographs, letters and other texts, and material memory. Close analysis of Golding’s garments has demonstrated that the memory of a life lived can be found in the creases and stains of the garments, but also in what is held in the pockets of these garments. Golding found the act of collecting objects meaningful in his life, a sentiment he publicly articulated and one that he demonstrated through those intimate possessions he left in his wake. Through study of this textual and material evidence, I have proposed that Golding’s accrual and retention of pocket contents were an act of self-documentation in the tradition of life-writing. Considering his pocket contents as this type of document has enriched my engagement with and interpretation of Golding’s wider collection of clothing and his biography. As examples in this chapter have demonstrated, pocket contents can be used to reveal events in a wearer’s life that would not be explicit from analysing the garment in isolation. Pocket contents materialize moments of lived, everyday lives and therefore must be included in wider discussions of the design history and social meaning of the pocket. It is evident that where surviving pocket contents exist, it is vitally important that collections not only retain the contents but that they are documented as an integral part of the whole garment. Ensuring this connection exists and preserving the pocket contents for future research may enhance understanding of how our garments represent our secret and private selves in the public realm.

Notes 1

Michel Foucault, ‘Language, Counter-Memory’, in Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Simon Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 118–19.

2

Ellen Sampson, Worn: Footwear, Attachment and Affects of Wear (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 1.

3

Timothy Long, Interviewed by Cyana Madsen, 2018.

4

The Sexual Offences Act 1967 legalized aspects of homosexuality between men in England and Wales.

5

Francis Golding, ‘On Collectors and Collecting’, in Francis Golding, ed. Satish Padiyar (self-published, 2015), 50–7.

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6 Ibid. 7

Ibid., 56.

8

‘Men of Distinction: It Shows in Their Homes’, Over 21, Issue 111, August 1981, 4.

9

Satish Padiyar, email to Cyana Madsen, 2021.

10 Barbara Burman, ‘Pocketing the Difference: Gender and Pockets in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, in Material Strategies: Dress and Gender in Historical Perspective, ed. Barbara Burman and Carole Turbin (Malden: Blackwell, 2003), 93. 11 Alan Oser, ‘About Real Estate’, New York Times, 9 March 1977, 86. 12 Bags: Inside Out, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 21 November 2020–12 September 2021; Burman, ‘Pocketing the Difference’, 77–99; Barbara Burman and Ariane Fennetaux, The Pocket: A Hidden History of Women’s Lives, 1660–1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019); Hannah Carlson, ‘Stella Blum Grant Report: Idle Hands and Empty Pockets: Postures of Leisure’, Dress 35, no. 1 (2009): 7–27; Pockets to Purses: Fashion + Function. The Museum at FIT, New York City, 6–31 March 2018; Bernard Rudofsky, Are Clothes Modern?: An Essay on Contemporary Apparel. (Chicago: P. Theobald, 1947); Rebecca Unsworth, ‘Hands Deep in History: Pockets in Men and Women’s Dress in Western Europe, c.1480–1630’, Costume 51, no. 2 (2017): 148–70; VADS: The Online Resource for Visual Art, ‘Pockets of History’ (accessed 29 March 2021). 13 Benjamin Whyman, ‘To Collect – Or Not: Sir Roy Strong CH and His Wardrobe’, Critical Studies in Men’s Fashion 4, no. 1 (2017): 43–62; Benjamin Whyman, ‘How Can Material Culture Analysis of Fashionable Menswear Augment Biographical and Museological Interpretations? A Critical Analysis of Three Wardrobes of Menswear at the Victoria and Albert Museum and Fashion Museum, Bath’ (PhD thesis, University of the Arts London, 2019). 14 Whyman, ‘To Collect – Or Not’, 51. 15 Whyman, ‘How Can Material Culture Analysis of Fashionable Menswear Augment Biographical and Museological Interpretations?’, 241–2. 16 ‘The Contents of Abraham Lincoln’s Pockets on the Evening of His Assassination’, Library of Congress (accessed 29 March 2021). 17 Alison Moloney, ‘The Dress of Charles and Ray Eames’, in The World of Charles and Ray Eames, ed. Catherine Ince and Lotte Johnson (London: Thames & Hudson, 2015), 150. 18 Tracey Barton and Margaret McAleer, email to Cyana Madsen, 2018. 19 Joseph Giovannini, ‘The Office of Charles Eames and Ray Kaiser: The Material Trail’, in The Work of Charles and Ray Eames: A Legacy of Invention, ed. Donald Albrecht (London: Harry N. Abrams in association with the Library of Congress and the Vitra Design Museum, 1997), 44–7; Moloney, ‘The Dress of Charles and Ray Eames’. 20 Tracey Barton and Margaret McAleer, email to Cyana Madsen, 2018. 21 Hallie Rubenhold, The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper (London: Doubleday, 2020), 349. 22 Igor Kopytoff, ‘The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process’, in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (University of Pennsylvania; Cambridge University Press; I. B. Tauris, 1986), 68. 23 Joanne Eicher, ‘Influence of Changing Resources on Clothing – Textiles and Quality of Life’, in Association of College Professors of Textiles and Clothing (St. Louis, 1981), 36–41. 24 Joanne Entwistle, The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 2015); J. C. Flügel, The Psychology of Clothes (New York: AMS Press, 1976); Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003).

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25 Peter Stallybrass, ‘Worn Worlds: Clothes, Mourning and the Life of Things’, in The Textile Reader, ed. Jessica Hemmings (Oxford: Berg, 2012), 69. 26 Rudolf Dekker, Egodocuments and History: Autobiographical Writing in Its Social Context since the Middle Ages (Uitgeverij Verloren: Hilversum, 2002), 1. 27 Gabriele Mentges, ‘Fashion, Time and the Consumption of a Renaissance Man in Germany: The Costume Book of Matthäus Schwarz of Augsburg, 1496–1564’, in Material Strategies: Dress and Gender in Historical Perspective, ed. Barbara Burman and Carole Turbin (Malden: Blackwell, 2003), 29. 28 Schwarz, ‘The First Book of Fashion: Matthäus Schwarz of Augsburg’, in The First Book of Fashion: The Book and Clothes of Matthäus and Veit Konrad Schwarz of Augsburg, ed. Ulinka Rublack and Maria Hayward (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 77. 29 Ibid., 101. 30 Dekker, Egodocuments and History, 15. 31 Timothy Long, interviewed by Cyana Madsen, 2018; Satish Padiyar, email to Cyana Madsen, 2021. 32 Ibid.; Francis Golding, ‘Building in Context: New Development in Historic Areas’, Online Guide, Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE), 2002; Francis Golding, ‘State Intervention/or Conservation in a Mixed Economy: Policy and Practice in the United Kingdom’ Paper presented at the International Scientific Symposium Economics of Conservation, Sri Lanka. November 15, 2011. 33 Shaun Cole, Don We Now Our Gay Apparel (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 61. 34 Ibid., 65. 35 Foucault, ‘Language, Counter-Memory’, 118. 36 Rudolf Dekker, ‘Egodocuments in the Netherlands from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century’, in Envisioning Self and Status: Self-Representation in the Low Countries, 1400–1700, ed. Erin Griffey (Hull: Association for Low Countries Studies in Great Britain and Ireland, 1999), 255–85.

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FIGURE 14.1  Pinafores, cotton, mid-1950s. Ready-made (top) and homemade with rick-rack trimming (bottom). With thanks to Chris Boydell.

14 Aprons Lou Taylor

I am asked to write 600 words on ‘everyday dress’ in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic, when our ‘everyday lives’ have been turned inside out – horrendously, stressfully and unimaginably. At the time of writing this text, over 40,000 people in Britain have died of the virus. What was once our ‘everyday’ life – working, shopping, getting on a bus – is forbidden. The ‘everyday’ world has become dangerous. What is ‘everyday’ dress during a Coronavirus lockdown? Dressing gowns, comfy clothes, exercise outfits and maybe aprons? For the first time in my life, I am spending a lot of time in my kitchen, baking bread (badly), making scones (badly), breeding yoghurt (successfully) and cleaning and disinfecting everything. I found that I really did need an apron and I had none. I have always been deeply hostile to aprons, perhaps with childhood memories of all those mid-1950s advertisements of housewives in perfect kitchens in their bright, fancy, ‘everyday’ pinnies. Vowing, from the age of about thirteen never to spend my life in the kitchen, I have consequently resisted doing that and resisted aprons too. For me they were the symbol of feminine drudgery. In the new Coronavirus world, however, I see things differently. Hence finally my need for a serviceable apron. Everyday clothes are not a new subject for the dress historian. Among others, Sheila Shreeve, Lyanne Holcombe and Jenny Gilbert have assessed them and before that, seminally, Anne Buck.1 In 2002, Ben Highmore published the definitive text on critical theory related to ‘Everyday Life.’ In 2012, Buckley and Clark added analysis of everyday dress into these critical methodologies.2 Interest has now surged, as reflected in the successful Everyday Fashion conference held at the Universities of Huddersfield and Leeds in June 2019. Very evidently, one woman’s everyday dress is not ‘everyday’ to another – varying according to income, community, work, personal taste, etc. Aprons have long been subjected to the vagaries of ‘fashion’, with differences gauged by style, fabric, intended use, longevity of use and so on. My examples here come from the 1880s; one from the United States and another from England. In January 1888, Godey’s Lady’s Book, geared towards middle-class American

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women, published ‘Some suggestions for aprons’ which gave advice for making a full range of designs from the dainty and decorative to the cheap and durable: There are none so pretty or so dainty as those made of sheer white lawn, hemstitched and entirely destitute of trimming, their beauty consisting of the delicacy of the material with which it is made. […] A ‘durable’ apron, on the other hand, ‘is made of coarse white linen fringed at the bottom […] and neatly buttonholed to prevent unravelling. If one wishes a bright coloured apron, there is nothing handsomer than the gay bandana handkerchief for this purpose. These are 25 cents apiece and with ribbon for strings costs very little more.3 What was ‘durable’ for Godey’s did not, of course, include aprons made of sacking so widely worn both in the United States, across Europe and in Britain by poor women working fields, mines and dirty factories. Women in the brickfields of Oldbury, in the Black Country, were described in 1883 as ‘carrying about 1.5cwt of clay at a time … clad in mere rags, with a great sack apron over all’.4 I did not have to resort to sacking for my 2020 homemade apron. I had a cheery length of unused, durable, dark red African fancy print. I stitched it by hand, as hand sewing calms me in stressful times. I made two identical pinnies – one for my sister and one for me (Figure 14.2). I even placed the pockets so they matched up exactly to the Paisley print pattern. I wear my pinny every day and have washed it a few times. It cheers me up. Right now, when our everydays are so far from ‘normal’, I have at least, achieved something creative and functional, as I wait longingly for the return of a the ‘old’ everyday which I hope will return before this text is published.

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FIGURE 14.2  Two aprons, made by Lou Taylor, May 2020 with close-up showing pockets matched to pattern of apron.

Notes 1

Anne Buck, ‘Variations in English Women’s Dress in the Eighteenth Century’, Folk Life 9, no. 1 (1971): 5–28; Sheila Shreeve, ‘The Hodson Shop’, Costume 48, no 1 (2014): 82–97; Lyanne Holcombe, ‘The Use of Aprons by Working Class Women in England in the Inter-war Period’, unpublished BA dissertation, University of Brighton 2001; Jenny Gilbert, ‘Everyday and Unworn Dress as Museum Pieces: A Study of the Hodson Shop Collection, Walsall Museum, 1983–2016’, PhD, University of Wolverhampton, 2016.

2

Ben Highmore, The Everyday Life Reader (London: Routledge, 2002); Cheryl Buckley and Hazel Clark, ‘Conceptualising Fashion in Everyday Lives’, Design Issues 28, no. 4 (2012): 18–28.

3

Godey’s, no 69, Vol. CXV1 Jan 1888: 164–65.

4

James Greenwood, Mysteries of Modern London, by One of the Crowd – Girls of the Brickfields, 1883; Diprose and Batman, London, quoted in Janet Sullivan, ‘Paying the Price for Industrialisation’, PhD thesis, 2014, University of Birmingham, 90.

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15 Learning through wear: Experiencing the everyday vintage wardrobe Liz Tregenza

There is a patch of red, slightly inflamed, dry skin on my right index finger that never quite heals. Typically more noticeable in the summer months, it is a sign of the imprint my clothing choices leave on me. This skin irritation has largely been caused by my penchant for tightly fitted 1950s and 1970s clothes, the worn skin symptomatic of having to pinch garments tightly together, so that metal zips, fifty years old or more, can slide up my back or the side of my torso with ease. My clothes tend to leave other marks too. From boning that has worn through its cotton binding with age leaving stab marks on my skin to red lines encircling my waist from belts secured tightly around my middle. Some may consider my clothing choices suffering for fashion. In an era of easy-to-wear soft clothing, my choice to encase my body in tight garments may seem surprising. Yet I find these garments liberating at the same time, and despite the marks left on my skin, generally comfortable too. In these vintage pieces I feel confident and notably my posture is often improved. When I look closely at my clothes, I recognize that they do not just leave marks on me, but I leave marks on them too. As Ellen Sampson suggests, ‘in the performance of dressing and the practice of everyday life, we are marking and altering our clothes’.1 This is most notable in the make-up marks I seem to leave behind. For example, the faded whisper of red lipstick, smeared on linings, where garments have been hastily pulled over my head as I undress. Clothes, however, do not just speak of the past people who have worn them, but often the past environments they have been worn or stored in. The smell of stale cigarette smoke, difficult to remove, hinting of a garment’s past life before smoking was banned indoors. The faint tang of damp and mould, still present after multiple washes indicating poorly-heated and ventilated homes. These examples indicate the physical and emotional affects that clothes can have on us, and we upon them. Ellen Sampson writes that In studying wearing, one is studying the social relations between people and their clothes. Clothing has both the capacity to affect deeply and to effect change. […] This affect – or the

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capacity of garments to affect us – is both symbolic and bodily/material. Clothes are both the locus and the agents of affect, while at the same time being affected themselves. The body and the garment are in a constant reiterative cycle of affecting one another. The body-self is affected physically and emotionally through wearing and simultaneously the materiality of the garment, its meanings and value are changed through wear: This cycle of affects moulds both bodily selves, identities and garments.2 My identity is deeply emmeshed in the clothes I choose to wear. In this chapter I look intimately at my own interactions and relationships with garments from my everyday vintage wardrobe, questioning broadly the idea of clothes as the ‘locus and agents of affect’.3 The wearing of vintage fashion in the twentieth- and twenty-first century, as well as its development from subcultural fashion to mainstream acceptance, has been broadly considered by scholars over the past thirty years.4 However, here I offer a different angle, considering my own personal experiences. Using wearing as a central methodological practice, I borrow heavily from the work of Sampson. She has suggested the ‘experience’ of wearing clothing is still a relatively under-explored and unconventional research methodology.5 Here, my usage of this methodology, while looking at historical garments from the twentieth century, is rooted in the contemporary. As will be shown, the rising popularity of vintage as a fashion trend is intimately tied up with the increasing speed at which clothing was produced in the twentieth century, the greater availability of low-cost garments and their consequent shorter initial life cycles. Vintage clothing has a special power of its own and when these garments are worn there is a feeling of the past continually colliding with the present. Their multiple life stories and owners can be buried within the very fibres of the garments and through wear there can be an intimate connection with their past lives. While what I have written is deeply personal, it offers a model through which clothes can more widely be considered. We all experience clothes on a daily basis, and questioning how clothes ‘feel’ when we wear them can be a valuable tool. Of course, wear of clothes, once they leave the private wardrobe and enter into a public collection is no longer possible. Yet, by turning to consider our own personal experiences of what we feel about clothes, and how we wear them, by adopting an approach rooted in material culture and wearing for our own clothes, it may open up further ways to consider those we cannot wear and how to collect stories of garments which were once worn. Sampson has suggested that ‘wearing is often a tacit and tactile experience: from the tacit knowledge embodied in acts of dressing, to the sensory experience of garments and skin, to the complex relationships between memory, experience, and garments’.6 Consequently, it can be challenging to articulate how wearing ‘feels’. The research presented here is centred on my own personal experiences of wearing vintage precisely for this reason and follows an autoethnographic  approach to wear. This can be posited as ‘insider knowledge’. As Tony E. Adams, Carolyn Ellis and Stacy Holman Jones suggest: ‘insider knowledge does not suggest that an auto ethnographer can articulate more truthful or more accurate knowledge as compared to outsiders, but rather that as authors we can tell our stories in novel ways when compared to how others may be able to tell them’.7 This articulation of my wearing research methodology is presented primarily through five case studies on garments that form part of my everyday wardrobe. Through the practice of wearing these garments I have considered the physical ‘tacit’ and ‘tactile’ experience of wear alongside how and why I wear vintage and what personally adds ‘value’ to these clothes. Vintage complicates the idea of memory and clothing, on wearing these garments it is not only

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my own memories which can re-surface, but also there is often the imagined – or in rare cases, the known – previous owner with whom I form an intimate connection through re-wear. Using wearing as a methodology is both ‘embodied’ and ‘bodily’ and here I discuss my own body and feelings about it, alongside my everyday wardrobe.8 The use of wear as a research methodology can be seen more broadly as part of the ‘embodied’ turn in fashion and dress studies. Hilary Davidson suggests that this is ‘the trend for scholars of history to appreciate and incorporate embodied, experiential, implicit or tacit knowledges gained through making and doing into their study of history. The embodied turn concept encompasses both the coming into being of objects and the role of bodies in their making’.9 Generally it is used to refer to remaking clothing and the wear or use of replicas, but equally this study, with ‘subjective bodily experience’ of dress at its heart, can be seen as part of wider concepts of embodiment.

An unsuitable methodology? My methodology is neither available to nor suitable for all and is limited to the wear of personal objects. Once garments enter into an archive or museum collection, their status changes. What was once clothing becomes artefact. After this point garments should no longer be worn. There are a multitude of reasons as to why this is the case, related to conservation issues and the potential damage that can be caused by bodies.10 Often the proportion of historical garments, even those less than seventy years old, is different to contemporary ones, and unless encased in period correct underpinnings, modern bodies can easily cause irreversible damage to garments. Furthermore, as Ingrid Mida argues ‘a garment that once belonged to another person is subtly altered when worn again. This could destroy critical evidence of the marks and imprints of the original wearer’.11 This is why there are particular challenges around garments worn by celebrities, or significant figures, whose garments were often custom-made. One only has to consider the furore that arose in May 2022 when Kim Kardashian wore Marilyn Monroe’s custom 1962 skin-like sheath dress by Jean Louis. I argue that it is precisely because garments cannot be worn once they enter into a museum setting that it is, however, vitally important to collect stories of wear from donors where possible. My own experience of working in museums has illustrated that often, when items are donated a layer of donor information is missing. Beyond the typical questions we may ask – the factual, ‘When and where did you buy it?’ ‘Where did you wear it?’ – are there questions that represent the deeply personal physical and emotional experience of wearing that we should ask too? For example, ‘How did it feel and how did it make you feel?’ or ‘How did it fit your body?’. So much can be understood about garments through careful material culture analysis but added information about the experience of wear can also offer valuable information for future conservation, storage and display. Writing in 2000, Joanne Entwistle suggested that the costume museum makes the garment into a fetish, it tells of how the garment was made, the techniques of stitching, embroidery and decoration used as well as the historical era in which it was once worn. What it cannot tell us is how the garment was worn, how the garment moved when on a body, what it sounded like when it moved and how it felt to the wearer. Without a body, dress lacks fullness and movement; it is incomplete.12

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Yet, advancements in digital technology mean that the possibilities of re-creating digital versions of historical dress in movement are almost with us. Understanding the past experiences of how garments were worn and how they felt, where possible, will help to ensure digital recreations can accurately portray garments for new audiences.

Wearing vintage fashion and second-hand consumption I can still clearly picture when vintage clothing became part of my everyday life. It was the summer of 2006, and after seeing an article in Elle Girl I set off on a mission from my home in Sutton, Greater London, to Shoreditch. I was trying to navigate my way through East London, in an era before Google maps – and still fairly rudimentary mobile phones available to teenagers – relying on some directions hastily written on a scrap of paper. I found Cheshire Street, a relatively sleepy side street off Brick Lane and ambled down it, hunting for Beyond Retro. The feeling of that first entry into Beyond Retro was one of wonder; the cavernous former dairy filled with vintage clothes from different eras. On that first visit, somewhat intimidated by the sheer volume of clothes on offer, I bought myself a blouse and a scarf, and left. But this was the start of something that changed my relationship with clothing and how I dressed, my first real foray into vintage clothing beyond low-price purchases of belts, handbags and jewellery in local charity shops. Soon after, I set up an eBay account, tantalized by the prospect of not only buying vintage clothes in person, but online too – and buying things from as far afield as America. The internet opened up considerable opportunities for the purchase of vintage fashion and as Heike Jenss has argued, it was the rise of the internet and the increasing popularity of e-commerce sites like eBay and Etsy, during the late 1990s and early 2000s which helped cement the popularity of vintage as a ‘wide-ranging trend and aesthetic phenomenon’.13 Indeed, my own shift towards a sartorial identity built on vintage clothes coincided in large parts with the rise of vintage as a fashionable alternative to the mainstream. Almost instantly, largely because of the low price of the garments I was buying, vintage formed the central part of my wardrobe. Over the following fifteen years I have had probably thousands of vintage garments pass through my hands; from ruined 1920s cocktail dresses, the chiffon worn so thin they disintegrated in my hands, to immaculate unworn 1950s cotton day dresses that still had their paper swing tickets attached. Importantly, considering the scope of this book, my everyday wardrobe is a vintage one and on a daily basis it is rare that my outfit is comprised of anything less than 50 per cent old. There are many reasons why people may choose to wear vintage. For some wearing vintage clothes is about creating an intimate physical connection with the past and many vintage wearers seek to re-create total period accurate looks. However, for others vintage garments are simply the ingredients for creating an interesting look and certainly this is my experience. Other factors for choosing vintage garments include fabric, fit, design, quality of manufacture or perceived ‘uniqueness’. However, vintage clothing, particularly more recently produced vintage, has an oxymoronic uniqueness. Many vintage garments, particularly those that might be considered ‘everyday’, would have originally been mass-produced. Initially when I began buying vintage my driving reason for choosing vintage clothes over contemporary garments related to their fit. I am petite with narrow shoulders, a small waist and comparatively large hips. My body shape simply does not suit most contemporary clothing,

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so it was a revelation, when buying vintage, to find clothes that truly fitted my body. As time progressed my choice to buy vintage over new also became rooted in sustainable consumption, spurred on by working in fashion retail and seeing the poor quality of many new garments produced by the companies I worked for. Increasingly, I recognized that in order to be sustainable I had to follow an approach advocated by Alison Gill and Abby Mellick Lopes that sustainable consumption is ‘more about making new relationships than making new things’.14 The popularity of vintage as a fashionable alternative to buying new is, however, intimately tied up with the fast fashion industry. Our attitudes to clothing and its value have altered dramatically over the past century because of the acceleration of fashion production against a backdrop of falling prices for clothing. A 2017 report by the Ellen MacArthur foundation illustrated the overproduction and consumption of clothes and decline in their utilization. Worldwide, clothing utilization – the average number of times a garment is worn before it ceases to be used – decreased by 36 per cent between 2000 and 2015. Globally, customers miss out on $460 billion of value each year by throwing away clothes that they could continue to wear, and some garments are estimated to be discarded after just seven to ten wears.15 This acceleration of fashion production and the proliferation of new clothes consequently mean that people are more likely to quickly dispose of their clothes, yet equally these clothes are less likely to be ‘worn out’ and can be discovered anew by someone later. Because of the acceleration of fashion production, vintage clothing, particularly that produced from the 1970s onwards, can often be found in its original, or very near to original form with little sign of alteration or repair, arguably also showing less of an imprint of its previous owner/s. Collecting the stories of worn clothing from the twentieth century can be challenging because the intimate signs of wear are less obvious. In 1980 Madeline Ginsburg wrote eloquently on historical garments and the second-hand trade, her research demonstrating that continual wear, alterations and long-term use were as common in luxury garments as everyday ones. Ginsburg came to understand these stories of wear and re-use through careful material culture analysis of surviving garments.16 Yet ideas of wear, re-wear and the potential long-term usage of garments by different people is less often considered with twentieth-century garments. Not only because clothing became a less valuable commodity, but also owing to the fact that signs of wear, alteration and re-use are not so evident unless that information is provided. Indeed, as Nicky Gregson and Louise Crewe suggest ‘many conventional accounts of consumption […] see either the act of purchase or the point of production as the key defining moment in a commodity’s biography’.17 It is vital, where possible, that we consider the various lives garments have lived. Looking beyond initial purchase and to further re-purchases as second-hand or vintage provides not only information about garments themselves, but wider patterns of consumption. As Gregson and Crewe indicate ‘power and value can be imbued in commodities long after the original production has ceased, through cycles of use, transformation and reuse.’ Value, they argue, ‘is rarely (if ever) an inherent property of objects, but rather a judgement made about them by consumers and traders’.18 This is certainly true for vintage garments, the value of which goes through cycles, much like any other kind of ‘antique’ – I mean this both in a monetary sense and a more abstract sense. Some garments, for example, have dropped in value as it has increasingly been recognized that the depiction of non-white figures on them represents potentially harmful racial stereotypes. On the other hand, the increasing availability of searchable digital magazine archives means it is possible to easily date garments accurately, and sell them alongside their original advertisements; this layered provenance has positive consequences for their value.

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Many hands I am aware that often by the time I wear my vintage pieces they have passed through many hands, worn, perhaps altered and their contexts different each time. Each owner and wearer adds their own layer of meaning to garments, but also physically alters the garment itself. However gently worn, every wear will ultimately contribute to a garment’s degradation. Clothes are very rarely ever frozen in time, nor remain as they once originally were. Garments may be obviously altered, often for reasons of fashion, hemlines shortened or sleeves removed for example. Their alterations may also be seen more in marks left behind, what Gregson and Crewe refer to as the ‘trace/s of habitation’, the sweat stains or food spills which, when not cleaned immediately, will seep into the fibres of the garment, and often discolour them in a way that washing cannot totally remove.19 However, clothes are affected by actions beyond wear. Cleaning, sunlight and storage can all affect garments materially. Washing, for example, may cause the fabric of some garments to change, perhaps becoming softer, and particularly if made from synthetic fibres, the garment may lose its original shape. Getting dressed is a sensorial, embodied experience. As Sophie Woodward suggests, ‘clothing is imbued with meaning not only through how it appears, but also through how it feels, smells and sounds’.20 I argue that this experience is enhanced when wearing vintage. One is aware of not only their own body, but the other bodies that have also previously experienced these garments. This specific sensory experience is particularly related to smell, as sometimes a previous owner’s smell will be re-activated when an older garment is worn. As Gregson and Crewe suggest clothing is ‘an extension of our own corporeality. It becomes us; we personalize it and possess it through our own leakiness […] Corporeal presence then, the personalization and possession which remains trapped in the cloth, is critical to the exchange and consumption of second-hand clothing’.21 Sampson has suggested that ‘there is something in the bodily nature of the garment, perhaps its “skin-like” quality […] that allows it to serve as a gateway, vessel, or locus for recollection’.22 For me, with a preference for tightly fitted clothes, this second-skin nature of clothing is more enhanced. The ghostly traces of previous owners are more likely to be found, simply because the garments sit so close to the skin. Vintage clothes make you confront both your own body and the past bodies that have worn them. This is particularly noticeable in those garments which, without alteration, fit like a glove and lead you to wonder about the ‘other’ body which once existed and was an almost an identical shape to your own.

Object stories My clothes can be broadly divided into three categories: wardrobe, collection and stock. These are murky boundaries and pieces will often cross between the three. As a vintage dealer I will often buy garments as stock, only to discover they fit and let them live, at least for a while, in my wardrobe. Equally, thanks to my business once I tire of a vintage piece it will generally migrate and become a piece of stock, destined to be sold onto another vintage wearer. Despite this opportunity, there are many garments in my wardrobe that are rarely worn, held onto ‘just in case’. I am not unusual in this sense, in her 2007 book Why Women Wear What They Wear, Woodward indicated that clothes in wardrobes are not always active, or in-use: ‘On average 12.2 per cent of women’s wardrobes are inactive’ and in some cases this rises to 40 per cent.

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Woodward refers to these garments as frozen or dormant, suggesting that ‘both the items of clothing and the former aspect of herself that they embody remain temporally frozen, their potential reactivation projected into an imagined future’.23 Garments in a wardrobe may belong to the past and the present. Woodward suggests that many women had clothes hanging in their wardrobes for twenty years or more, having a ‘long-term relationship’ with them.24 Here, I have chosen to study five garments that are all part of my ‘active’ wardrobe, worn regularly. The garments represent my everyday fashion sense very broadly. I tried to pick a range of garments that covered the full spectrum of my general wardrobe, representing the diversity in garment styles, periods, cost of items and purchasing sites that my wardrobe encompasses. These garments were purchased over a relatively long time period; however, I noted when trying to think through the concept of my ‘everyday’ wardrobe that the majority of my most worn garments were purchased in 2017 or 2018. This led me to ask questions about my own sartorial identity; was there a particular reason why at this point I seemed to identify a sense of style that has stuck? More than anything, I think this was reflective of my financial situation as I had less disposable income to spend on vintage, I became more careful with my purchases, buying only garments I was confident I loved. My ‘everyday’ wardrobe is largely different to that worn by many others. What others may consider party frocks or outfits for formal occasions form part of my everyday garment rotation. I have happily swept into work in elaborate 1970s maxi dresses with billowing balloon sleeves or 1950s cotton sundresses, puffed out with layers of petticoats. It is important to remember that everyday should not be synonymized with boring, plain or simple. In terms of dress, ‘everyday’ refers to the styles worn on a day-to-day basis, whatever your style may be. The concept of what constitutes the ‘everyday’ can be difficult to navigate, and not everyone’s experience of the everyday is the same. Indeed, Lisa Heinze has suggested that ‘everyday life’ is an ‘amorphous term’; citing the work of Ben Highmore she suggested that it is a paradoxical term due to the presence of both the ‘ordinary and extraordinary’ in everyday life.25 I would argue that a wearing methodology is not only tied up in the physical act of wear, but also the wardrobe experience. Choosing what to wear, touching garments within the wardrobe, can be as important as actually putting these garments on. For this chapter I wore all five selected garments again, an exercise that felt like revisiting old friends. Using questions laid out by Sampson, I sought to carefully document my experience of wear, considering the full embodied experience.26 Alongside this, I completed a standard material culture analysis, using that proposed by Alexandra Kim and Ingrid Mida in order to understand each garment in as holistic a way as possible.27 While I only wore a small number of garments for this exercise, as will be seen, it made me think broadly about my own sense of style and the importance of both the physical and emotional ‘feel’ of garments.

Simon Massey wholesale couture suit jacket: Purchased on eBay for £24 in 2019 For the past ten years I have extensively researched the London wholesale couture trade, a sector recognized as creating garments that were heavily influenced by Parisian designs, yet adapted to meet ready-to-wear manufacturing techniques in Britain. This jacket (Figure 15.1) was produced by wholesale couture firm Simon Massey, established by Harry Massey c.1943,

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FIGURE 15.1 Simon Massey wholesale couture suit jacket. Black wool with velvet accents, c.1952. © Liz Tregenza.

and is typical of the firm’s early 1950s output. Through a material culture analysis, the quality of the garment becomes clear, and it has a surfeit of hand-finished details. However, my experience and understanding of wholesale couturiers as producers of high-quality garments more broadly have been enhanced through wear. When putting on this suit jacket the inherent, hush quality of the piece is more evident. The way in which the lining is stitched in place so that it glides over the arm, the shoulder pads that neatly mould to my natural shoulder line and the weights in the hemline ensure it sits correctly. This suit jacket also has a form of its own, canvas padding in the hip area, alongside padded shoulders creates an exaggerated hourglass silhouette, the desirable shape of the period. Wearing this jacket makes me question my own material knowledge of clothes – why do I feel that I can define a garment as being of high ‘quality’ workmanship? Largely this is thanks to experiences as a child with my grandfather (who had worked in the tailoring trade), being taught how to speedily whip stitch hems by hand, or machine sew using my Great Grandmother’s slow rhythmic Singer treadle sewing machine. Later, I trained as a fashion designer and the skills learnt during this degree certainly helped to develop my material knowledge further. Whilst

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today I rarely complete anything more than a simple repair, these experiences, this knowledge of sewing and understanding of how garments are made, have led me to have a greater appreciation for the complexities of manufacture.

Horrockses fashions cotton dress and matching bolero, 1948: Purchased from Biddy Stanford (via Facebook) for £100 in 2013 Generally, when I purchase a garment from eBay, like in the Simon Massey jacket, there is limited provenance available. However, I have purchased some items direct from their longterm custodians. One piece is a Horrockses dress, purchased from my friend Biddy Stanford in 2013. The dress was made in 1948 and is covered with an exuberant print designed by Alastair Morton. The dress, as a May 1948 Vogue advertisement indicated, could be purchased

FIGURE 15.2  Horrockses cotton dress and matching bolero, 1948. Worn here by the author in 2022. © Liz Tregenza.

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from Harvey Nichols for £5.7. 8 (and ten coupons). Biddy purchased the dress second-hand, in around 1980. She seems to remember that then, considering vintage clothes were still plentiful and relatively cheap, it was quite expensive, costing her around £20 – purchased either from Marvellette on the Kings Road, or Cornucopia in Colchester. This dress has been heavily altered. The front bodice seam particularly shows considerable signs of alteration, with other smaller alterations elsewhere, all in order to make the garment smaller. Most of these alterations have been executed in bright green thread. Whilst these are an attempt to match with the green waves within the print, they are quite obvious inside the dress. The buttons on the back of the dress have been stitched in place with the same vibrant green thread, and it is clear when studying the button placket that the buttons once were stitched elsewhere. The alterations to the button placement have further decreased the size of the dress, particularly at the waist. There are signs however that some alterations have been executed in order to prolong the life of the dress, the top button has been re-enforced inside with what appears to be webbing. The alterations (primarily executed by Biddy) are key to the biography of this garment. On documenting these repairs, I contacted Biddy to ask her whether she had altered this dress. This opened up a dialogue about her perceived value of clothes and how this has changed over time, as Biddy remembered, I altered it SO MUCH!! SORRY – in those days I altered absolutely everything! I was obsessed with everything fitting snugly on that waist […] I was a very cavalier seamstress in those days and viewed all garments as a starting point. […] I think the cups on the dress were too far apart for my frame so I probably took in the centre seam? These were all my stock alteration tricks to suit my body at the time. I know it seems wicked now but at the time vintage frocks were in plentiful supply […] Back then I was full of confidence and optimism and honestly thought I would be improving the garment! I have much more respect for clothes now […] I am very afraid of ruining things.28 Biddy suggested she was unhappy with the alterations she had made, which meant it did not fit properly anyway. This led to the dress being relegated for some years to the dressing up box, until, noticing the label, Biddy contacted me to ask if I might be interested in it.29 Through wear and re-wear garments can be re-contextualized and new layers of meaning added. For Biddy this sundress represented a failure of her own sewing skills. For me, this poor stitching, the fact that it is now in altered condition, is actually part of its appeal. The dress has a multilayered connection to a dear friend of mine, but also as it has been heavily altered I feel I can wear it with little fear of further damage. This dress is an excellent example of the fact that, as Gregson and Crewe argue, value ‘is rarely (if ever) an inherent property of objects, but rather a judgement made about them by consumers and traders’.30 On the body this dress has its problems. Biddy’s hand repairs mean that the bust does not quite sit properly, and I find myself continually re-adjusting both it and my bra throughout the day. However, some of the problems of fit I experience when wearing this dress have not been caused by Biddy but relate to its original manufacture. The buttons on the back are not the most effective fastening, and a zip would have created a much neater line. Normally I would reject a matching bolero with a sundress, thinking they make a dress look fussy, but with this dress I find myself wearing the bolero with it too, more than anything to cover up the awkward way the buttons bulge through the centre back seam. Horrockses is unquestionably one of my favourite labels, and much of my summer wardrobe comprises of dresses by the brand. Indeed, Horrockses garments are amongst the most desirable

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on the vintage market today. Part of the reason for their enduring popularity with vintage wearers is because they wear so well, often their prints are still vibrant and the garments can easily be washed and cared for. This dress is however in some ways a poor example by the brand, produced when material shortages were still hampering the fashion and textiles trades, its workmanship is symptomatic of the lack of resources available to many manufacturers in the late 1940s. Alongside the awkward button fastening, the dress lacks the finishing of many other Horrockses I own, the seams are badly frayed throughout and all of the seams would have benefitted from being overlocked.

Alice Edwards dress, cotton with a Calpreta drip-dry sheen finish, 1960: Purchased on eBay for around £50, 2018 Sometimes previous owners may not be known by name but have obviously left their imprint upon a vintage garment. There is a ghost still of the previous owner found in the bones of a favourite summer dress by ready-to-wear firm Alice Edwards, the bones very obviously moulded to the shape of the previous owner through wear. When I wear this dress, her shape is all the

FIGURE 15.3  Alice Edwards dress in cotton with a Calpreta drip-dry sheen finish, 1960. Worn here by the author in 2019. © Liz Tregenza.

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more striking because she was blessed with a more ample bosom than I, despite the rest of the dress suggesting her measurements were not dissimilar to my own. In some ways I am grateful for these misshapen bones. As my bust does not fill out the dress, they have remained in this shape, giving the illusion through wear of perhaps a more hourglass silhouette than I am naturally blessed with. Alice Edwards was established c.1946. The company from the outset specialized in mediumrange cheerful printed cotton and nylon dresses. The company was based in London, but manufactured most of their garments in Wales. This dress bears the ‘Alice Edwards Italians’ label, as promotional literature purports, inspired by the founder Alice’s trips to the country. Dresses bearing this label are, like Horrockses, desirable on the vintage market – largely because their silhouettes are still so wearable today. This garment was purchased relatively cheaply however because it needed a new zip. I took this to be professionally repaired and it is striking that no discernible evidence of the repair can be seen. A period accurate zip was used, and the zip has been stitched seemingly along the same stitch lines as the original. Other than this necessary repair, the dress when I bought it was in remarkably good condition. It is evident when studying this dress that its manufacture, despite being a fairly low-price dress when new (a version of this dress with short sleeves retailed at 99/6), was of very high quality. The bodice is fully lined, there are generous seam allowances throughout, and each seam has been carefully finished to ensure it does not fray. The vibrancy of the cotton is notable too, when looking inside the dress it is clear to see that it has not faded. It is challenging to do a like-for-like comparison, as this dress and the Horrockses discussed previously were made under very different circumstances; however, overall this dress is finished to a much higher standard. Woodward has suggested that ‘within the wardrobe, the outfits which embody bad memories or were a failure are thrown away’.31 Yet this is not the case for this dress, despite being worn multiple times over the summer of 2019 amidst a terrible relationship break-up; in some ways it seems to have had the opposite effect. Worn at some of my lowest moments, the dress, with its tightly fitted waist, full skirt, sweetheart neckline and bold cheerful print is a stereotypically ‘me’ garment. In many ways I think it was so heavily worn in the summer of 2019 as an attempt to make me feel a little better about the challenging situation I found myself in. This dress indicates the power I see in clothes. On wearing again, I am still reminded of these bad memories, but also, ultimately this dress makes me feel good about myself. I wonder whether, as the previous owner is still ghostly present in the bones of the dress, am I somehow taking possession of her energy when I wear it?

Sportaville blouse and short co-ordinate set in cotton, c.1956: Purchased from Frock & Roll, Reading (via Instagram), for £25 in 2017 An alert from Instagram pings on my phone as someone has tagged me in a post. I swipe to unlock my phone and see an Instagram post for a vintage 1950s two-piece outfit by British brand Sportaville consisting of shorts and matching blouse. The price is low (owing to fairly poor condition) and the size is right, so I comment, professing my interest. This little outfit despite its damage quickly becomes a wardrobe favourite.

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FIGURE 15.4  Sportaville blouse and shorts co-ordinate set in cotton, c.1956. © Liz Tregenza.

Shorts and blouse co-ordinate sets were a popular part of Sportaville’s design output in the late 1950s and early 1960s; however, it is the printed fabric of this set which establishes its significance. This angel fish pattern was designed by noted Hawaiian textile designer, Alfred Shaheen. However, unlike most Shaheen textiles this set is unsigned. A version of this print appeared in a 1956 advertisement in the trade journal The Ambassador, and it seems likely that this design was produced under licence in Britain for Oriana fabrics. Despite the poor condition of this set, the fact the print was designed by Shaheen means that it is highly desirable to vintage collectors and consequently can be seen as a lucky find. Since purchasing this set in 2017, it has been worn each summer despite its condition. When I purchased the set it had colour run across the shorts, seemingly from the zip, leaving rusty coloured marks. The shorts showed signs of stress through the seams, where they were likely a little too tight for a previous owner. My wear of this set, particularly the shorts, has further contributed to their degradation. The already stressed waistband damaged considerably thanks to my seasonal bouts of hay fever. The button has been hastily stitched back on multiple times, and I note that on wearing it definitely needs securing again. The buttonhole, too, is out of shape, and I wonder whether the button now sewn on is original. I note here the transformations that the shorts in particular have undergone because of me, but wearing this outfit again in 2022 I have to question if the shorts may slip from active to dormant wardrobe. When worn, I feel self-consciously aware of how short they are and that my normally hidden intimate collection of tattoos (which I have added to in the past year) is quite visibly on display. In this instance my changed body, one that I have actively changed through choice, has changed my relationship to my clothes.

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Jean Varon Balloon Sleeve Blouse, c.1973: Purchased from Pret-a-Vintage pop-up off Brick Lane for around £75 in 2018 My preferred era of vintage clothing is primarily late 1940s to early 1960s, although I do quite often also wear 1970s pieces. One such garment is a red cotton dot print Jean Varon blouse with statement balloon sleeves. The blouse has a tie neckline and fastens at the front with plastic buttons. This blouse is notably missing its Jean Varon label. However, both I and the dealer I purchased this from knew what it was. This blouse quickly became such a loved part of my wardrobe that I set up an eBay saved search in the hope of finding another similar one. Eventually I managed to find the same blouse in black. This, unlike my red version, is labelled. The label is large and not fully tacked into place. On wearing the black version it is clear that the label of the red was likely removed because it was large and uncomfortable. Whilst the red blouse is still perfectly wearable, it is notable that the manufacturing of this piece is not as high-quality as many of my 1950s pieces. There are small seam allowances throughout and one side seam has frayed badly, roughly stitched together with golden thread. There is also evidence of other minor alterations. The blouse, as a small knot of thread on either side indicates, once had belt loops, but it looks as if they were hastily chopped off at some point prior to my ownership of the blouse. Despite the lack of belt loops, the slight wear to the polka dots around the waist indicates the continued wear of a belt.

FIGURE 15.5  Jean Varon cotton balloon sleeve blouse, c.1973. © Liz Tregenza.

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The blouse is one that I consider to be extremely versatile, and I have probably worn it more times than any other garment selected as part of this research. However, this piece is one that is not tied up with particular memories. It is, for me, a wardrobe staple – a go-to garment when I need something that makes a statement, but equally it is easy to wear. A rare garment in my wardrobe, which is genuinely suited to wearing in winter (it is roomy enough that I can easily wear a thermal layer underneath). This garment can however prove frustrating, as it does not photograph well. Static on a human form, the exaggerated balloon sleeves tend to droop, the overall silhouette for me reminiscent of a wilting flower. Yet, the blouse comes to life when in movement, the statement sleeves unquestionably taking up space. It is a blouse, when worn, that makes me feel confident, it is a fantastic blouse to present in, the sleeves exaggerating my own movements as I gesticulate. Vintage clothing has a unique power and as Jenss suggests, Due to the intimate relationship between clothing and the body, the wearing of old clothes generates an instant temporary exchange between the current wearer and the material past, between the body in the present and body history. There is likely no other object in material culture through which this kind of immediacy and at the same time temporal distance between present and past can be felt in a more intimate and immediate way.32 In picking just a small selection of garments and wearing them I noted that my sartorial style was often about standing out and taking up space. I have always had a preference for wearing bright colours, but it was only when thinking carefully about the physical act of wearing that I recognized my clothing choices were heavily determined on the visual impact they make, and specifically creating exaggerated silhouettes. This preference is driven by shyness, and in many ways an awareness that, the larger-than-life statements my clothes make, mean that in a social situation they can act as a conversation starter. It was striking when completing this exercise that, other than the dress purchased from Biddy, I knew nothing of the previous owners of my garments. Indeed, this is the case for almost all of my everyday wardrobe – in part this is symptomatic of where I have purchased these pieces – at vintage fairs, through eBay or in charity shops largely. However, if I turn to consider the more spectacular dresses I own, the evening gowns and wedding dresses – they often come with rich stories of their past lives in the form of attached notes and even photographs. The stories of everyday garments, precisely because of their everyday-ness, are unlikely to be kept, unless part of broader narrative relating to someone’s sense of style, yet can tell rich stories about clothes themselves and the bodies that once inhabited them. The act of wearing, as Woodward suggests, is a kind of ‘performance of the self’.33 It must be seen that our clothing choices are about relationships with our own bodies, with others and how we position ourselves within the world. Consequently, in performing this exercise I learnt not just about garments, but something about myself. That my clothing choices, like most other people’s, are anchored on ‘feel’ both physically and emotionally. Clothes are ultimately powerful and can affect us in many ways, putting on a garment, particularly for the first time can be a special experience. For me, this pleasure comes in finding a garment that fits perfectly, with no need for alterations. I find the desire to twirl, no matter whether the garment is suitable for twirling or not, irresistible. There was also a sense of privilege in completing this exercise. My wardrobe is both past and present, but not just because I wear vintage, but also because my body shape has remained relatively stable for all of my adult life.

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This chapter has illustrated the potential benefits of wearing as a methodology; however, it can be challenging to articulate the feeling of wear in a meaningful way. Here I discuss vintage clothes, but equally the methodology presented here could be applied effectively to contemporary clothing. As clothing utilization has decreased, stories of wear are less obvious in garments themselves and more must be asked of the wearer. Stories of wear are not just about the garments themselves either but can be a way of constructing biographies and autobiographies. Collecting stories of wear offers potential benefits for understanding consumption practices alongside future conversation, storage and display of garments too.

Notes 1

Ellen Sampson, ‘Entanglement, Affect and Experience: Walking and Wearing (Shoes) as Experimental Research Methodology’, International Journal of Fashion Studies 5, no. 1 (2018): 64.

2

Ibid., 66.

3 Ibid. 4

Below are some of the key academic texts that have dealt with vintage fashion and style since the late 1980s: Tracy Diane Cassidy and Hannah Rose Bennett, ‘The Rise of Vintage and the Vintage Consumer’, Fashion Practice 4, no. 2 (2012): 239–62; Marilyn DeLong, Barbara Heinemann and Kathryn Reiley, ‘Hooked on Vintage!’, Fashion Theory 9, no. 1 (2005): 23–42; Nancy L. Fischer, ‘Vintage, the First 40 Years’, Culture Unbound 7 (2015): 45–66; Nicky Gregson and Louise Crewe, Second-Hand Cultures (Oxford: Berg, 2003); Samantha Holland, Modern Vintage Homes and Leisure Lives: Ghosts & Glamour (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); Heike Jenss, ‘Dressed in History: Retro Styles and the Construction of Authenticity in Youth Culture’, Fashion Theory 8, no. 4 (2004): 387–403; Heike Jenss, Fashioning Memory: Vintage Style and Youth Culture (London: Bloomsbury, 2015); Jennifer Le Zotte, From Goodwill to Grunge: A History of Secondhand Styles and Alternative Economies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017); Maria MacKinney-Valentin, Fashioning Identity Status Ambivalence in Contemporary Fashion (London: Bloomsbury, 2017); Angela McRobbie, ed., Zoot Suits and Second-Hand Dresses (London: Routledge, 1989); Alexandra Palmer and Hazel Clark, Old Clothes, New Looks: Second Hand Fashion (Oxford: Berg, 2005); Daniella Ryding, Claudia E. Henninger and Marta Blazquez Cano, eds., Vintage Luxury Fashion: Exploring the Rise of the Secondhand Clothing Trade (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); Raphael Samuel, “Retrofitting” and “Retrochic”, in Theatres of Memory (London: Verso, 1994), 51–118.

5

Sampson, ‘Entanglement, Affect and Experience’. See also, Ellen Sampson, Worn: Footwear, Attachment and the Affects of Wear (Bloomsbury: London, 2020).

6

Ibid., 58.

7

Tony E. Adams, Carolyn Ellis and Stacy Holman Jones, ‘Autoethnography’, in The International Encyclopaedia of Communication Research Methods, ed. Jörg Matthes (John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 2017), available at: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/9781118901731.iecrm0011

8

Sampson, ‘Entanglement, Affect and Experience’, 72.

9

Hilary Davidson, ‘The Embodied Turn: Making and Remaking Dress as an Academic Practice’, Fashion Theory 23, no. 3 (2019): 330.

10 See Philip Sykas, ‘Caring or Wearing?’, Museums Journal 87, no. 3 (1987): 155–7. There are rare occasions when the wear of certain museum artefacts can be deemed appropriate. For example, as

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part of wider attempts to de-colonize museums, it can be appropriate for those from the original communities who created them, to wear objects held in museum collections in order to connect with their heritage. 11 Ingrid Mida, ‘Animating the Body in Museum Exhibitions of Fashion and Dress’, Dress 41, no. 1 (2015): 43. 12 Joanne Entwistle, The Fashioned Body (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 10. 13 Jenss, Fashioning Memory, 30. 14 Alison Gill and Abby Mellick Lopes, ‘On Wearing: A Critical Framework for Valuing Design’s Already Made’, Design and Culture 3, no. 3 (2011): 307–27. 15 Ellen MacArthur Foundation, A New Textiles Economy: Redesigning Fashion’s Future (2017), http://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/publications. 16 Madeleine Ginsburg, ‘Rags to Riches: The Second-Hand Clothing Trade 1700–1978’, Costume 14 (1980): 121–35. 17 Gregson and Crewe, Second-Hand Cultures, 111. 18 Ibid., 172. 19 Ibid., 155. 20 Sophie Woodward, Why Women Wear What They Wear (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 55. 21 Gregson and Crewe, Second-Hand Cultures, 171. 22 Sampson, ‘Entanglement, Affect and Experience’, 58. 23 Woodward, Why Women Wear What They Wear, 51. 24 Ibid., 65. 25 Ben Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2002), 16. Cited in: Lisa Heinze, ‘Wardrobe Stories: Sustainability and the Everyday Aesthetics of Fashion Consumption’, Continuum 35, no. 6 (2021): 853–69. 26 Sampson, ‘Entanglement, Affect and Experience’, 68. 27 Alexandra Kim and Ingrid Mida, The Dress Detective: A Practical Guide to Object-based Research in Fashion (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). 28 Biddy Stanford in conversation, May 2022. 29 Ibid. 30 Gregson and Crewe, Second-Hand Cultures, 112. 31 Woodward, Why Women Wear What They Wear, 62. 32 Jenss, Fashioning Memory, 108. 33 Woodward, Why Women Wear What They Wear, 59.

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PART II

Everyday Fashion in Practice

16 The fabled Chintz: Global entanglement and South Asian agency in everyday British fashion, 1600–1800 Aditi Khare

British history, we are convinced, has to be transnational, recognising the ways in which our history has been one of connections across the globe, albeit in the context of unequal relations of power.1 Catherine Hall and Sonya O. Rose, preeminent historians of the British Empire, made this compelling argument in 2006. They decried the study of British history in isolation and argued for recognition of the fact that it has ‘functioned as a way of normalizing power relations and erasing our [British] dependence on and exploitation of others’.2 There is perhaps no better example of this process than the fabric of chintz. Printed and painted cottons, or chintz textiles, were a widely popular consumer choice in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain. These became common on the European landscape through trading companies’ activity in the South Asian subcontinent. Produced in various regions of the subcontinent, the cotton fabrics had long been the central currency within a global network of exchange.3 The vibrant and fast colours, hitherto rare in Europe, combined with the technical skills of a long-standing manufacturing industry in the subcontinent soon captured the imagination of the trans-Atlantic world as well. The involvement of English, Dutch, French and other European traders, diplomats and travellers was a vehicle for widespread use of chintz within Europe. By the mid-eighteenth century, the fabled fabric proved to be the motivation for significant textile innovation in British manufacturing and consumption processes. As a culturally, economically and politically critical fabric, chintz was a ‘material vector’4 for an extensive network of entanglement across the globe. Marcy Norton and Ralph Bauer have theorized that a paradigmatic shift away from ‘contact zones’, ‘peripheries’ or ‘borderlands’, is required for a nuanced understanding of these ‘dynamic processes of intercultural exchange

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and conflict that are neither static nor complete’. This entanglement is the primary focus of my chapter. Here, I highlight the role of South Asian useful knowledge, artisans, design vocabulary and manufacturing systems in eighteenth-century everyday British fashion. In the following sections, these intellectual legacies are explored through two key categories of involvement from the subcontinent – tacit manufacturing knowledge and diverse botanical knowledge. Both manufacture and consumption of chintz, throughout its trajectory, operated with multiple contributions from stakeholders on either side of the colonial power dynamic. Recognition of these complex exchanges – as well as the role of Indian presence within it – belies the simplified narratives of British industrialization and supposed Indian deindustrialization, compelling us to re-think the geographies of what we understand to be British fashion.

Chintz and the global textile trade in scholarship Giorgio Riello argued that trade in the subcontinent acted as an apprenticeship for European traders and manufacturers. Termed as the Indian apprenticeship, this process highlighted the role of South Asian tacit and codified artisanal knowledge in British chintz printing.5 The very idea of an apprenticeship, or training, emphasizes that the global manufacturing centre in South Asia acted as a source of instruction and inspiration for Britain’s budding cotton sector. As Ruth Barnes, Rosemary Crill, John Guy and K. N. Chaudhuri have discussed, the global trade in Indian textiles before European participation was vast – chronologically, geographically and culturally. In particular, Barnes’s seminal research expanded the boundaries of the field by arguing that these fabrics were traded across the world (particularly the middle east), as far back as the fourteenth century.6 Her research connected the South Asian subcontinent’s production centres with south-east Asian and African consumption zones. Similarly, John Guy detailed the intra-Asian textile trade through extensive networks between India, Sri Lanka, Thailand and other regions in the early modern period.7 Europe’s apprenticeship, therefore, was extensive and thorough, based on a complex prior network. Riello’s apprenticeship framework can be categorized into four major sections: material, technique, taste and design. The knowledge transfer in these categories transformed British understanding of fashion, textile decoration and consumer culture. Cotton trade with South Asia triggered knowledge dissemination about cotton and dyes as relevant raw materials. Further, the processes of chintz painting with mordants and kalam (brush) to achieve vibrant and fast colours on fabric marked a crucial addition to Europe’s explorations with textiles.8 Finally, trade, consumption and emulation of chintz provided significant impetus to the development of Britain’s consumer culture and design vocabulary. As Beverly Lemire argued, ‘European patterns of dress and domestic textiles were refashioned through the commercial, cultural and economic exchanges with Asia.’9 This chapter elaborates on the tacit entanglements to highlight the role of Indian knowledge in this refashioning, reading imperial and material sources against the grain for South Asian agency. The past two decades have seen disruptions of linear industrialization narratives in global textile history. Most recently, Ariane Fennetaux contributed to the conversation of Europe’s Indian apprenticeship.10 Her close study of chintz banyans (male informal robes) present in various western collections argued that the eighteenth-century Indian textile industry was producing specialized, ready-to-wear pieces at a scale unseen in the rapidly standardizing European ready-made clothing sector. In another notable example of South Asian design

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longevity and its appropriation in western fashion systems, Michelle Maskiell traced the production of Kashmiri shawls before their naturalization by nineteenth-century trans-Atlantic consumers and highlighted the intellectual legacy represented through the iconic ‘paisley’ motif.11 Further, Sarah Cheang argued that the appropriation of Chinese imperial aesthetic functioned beyond a design legacy and was highly instrumental in class identity formation in nineteenth-century Britain.12 These key works, among others, exemplify the methodology of entanglement proposed by anthropologist Nicholas Thomas and later Norton and Bauer – that ‘dynamic processes of intercultural exchange and conflict’ require a ‘symmetry of attention’.13 In this chapter the symmetry is addressed through close study of East India Company accounts and material objects entrenched in an imperial narrative. Catherine Dean and Dana Leibsohn’s ‘deception of visibility’ is a critical concept for this research, as it is for the non-Eurocentric scholarship discussed thus far.14 They criticize the idea of a ‘hybrid’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ trade object, arguing that debates of identity and ownership hurt our understanding of colonial agency. The deception functions through a surface-level analysis – that Indigenous people or cultural objects have to look Indigenous in order for them to be recognized as such. This excludes the influences of the non-dominant culture, at once fetishizing the ‘exotic’ aesthetic and displacing the adaptation exercised by the suppressed. In addition to Cheang and Maskiell’s work discussed so far, Sylvia Houghteling recently provided an excellent example of the deception in practice. Houghteling analysed the connections between English crewel work and Indian chintz.15 In her revisionist work, she argued that the visual language of the two textile groups was more entangled than has been previously understood, forming a relationship of mutual influence as opposed to a linear transfer from Britain to India. Notably, she demonstrated how visibility (or lack thereof) has hurt our understanding of both crewel work and chintz by reading previous scholarship against the grain. Adding to recent scholarship, this chapter expands on the concept of chintz as a supposedly ‘hybrid’ object.16 In order to recognize signs of South Asian agency, we look at visual sources such as botanical drawings and textiles themselves, textual sources such as East India Company records and recipe books and a collection of personal communication.

Dissemination and collection of tacit knowledge: Perspectives on the East India Company Tacit or non-codified knowledge plays a key role in understanding complex interactions within a diverse range of exchanges. In particular, it highlights the significance of artisanal technical information critical to the manufacture of chintz. Liliane Hilaire-Pérez argued that technical knowledge in the eighteenth century was heavily constituted through public culture, mobility and networks.17 She further stressed the prevalence of ‘open technique’ in the global sphere. Artisanal migration, tacit communication and mercantile analysis contributed towards a collective growth in ‘technological capabilities’ as a public culture. Additionally, Pérez concludes that ‘training merchants to gather and exchange information about local manufactures’ had a ‘cultural impact on technical thought’.18 This is particularly relevant while reading East India Company sources for voices of South Asian manufacturers. The Company factories, established in the subcontinent as centres for collection, quality control and trade administration, were important centres of cultural exchange. More importantly, they were spaces wherein the commodification of everyday British fashion was exercised through routine interactions between

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Company employees (factors) and Indian merchants. Riello has detailed how British, French and Dutch traders were thrust into a complex and unfamiliar market in the seventeenth century, plagued by costly mistakes. Their learning process – and the shaping of British consumers’ preference through them – was only navigable with a deep understanding of Indian textiles.19 Within the entanglements of chintz production, therefore, the interaction of East India Company agents and South Asian actors represented a crucial link. The subcontinent’s printed and painted cottons were somewhat part of English fashion as early as the sixteenth century.20 However, the wider spread of chintz within everyday British fashion was accelerated through regularized East India Company trade. Several historians have elaborated how the fabric was accepted within early modern British dress – as a mark of the cosmopolitan elite, as a popular choice among new consumer classes and as alternatives to ‘cheaper patterned-worsteds and silk-worsted mixes’.21 One of the most significant roles in this trajectory was that of the East India Company’s men operating within Indian knowledge networks. Lemire has extensively detailed how the Company officials generated demand and introduced the fabrics across multiple classes through ‘promotion of high-to-low quality garments’ such as gowns, head-dresses, pockets, sleeves, etc., and ‘production of commonly used ready-made articles from East Indian fabrics’ – banyans, shirts and shifts.22 The knowledge that allowed for such elaborate re-fashioning of British dress was acquired by the Company during its apprenticeship in the subcontinent – in a vast global market, ‘Indian merchants and producers became skilled in the creation of products suited to various classes of buyer’ across geographies and cultures.23 Chintz altered British fashion in countless ways, and it largely did so through complex trade networks centred around India. Tacit knowledge concerning chintz manufacture was transferred through live carriers and their experiences, the trade products and other accounts. Looking at the Company’s records for live and incidental information carriers indicates an increase in Britain’s epistemic base concerning cotton printing and painting. The East India Company letter books contain several instances of instructions sent from London regarding the quality of fabrics required in England and the preferred consumer choices to be reflected in the design.24 These were largely based on the auction prices of the East India Company’s quarterly auctions in London and samples of fabric (musters) sent from India, and would indicate the application of trade and design-based knowledge acquired by the merchants within England or Europe.25 Notably, this exchange of knowledge – and more specifically samples and musters – was reciprocal. The Company’s employees in India were regularly instructed to send samples and descriptions of the products of different regions, to identify products for trading. For example, in 1617 Francis Fetiplace and Robert Hughes wrote of Robert Young (who was instructed to oversee the trade of indigo fabrics in Agra): We have sent your worships by Robert Young musters of such sorts of cloths as are to be had in Agra in quantities, viz., six sorts, and are twelve pieces. The sorts are numbered from A to F, with their contents, names and prices written on their papers, and are bound and sealed up in six bundles.26 While such exchanges were arguably intended for commercial purposes, the samples and descriptions sent from manufacturing centres in South Asia to England played an important role in acclimatizing the English tastemakers with cotton textiles and the possibilities regarding their printing. In the earlier decades of England’s institutionalized trade in chintz, material objects such as samples and fabrics imported from the subcontinent helped with the acclimatization of the European consumers and merchants with cotton as a material and more importantly with

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the colour-fast qualities of the fabric. Partly unintentionally, these samples as well as the East India Company men carrying or dealing with them became carriers of tacit knowledge, which provided Britain’s textile industry with an epistemic design base on which to build a striking fashion commodity. Apart from fabric musters and instructions, the proximity of the East India Company’s men in India to the production centres of chintz also led to additions in tacit knowledge concerning production and trade. Proximity to and interaction with the manufacturers of these textiles could have led to the East India Company men becoming live carriers of knowledge, acquiring information through observation and communication. Probably the most extensive form of tacit transfer, unfortunately this has little to no surviving codified evidence. As we shall see in the next section however, material objects often speak to the presence of non-literary interaction. It should be noted that communication between the textile manufacturers and British traders would have been sporadic due to language inconsistencies and cultural differences. Interestingly, this makes space for our understanding of the Indian merchants who acted as middlemen (or brokers) in the chain of trade and production. Numerous South Asian traders, either employed by the East India Company or self-employed, acted as the link between the employees and the artisans. These men were responsible for collecting orders and payments from the employees and conducting the production in time for the fabrics to be delivered to the Company factories.27 The Company records mention several instances where the relations between the brokers and the Company officials were tumultuous, indicating that the communication of the Company’s men beyond the brokers was rare.28 Nevertheless, through Company records and proximity of the subordinate East India Company factories in relation to chintz production centres in India, we can see that there was at least some routine level of communication between the Company men and the Indian manufacturers and brokers. Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the East India Company established factories in India intended as centres for trade and collection of various commercial goods. The main factories were established at Surat, Bombay [now Mumbai], Madras and Calcutta [now Kolkata] – all of which were major ports and allowed for easy maritime trade. The subordinate factories, however, were established either along overland trade routes within the subcontinent, or near production centres to allow for supervision and quality control. The communications between employees indicate an increased level of involvement with local manufacturers. For instance, in 1709, Francis Hastings – a Company man assigned to inspect Barampore for trade goods and production – wrote to Thomas Pitt, the governor at the Madras factory, ‘Barampore is a day’s journey from this place affords abundance of weavers and holds very considerable merchants […] I don’t doubt your honour will find it for the Company’s advantage to send every year a person hither to make an involvement in longcloth, palampores […].’29 Similarly, the Company instructed the council at Madras in 1741, ‘on an invitation to settle at a port opened north of Vizagapatam send a person to enquire if proper sorts of cloth were made there’.30 These examples show that the East India Company was keen on establishing contact with production centres, albeit in order to eliminate middlemen, cost of transport and irregularities in product quality. They were not successful in eliminating the South Asian merchants who acted as brokers, and for various reasons these middlemen remained essential to the working of the East India Company.31 In addition, either accidently or due to circumstances, they also maintained occasional contact with the manufacturers, and in a few cases were also instructed to deal directly with the producers.32 The council at Madras noted in 1745 that the employees settled in Maddapollam and Vizagpatam had no protection or subordinate brokers and had to consequently procure

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goods themselves from the manufacturers.33 This contact, although a result of the shortage of Company’s resources and regional civil unrest, would have created direct exchange of useful manufacturing knowledge between the employees and the manufacturers. Production centres of textiles in the subcontinent and East India Company’s factories were often overlapping with either the manufacturing hubs or commercial ports. As Chaudhuri suggests, while the East India Company was not establishing centres of production, they were assessing existing centres for merits and advantages.34 This resulted in the establishment and abandonment of several subordinate factories as the production centres shifted over time due to civil unrest and natural causes. The continuous flux of movement and establishment of the new factories indicates a continuing discussion surrounding the commercial merits of chintz, standardization, finishing and design qualities which undoubtedly led to an increase in Britain’s awareness surrounding the cotton fabric. For instance, Charles Lokyer – who compiled a trade manual in 1711 – mentioned that the factories at Metchlepatam, Vizagapatam and Maddapollam along the Coromandel Coast near Madras were established for continued access to cotton and redwood manufacturers present there.35 Additionally, personal correspondence of the East India Company men and travellers in India contains some information about chintz. While there is no known record that establishes codified information collected by the East India Company for the purpose of transferring printing and painting techniques within this time period, experiential records show examples of transfer of tacit knowledge. Thomas Pitt said in a letter to London in 1700, I have with all diligence encouraged the painting trade, and have been at some charge to do it. Without any manner partiality I think we far outdo Masulipatam and hope by the next ship to send you a thousand pieces such as never were seen in the world, if I can but keep these cursed fellows from mixing the Southern Chay [material used for red dye] with the Northern, the latter being the best and costs much more.36 Here he was presumably talking about the cotton printers that were encouraged to settle at Fort St George, the Company factory at Madras. His statement about the quality of the fabric being painted indicates his awareness regarding the raw materials, the application process and its implications in the quality of product. Inviting painters to Fort St George in the seventeenth century was not the only time that the East India Company attempted to solve local issues and implement standardization by creating production centres. Chaudhuri writes of the situation in Surat in 1734 when the Company’s brokers complained of the weaver’s instability due to unrest in the region, and consequently the weavers were invited to the Company’s factory in Bombay to set up production.37 The Surat factory records from 1647 also mention a dyeing house established within the factory, with thirty-six vats dedicated for the purpose of dyeing calicoes for export to Britain.38 These instances of contact with skilled workers in the factories of the East India Company did not produce any codified manuals that we know of, but the observation and communication between manufacturers and employees certainly give us grounds to presume some extent of tacit transfer. Institutionally, the East India Company continued to be embroiled in political, commercial and military matters throughout the eighteenth century. The competition it faced from the New East India Company from the 1689 to 1709, reduction in its role as financial creditor to the government due to the establishment of the Bank of England in 1694, rivalry from the other trading companies and wars within Europe which often extended strategically and militarily to India – constituted issues that might have shifted the Company’s goals from

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accumulation of manufacturing knowledge.39 Nevertheless, it is crucial to recognize the role of the South Asian artisan’s knowledge through a decentralized approach to the global chintz network. Such histories return agency to the colonized culture, attributing intellectual contributions to India.

South Asian floral culture in English lived experience The trade and commodification of chintz operated within complex cultural entanglements in Britain. The fashion of the fabled textile grew as a part of the larger early modern fascination with all things exotic and floral. Beverly Lemire argued that the influx of painted and printed cottons into Britain was intertwined with new imperial practices of botanical collection and heightened floral presence in the British lived experience.40 This connection is critical to our understanding of chintz in Europe – it was a key link in the commodification of the benign flowers. It is within these botanical sources that we can look for South Asian artisans, visual language and floral inspiration from the subcontinent. Even more crucial is the recognition of the naturalization of these colonial legacies – such that they eventually came to symbolize a ‘hybrid’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ British fashion, often divorced from its imperial origins. Lemire emphasizes that by the eighteenth century, the cottons and the florals that inspired them were both domesticated in English settings and had significant ‘contribution to the creation of Englishness in material culture and cultural idiom’.41 The presence of flowers from all over the world, and particularly Asia, was evident in seventeenth-century Europe. Contrary to earlier characterization of pre-eighteenth-century consumption of chintz in Britain as a novelty, the material culture and botanical compilations of seventeenth-century document the encounters and exchange prior to the eighteenth century.42 As a product of flourishing global trade in which Europe was a participant, Asian flowers were increasingly commonplace in European life. Jack Goody has elaborated how explorations aimed at expanding the epistemological botanical base in Europe started as rapidly as early sixteenth century.43 The initial explorations – especially to Levant – were aided by trade and aimed at largely commercial expeditions. As early as 1494, Christopher Columbus’s second voyage included the collection of sugarcane cuttings – a valuable trade commodity for production and consumption in Europe.44 Beyond commercial trade, flowers from different parts of the world were commonplace in British food, spices, medical remedies and other spheres. One of many such examples is the Historia medicinal de las coasa que se traen de nuestras Indias Occidentales que sirven en medicina, written by Nicolás Monardes in the late sixteenth century.45 Compiled as a collection of natural products from the Americas, this book contained also the procedures by which these products could be used in medical practice.46 Its wide popularity and numerous translations are indicative of the prevalence of foreign botanical products. Several similar examples abound in the sphere of food in early modern England. Joan Thirsk elaborated on how the increasing encounters in the Indian subcontinent meant that the recommended diets in late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries often included substances from Indian diets.47 The markets in London, Antwerp and Amsterdam were filled with new and ‘exotic’ natural products from various parts of the world. First-hand experiences in the Americas and in Asia meant that the flora from these parts of the world and its usage in food were observed, recorded and circulated among the public in early modern Britain.

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Chintz itself was gaining a presence in pre-seventeenth-century Europe. Lemire has analysed material objects and inventories to find several instances of use of the cotton fabric in sixteenthcentury England.48 These objects included furniture, fabric lengths, mass-market garments and various other types of cloth. She further elaborates how the quantitative and qualitative density of this influx increased once the Portuguese, Dutch and English trading companies became active in the early seventeenth century.49 These arguments are supported by numerous recent studies into East India and Levant trade – denying the claim that global floral presence in seventeenth-century Europe was a product of mere novelties. K. N. Chaudhuri’s compilation of early English East India Company’s Indian trade discusses how the chintz trade gained prominence in the 1620s due to a rapidly expanding market in England.50 As a part of the larger trade network which operated from key cities including Mokha, Aleppo and Gombroon in the Middle East; Lisbon, London and Amsterdam in Europe; Goa, Surat, Dacca and Lahore in the Indian subcontinent; and Melaka, Macao and Nagasaki in East Asia; European trading companies aided circulation of the culture of flowers – and the popularity of chintz – across the globe. The presence of South Asian floral culture became more prominent in the seventeenth century. This is evident in the medical texts published in Europe for public consumption. One such example is Nicholas Culpeper’s Complete Herbal, published in England in 1653, a collection of recipes and resources that can be used to cure various remedies.51 His collection of natural resources contains several Indian plants and flowers, intended for medicinal use by the general public. The recipes for ‘heat in the head’ and the stomach include application of the root of ‘spikenard, Celtic and Indian’.52 Spikenard is a plant native to the hills of Himalayas, useful for making perfume. Similarly, recipes for pills include Indian Myrobalan (purple leaf plum), Indian Bellerick (Indian gooseberry) and Indian Diagrydium (possibly Dacrydium – a genus of conifers).53 The knowledge of colonial botany and its resources thus did not remain restricted to elite generation by natural historians for consumption by a selective audience – neither did it remain on the fabrics and other decorative objects. Instead, the existence of common prescriptive knowledge is indicative of the increasing familiarity with South Asian flora. The acceptance of these and several other Asian plants in the everyday knowledge of English lived experience in also evident in Theatrum Botanicum: The Theatre of Plantes – a book on herbals by John Parkinson published in London in 1640.54 In a mammoth collection of plants and their benefits, Parkinson has included several plants from South Asia and the West Indian colonies, and goes into remarkable detail about their origins, transport to Europe, domestication and Indigenous uses. Take, for instance, the description of the ‘Myrobalani – Myrobalan of Purging Indian Plummes’.55 Johnson describes five species of these trees, specifying that none of these trees grow in Europe but grow wild in various parts of the South Asian subcontinent. Further, he mentions the following: […] to stir up some ingenious mind among our Merchants, that trade to Aleppo & Cairo, & into Persia and the East Indies, to give order to their factors, if they doe it not themselves, to enquire and seeke out such of the sorts that are to be found in the places of their abode, and either to plant the stones of these severall kinds in those warmer countries, if they abide any time in them, that when they are a little growne they might then send them hither: or send the fresh stones over hither to us (for those are too dry that are brought for physicke use) that wee may plant them here to try if they will not growe and abide with us, that at least, having but a sight of the forme of the leaves of any sort, we might compare them with the descriptions that writers have made of them […].56

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The request for plant specimens to be brought into Europe through trade shows the prevalence of such a practice, and the general inclination of the society aimed at collecting species of flora and fauna from around the world. In other instances the book also mentions the manner in which the plant species were brought into Europe – laying out networks of royal patronage, trade and religious exploration.57 Texts such as this one bridge the divide usually prevalent in the case of scientific knowledge and direct our attention instead to the general presence of tacit knowledge that was generated through Indigenous practice, transferred through multifaceted networks and employed through common practice and consumption. More importantly, it allows us to deny the categorization of chintz as a mere decorative fabric, and instead highlights its role within the larger colonial systems. The seventeenth century was characterized with further naturalization of the aesthetic of chintz from the subcontinent. The advent of the scientific revolution in early modern Europe coupled with colonial explorations in the seventeenth century saw a rise in codified botanical collections and exchange of physical plants. The transition from botany as a division of medical theory to its position as a ‘big science’ was also aided, and often driven by botanical exploration that was only possible due to increased access to new geographies, people and resources.58 Deepak Kumar has demonstrated how the earliest explorations of colonial botanical knowledge relied on individual interest – and thus allowed South Asian knowledge to exist somewhat independently of British derivations.59 For instance, key texts such as Hortus Indicus Malabaricus (Heinrich van Rheede, 1678–93) and Icones Plantarum Malabaricum (Unknown, early eighteenth century) – records of the plants of the Malabar coast of India and Sri Lanka respectively – both make note of the plant in its natural habitat, usually adding its name in Hindi, Sanskrit or Tamil. Beth Tobins’s detailed work also discusses how the sensitivity shown in these texts by placing the plant in its colonial climes was a pre-Linnaean form of collecting knowledge.60 Thus, at the stage of encounter and exploration, knowledge collected from the Asian subcontinent was often incorporated within Europe’s culture of flowers in its Indigenous format. The late eighteenth-century fashion, however, did not ascribe to similar sentiments. Among other spheres, all the forms of tacit transfer discussed above fuelled Europe’s fascination with South Asian flowers in both decorative arts and actual specimens. The extensive popularity and consumption of colonial flora shed light on the manner in which flowers became an increasingly dominant part of the British everyday experience. While eventually this knowledge was reduced to scientific domains where the originating culture was a mere mention – if at all – the early stage of encounters accorded some agency to the colonial cultures as sources of knowledge. Daniela Bleichmar has succinctly compiled colonial power into a cycle of encounter, reinterpretation and appropriation.61 In terms of chintz fabrics, this can be translated as the following – encounter with painted cottons, flowers and their increasing consumption in everyday life; reinterpretation through inputs of consumer preference, European printing industry, and standardization of botany; and finally appropriation, or the stage where these interactions or commodities are naturalized such that they conform into categories of colonized, other, or inferior. It is critical to look for South Asian agency at multiple moments of this complex process in order to re-appropriate the narrative – making Indian actants active participants. As Deborah Root has detailed, a eurocentric linear understanding of commodification labels colonized cultures as ‘objectified, passive sources of inspiration rather than participants in an exchange of ideas’.62 Continuing analysis – of chintz as a decorative fabric – without regard for its inherent role as an imperial tool – often supported colonial ideas of the ‘exotic’ commodity. Indeed, the

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commodification of Indian aesthetics relied entirely on its simultaneous appropriation and exotification. Joanna de Groot has argued that everyday consumption of foreign objects hinged on their marketing as ‘appealingly exotic but potentially accessible commodities for purchase and possession’.63 Chintz was an ‘exotic’ novelty, but it became ubiquitous largely owing to its representation as a ‘safely exotic stage, without the risks and inconvenience of foreign travel’.64 This is reflected in the widespread consumption of Indian knowledge we see here. The rehabilitation of Indigenous plants, their representation in textiles and their knowledge were entrenched in power imbalances – demonstrating the ability to own and commodify the exotic. The eighteenth century in Britain was characterized by movements such as the scientific revolution, the enlightenment and extensive imperial consolidation. In terms of flowers and chintz, the changes were drenched in imperial systems – after a peak of Indian chintz consumption, competing European industries developed to an incomparable extent. Further, the implementation of Linnaean botany, centralization of scientific knowledge, establishment of a network of botanical gardens and the crystallization of power structures aided this increase in the strength of the floral culture.65 Both products and knowledge travelling within global networks through the long eighteenth century were emblematic of these evolving contexts. South Asian artisans producing chintz or the artists hired to make illustrations in botanical books (often the same) were constantly adapting and responding to these changing contexts – their art reflected this. The amalgamation of various influences and the consequent entangled visual vocabularies of the floral commodities can be further illustrated through some examples from an eighteenth century chintz jacket from the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada (Figure 16.1). The museum records trace its production to the Coromandel Coast of India in the early eighteenth century.66

FIGURE 16.1  Woman’s jacket (wentke), Chintz: cotton tabby, painted mordants and resist, 1700–1799. Royal Ontario Museum, 962.107.2. Image courtesy of the Royal Ontario Museum.

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The construction of the jacket, especially the manner in which the pieces attach at the seams, is indicative of the fact that the fabric would have been repurposed to make this jacket. This was common practice at the time due to the popularity of the material and the early modern culture of consumption. Although the stains and mending patches on the garment indicate moderate use, it is nevertheless remarkably preserved – the green and yellow parts of the design show very little fading, which is highly unusual for a garment from the eighteenth century. The relatively good condition of the designs allows us to see the manner in which the fabric was printed. While the fabric as a whole would have been mordant dyed to achieve varied hues of red,67 indigo and turmeric seem to have been over painted in order to achieve the blue and greens. The remarkable details in white are products of resist dyeing – fine details such as the one on this garment required an exceptional level of skill common to most Indian chintzes in the early modern period (Figure 16.2).68 Additionally, occasionally messy and overlapping outlines indicate hand drawing of the stencil prior to dyeing and painting. Remarkable skill and ingenuity aside, the designs of the motifs showcase a range of visual influences. These designs were shaped by tacit transfers of knowledge across trade networks – networks that pre-dated Euro-centric trade. Take, for instance, the bird that appears on multiple places in the jacket (Figure 16.3). The 1970 catalogue of the garment attributes the design of the birds to Persian influence.69 While this is likely true, the motif also bears remarkable resemblance to the phoenix design common to Chinese decorative style and – more specifically – chinoiserie.70 If we look for Indian depictions of this motif beyond the realm of textiles, we can clearly identify its existence in multiple pieces of Indian art. Mughal miniatures from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century at the National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institute, depict the phoenix in nearly the same style as that on the chinoiserie samples and

FIGURE 16.2  Resist detail of Woman’s jacket (wentke), 1700–1799. Royal Ontario Museum, 962.107.2. Image courtesy of the Royal Ontario Museum.

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FIGURE 16.3  Bird detail of Woman’s jacket (wentke), 1700–1799. Royal Ontario Museum, 962.107.2. Image courtesy of the Royal Ontario Museum.

the jacket from early eighteenth century (Figure 16.4).71 These miniatures were created under the patronage of Mughal emperors in India, who were powerful benefactors and guardians of Indian art and design through much of the early modern period. Taking into account the fact that the development of several schools of South Asian painting style in the sixteenth century was largely due to the patronage of the Mughal court and its training of artisans, the appearance of the phoenix in the miniatures and eventually on the jacket creates a complex picture of visual culture evolution in fashion.72 The chronology of the pieces under consideration here further convolutes this intricate network. While seminal historian and curator John Irwin argued that chinoiserie entered Indian art and textiles through European influence and consumer demand, the existence of this motif in Indian miniatures pre-dating peak European trade defies such clear categorization.73 Both miniatures I have shown here are from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. As we have already discussed, this was the period of trade wherein European trading companies were only beginning to conduct independent trade. For a large part, the thriving Asia-centred global trade within which the European traders acted as freight carriers dominated this period.74 John Guy has further elaborated how even the independent trade conducted by European companies was largely intra-Asian well into the seventeenth century – since more profits could be gained by participating in a well-established prior network.75 The Asian trade network facilitated extensive exchange of spices, fabric and forest products across several important regions such as South East Asia and China, throughout the medieval and early modern period. The

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FIGURE 16.4  Animals and Birds, Mughal Dynasty, seventeenth century. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C. Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1907.623.

increasing complexity of this network and the involvement of multiple stakeholders ensured substantial transfer of tacit knowledge and visual language. Further, Guy’s discussion of the highly specialized designs created for individual regions demonstrates South Asian expertise in production processes that responded to specific consumer choices in East and South East Asia.76 While this does not necessarily imply that there was no tacit transfer to Europe at this time, it is important to note that complex exchanges behind seemingly benign motifs can defy the deceptions of visibility. Other floral motifs on the jacket reveal the presence of additional transfers. As per the museum records, some flowers on the fabric resemble peonies.77 While one might assume that a flower such as the peony – widespread in the current British lived experience – was free of trade influences, such an assumption would ignore early modern exchange of botanical specimens between Europe and China. Jack Goody has elaborated how popular flowers such as ‘camellias, chrysanthemums, peonies, magnolias, forsythia, wisteria and the gardenia’ travelled to Europe from China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.78 Their wider proliferation

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and acceptance, as well as eventual naturalization into the British culture, were a result of their popularity in many cultural forms – both decorative objects and lived environment. A rather striking example of South Asian flora influencing the design of this jacket is presented through an unusual motif (Figure 16.5). This combination of small flowers with rather square petals and the tubular stacked leaves is not prominent in either chinoiserie or European art, but a nearly identical botanical drawing can be found in William Roxburgh’s compilation of plants of the Coromandel Coast (Figure 16.6).79 Since Plants of the Coast of Coromandel was compiled in the late eighteenth century, this interpretation of the plant does not contain the vernacular name or other geographical characteristics of its habitat. The purpose of this collection of plants was to add to the increasingly powerful colonial botanical network – exercised through botanical gardens, Linnaean nomenclature, scientific classification and institutionalization of codified colonial knowledge. Nevertheless, the presence of this plant (Justicia pulchella) is important since it emphasizes that both South Asian art and flora contributed to the designs of chintz. Both Kapil Raj and Beth Fowkes Tobin have argued for recognition of the colonial artists responsible for botanical books in the eighteenth century.80 In particular, Tobin argues that the agency of the artist is visible in the drawings irrespective of the power structure that produced them. Re-interpretation of the botany of the empire meant that most of the naturalists were commissioned to collect, sample and transfer specimens to London. Once in London, the samples were assimilated into the ‘British Botanical Empire’ through gardens such as Kew.81

FIGURE 16.5  Flower detail of Woman’s jacket (wentke), 1700–1799. Royal Ontario Museum, 962.107.2. Author’s photograph reproduced courtesy of the Royal Ontario Museum.

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FIGURE 16.6  Flower drawing, plate 177. William Roxburgh, Plants of the Coast of Coromandel: Selected from drawings and descriptions presented to the hon. court of directors of the East India Company, (London, 1795–1819). Image from the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Contributed by the Missouri Botanical Garden.

However, this process of assimilation involved several steps, networks and individuals who operated somewhat independent of the linear goals of scientific botanist such as Sir Joseph Banks – unofficial director of the Botanic Gardens at Kew.82 Raj’s extensive study of a French manuscript (Jardin de Lorxia, L’Empereur) highlights how the author acknowledged the wide network of Indigenous people such as fakirs (religious men), artisans, apothecaries, gardeners and merchants responsible for the codification of his manuscript.83 Crucially, he discusses the fact that local artists were employed in creation of the botanical drawings since Chandernagore being a major trading port, tens of thousands of Asian merchants, interpreters, bankers, and craftspeople worked for the European export market. Many were painters who earned their livelihood executing floral designs on calicoes that formed some of the main Indian exports to Europe. L’Empereur thus found it ‘easy to get natives to draw the plants.84 This is especially significant since it highlights overlap between the botanical artists and the chintz painters. Further, it emphasizes the relationship between flora in the lived experience and technical skill in cotton manufacture.

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This recognition of the agency of Indian artists and respect for Indigenous knowledge was also present in other manuscripts the frontispieces of both Jardin de Lorxia and Hortus Indicus Malabaricus present striking acknowledgement of colonial cultures as knowledge producers. Both the illustrations feature South Asian individuals – while the Jardin depicts them engaged in drawing a floral specimen with L’Empereur supervising, Malabaricus depicts them as engaging with the specimens and presenting them to ‘the goddess of Indian botany’.85 Both the central scenes are framed by other lush flora – placing the actors and plants within their geographical origins. Raj has further detailed how the Indian artists that created the Jardin frontispiece might have had access to the Malabaricus, since they follow the general visual structure but carefully re-interpreted the individual elements according to their training.86 Thus, the woman on the left in Jardin can be seen as an interpretation of the statues in the summerhouse on the Malabaricus piece. Similarly, the actors in the Jardin piece are not simply offering the botanical specimens, but actively engaging with them – the artists on the left illustrating the plant and the fakir (learned man) on the right recording the knowledge in his manuscript. Further, the architecture bordering the Malabaricus piece is also similar to the trees arching over the scene in Jardin – a visual tradition commonly seen in other Indian art.87 What is perhaps most remarkable is that neither of these pieces depicts the hierarchical setup of imperial power that was common in later European visual culture. The goddess of botany in Malabaricus is not European, bearing similarities in features to the other South Asian actors on the scene. Similarly, the only European represented in Jardin is presumably L’Empereur himself – observing and not supervising, standing at the same level as the artists and not visually superior. His proximity to the fakir and his role as an observer are reflective of the methods he employed to collect knowledge – L’Empereur elaborates in the ‘note to the reader’ how he developed a relationship with the fakirs over several years and could eventually qualify to offer them alms in exchange for botanical knowledge.88 Further, he built on this body of oral knowledge by studying codified Indigenous texts that circulated in the form of palm-leaf manuscripts. The methodology of research and knowledge accumulation as well as the visual representation in the frontispiece are both excellent examples of some degree of acknowledgement for the colonized culture.

Conclusion: Finding agency in everyday entanglement Deborah Root argued that appropriation signifies ‘not only the taking up of something and making it ones’ own but also the ability to do so’.89 The commodification of chintz and its assimilation within the complex representations of British fashion are emblematic, not only of an imperial process, but also of the displacement of South Asian agency. Therefore, as an act of re-appropriation, the entanglements studied in this chapter subvert our understanding of the decorative and ‘exotic’ chintz. The ubiquitous fabric has often been studied for its ornamental representations, but ‘visibility … tricks us into recognizing the native only in very limited and circumscribed ways’.90 There is power in moving beyond the visible. Reading between the lines, we can acknowledge the inextricable linking of the everyday Indian artisan and the British consumer within complex colonial networks. While the manufacturing knowledge and its representation across historical sources inevitably continue to be drenched in power imbalances and ‘dependence on and exploitation of others’, these sources embody a more nuanced approach by recognizing a moment in British history as one of ‘connections across the globe’.91

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Notes 1

Catherine Hall and Sonya O. Rose eds., At Home with Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 5.

2 Ibid. 3

John Guy, ‘One Thing Leads to Another: Indian Textiles and the Early Globalisation of Style’, in The Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500–1800, ed. Amelia Peck (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013), 13–27.

4

Michelle Maskiell, ‘Consuming Kashmir: Shawls and Empires, 1500–2000’, Journal of World History 13, no. 1 (2002): 29; Ralph Bauer and Marcy Norton, ‘Introduction. Entangled Trajectories: Indigenous and European Histories’, Colonial Latin American Review 26, vol.1 (2017): 8.

5

Giorgio Riello, ‘The Indian Apprenticeship: The Trade of Indian Textiles and the Making of European Cottons’, in How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian Textiles, eds. Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy (Boston: Brill, 2009), 309–46.

6

Ruth Barnes, Indian Block-Printed Textiles in Egypt, the Newberry Collection in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 8–9.

7

John Guy, ‘One Thing Leads to Another: Indian Textiles and the Early Globalisation of Style’, in The Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500–1800, ed. Amelia Peck (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013), 13–27. See also: K. N. Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

8

Rajarshi Sengupta, ‘An Artisanal History of Kalam?’, Journal of Textile Design Research and Practice 7, no. 1 (2019): 25–37.

9

Beverly Lemire, ‘Fashioning Cottons: Asian Trade, Domestic Industry and Consumer Demand, 1660–1780’, in The Cambridge History of Western Textiles, vol. 1, ed. David Jenkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 494.

10 Ariane Fennetaux, ‘Indian Gowns Small and Great: Chintz Banyans Ready Made in the Coromandel, c.1680–c.1780’, Costume 55, no. 1 (2021): 49–73. 11 Maskiell, ‘Consuming Kashmir’, 41. 12 Sarah Cheang, ‘Dragons in the Drawing Room: Chinese Embroideries in British Homes, 1860–1949’, Textile History 39, no. 2 (2008): 223–49. 13 Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 5; Bauer and Norton, ‘Entangled Trajectories’, 2. 14 Carolyn Dean and Dana Leibsohn, ‘Hybridity and Its Discontents: Considering Visual Culture in Visual Spanish America’, Colonial Latin American Review 12, no. 1, (2003): 15. 15 Sylvia Houghteling, ‘Origins in Entanglement: Connections between English Crewel Embroidery and Indian Chintz’, in Cloth that Changed the World: The Coloured Cottons of India, ed. Sarah Fee (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 182–91. 16 The use of the term ‘hybrid’ here is intentional, in order to highlight the flaws in the global understanding of material objects from historically colonized cultures, and the urgent need for an entangled framework. 17 Liliane Hilaire-Pérez, ‘Technology as a Public Culture in the Eighteenth Century: The Artisans’ Legacy’, History of Science 45, no. 2 (2007): 135–53. 18 Hilaire-Pérez, ‘The Artisan’s Legacy’, 139, 147.

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19 Giorgio Riello, Cotton: The Fabric That Made the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 96. 20 Lemire, ‘Fashioning Cottons’, 494. 21 See John Styles, The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Alexandra Palmer, ‘Fashioning Chintz for the West in the Eighteenth Century’, in Fee (ed.) Cloth that Changed the World, 137–49; Lemire, ‘Fashioning Cottons’. 22 Lemire, ‘Fashioning Cottons’, 495–6. 23 Beverly Lemire, ‘Fashioning Global Trade: Indian Textiles, Gender Meanings and European Consumers, 1500–1800’, in Riello and Roy (eds.) How India Clothed the World, 370. 24 See particularly: British Library, East India Company records, Surat records, IOR/G/36. 25 K. N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the East India Company, 1660–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 280. 26 William Foster (ed.), Letters Received by the East India Company From Its Servants in the East, vol VI, (London: 1896), 249. 27 John Irwin and P. R. Schwartz, Studies in Indo-European Textile History (Ahmedabad: Calico Museum of Textiles, 1966), 13. 28 Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia, 306. 29 British Library, Thomas Pitt’s Correspondence, MS 59481, 30. 30 British Library, Miscellaneous Factory Records, IOR/G/40/7A. 31 Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia, 304. 32 Ibid., 305. 33 British Library, East India Company records, ‘Relating to the method of providing callicoes on the coast of coromandel and the nature of the settlement there.’ Memoranda of Correspondence, Vol 102, 1745. 34 Chaudhuri, Trading World of Asia, 239–40. 35 Charles Lokyer, An Account of Trade in India (London: 1711), 13. 36 Letter from Thomas Pitt, British Museum MS. 22842, f. 31, quoted in Irwin, ‘Indian Textile Trade in the Seventeenth Century’, 1. 37 Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia, 251. 38 BL, Surat Factory Records, Vol. 102A, 121. 39 Lucy S. Sutherland, The East India Company in Eighteenth Century Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), 26. 40 Beverly Lemire, ‘Domesticating the Exotic: Floral Culture and the East India Calico Trade with England, c.1600–1800’, Textile: Cloth and Culture 1, no. 1 (2003): 71. 41 Ibid., 69. 42 John Irwin, ‘Oriental Style in English Decorative Art’, The Burlington Magazine 97, (1955): 106–14. 43 Jack Goody, The Culture of Flowers (CUP Archive, 1993), 177. 44 Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan (eds.), Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 12. 45 Daniela Bleichmar, ‘Books, Bodies, and Fields: Sixteenth Century Transatlantic European Encounters with the New World Material Medica’, in Schiebinger and Swan, Colonial Botany, 156. 46 Ibid., 159.

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47 Joan Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England: Phases, Fads, Fashions 1500–1760 (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007), 164. 48 Lemire, ‘Domesticating the Exotic’, 67. 49 Ibid., 68. 50 K. N. Chaudhuri, The English East India Company: The Study of an Early Joint-Stock Company 1600–1640 (London: Routledge, 1999), 174. 51 Nicholas Culpeper, Culpeper’s Complete Herbal and English Physician (London: 1653). 52 Culpeper, Culpeper’s Complete Herbal, 258. 53 Ibid., 345. 54 John Parkinson, Theatrum Botanicum: The Theatre of Plants, or, an Herball of a Large Extent (London: 1640). 55 Parkinson, Theatrum Botanicum, 246. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid., 1596. 58 Harold J. Cook, ‘Global Economies and Local Knowledge in the East Indies’, in Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World, ed. Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 185. 59 Deepak Kumar, ‘Botanical Explorations and the East India Company: Revisiting Plant Colonialism’, in The East India Company and the Natural World, ed. Vinita Damodaran, Anna Winterbottom, Alan Lester (Palgrave Studies in World Environmental History. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 21. 60 Hendrik van Rheede, Hortus Indicus Malabaricus (Amsterdam: 1678–1693); Tinde Van Andel, Ariane Scholman and Mieke Beumer, ‘Icones Plantarum Malabaricarum: Early 18th Century Botanical Drawings of Medicinal Plants from Colonial Ceylon’, Journal of Ethnopharmacology 222 (2018): 11–20; Beth F. Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 182. 61 Bleichmar, ‘Books, Bodies, and Fields’, 155. 62 Deborah Root, Cannibal Culture: Art, Appropriation, and the Commodification of Difference (New York: Routledge, 1996), 72. 63 Joanna de Groot, ‘Metropolitan Desires and Colonial Connections: Reflections on Consumption and Empire’, in Hall and Rose, At Home with Empire, 187. 64 Lemire, ‘Domesticating the Exotic’, 72. 65 Khyati Nagar, ‘Between Calcutta and Kew: The Divergent Circulation and Production of Hortus Bengalensis and Flora Indica’, in The Circulation of Knowledge between Britain, India and China, ed. Bernard Lightman, Gordon McOuat and Larry Stewart (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 153–78. 66 Museum Records, 962.107.2, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto. 67 Mordant dyeing is a common process of colouring fabrics that uses an additional chemical (mordant) that reacts with the dye pigment to promote adhesion with the fibres. A large category of natural dye materials is soluble in water such that they mix in water when applied to the fabric and promote application. However, in order to ensure that this coloured pigment is retained on the fabric and does not wash off in subsequent washes, the mordant mixes with the dye in order to yield an insoluble coloured substance on the surface. In practice, the mordant is first applied on the fabric in varying concentrations, followed by the dye solution. A greater concentration of mordant ensures a deeper colour and so forth. Additionally, different mordants react with different dyes to yield varied basic colours. Thus, mordant dyeing allows the artisan to achieve multiple hues of various colours within the same pattern.

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68 Resist dyeing is a common method of dyeing employed to achieve either white or similar light designs on coloured backgrounds. The basic process involves applying wax on the parts of the pattern that were meant to stay white. When dipped in a dye vat, these ‘resisted’ parts would not absorb the colour – instead, the ground would take on the colour of the dye. This process was commonly used in indigo dyeing for white designs on blue ground; however, it was by no means limited to indigo vats and instead extended to other colours that could be painted or printed on the fabric. 69 John Irwin, Origins of chintz: With a Catalogue of Indo-European Cotton Paintings in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto (London: 1970) plate 119a. 70 State Bed, circa 1715, Calke Abbey, Derbyshire, National Trust, UK. 71 ‘The World of Animals’, Miskin, ca. 1590. National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institute. < https://asia.si.edu/object/F1945.29/> ‘Animals and Birds’, early seventeenth century, National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institute < https://asia.si.edu/object/F1907.623/>. 72 John Guy, and D. Swallow, eds., Arts of India: 1550–1900 (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1990), 28. 73 John Irwin, ‘Art and the East India Trade’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 120, (June 1972): 456. 74 Sinnappah Arasaratnam, Maritime India in the Seventeenth Century (Delhi; New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 63; Chaudhuri, The English East India Company, 175. 75 John Guy, ‘One Thing Leads to Another’, in Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500–18000, ed. Amelia Peck (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013), 17. 76 Ibid.,16. 77 Museum Records, 962.107.2, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto. 78 Goody, The Culture of Flowers, 214. 79 William Roxburgh, Plants of the Coast of Coromandel: Selected from Drawings and Descriptions Presented to the Hon. Court of Directors of the East India Company (London: 1795–1819), 177. 80 Kapil Raj, ‘Surgeons, Fakirs, Merchants, and Craftspeople: Making L’Empereurs’s Jardin in Early Modern South Asia’, in Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World, ed. Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power. 81 Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power, 176. 82 Nagar, ‘Between Calcutta and Kew’, 155. 83 Raj, ‘Surgeons, Fakirs, Merchants, and Craftspeople’, 460. 84 Ibid., 461. 85 Raj, ‘Surgeons, Fakirs, Merchants, and Craftspeople’, 463. For the frontispieces, see Raj, ‘Surgeons, Fakirs, Merchants, and Craftspeople’, 454; Hendrik van Rheede, Hortus Indicus Malabaricus (Amsterdam, 1678–1693). 86 Raj, ‘Surgeons, Fakirs, Merchants, and Craftspeople’, 463. 87 Ibid., 461. 88 Ibid., 459. 89 Root, Cannibal Culture, 70. 90 Dean and Leibsohn, ‘Hybridity and Its Discontents’, 15. 91 Hall and Rose, At Home with the Empire, 5.

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FIGURE 17.1  Flannel waistcoat found on the body of Henry Wardell, Mare Street Baptist Chapel, 2014. © MOLA (Museum of London Archaeology), photograph by Andy Chopping.

17 Henry Wardell’s flannel waistcoat Hilary Davidson

Henry Wardell died in November 1840. He was eighty-eight, a good age, and was buried in the grounds of the Mare Street Baptist Chapel in Hackney, East London. His family had options for his graveclothes. They could have wrapped him in a woollen winding sheet, paid the undertaker for a respectable cotton or linen shroud – a backless garment like a hospital gown with frilled decoration on the front, or had sham grave clothes made which coarsely imitated normal clothing. In the end, the final clothing Henry ever wore was his old, shabby, much darned and mended wool flannel ‘waistcoat’, a kind of undershirt with minimal shaping that buttoned down the front, had bound edges and a round collarless neckline. Perhaps it had been his cosy and comfortable companion during an autumn illness. Perhaps it was his worst garment, one nobody would miss in the ground, too far gone for passing on to a family member or selling second-hand. And so, Henry and his shirt lay in the earth until their not-so-final repose was disturbed by archaeologists in 2014. The garment that reached me through a chain of excavators and conservators is the intersection of two of my research interests, burial dress and flannel underwear. Both are kinds of clothing with only partial glimpses appearing in sources, hidden below the comparative dazzle of mourning dress and linen underwear, respectively. They are everyday dress whose familiarity for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britons was much greater than scholars have so far emphasized, partly because their quotidian and prosaic nature is only revealed at the margins, in occasional collecting, and in the case of burial textiles, almost exclusively through archaeology. Both are founded on wool, staple fibre of the British economy for centuries. The Burying in Woollen Acts of 1666–80 (finally repealed in 1812) attempted to dictate that everyone must be buried in textiles made from wool or pay a hefty fee for an exemption to be buried in linen. The conditions of soil burial support this preference as proteinaceous fibres survive far better than cellulose. Cotton only emerges the damp earth via mineralization. As the legal boundary of 150  years before the present-day creeps further outwards from history so archaeologists increasingly dig up the early- to mid-nineteenth century and peer into the secrets of what its people wore after death.

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The finds are almost always partial – scraps of iron-stained and tar-encrusted wool with many holes here, a silk ribbon loop with the pins shaping its form tarnished to its satiny surface there. Sometimes identifiable parts of clothing or sewn items emerge and by careful extrapolation match with real, sham, or grave clothing. Henry’s shirt is rare for being relatively large and whole which enabled its identification as something worn before death. The careful darns and mending spoke of its long use, a workhorse piece of clothing with enough original details surviving to compare with collected examples. Cream-coloured wool flannel waistcoats, drawers, bodice and petticoats were hidden underneath dress for warmth and comfort – like modern thermal underwear – throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They prevented women from shivering in muslin gowns and regulated the temperatures of martial men in the tropics and naval men at sea. The most notable survival is Admiral Lord Nelson’s flannel waistcoat in the National Maritime Museum. Flannel was the fabric of choice for the ill and elderly, a soft, warm alternative to the stiffer outer clothing prevalent until the early twentieth century. There is no fashion at all in flannel underwear yet it was a widespread and enduring part of everyday dress. Henry Wardell’s flannel waistcoat tells of the privacy of the body and its protection. It is the antithesis of display, even in the grave where bodies were often dressed for viewing at a wake. It hints at how much more there is yet to explore about everyday clothing, especially further in the past, and the ways that humans have always mediated their intimate, non-public selves through textiles.

18 The everyday in eighteenth-century women’s sartorial life-writing Serena Dyer

The ‘everyday’ in fashion is often composed in opposition to the garments of the genteel and the elite.1 The dress of the wealthy is perceived as antonymic to the everyday, which is itself framed as the dress of the plebeian and working people. Temporal and customary patterns of wear and divisions of class and social status are conflated in such definitions. The exceptional and extravagant only made up a proportion of wealthier consumers’ wardrobes, and the sartorial taxonomy of ‘everyday’ and ‘best’ spread across society.2 Conceptions of everyday and the exceptional are relative but were becoming increasingly categorized and defined in the eighteenth century. As fashion plates began their rise to sartorial ubiquity from the 1750s, the drive to define and index garment types using standardized phrasing underscored the distinctions between temporal and spatial categories of dress.3 What was worn every day by elite and genteel consumers was conceived in contrast to the ‘full dress’ of exceptional occasions. If we acknowledge ‘everyday’ as a category of dress based on habitual wearing and temporal patterns of dress, then we must acknowledge that genteel and elite consumers, too, had their own everyday fashion. This chapter will reflect upon the relationship between the everyday and the exceptional in the sartorial life-writing of eighteenth-century genteel women.4 The stratification that is usually constructed around these women’s dress rests upon notions of social status and cultural purpose, concepts which have been manufactured through the captions of fashion plates and the interpretation of sartorial vocabularies. Taking a step backwards from the minutiae of these definitions, this chapter considers how eighteenth-century women conceived of difference between their everyday clothing and the more distinctive and remarkable garments worn for exceptional occasions. In creating these diaries of their dress, these women’s records offer unprecedented access beyond their portraits or epistolary accounts of gowns worn at balls. Instead, we see what they wore each day, and how they, in their own subjective ways, distinguished between the everyday and the exceptional.

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Both survival bias and a human tendency to record the notable over the quotidian have contributed to the historical focus on exceptional dress across the social spectrum, from the wedding gowns of the working class to the court dress and haute couture worn by the aristocracy. Yet modes of recording personal fashion choices and observations were based on steady temporal rhythms alongside the occasional crescendo and cymbal crash of a unique sartorial moment. This was the case for both Ann Frankland Lewis (1757–1842) and Barbara Johnson (1738–1825), whose modes of sartorial recording will form the focus for this chapter. In the archives of both women, it is temporal and customary regularity which led them to record their own everyday dress. Although not recorded with the diurnal regularity of, for example, Marie Antoinette’s Gazette des Artours de Marie-Antoinette, the systematic diarizing of dress habits offers a window into how these women perceived their own hierarchies, tempos and taxonomies of their dress.5

Sartorial recording: Towards diurnal dress The dress diary is a familiar feature of nineteenth-century sartorial culture.6 Yet recording the passing of time, whether on a daily, yearly or sporadic basis, through the medium of dress was an established practice. Matthäus Schwartz, for example, commissioned his regular sartorial portraits in sixteenth-century Germany, and compiled the images in his Klaidungsbüchlein or Trachtenbuch, which loosely translates as his ‘book of clothes’.7 This autobiographical sartorial narrative centred garments as a key means of reflecting the passing of time and the evolution of the self. Economic and social progress could be marked through such records, and a human life captures for posterity. As with most deliberate constructions of legacy, however, it is the exceptional moments, carefully curated to present a certain mirage of the self, upon which Schwartz focused. While he records the passing of his life through fashion, it is unclear whether these garments were donned every day. By the eighteenth century, the symbiosis between time and fashion was increasingly prevalent in sartorial and literary cultures, as Timothy Campbell has shown.8 The temporal regularity of the fashion plate within the annual pocket book from the 1750s, and then eventually the fashion periodical from the 1790s, contributed to a broad association between clothing and particular moments in time.9 While some of the moments captured by Lewis centred around grand political events or were defined by epochs, others were arranged around routine and regularity.10 Rarely were sartorial records truly diurnal (although Hutton’s diary comes close to a diurnal record of her sartorial making), but they instead marked more fluid and personal interpretations of the passing of time.11 This, in turn, encourages us to return to the notion of ‘everyday’. Habituality and regularity could construct the everyday without the need for strict diurnal recording. As with autobiography, the chronometrics of everyday life can be unstable and peculiarly individual. So too can the temporal rhythms which underscore everyday dress. Material or sartorial life-writing is a practice which I have defined elsewhere as pertaining to individuals who ‘fashioned narratives of their lives through series of objects – both purchased and homemade – which sat at the conjunction of the manual labour of making and cultures of consumption’.12 As a mode of personal recording, sartorial life-writing marries the temporalities with which fashion was culturally imbued with projected notions of selfhood and emotive personal experience.13 As such, it translates the somewhat abstract ideas around sartorial time found in satirical prints and in fashion magazines and connects them to the everyday

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lives of individuals. These records certainly pinpoint and underline exceptional sartorial moments, such as Laetitia Powell’s spotlighting of her wedding gown in her own material lifewriting.14 However, they also record the sartorial minutiae of everyday sartorial life. From the processes and practices of obtaining and making clothes, to the role that clothing played in commemorating and memorializing the emotional resonances of activities which may seem mundane or ubiquitous, sartorial life-writing offers a window onto the diverse ways in which everyday dress was experienced and defined.

The annual and the everyday: Ann Frankland Lewis Ann Frankland Lewis’ sartorial recording took the form of annual watercolours, which she captioned as ‘dress of the year’. The thirty-two watercolours were painted between 1774 and 1807, when she was between the ages of seventeen and fifty.15 These images are the most consistent and comprehensive record which Lewis left behind of her life, which is otherwise only recorded through her patriarchally defined roles of daughter, wife and mother. Born Ann Frankland, she was the daughter of Admiral Sir Thomas Frankland (1718–1784), who amassed wealth through capturing privateers as well as the exploitation of enslaved people.16 Her American mother, Sarah Rhett (1722–1808) was the daughter of a wealthy Charlestown merchant, William Rhett (1695–1728) and granddaughter of plantation owner and enslaver Colonel William Rhett (1666–1722). When Ann Frankland Lewis commenced her watercolours, she was living with her parents and nine surviving siblings at Thirkleby Hall in Yorkshire, where they had resided since 1768. In 1778, she married her first husband, John Lewis (1738–1797), a Welsh landowner and, briefly, Member of Parliament for Radnor. The couple had three children: two daughters who died young and a son, Sir Thomas Frankland Lewis (1780–1855), who would grow up to become an influential Victorian politician. Beyond this smattering of genealogical history, Ann Frankland Lewis’ life would only be recorded in short scraps of letters and fragments of ephemera from the balls and parties she attended, were it not for her watercolours. While written records of her life, emotional experiences and social circles are fragmented and scattered, her annual watercolours provide a steadfast structure to the passing years of her life. Completed with annual regularity, the images retain hints to how Lewis saw her identity and roles changing over time, from the shift in her name from Ann Frankland to Ann Lewis, to the sartorial content depicted in the images themselves. Some of the images depict anything but everyday dress. For example, her garment choices for 1781 and 1784 are wide-hooped court dresses.17 Similarly, she often encapsulated key cultural moments through her garment choices. Her 1789 watercolour, which was captioned ‘the Windsor Uniform – worn at the ball at Windsor given on the King’s recovery’, offers posterity the only visual record of the titular Windsor uniform for women.18 George III had suffered through a lengthy period of illness in 1788, culminating in the 1788–9 regency crisis. When the King’s position had looked dire, many courtiers had flouted their loyalty to the Prince of Wales and his drive to implement an official regency. With the King restored to good health, loyalty to the recovered monarch was feverishly brandished through fashion. Yet, much like the rhythms of life itself, in between these spectacular moments of cultural significance or experiences of elite luxury, Lewis also recorded her quotidian routines through dress. Lewis presents her everyday dress through its intersection with everyday activities. Most notably: walking her dog, undertaking needlework and other crafting activities and her familial

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and emotional life. Both the 1791 and 1795 images depict Lewis with her dogs (Figures 18.1 and 18.2). Painted shortly before the imposition of the Dog Tax in 1796, Lewis positioned herself within broader cultural discussions of dog ownership as display, to which fashion plates were complicit.19 Yet beyond these broader cultural narratives, Lewis also presents herself in a dynamic snapshot moment of her daily life. In the 1791 image, the dog has raised itself on its hind legs, eager for Lewis’ attention, with the shaggy hair of its tail clearly captured mid-wag. This is such a compellingly human moment between the dog and its owner. Here, the emotive and empathetic resonance of this interaction act as a form of sartorial contextualization. While Lewis’ garments may appear strikingly fashionable and formal, especially the embroidered gauze veil and trail on her blue silk gown, the quotidian affinity of this moment frames these garments as everyday clothing to Lewis. Similarly, the 1795 image depicts a more manageable white cotton gown, but it is paired with an elaborate green feathered bonnet. This clothing is worn while Lewis cuts flowers from her garden, while another dog inquisitively sniffs at the blooms. Once more, a snapshot of a habitual activity was captured by Lewis, through which her garments are contextualized as belonging to her own definition of everyday. Being in her garden, with her dog, was Lewis’ most significant sartorial moment of these years. Whether these watercolours represented a constructed performance of fashionable dog ownership or an emotive reminiscence of pet ownership, Lewis nonetheless chose these moments of domestic activity as her sartorial makers for these years.

FIGURE 18.1  Ann Frankland Lewis, Morning dress 1791. Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

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FIGURE 18.2  Ann Frankland Lewis, Morning dress 1795. Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The annual watercolours similarly capture moments of everyday activity in 1778 and 1785. Both images depict Lewis undertaking some form of craft. In 1778, Lewis appears to work at a small piece of needlework with a needle and thread (Figure 18.3), while in 1785 she is more clearly knitting a long tubular item (Figure 18.4). While the large hats, poised precariously on Lewis’ head in both images, seem impractical when undertaking manual making labour, there is an intriguing connection here between the fashionability of Lewis’ clothing, and her own material literacy and labour as a maker of that clothing. Both these elements of Lewis’ sense of self – fashion and making – were so integral to her projected identity that they are fundamental to her personal definition of everyday dress. Of course, we can only speculate about why Lewis chose these particular garments and activities to represent these years of her life – perhaps she was especially proud of the projects she was working on, or maybe she was crafting gifts that held emotional resonance. Her first child, for example, was born in 1779, and we might conjecture that she was stitching small garments for her impending arrival in the previous year. In 1785, she might have been knitting garments for her then two-year-old youngest child. Or she may just have captured the humdrum sewing and mending of daily life.

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FIGURE 18.3  Ann Frankland Lewis, The dishabille of the year 1778. Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

FIGURE 18.4  Ann Frankland Lewis, Morning dress of the year 1785. Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

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Such romantic imaginings surrounding why and what Lewis was making are, however, speculative and moot. What, it is significant to note, is the way in which Lewis negotiated a process of translating the everyday labour of domestic textile craft into a memorial to a year of her life. Making was, indeed, a performative act through which women enacted femininity and mobilized received visual literacy to embody allegorical virtues and craft public selfhood. It was also, however, an act of intense and varied emotional and bodily experience. From the pricking of fingers and frustrations of threading a needle to the memories embedded in crafted objects, these moments of making were both exceptional and commonplace. They are both everyday and exceptional. The annual rhythm used by Lewis has since been adopted by the Fashion Museum in Bath, where a high-fashion garment is chosen annually as their ‘dress of the year’, following the criteria that it ‘encapsulates the prevailing mood of fashion, represents the past year and captures the imagination’.20 Yet the Fashion Museum’s choices are far from everyday fashion. Instead, the collection represents the work of designers such as Hussein Chalayan, Alexander McQueen and Donna Karan. There is something around annual rhythms which implies a sense of exceptionalism and superlative delineations. Awards and celebrations are often used to define the ‘best’ of the year. Yet the museum’s choice for 2020 acknowledged the impact of Covid-19 on everyday life. The cashmere and leather cape worn by Naomi Campbell and designed by Ricsardo Tisci for Burberry provided the fashion, while the latex gloves, Tyvek hazmat suit and face mask acknowledged the everyday reality of what was being worn ‘everyday’. Again, an exceptional moment can also incorporate the everyday. Lewis’ temporal rhythm and patterns of terminology were borrowed from the fashion plate, which itself strove to present itself as the epitome of fashion for a particular year, whilst simultaneously incorporating informal modes of undress. Lewis’ adoption of the tropes and conceits of the fashion plate genre was not static, but evolved alongside the maturing visual form. As the fashion plate evolved, so too did the elements that she embraced. In the watercolour of 1778, the first signed using her married name of Lewis, she adapted the formulaic ‘dress of the year’ caption used in previous year, and instead captioned the image as ‘dishabille of the year’ (Figure 18.3).21 Similarly, in 1784 she presented ‘the half dress of the year’ and by 1791 she had dropped the ‘dress of the year’ model entirely, instead using ‘morning dress’, the year by itself or occasionally the month and year (Figure 18.1).22 This gradual shift from the ‘dress of the year’ paradigm to the partially descriptive or more precisely timed captions parallels the same changes as they occurred in fashion plates. In some cases, she even pre-empted the shift becoming widespread. Gallery of Fashion (1794–1803), for instance, the most expensive and exclusive fashion periodical of the late eighteenth century, did not adopt the model of specifying ‘morning’, ‘afternoon’, ‘full’ or ‘court’ dress until June 1794, after which point it was a protocol they used regularly.23 Through her watercolours, Lewis delineated both her everyday dress and her moments of sartorial exceptionalism. In doing so, she also elevated the everyday to sit alongside those grand fashionable garments in her biographical sartorial narrative. To Lewis, the garments worn for dog walking and knitting were as emotionally and personally significant as those worn to court or for major historical moments. Vitally, Lewis demonstrates the taxonomic difficulties of how we go about defining ‘everyday’ as a useful sartorial term. During a period when the indexing and identification of types of dress – court, dishabille, morning, mourning, full-, half- and undress – was in flux, the classification of everyday is muddied. Dress sat at a complex nexus of ideas around time, space, activity, and social status. What is evident, however, is that Lewis used dress as a key means of negotiation of all her activities, whether exceptional or mundane.

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Material accounting and the everyday: Barbara Johnson Where Lewis maintained her record of sartorial life-writing with annual regularity, Barbara Johnson was instead ruled by the rhythms of fashion consumption. Her record consisted of a large album, where she had deposited fabric samples and accompanying notes relating to the garments that she had made for her throughout her lifetime.24 The notes are varied in terms of detail, always provided a description of the textile and the garment it was made into, and occasionally including the full cost and any special purpose. Vitally, the album shows us the (almost) complete range of garments that Johnson owned during her lifetime, from spectacular silks to hardy woollen stuffs. The fabric samples and notes are interspersed with Johnson’s collection of fashion plates, which were taken, exclusively, from pocket books. The album contains 122 samples in total, with an average consumption of two to three garments per year from the age of eight to eighty-five. The ledger in which Johnson kept this record had previously been used as an account book by a George Thompson, and how Johnson came to possess this book remains somewhat of a mystery. As Thompson’s ledger dates from 1738 to 1748, and the first sample is dated 1746, the earliest samples were certainly accumulated into the book retrospectively. The chronology in these early years is also not entirely consistent, as the samples were probably stored elsewhere, attached to their little paper labels, and later deposited and arranged within the album itself. Nonetheless, the album represents a major, lifelong undertaking, and records for posterity the everyday practicalities of consuming dress amongst the genteel ranks of Georgian Britain. Barbara Johnson was born in 1738 in rural Buckinghamshire. She was the eldest and only daughter of the Reverend Woolsey Johnson (1696–1756), a relatively successful career churchman. Her mother, Jane Johnson (1707–59), was credited with writing the first fairy tale in English for children.25 It is likely that Johnson began the album as part of the educational activities devised by her mother.26 Both her parents died young, leaving twenty-one-year-old Johnson to care for her three younger brothers. Despite this pseudo-maternal responsibility, Johnson was financially stable. In her will, Jane Johnson left her daughter and each of her younger sons £1,500.27 This sum was to be paid to Barbara Johnson whenever she wished, with interest of 3 per cent in the intervening period. Though supplemented later in her life, this bequest provided Barbara Johnson with a steady, respectable and reliable income of £45 per annum. Johnson’s album, although restricted entirely to the acquisition of fashionable dress, acted as a means of accountability and self-regulation as Johnson managed her income and retained everyday fashionability on the fringes of polite society. The album is very self-conscious in its construction, as epitomized by the print Johnson selected as an epitaph at the opening of the volume. The image depicts a lady and a gentleman in fashionable attire of the 1750s. Engraved by the French artist Louis Peter Boitard, its quality and detail cause it to stand out from its surrounding prints. Although it is unusual for a pocket book fashion plate, the print is the same size as its companions. Its caption, however, is rather more verbose. It reads: Well regulate your Cash; to Trade attend; Mark from Receipts and payments what you spend Pay every Debt, exact each just Demand; So shall fair Fortune wait upon your hand.28

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Johnson’s choice of this print as an opening introduction to the album must be read as a signal towards Johnson’s motivations. The album was, at its heart, a form of account. While the volume focuses exclusively on dress, this does not negate this interpretation. As Amanda Vickery has noted, ‘even keen accountants may have chosen to capture only one area of their lives in a record book’.29 Johnson’s focus on fashionable dress clearly marks out her sartorial consumption as an area in which she felt the need for additional tools to mediate her self-regulation as a consumer. As an espousal of economic values, this verse reflected the ethos instilled in Johnsons’ album from her youth. In the face of her economic instability as a never-married woman, Johnson retained this extensive financial, material and sartorial record of dress for seventy-seven years. She regulated her cash and her consumption and fashioned her biography through clothing. Begun as a pedagogical exercise at the apron strings of an intellectual mother who valued selfregulation, the volume evolved with Johnson as she grew and matured. The material literacy expressed within the volume developed too, as fashion plates nurtured and maintained this sartorial knowledge. Johnson deployed specific and specialized textile terminology, littered between records of pounds, shillings and pence. The album fostered Johnson’s combined material and economic literacy and, in essence, is Johnson’s material biography. Both financial and material, the album offered a space for Johnson to signify her spending through a physical record of the goods purchased. In so doing, Johnson exposed the relationship between abstract money and tangible goods in a form of self-regulatory exercise. In framing the album as a means of monetary regulation and personal reflection, the album is elevated from being a repository of purchased goods to a fundamental part of how Johnson constructed her everyday relationship with dress. The album was a mediator, which allowed Johnson to materialize her relationship with her own garments, and to record how her own sartorial dynamics evolved over time. Instead of figures on a page, monetary value was articulated through fragmentary reminders of what that money materially translated to. Chronology and consistency were key concerns when the album was compiled, which lends itself to an interpretation of the album as a means of recording the rhythms of life. Again, temporality played a key role in the everyday dynamics of fashion. As a material form of the account book, the album was a defence against the rhetoric around overindulgent fashionable consumption, and the problems which surrounded a credit-based consumer economy. When not warning consumers about the ploys of tradespeople, moral literature from the period often promoted an image of the consumer in control, particularly in financial terms. This control chiefly operated through economies of credit and was enacted through how, when and to whom credit was paid off.30 This culture of credit came about as part of the financial revolution of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and provided the precedent for the majority of the consumer’s financial transactions throughout the eighteenth century. Credit was granted based almost entirely on the appearance of the consumer. Did they look respectable? Were they well-presented and dressed in appropriate clothing? Dress acted as proof of creditworthiness. As Margot Finn has stated, ‘[c]reditors sought constantly and unsuccessfully to read debtors’ personal worth and character from their clothing, their marital relations, their spending patterns and their perceived social status’.31 If consumers could be trusted to keep accounts, then retailers and merchants would, in theory, have their bills paid on time. Money would continue to flow through the country, and the national economy maintained. Johnson’s album, therefore, not only promoted financial self-regulation, but it existed as part of a culture of economic performance which was vital to the ways in which consumers obtained garments. Again, the links between the materiality of garments bought, and the intangible (and

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presupposed possession of the) finances required to purchase them on credit are made clear here. The album, then, is central to the ways in which Johnson mediates and manages her clothing within her everyday financial life. Both the album and the garments it records were a means by which concepts of money were made tangible, and the necessities of economic management were materialized. Of course, like Lewis’ watercolours, Johnson’s album also reflected a diverse array of both exceptional and everyday clothing. The exceptional generally related to significant family events. The fourth page of the album, for example, contains exclusively black, brown and dark grey fabrics. Johnson denoted these as the fabrics she wore for ‘mourning for my mother’ and ‘mourning for my father’.32 In an otherwise colourful and joyous album, this page acts as a material reflection of inner turmoil and sorrow. Elsewhere, Johnson records a beautiful blue and white spotted lutestring silk, which was purchased for a gown for her brother’s birthday in 1762, a fabulous scarlet and white shot gown for Christmas in 1764, and a striking pink and green concoction with matching trimmings for the Stamford Races in 1767.33 It is these striking swatches, and others like them – highlighted for either their emotional or aesthetic qualities – which tend to dominate discussions of this album. Yet between the brightly coloured silk brocades and printed chintz, Johnson also records more humdrum gowns. This peppering of plain woollen stuffs, calicoes and ginghams punctuates the more immediately noticeable, aesthetically appealing, and technologically innovative fabrics which leap from the page. A tiny snippet of a green camblet coat is overshadowed on the first page of the album by floral brocades and a delicate blue damask.34 Later in the album, a very practical and lightweight gingham round gown, purchased in August 1799, is dwarfed by the purchase of two mourning gowns – one of calico and one of taffety – to mark the death of Johnson’s brother, Robert.35 This bias amongst researchers to see the exceptional, sparkling and exciting, before noticing the humdrum ‘filler’ gowns must be in some part culpable for the field’s historic partiality away from the everyday. Similarly, the structure of research questions has skewed the way the album is viewed. If, for example, a researcher is searching for evidence of cotton textile consumption, then it is understandably inevitable that the staple woollen garments which dominated Johnson’s everyday wardrobe are of less relevance.36 Undertaking a systematic evaluation of the variety of fibre types in the album reveals both the presence of ‘everyday’ garments amongst Johnson’s wardrobe and reveals how changing access to and fashionability of different fibres shifted both consumption patterns and the attitudes to different fabric types. Johnson’s relative consumption of cotton and silk textiles across the seventy-seven years covered by the album reveals the impact of changing patterns of global trade on Johnson’s shifting and evolving consumption and underlines the need to continually update material vocabulary (Figure 18.5).37 During her teens and young adulthood in the 1750s and 1760s Johnson demonstrated a preference for silk textiles, and an awareness of terminology used to denote the abundance of available varieties. Silk brocade, tabby, satin and lustring dominate the samples Johnson collated. Throughout the final decades of the eighteenth century, however, silk satins and brocades were replaced by purchases of cottons in the form of calico, muslin and chintz. Silk and cotton had consistently been the most popular imported fabrics into Britain.38 In the late eighteenth century, the domestic cotton industry began to boom, and this cheaper, novel fabric enjoyed a burst of popularity amongst consumers.39 Further nurtured by the mercantilist banning of imported Indian cottons earlier in the century, this protectionist attitude to domestic economics had fostered a shift in consumer spending. These fabrics were comparatively inexpensive, meaning better prices for consumers and better profits for retailers and merchants.

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FIGURE 18.5 Appearances of silk, cotton, linen and wool in Barbara Johnson’s album, 1746–1823, arranged by decade. Source: VAM: T.219–1973.

Perhaps more intriguing is the fluctuating presence of linen and wool in Johnson’s album.40 During her teen years, these hardy fibres made up half of her fabric consumption, before gradually tailing off to become an occasional feature of her wardrobe (Figure 18.5). This can partially be explained by growth in popularity of cotton as a fibre. Like linen, cotton could be more easily laundered whilst also appearing fashionable. However, there is also an intriguing dynamic between age, durability and the everyday. We have already established that the ‘everyday-ness’ of garments might be constructed through temporal and spatial means, but there is also an element of robustness and resilience. For a garment to be ‘everyday’, does it also need a degree of permanency within the wardrobe that is difficult to track through records of consumption? Although we know Johnson rarely purchased wool or linen gowns after the 1770s, it is difficult to ascertain whether this was for reasons of fashion, availability, or because existing wools and linen might be remodelled and recycled into new garments.41 Fundamentally, Johnson’s album demonstrates that evidence for the everyday fashions of genteel and elite consumers of the eighteenth century is hiding in plain sight. Splendid silks may dominate portraits and inform the survival bias which has shaped museum collections, but Johnson’s album offers insight into a (near) complete wardrobe for a particular individual of this social rank. The assumption, too often made, that a fancy silk must belong to an elite lady of leisure, while a plain woollen stuff must be property of a poor working woman is entirely contradicted through the album. Women of all ranks and of any status possessed a range of garments which sat between ‘everyday’ and ‘best’, and Johnson clearly demonstrates that. Johnson also shows us the ways in which the balance between everyday and best might shift

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over time, and reveals the vagaries and inconsistencies which sometimes blur these categories in the archive. The everyday, Johnson shows, was mutable and complex, but certainly present in the wardrobes of the genteel and elite.

Taxonomies of everyday dress If everyday dress is defined as garments which are normal, average and unremarkable, then this category of dress must exist in all wardrobes across the social spectrum and across time. Garment survival bias, a general tendency not to record the humdrum elements of life and the structure of the fashion industry in more recent years have reshaped the ways in which the fashion that people wear has been distinguished from high fashion. Yet, for eighteenth-century people, possessing a range of garments, whether in the form of full outfits or disparate accessories, which could be categories across a spectrum of ‘everyday’ to ‘best’ was universal. As Elizabeth Spencer has demonstrated in her work on clothing in wills, such categories were universal and key to the ways in which the clothing of the poor was understood and distributed.42 The will of Lady Frances Blout references ‘my best white suit’, that of Cornish vicar William Bayly includes ‘my best greatcoat’ and Sir John Oglander bequeathed ‘my best pearl necklace’.43 The taxonomic gradation of material possessions, including clothing, was not restricted by social strata. Wardrobe hierarchies, difficult to access outside wills and even more tricky to connect to material objects and qualities, were key to the eighteenth-century construction of notions of the everyday. The sartorial records of both Lewis and Johnson complicate our definitions of the everyday. On the one hand, they show that everyday garments existed alongside the special across the social spectrum. Hierarchies and taxonomies of dress existed within personal wardrobes as well as across society. Yet they also show that the everyday can itself been intensely exceptional. As shown in Lewis’ watercolours, the most mundane of moments can simultaneously be an encapsulation of everyday life, and a significant and remarkable memory. The everyday is far from a straightforward categorization of non-elite dress. Instead, it is interwoven across social spectrum, notions of temporality and the habits and customs of individuals. Fashion writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century clamoured to categorize and delineate fashion in the periodical press, yet these older, fluid and complex hierarchies of clothing quality were still eminently present in the clothing practices of the wealthy and poor alike.

Notes 1

For example, John Styles uses ‘everyday’ as a synonym for plebeian dress in the title of The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Yale University Press, 2007).

2 Styles, The Dress of the People, 19. 3

On fashion plates, see Serena Dyer, Material Lives: Women Makers and Consumer Culture in the 18th Century (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 58–78; Serena Dyer, ‘Fashions of the Day: Materiality, Temporality and the Fashion Plate, 1750–1879’, in Disseminating Dress: Britain’s Fashion Networks, 1600–1970, ed. Serena Dyer, Jade Halbert, and Sophie Littlewood (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), 73–94.

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4

For more on the concept of ‘material life writing’, see Dyer, Material Lives.

5

For discussion of Gazette des Artours de Marie-Antoinette, see Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell, Fashion Victims: Dress at the Court of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette (London: Yale University Press, 2015), 100–1.

6

For example, Anne Sykes’ ‘dress diary’, which is in a private collection. For Anne Hayslip’s album, see CW: Acc. No. 2016–124 (S). For the Hardy fabric samples, see Dorset County Museum: 1941.7.87. See also Lucy Johnston, ‘Clothing in Context: Nineteenth-Century Dress and Textiles in the Thomas Hardy Archive’, Costume 52, no. 2 (2018): 261–84.

7

Ulinka Rublack and Maria Hayward, eds., The First Book of Fashion: The Books of Clothes of Matthäus and Veit Konrad Schwarz of Augsburg (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).

8

Timothy Campbell, Historical Style: Fashion and the New Mode of History, 1740–1830 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

9

Pocket books were small commercially produced diaries, which consisted of diary pages as well as a space for accounting, and a wealth of useful information. They were the Filofax of the eighteenth century, but with additional engravings of fashionable dress or scenes from popular fiction. Dyer, ‘Fashions of the Day’; Dyer, ‘“I Have Been a Collector of Costumes”: Women, Dress Histories and the Temporalities of Eighteenth-Century Fashion’, History 106, no. 372 (2021): 578–96.

10 Hannah Greig and Amanda Vickery, ‘The Political Day in London, c.1697–1834’, Past and Present 252, no. 1 (2021): 101–37. 11 Dyer, ‘I Have Been a Collector of Costumes’, 587. 12 Dyer, Material Lives, 1. 13 On life writing more generally, see Cynthia Anne Huff, ed., Women’s Life Writing and Imagined Communities (London: Routledge, 2005); Daniel Cook and Amy Culley, eds., Women’s Life Writing, 1700–1850: Gender, Genre and Authorship (London: Palgrave, 2012); Amy Culley, British Women’s Life Writing, 1760–1840: Friendship, Community, and Collaboration (London: Palgrave, 2014); Adam Smyth, A History of English Autobiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Leonie Hannan et al., ‘“A View from Old Age”: Women’s Lives as Narrated through Objects’, Life Writing 16, no. 1 (2019): 51–67. 14 Dyer, Material Lives: Women Makers and Consumer Culture in the 18th Century, 169. 15 The watercolours are now in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, AC1999.154.1–.32. 16 Simon Smith, Slavery, Family, and Gentry Capitalism in the British Atlantic: The World of the Lascelles, 1648–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 122. 17 LACMA: AC1999.154.8 and AC1999.154.13. 18 LACMA: AC1999.154.15. 19 For further discussion, see Lynn Festa, ‘Person, Animal, Thing: The 1796 Dog Tax and the Right to Superfluous Things’, Eighteenth-Century Life 33 (2009): 1–44; Ingrid H. Tague, Animal Companions: Pets and Social Change in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015). 20 ‘Dress of the Year’, Fashion Museum, Bath, https://www.fashionmuseum.co.uk/galleries/dress-year. Accessed 30 May 2021. 21 LACMA: AC1999.154.5. ‘Dishabille’, meaning the state of being only partly or scantily clothed, was usually used as a term for informal and everyday garments. 22 LACMA: AC1999.154.10 and AC1999.154.17. 23 LACMA: AC1999.154.20.

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24 The album is cared for by the V&A and has been published in facsimile. VAM: T.219–1973. Natalie Rothstein, ed., Barbara Johnson’s Album of Fashions and Fabrics (London: Thames & Hudson, 1987). 25 Susan Whyman, Pen and the People: English Letter Writers, 1660–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 167. 26 Serena Dyer, ‘Barbara Johnson’s Album: Material Literacy and Consumer Practice, 1746–1823’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 42, no. 3 (2019): 263–82. 27 NA: PROB 11/844/305. This was equivalent of £175,000 in terms of spending power. Conversion calculated using the National Archives’ currency converter, http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ currency-converter. 28 VAM: T.219–1973, f. 8. 29 Amanda Vickery, ‘His and Hers: Gender, Consumption and Household Accounting in EighteenthCentury England’, Past & Present 1 (2006): 12–38. 30 On credit, see Margot Finn, The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Anne L. Murphy, The Origins of English Financial Markets: Investment and Speculation before the South Sea Bubble (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Carl Wennerlind, Casualties of Credit: The English Financial Revolution, 1620–1720 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 31 Finn, The Character of Credit, 21. 32 VAM: T.219–1973, f. 4. 33 VAM: T.219–1973, f. 9–11. 34 VAM: T.219–1973, f. 1. 35 VAM: T.219–1973, f. 46. 36 Beverly Lemire, Fashion’s Favourite: The Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain, 1660–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 111. 37 Lemire also notes this shift in Johnson’s consumption, see Lemire, Fashion’s Favourite, 112. 38 Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy, eds., How India Clothes the World: The World of South Asian Textiles, 1500–1850 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 10. 39 Lemire, Fashion’s Favourite, 97; Beverly Lemire, ed., The Force of Fashion in Politics and Society (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 78; Giorgio Riello, Cotton: The Fabric That Made the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 124. 40 On the role of linen in everyday life, see Alice Dolan, ‘The Fabric of Life: Time and Textiles in an Eighteenth-Century Plebeian Home’, Home Cultures 11, no. 3 (2014): 353–74. 41 Ariane Fennetaux, Amélie Junqua, and Sophie Vasset, eds., The Afterlife of Used Things: Recycling in the Long Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2014). 42 Elizabeth Spencer, The Description and Use of Women’s Clothing in Eighteenth-Century England (PhD thesis, University of York, 2017). 43 Birmingham Archdiocesan Archives: Z6/7/21; Cornwall Record Office: X355/68; Isle of Wight Record Office: OG/Z/73.

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FIGURE 19.1  Silk and wool gown, originally made c.1770–80 and remade c.1830–40. © Leeds Museums and Galleries. Photographed by David Lindsay.

19 An open robe gown Vanessa Jones

This open robe gown is one of many garments at Leeds Museums and Galleries without provenance. With the donor unknown, maker lost to time and wearer long gone, we can only speculate on this object’s plausible biography. Due to object survival, expense of fine fabrics or lack of wear, eighteenth-century garments are often interpreted with elite stories of wealth and status in mind. Yet this is not the only narrative these garments tell. Mending, darning and re-using cloth was practised by the majority of society due to necessity. There was a need to extend the life of a worn garment regardless of your social status. A garment may have been mended at home or perhaps a gown was taken to a dressmaker for turning, the act of physically unpicking and turning a garment inside out. The traces left of masking the effects of wear echo a past life of everyday clothing practices that are repeatedly forgotten in museums. The candyfloss striped silk gown reveals numerous processes involved in its continuous wear, whether concealing a worn surface or efficient economic practices reducing waste. The bodice lining of this gown is not made of one single piece of fabric, instead the lining is pieced from various cotton-linen blends, all with slightly different weaves and textures. An unusual configuration emerges where seams start and stop within centimetres of one another; triangular pieces have been added to fill gaps on rectangular lengths. The original bodice lining was likely pieced from fabric scraps or repurposed from older garments. This part of the garment would have only been visible to the wearer, it is therefore assumed that purchasing new cloth would not add to the aesthetic value of the gown and would only add to the garment’s overall cost. Although the gown is made of silk, and therefore expensive, the pieced lining infers the wearers of this gown were not particularly wealthy. Later signs of adaptation include a vibrant dark green silk lining, which almost certainly came later in the garment’s history. Along with foreshortened sleeves and cumbersome darning, this may indicate the garment was worn as fancy dress in the nineteenth century. The underarms of the garment are heavily stained; a yellow brown hue saturates the silk leaving it visibly soiled. This is not unusual, plenty of garments from this period are tarnished particularly in the areas where sweat accumulates. Yet time and effort have been made to hide the sweat and disguise the blemishes. Layers of the same silk are carefully stitched with patterns

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matching to reduce the appearance of bodily excretions. On the left are two layers and, on the right, there are three. Each patch sewn on top of the other at later stages as wear seeps through to the surface. The stitches used for initial construction are remarkably similar to the patched underarms. Does this mean the maker was the same as the wearer? Or does this mean the wearer returned to their dressmaker to sew these patches on at various stages of the garment’s life? It is plausible to suggest the gown originally belonged to a middling-sort needlewoman who made and maintained the garment herself, caring for the small silk scraps that were left over from the original making process and adding to the gown when required. When able to spend time reading a gown in detail, commonly circulated narratives of the elite consumers and their pristine silk clothing suddenly appear redundant. A single gown offers an alternative insight into everyday clothing practices of the eighteenth century. Initially, a narrative exploring an investment piece is seconded by a need to maintain and re-wear. It reimagines silks in a middling environment and could address the makings of a skilled woman at home.

20 Accidental remainders: Working men’s fashion c.1730–1880 in National Museums Scotland Emily Taylor

In 1999 Christopher Breward introduced The Hidden Consumer Masculinities, Fashion and City Life 1860–1914 with a critique of separate spheres gendering in historical fashion studies and the unquestioning absorption by menswear scholars of psychologist J. C. Flügel’s ‘The Great Masculine Renunciation’.1 This theory, that men repressed fashionable engagement in the nineteenth century, persists as a convenient way to frame male sartorial timelines. Flügel wrote his theory almost a century ago; a child of the nineteenth century he was undoubtedly influenced by received narratives. Yet while his reductive and sexist assertions about women have been ignored, his positioning of male uniformity has been mythologized. Flügel’s narrative has been perpetuated by value systems that have created, in Breward’s words, ‘limited histories, hemmed in by a misinterpretation of the validity of the surviving evidence and a too eager acceptance of the uniform effectiveness of symbolic codes’.2 The following chapter will use the collections and collecting practices of National Museums Scotland (NMS) to reflect on how narrative systems such as Flügel’s, have influenced not only how fashion historians engaged with dress collections, but the wider identity performances constructing our cultural heritage. Twenty years after Breward’s call for revision, scholarship on men’s fashion is still focused on sartorial high, marginal and urban design, while studies of masculinity are disconnected from the clothes that men wore.3 The everyday fashion of average working men still lies dormant, its contributions to our cultural understanding subdued by received narratives.

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Narrative channelling When beginning a cultural investigation, understanding semantics and how they frame our thinking matters immensely.4 In museums, it is not just the semantics of interpretation (cultural narratives) that channel our knowledge, but the framing of categories and collecting policies, whereas gender studies risk overgeneralizing the lived experiences of people they concern.5 It is significant that recent studies purporting to interrogate men’s history through material culture tend to look at the depiction of masculine tropes on objects or actions represented by objects, rather than the traces of men’s lives in those objects.6 The material lives of men exist all around us, these divisions are symptomatic of the strength and quantity of narratives about men. The critical narratives to consider in relation to working men’s fashion of c.1730–1880 are: politeness and public office; idolizing everyday work and heroism of grafters; chivalry, antiquaries and genealogical place; consumerism and the feminization of fashion.7 Common threads between these narratives are the relationship of manly assertion to knowledge, physical skill, honour and generational inheritance. Scholarship has positioned the complexity of male identities against these tropes, but as the collections of NMS will demonstrate, they remain embedded within British cultural understanding.8 Study of men’s everyday lives illuminates nuances but is yet to establish a strong relationship to appearances, specifically fashion.9 Whereas research into how narratives have historically been positioned and manipulated for specific purposes is creating insightful interrogation of male identities.10 When studying historic fashion, consideration should be given to the longevity of nineteenthcentury constructions of the ‘working class’ and how they continue to frame our understanding of what constitutes everydayness.11 The twentieth-century boom in social history museums and collecting had a generational connection to vigorous social dialogue about the working classes, associated with the formation of the British Labour Party in 1900.12 Consequently, the associations between the everyday and work, and between work and men, have given men’s everyday fashion in museums the challenge of mundanity. The following discussion will use NMS fashion and textiles collections to test how curators and historians can begin unpacking the relationship of these narrative codes to surviving objects and their institutions. More than just understanding the objects themselves, collections interrogation is a journey of revelations around how and why we know things.

Institutional obfuscation NMS has a hybrid collections history, which makes it rich in cross-disciplinary connections, but subject to the functional difficulties of retrofitting.13 Elements of the collection affecting knowledge of men’s fashion consist of objects that were formerly under the National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland (NMAS), founded in 1780, and those collected by the Royal Scottish Museum (RSM), founded in 1854 as the Industrial Museum of Scotland. These collections amalgamated in 1985 to become NMS. Additionally, the Scottish United Services Museum (SUSM – now the National War Museum within NMS) transferred civil items to RSM associated with people in their egalitarian military remit. Broadly, NMAS collected objects strongly associated with the history of Scotland. In contrast, RSM’s earliest incarnation was as a branch venue of the Department of Science and Art, whose primary site was the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum, London).

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The Industrial Museum was explicitly intended to collect and instigate ‘industrial education for the working class’.14 An uneasy relationship, as the founding director discovered through difficulties persuading working men to submit materials from their occupations.15 The heyday of the RSM fashion collecting was during the tenure of the History of Applied Arts department (HAA).16 Simultaneously, collections staff in NMAS and RSM occasionally shared large acquisitions, now fortuitously reunited. Curatorial and institutional direction are subject to individuals employed and the availability of the means to acquire objects through directive, policies, permissions and finances, externally affected by availability of objects, social and political systems. All of these have some form of traceable impact on what is collected and why.17

Collecting men’s fashion Historic men’s fashion in NMS dating to c.1700–1850 offers a capsule on which to test Breward’s limited histories and symbolic codes in relation to collecting practices.18 Momentarily shifting focus away from the reading and interpretation of objects will ultimately enable a greater critical engagement with their histories. Testing the binary gender spheres so frequently imposed on historic fashion and textiles against how they have been preserved and valued will begin a journey towards understanding the impact gendered social narratives have had in the formation of cultural heritage. The following analysis relates to 503 menswear objects that fall within the remit of European Decorative Arts (pre-1850) and Fashion and Textiles in the NMS cataloguing system. This remit includes non-military dress from European countries and non-indigenous dress from North America and excludes fashion from all other countries. The list contains some items of Highland dress but cataloguing more often places Highland dress in distinct categories relating to the Scottish History and Archaeology department remit. To analyse gendered values, the acquisition sources were divided into male, female and companies. Gender binaries are a limiting identifier, but they are one of few data sets available in the current collection system.19 Identification of female sources was predominantly aided by the gendered titling of women; men are untitled except for professional credentials (such as Dr and Rev).20 Where no title and no further information was available the name was presumed to be male, and the few instances of co-gendered sources were analysed as female. Companies were further identified as male agents where a single male name acted as a company name; female agents; ungendered companies where only surnames or no names were used; and museum or collection transfers. All individual source names, with two male exceptions, are Anglo- or Scottish and all company locations fall within Europe and North America. Marital status can be inferred from the women’s titles, but inconsistency means marital information is lacking. Social position has been included via hereditary titles: this does not encompass untitled members of landed, propertied and ranked heritable families, whose contributions to the collections are significant. Arising from the breakdown of collection contributors is the outstanding number of objects contributed by men as both donations and sales, of which only a tiny proportion has been men’s fashion 1700–1850. Whereas women’s contributions have been more limited in volume and are more frequently donations. A deeper analysis is required to provide solid statistics around crosscollection objects contributed, but (unquantified) reviews of collection areas associated with

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TABLE 20.1  Men’s fashion (1700–1850) accessions contributor type breakdown = 489 TOTAL. (Omitting 14 unknown or anonymous sources) Women

Men

Companies (overall)

Number of sources

59

39

29

7

1

Total items provided to men’s fashion 1700–1850

182

127

180

56

1

Number of donations

139

42

15

-

-

Number of sales

43

85

73

56

1

Auction acquisitions

N/A

N/A

92

-

-

Average number contributed per source

3.1

3.3

6.2

8

1

7.7%

37%

-

15%

Overall contribution

37%

26%

Overall donation

27%

17%

% from hereditary titles % from professional titles

37%

Company male

11%

Company female

0.2%

TABLE 20.2  Museum-wide accessions from men’s fashion (1700–1850) contributors: TOTAL 8070. Women

Men

Companies

Company male

Company female

Total contributions

1520

6550

N/A

3361

21

Donations, loans adopted & bequests

1276

2736

-

-

-

86

2335

-

2465

21

158

1479

-

-

-

19%

81%

-

-

-

11.9%

1.9%

-

1.7%

4%

1.5

-

-

-

Sales Mixed sales and donations Proportion % of items contributed Men’s fashion % of contributions Average no. men’s fashion items

4

each source indicate a trend for women’s contributions to concentrate on one area, for example a mixed group of only fashion and textiles, as opposed to male sources tending to provide homogenous groups of antiquarian interest, including armour, decorative arts (glass, ceramics, metal ware, wood, horn) and textiles. This divide probably reflects juncture between donations focused on family objects, versus sales of collected curiosities. There are exceptions in both gender categories, currently counterbalancing one another, so the generalization should not be stretched too far without further data; however, it does play into chivalric antiquarian and feminized fashion narratives.21 These

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FIGURE 20.1  Breakdown of men’s fashion objects dated 1700–1850 contributed by women, men and companies from inauguration to present.

tendencies raise the question of how far people used their contributions to the museum to express, construct and enact identities. Mapping the 1700–1850 men’s fashion group against contribution date shows a trend for collections growth, making a strong case for similar analysis of other parts of the fashion collections to assess contribution waves. The concerted purchasing of men’s fashion at NMS in the 1950–2000 period is 95 per cent attributable to curator Naomi Tarrant, with only a handful of accessions within these dates pre-dating her tenure. This acquisitions push was directly connected to the available finances and managerial encouragement within the HAA department, enabling dynamic filling of a collections gap.22 It equally reflects the increased scholarship of the mid-twentieth century, which had a direct relationship to the number of items being valued, sold and offered. The Costume Society was founded in 1964 and the Courtauld Institute of Art began the first UK History of Dress course in 1965. The largest single group of donated men’s fashion within the analysed objects was contributed by the collector Charles William Stewart (1915–2001) in 1977. Stewart was an early member of The Costume Society and proponent of conservation, restoration and provenance knowledge. Mid-twentieth-century fashion collectors made enormous contributions to museums across the UK, but the social and cultural conditions behind this sudden influx are yet to be analysed.23 Viewed from 2021 it looks like a mid-century social history culture-grab or rescue, not too dissimilar to nineteenth-century Egyptology, or the eighteenth-century Ancient Mediterranean mania. The impact of collecting surges and fall-outs offers powerful information towards the social values of communities creating institutions and might hold the key to mitigating cultural and material knowledge gaps in future generations. Evaluating cultural processes will enhance

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understanding of who and what is excluded by collections and why. One question that cannot currently be mapped with NMS data is how the date of the object compares to its date of accession; this would offer insight to the shifting values placed on different eras of fashion, in different historical periods.24

Material lives of working men Among the institutional and social systems of collecting, museum objects still have much to say about why they have been accessioned (and valued) for posterity. The following case studies will briefly introduce items in NMS’s collections that speak to working men’s fashion and the roles of associated narratives. In NMS library manuscript’s collection is a merchant’s notebook (SAS Ms 620) containing memorandums from an over-land business trip from Aberdeen to London, autumn 1737 (Figure 20.2). The original author made notes only about this one trip, which almost fill the volume. The book is believed to have firstly belonged to a William Young of Aberdeen (b.1704), however there is a lack of clarity around this source.25 The following discussion proposes it relates to another Aberdeen merchant, James Young (1697–1790/4).26 The death of James and

FIGURE 20.2 A merchant tailor’s notebook bound in green leather, 1737, LIB.2021.15/SAS Ms 620. © National Museums Scotland.

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the sorting of his estate can explain secondary entries in 1795 and 1796 made by a different author. These entries attempt to copy the original handwriting, repeating phrases, then recording an eclipse, a flood and a petition of Alexander Aachandachy [Achindachy] regarding a life rent laid out for a ‘George Gordon of Whitetey’. There are a further two entries by William Milne, from whom the volume eventually entered the museum. William engages with the secondary entries and adds his own note about an asteroid event in 1866. In 1867 he adds a note at the back of the volume about how it came into his possession, incorrectly believing it belonged to the Provost William Young of Aberdeen (b. 1736). Milne’s notes and other letters associated with the notebook’s donation draw out antiquary narratives, while Milne’s notes are characteristic of a desire to find importance in inherited objects and positioning male value in public offices. In 1914 the subsequent donor, Brodie, wrote: The book came into my hands after the death of my old friend Mr William Milne, who was for many years head of the Conveyancing Department at 5 Thistle Street, Edinburgh. He was a most scholarly and interesting man, and Latin and Greek he was almost as familiar with as English. I used to work under him, and I believe I was the only real friend he had in the world … On 7 April of that year [1880] I went, at his express, to say goodbye to him at the office, and to my horror found him sitting dead in his chair.27 Brodie’s sentimental attachment is tainted with a nostalgia that is not entirely selfless. His letter implies that Milne intended the residue of his estate to go to Brodie, had he lived longer. Whereas Milne’s Will emphasizes attachment to his landlady and his happiest days at the University of Aberdeen.28 Outside of the diligence that enabled Milne to his career in conveyancing, these narratives have little in common with James Young’s notebook. Its pages are alive with lists, memorandums, associations and samples of merchandise. Young was a merchant who dealt in tailoring goods: fabric, haberdashery, inter-linings, stay supports, ready-made stockings and hats. He stocked anything that might be needed to make clothes and accessories. His narratives are of business, social activity, regional identity and most striking of all: a profound material knowledge of fashion and its manufacturing communities. On the inside front cover Young lists the main costs of his journey, itemizing: Edinburgh by the 4 October, then Leeds, Wakefield, Halifax, Rochdale, Manchester, Stockport, Macclesfield, a ‘stop at night’, Fledgeford and Birmingham before arriving in London by the 29 October. Somewhere on his trip he called at Coventry, having been provided with at least ten contacts in the city. Throughout his journey, Young mixes social commissions and business; the most intense commissions being sixteen memorandums for contacts in Edinburgh, from personal errands to petitions for others. At almost every stage of his journey Young adds a new memo or contact, many of which use association as an identifier: ‘Mr. John Smith in Walsall in Staffordshire Spur maker who puts up when in London at the Bell Inn in wood street to whom I have sold my horse for six pound.’ Throughout this community of trade, people knew each other by street name, occupation and regional characteristics, on occasion Young reads as though making notes from dictation: ‘at the x keys in wood street, the Notingham men puts up who chefley dealeth in Silk, & in worsted wove stockings & c. Mr Shain of Notingham is there now’. The book includes several pages with small samples of wool cloth affixed against pricing notes. Some of these are listed beside a large order for wool fabrics made in Leeds; and when pasting in ‘Jemmies and Mankies’ Young noted a memorandum for a brush for velvet cloth,

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watch crystals and springs. There is a sense of continual conversation, where makers and merchants share material understanding as they handled and viewed goods. Young constantly compared and suited his purchases: in Leeds he buys half pieces of cloth ‘to match a deep lead patern among my London cloths’, and he invested in experiments: ‘James Scoats Skinner at Northallerton given him orders for a pack of fine Wooll to be sent me for a Tryall’. The richness of Young’s entries is almost bewildering; from wool cloth, to thread, to silk hats, stays supports, silk napkins, gold waistcoats, coloured figured fustians, cotton hose, horsehair and plate buttons, ribbons and sending linen to be stiffened. He supplied for both men’s and women’s fashions, though predominantly men’s. His list of goods shipped ahead to London includes three ‘old silk plaid’ items supplied by male customers ‘to dye’, among other merchandise returns. While we know little from these entries about Young’s personal attire, his everyday world of fashion was materially rich and varied, predicated on material quality, trust and social connection. In contrast to James Young’s autonomy is a livery outfit (A.1894.121 & A–B) dated to the 1760s (Figure 20.3). It consists of a yellow wool cloth coat, cut with a full skirt and deep cuffs in a dark pink (crimson or red) cloth. All seams and edges are trimmed with a wool (worsted)

FIGURE 20.3  Detail of a man’s livery waistcoat, c.1760s, A.1894.121 A. © National Museums Scotland.

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and linen uncut velvet braid. The braid has a bold geometric design in dark pink and black on yellow. There is a short waistcoat in red or pink wool cloth with a double edging of a similar braid, but with a different pattern and accessioned with them are a pair of soft cream leather breeches; tight fitting, high-waisted and full-length with stirrup straps. Further investigation is required to ascertain if each piece originated in a different ensemble. The group was acquired by the museum from a posthumous sale of artist Gourlay Steell (1819–94). Steell likely acquired the livery as a curiosity and prop: other items in Steell’s collection include jingling spurs, a matador’s jacket, a targe and a North African bridle, so the NMS livery is not necessarily British.29 Steell specialized in animal portraiture, but also did historical works. His engagement with romantic historicism is evident where even animal portraits, such as The Master’s Best Friend (1863), include historicizing props.30 As with George Milne, Gourlay Steell’s interest in the objects he preserved rests largely with a romanticized conception of history; Steell’s collection engages directly with antiquarian chivalric narratives. The garments were probably used by a livery rider: the breeches are stretched over the calves and have darkened bands from creasing behind a bent knee; the front of the coat skirt, which would cover the thighs when seated is the most darkened area, with the coat braid most worn on the waist front and armpits – all evoking a horseback attitude. The waistcoat is cut short, contrary to elite fashion in the mid-eighteenth century, but matching depictions of working men and riding servants.31 Notably, the coat and waistcoat would fit a slight build. The pieces combine showmanship and practicality; hardwearing, warm materials that could be cleaned, in bright colours with coat trimmings to be viewed from front and back. Conspicuous context is critical when considering the demographics of men who wore livery in the mid-eighteenth century. Although livery gave a flavour of archaism, contemporary exclamations about modish materials suggest livery announced the fashion, credit, respectability and power of the person who commissioned it.32 Livery wearers were therefore conspicuous objects of fashion in themselves in their everyday lives. John Styles found that British men’s relationship to livery was ambivalent, probably due to a combination of personal ambition and working conditions: livery signified unskilled work centred on appearance.33 A quotation cited by Styles from the London Chronicle (1757) is revealingly vehement: ‘I consider an Englishman in livery, as a kind of monster. He is a person born free, with the obvious badge of servility.’34 The author was writing at a time when the majority of c. 15,000 Black and Asian people living in the UK, centred in London or other trading ports and were strongly associated with service in livery as enslavement.35 Fashionable portraits of the time make clear the direct visual associations contemporaries had between Black and Asian enslaved men and livery.36 From this perspective, the language of being a monster, born free and wearing a badge has racialized emphasis. The most visible and controlled group of eighteenth-century livery-wearing servants are likely to have been Black and Asian youth, many aged between eight and twelve, often trafficked alone from India, Africa and the Caribbean.37 Yet, despite livery having been worn by estimated tens of thousands of male household servants, eighteenth-century examples rarely survive.38 One reason is that livery might have been one of only two sets of clothes the wearer owned, especially those enslaved. The control this enacted is evident in runaway advertisements: The Daily Advertiser, 1741 lists a young ‘Negro Lad … drawn away by another Negro Man, who wears a yellow Livery’. In a 1763 listing of two separate runaways from one owner a pregnant woman is described as taking two changes of dress with her, whereas the male counterpart ran wearing only his livery. Underground networking to assist runaways would have led to the unpicking, sale or destruction of identifiable garments.39 The female servant was advantaged in having clothes to quickly sell or exchange.40

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Eighteenth-century livery deserves greater research, especially within British dress cultures, ostensibly asserting democratic identity. To be explored are how other European countries’ livery influenced British uniforms; relationships between livery, enslaved servants and the income explosions associated with globalization and the cross connections between civil uniform, livery, military uniform and the performative wear of ‘Turkish’ bands.41 The latter might offer readings of working male migrants using band outfits to repurpose sartorial codes. In contrast to a uniform signalling servitude are a group of items presenting an adopted uniform of everyday autonomy. Two female members of the Turcan family donated, at separate times, a group of seventy-four garments, of which seven were men’s dress c.1820–50. These seven are the oldest objects in the group, everything else dates to c.1900–20. They consist of: A.1978.282, a pair of heavy cotton trousers, loose cut with a fall front and three pockets; A.1978.283, a white cotton jacket, waist length, single breasted with ‘W.T’ embroidered into the inside rear waist (Figure 20.4); A.1978.284, a nightshirt with a small cross-stitch initial in red ‘W.T2’; A.1992.233, a fine linen shirt marked in ink ‘John Turcan No1 1834’, handsewn with a half-length placket flanked by a broad pleat panel; A.1992.234 A is a waist-length jacket, double-breasted, in heavy white cotton; A.1992.234 B are the suited trousers of heavy cotton, with straight legs, small notches at the hem and a button marked ‘W P Gunnyon Liverpool’; finally, A.1992.245 is another lighter weight waist-length cotton jacket of the same design as A.1978.282.

FIGURE 20.4  Detail of a man’s cotton jacket, c.1820–50, A.1978.283. © National Museums Scotland.

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The Turcan family had multiple connections in Perth and Edinburgh shipping from their family base in Tulliallan, Kincardineshire (Fife, Scotland), and the trousers and jackets in the group are mariner style. The Turcans were an active merchant sea-faring family, the business lives of the men are readily traceable through printed and archival materials. The NMS garments almost certainly belonged to William Turcan (1811–87) and his brother John Turcan (1804–42). They had six further siblings but three died in childhood; Mary, who died aged twenty-eight married a Liverpool merchant. James (1806–76) probably became head of the family to be the James listed against Inch House, Perth, in 1857.42 Their sister Euphemia outlived them all, dying in 1893 aged eighty-five. They were all children of James Turcan (1762–1852) and Mary Watson (d. 1850), both of whom had loaned their names to familyowned ships.43 John Turcan married Catherine Jameson in 1834, and it is likely that shirt ‘No1 1834’ refers to that event. John died only eight years later, a father of four children.44 Catherine seems to have removed back to Tulliallan with the children, to be ‘Mrs John Turcan’ on an 1855 valuation roll.45 John’s business traded in Leith, Edinburgh, under ‘Watson, Turcan and Co.’, merchants dealing in butter and flour among other provisions, and in 1834 John had advertised a pleasure sail on the Stirling Castle from Chain Pier (Newhaven, Edinburgh).46 His post-humous inventory shows he owned a share of the Alloa and Kincardine steam boat company and one of Trinity Pier Company, he also owned one eighth of the barque James Turcan and part shares in five other vessels.47 The James Turcan is probably named for John’s father, on whose death it was valued at a total of £2460, the deceased James owned thirty-two of sixty-four shares.48 The James Turcan traded to the Indian Ocean and Australasia, captained by William Turcan, whose jacket and nightshirt reached NMS collection. William appears to have spent most of his adult life at sea, sailing to ports around the UK, such as Liverpool and Gravesend, for Calcutta, Singapore, Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) and in 1841 disembarked twelve cabin passengers in Adelaide, Australia.49 The barque was stranded in a mess of boats after a hurricane hit Calcutta in June 1842.50 Consistent with manual employment, both pairs of trousers and the heavy cotton jacket have repairs: a large tear on the inside front of the jacket, assorted button replacements, a patched hem, patched side seams and the repair of a cross-posterior seam. John Turcan’s shirt is patched on the wearer’s left shoulder, with several darns on the lower front and a large repaired tear at the back hem. These are the modest remains of occupational dress encountering fashion. Carefully handsewn and hand-repaired, the garments combine nineteenth-century manly mariner narratives with those of the industrious merchant.51 These clothes saw hard labour but were laundered to white neatness. They also express style; the pleating on John’s shirt front and sleeves adds trimming that is low maintenance and evocative of manly simplicity, functionally decorative. John’s early death makes it unlikely he was involved in the preservation of his shirt, but as a widow’s memento it expresses both associations with homemaking and importantly his favoured everyday sartorial expression. William’s clothing is equally not just a mariner’s uniform. Possibly kept by William in his retirement, it is tempting to read either Catherine or his sister Euphemia as conduits for their preservation. His garments would have expressed personality as well as rank and trade. Following the fashion of high collar, tapered sleeves, notched lapels and double-breasted front, William’s bright white clothes would have been layered and accessorized in the colourful, evocative fashions of mariners, where neckties, bows and buttons were worn alongside rips and repairs.

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FIGURE 20.5  Salt print depicting Willie Liston, a young Newhaven fisherman ‘redding the line’, from a volume of salt prints by David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, 1843–7, D.2014.2.94. © National Museums Scotland.52

Tracking the James Turcan in shipping listings makes the global scale and vivacity of the mid-nineteenth-century industry inescapable, yet this small group of cherished clothes is all that has so far been found in NMS fashion collections evidencing lived experience in the merchant mariner trade. The raw materials and perishable cargoes shipped by the Turcan’s give limited intimation of the by-lines discussed by Beverley Lemire for earlier generations, but the founding objects of NMS – such as grass from China and minerals from India – evoke entangled narratives between the everyday fashion of merchants and the formation of cultural institutions.53 Another item of actively worn men’s fashion came into the collection by accidental discovery (A.1977.307). In 1977 a part of the museum originally constructed in 1875 underwent redevelopment, during which a pair of boots (Figure 20.6) were uncovered. The boots are heavily used with incomplete laces. They fit strongly into a pattern of concealed shoes, popularly observed across the UK.54 Many found shoes date from the 1840s to the early twentieth century, along with other found objects, such as garments and bottles. How they tie into the nineteenth-century building and population booms is not clear, but there were folk traditions

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FIGURE 20.6  A pair of leather boots, c.1875, A.1977.307. © National Museums Scotland.

in the nineteenth century around shoes being good luck, or used in witchcraft.55 However, the deliberate placement of items in walls during construction can also be one of convenience. What appears to be a generational pattern of behaviour, could be a complicated mixture of lost objects, local superstition and walling up rubbish, or what you no longer need on payday. NMS found shoes are the most unambiguously working-class objects in the fashion collections. They are all worn and repaired to the point of destruction; they constitute a group of everyday fashion worn by low-income households. The strongest clues to the history of the NMS boots and their wearer are embedded in the materials. The top of the boot has worn where a trouser cuff rubbed at the leather, the last eyelet before the lace hooks took most of the lacing strain and there is wear where the extra lace length was wrapped around the boot top, the sole has split over the bridge of the foot, the leather has moulded and broken suggesting the leather has been wet and dried without polish, the toe ends are scuffed with small holes appearing, the inside edge of the toe box has been patched and the toe box itself has a second layer with punched detailing, the sole has worn through, revealing the stitching to the upper and there are two types of tacks. The repair over the toe is comparable to similar repairs on other found shoes

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in the collection, showing that toe caps were routinely reinforced.56 However, the decorative detailing on the boots indicates care and attention: affording detailing on shoe patches is a deliberate investment in styling. Whoever wore these boots, cared about their treads. From the context of their being found, it is likely (although not certain) the boots belonged to a male builder, a carpenter or other skilled tradesman working in the building. The pronounced buckling of the right boot across the toes suggests that whatever the wearer did, they predominantly rested or used that foot in a bent position. Narratives of nineteenth-century working men that swing from hero to fiend have little role in these objects, but the trend for photographing working groups at the turn of the twentieth century means the boots can be placed into a visual mass context, so often lost to museum collections.57 Robert Tressell’s novel Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (authored 1906–10) reputedly the first to be written by a working-class man, gives an emotive counterbalance to working class heroes: Bert White was a frail-looking, weedy, pale-faced boy, fifteen years of age and about four feet nine inches in height. His trousers were part of a suit that he had once worn for best, but that was so long ago that they had become too small for him, fitting rather tightly and scarcely reaching the top of his patched and broken hobnailed boots. The knees and leg-bottoms of the legs of his trousers had been patched with square pieces of cloth, several shades darker than the original fabric, and these patches were now all in rags.58 There is no way to know whether the placing of the boots in the museum was driven by superstition, convenience or mere forgetfulness, but the fact they were found was accidental. Their being found in the 1970s when the museum dress collection was actively expanding and both dress history and museums were investing in social history and folk narratives sealed their accession fate.

To be continued Within the scope of individuals adding to the collection there are many further items that can continue exploration of the narratives and values surrounding men. An orange and white gingham coat c.1825–30 (A.1979.113) (Figure 20.7) is thought to have come from the North American Wendell Fendall family. The coat is a colourful affront to Flügel’s claims that professional and merchant men had adopted a sober uniform; it dates to a time when the Wendell brothers were successful cotton manufacturers and a merchant in New Hampshire and lawyer Philip Richard Fendall II married in 1827. Two waistcoats associated with the weddings of Lothian farmer’s in the mid-nineteenth century (H.TJ 28 and H.TJ 29), donated by their ancestors have much to say about male engagement with textiles: one is a leather waistcoat imitating printed cotton; the other is a silk designed to look like marbled water or paper. An important generational bridge into the twentieth century is represented by the 1920s business wardrobe of Alexander McCulloch Stewart, father of collection donor Charles William Stewart. Alexander worked for an insurance company in the Philippines, in suits of cream and white silk and cotton. Stewart’s unselective approach to preservation has given NMS a valuable window into the unglamorous world of colonial administration, where fashion was expressed through cut, accessories and deportment.

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FIGURE 20.7  Man’s coat in cotton gingham, c.1825–30, A.1979.113. © National Museums Scotland.

Conclusion This capsule investigation indicates the potential for enhanced understanding of cultural value systems through quantifying and qualifying museum collections. With more and better acquisitions data, museums could address their limitations, constructively develop greater collections diversity and contribute to unexpected areas of cultural knowledge. To begin the process requires acknowledgement that museums are subjective institutions, constructed by the values and narratives of personal and social identities. It requires a willingness to grapple with messy, complex and occasionally unfulfilling cultural histories and – most importantly – communicate these processes broadly for public benefit. The perpetuation of historical narratives and value systems visible in the above study shows how understandings of men’s everyday fashion and material culture have been limited. The objects discussed above all entered the collection by circular paths. None of them were provided by the original owners in a direct

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conversation about their everyday lives, and yet they are rich in multi-layered information, launching investigation across time periods, occupations, ethnicities and the globe. As dress historians, curators of fashion and cultural investigators we know that what surrounds people in their everyday lives determines the paths that they take and that the materials they live with shape their values. It is no longer appropriate to allow the conditions that shaped Flugel and past generations of collectors to blinker our knowledge via unquestioning inheritance. Instead, revisiting and reviewing their contributions offer up a multiplicity of narratives shaping our culture, inviting Breward’s ‘questioning framework’ into the everyday fashion of working men.59

Notes 1

Amanda Vickery, ‘Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History’, The Historical Journal 36, no. 2 (1993): 383–414; J. C. Flügel, The Psychology of Clothes (London: Hogarth Press, 1966), 110–11.

2

Christopher Breward, The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion and City Life, 1860–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 11.

3

Recent contributions: Sharon Sadako Takeda et al., Reigning Men: Fashion in Menswear, 1715–2015 (London: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2016); Peter McNeil, Pretty Gentlemen Macaroni Men and the Eighteenth-Century Fashion World (London: Yale University Press, 2018); Jay McCauley Bowstead, Menswear Revolution: The Transformation of Contemporary Menswear (London: Bloomsbury, 2018); Shaun Cole and Miles Lambert, Dandy Style: 250 Years of British Men’s Fashion (London: Yale University Press, 2021).

4

For semantics within sartorial studies see Valerie Cumming, Understanding Fashion History (London: BT Batsford, 2004), 7–32.

5

Karen Harvey, ‘The History of Masculinity, circa 1650–1800’, Journal of British Studies 44, no. 2 (2005): 296–311; for narrative codes in everyday practices see Lynn Abrams and Elizabeth Ewan, Nine Centuries of Man Manhood and Masculinities in Scottish History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 1–17.

6

Hannah Greig, Jane Hamlett, and Leonie Hannan, Gender and Material Culture in Britain since 1600 (London: Palgrave Macmillan Ltd., 2015); Joanne Begatio, Manliness in Britain, 1760–1900: Bodies, Emotion, and Material Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020).

7

Elaine Chalus and Perry Gauci eds., Revisiting the Polite & Commercial People (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 1–16; John Tosh, ‘Masculinities in an Industrializing Society: Britain, 1800–1914’, Journal of British Studies 44, no. 2 (2005): 330–42; J. A. Mangan, ‘“Muscular, Militaristic and Manly”: The British Middle‐Class Hero as Moral Messenger’, The International Journal of the History of Sport 13, no. 1 (1996): 28–47; Michèle Cohen, ‘“Manners” Make the Man: Politeness, Chivalry, and the Construction of Masculinity, 1750–1830’, Journal of British Studies 44, no. 2 (2005): 312–29; Jon Stobart and Mark Rothery, Consumption and the Country House (Oxford Scholarship Online, 2016); David Kutcha, The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity England, 1550–1850 (London: University of California Press Ltd., 2002), 77–178.

8 Begatio, Manliness in Britain, 5–14. 9

Hannah Barker, ‘Soul, Purse and Family: Middling and Lower-Class Masculinity in EighteenthCentury Manchester’, Social History 33, no. 1 (2008): 12–35; Margot Finn, ‘Men’s Things: Masculine Possession in the Consumer Revolution’, Social History 25, no. 2 (2000): 133–55.

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10 Stephen Moore, ‘“A Nation of Harlequins”? Politics and Masculinity in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England’, Journal of British Studies 49, no. 3 (2010): 514–39. 11 Kutcha, The Three-Piece Suit, 133–72; Gregory Vargo, ‘“Outworks of the Citadel of Corruption”: The Chartist Press Reports the Empire’, Victorian Studies 54, no. 2 (2012): 227–53; Patrick Butler, ‘Most Britons Regard Themselves as Working Class, Survey Finds’, The Guardian (29 June 2016); Emily Gallagher discussing ‘Uncovering Victorian and Edwardian (1850–1910) Working-Class Dress in England’s Museums’, Sartorial Society Series seminar (25 March 2021). 12 Social history, heritage and folk collecting burgeoned in the mid-twentieth century, influenced by Scandinavian museum models and economic upheavals: the Highland Folk Museum was founded in 1935; St Fagans National Museum of History (formerly Welsh Folk Museum) took form c.1926–1948; Beamish Living Museum of the North began in 1958; Ironbridge Gorge Museum started its first employee in 1969; Weald and Downland Living Museum launched in 1967; of scholarly influence: E. P. Thomson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Pelican, 1963). 13 For detail on timelines of collections, names, buildings and directors see National Museums Scotland website. 14 Geoffrey N. Swinney, ‘George Wilson’s Map of Technology: Giving Shape to the “Industrial Arts” in Mid- Nineteenth-Century Edinburgh’, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies 36, no. 2 (2016): 169. 15 Swinney, ‘George Wilson’s Map of Technology’, 181. 16 The mid-century curators across NMAS and RSM laid the foundation of how the collections are still used today: Stuart Maxwell and Helen Bennett at NMAS; Naomi Tarrant (1974–2002*), Jennifer Scarce, Lou Taylor and Dale Idiens at RSM, under the direction of Revel Oddy (*employment tenure dates). 17 See for example Elizabeth Carnegie, ‘“It wasn’t all bad”: Representations of Working-Class Cultures Within Social History Museums and Their Impacts on Audiences’, Museum and Society 4, no. 2 (2006): 69–83. 18 Originally compiled to assist a research project proposal on the subject. List fall-out is an unknown portion of NMAS objects unassigned appropriate collection and date values due to historic cataloguing quirks (see Swinney, ‘George Wilson’s Map of Technology’, 187); each part of an outfit constitutes one object. 19 The catalogue includes an acquisition source gender category but use lacks consistency; identification of other protected characteristics would require case-by-case research. 20 Women could have a masculine or neutral appearance by omitting prénom and pronouns. The only way to ascertain this is via case-by-case research. 21 Kutcha, The Three-Piece Suit, 149, 157; for how historians have emphasized consumer markets as female see Finn, ‘Men’s Things’, 133–55. 22 With grateful thanks to Naomi Tarrant for her thoughts on the HAA era. 23 Manchester City Art Gallery acquired the collection of Phyllis Emily Cunnington and Cecil Willet Cunnington in 1947; Doris Langley Moore founded The Fashion Museum, Bath in 1963; The Olive Matthews Collection was housed in the new Chertsey Museum in 1969; The School of Historical Dress houses the Janet Arnold Archive and The Hopkins Collection, whose collectors are still contributing after 40 years. The Needlework Development Scheme (1934–1961) is now split across multiple collections. 24 Extensive object reviewing would be required for date mapping. 25 William Young Senior is referred to in Letter 2 SAS Ms 620. 26 The Edinburgh Magazine lists James Young’s death as 1794, Alexander Johnson lists it as 1790: Alexander Johnson, A Short Memoir of James Young, Merchant Burgess of Aberdeen, and Rachel Cruickshank, His Spouse, and of Their Descendants (Aberdeen: James Craighead & Co, 1860), 9.

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27 G. S. Brodie, London, 28 February 1914: Letter 3 SAS Ms 620. 28 Edinburgh Sheriff Court, Wills and testaments SC70/4/184. 29 A targe is a circular body shield worn on the arm, commonly associated with pre-1745 Scottish weaponry; A.1894.118 & 119; A.1893.134; A.1894.120; A.1894.129. 30 Private collection; appointed painter of animals to Queen Victoria 1872. 31 Captain Lord George Graham in his Cabin, 1742–1744, by William Hogarth, Royal Museums Greenwich BHC2720; O The Roast Beef of Old England (‘The Gate of Calais’), 1748, Tate Gallery N01464; The Paris Diligence, 1810(?), by Thomas Rowlandson, The Royal Collections Trust RCIN810826. 32 John Styles, The Dress of the People Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Yale University Press, 2010), 295–6, 299; Anne Buck, Dress in Eighteenth-Century England (London: BT Batsford, 1979), 105–9. 33 Buck, Dress, 108–9; Styles, Dress of the People, 299–300. 34 Styles, Dress of the People, 300. 35 Gretchen Gerzina, Black London Life before Emancipation (Hanover: Dartmouth College Library 1995), 5; Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 2018 first published 1984), 74. 36 David Bindman, ‘Subjectivity and Slavery in Portraiture from Courtly to Commercial Societies’, in Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World, ed. Agnes Lugo-Ortiz and Angela Rosenthal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 71–88. 37 As detailed in Stephen Mullen, Nelson Mundell, and Simon P. Newman, ‘Black Runaways in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, in Britain’s Black Past, ed. Gretchen H. Gerzina (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020), 81–98. 38 Styles, Dress of the People, 51; The National Trust collections online has 170 items under livery + archive, manuscripts, costume, prints and paintings, nearly all post-dating 1800; The Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute has fifteen searchable livery items, all nineteenth century; The V&A holds a number of eighteenth-century livery items from across Europe e.g. T.190-1995; T.2551966; 70-1892. 39 A farmer is described (re-)wearing livery, 1759: Buck, Dress, 108. 40 110 of 836 UK runaway slave advertisements feature livery and date 1700–1777; 33 per cent feature yellow as a descriptive, 70 per cent feature red, 95 per cent feature hat/cap, 62 per cent coat, 45 per cent breeches; Daily Advertiser, 5 March 1741 and Public Advertiser 19 November 1763 as listed on https://www.runaways.gla.ac.uk/database/table/. 41 Fryer, Staying Power, 81–90. 42 Post Office, Directory to Noblemen and Gentlemen’s Seats, Villages etc.in Scotland (1852, 1857): https://digital.nls.uk/91049076. 43 Married 8 March 1801: Old Parish Registers Marriages 397/20 140. 44 Deaths (13 July 1842), The Scotsman (1817–1858). 45 Tenant at a house at Shore Street: Scotlands People reference VR011300001. 46 Classified Ad. 8 (7 June 1834), The Scotsman (1817–1858). 47 Edinburgh Sheriff Court, Wills and testaments SC70/1/63. 48 Dunblane Sheriff Court, Wills and testaments SC44/44/10. 49 Noted in the record for an accommodation plan of the James Turcan in the Australia National Maritime Museum: ANMM Collection 00003915.

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50 Naval Intelligence: Royal Navy (10 August 1842), The Scotsman (1817–1858). 51 Begatio, Manliness in Britain, 101–35. 52 Such as colourful kerchiefs: Beverly Lemire, ‘“Men of the World”: British Mariners, Consumer Practice, and Material Culture in an Era of Global Trade, c.1660–1800’, Journal of British Studies 54, no. 2 (2015): 288–319; see also National Galleries of Scotland PGP HA 302; PGP HA 306; PGP HA 330. 53 A.1855.17.1–4 Specimens of Chinese grass used in textile manufacture; items A.1855.20, 21, 22, 23 and 28 include specimens of silk, grass, colours used in painting and printing cloths, lichens for dyeing and illustrations of calico printing and dyeing. 54 https://northamptonmuseums.wordpress.com/tag/concealed-shoes/ (accessed 30 March 2021). 55 Ceri Houlbrook (28 July 2016): https://theconcealedrevealed.wordpress.com/2016/07/28/thefolklore-of-shoe-shaped-confetti/ (accessed 30 March 2021). 56 Example: K.2002.1084. 57 Example: https:\\www.alamy.com ‘Edwardian workers’ (accessed 30 March 2021). 58 Robert Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (London: Harper Perennial, 2005 first published 1914), 16. 59 Christopher Breward, The Culture of Fashion (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 4.

FIGURE 21.1  Mr and Mrs John Marshall photographed by Archibald Robertson of 37 Glassford Street, Glasgow, c.1866–1867, E.1974.104.2. © CSG CIC Glasgow Museums and Libraries Collections.

21 A Victorian best-day wedding dress Rebecca Quinton

Among the 150 wedding dresses in Glasgow Museums’ European dress collection, more than half of nineteenth-century examples are best-day gowns: day dresses in black, blue, brown, green, grey, purple, red or yellow silks that were suitable for the bride to wear again as her Sunday best. There are several reasons why a coloured-silk dress was the preferred option. For many it was for economic reasons as it allowed the bride to wear an existing dress or purchase a new one that could be worn for subsequent occasions. In Scotland weddings did not require a church service as regular marriages could be officiated by a minister in any venue.1 As a result, many Victorian Presbyterian brides got married in their parents’ home. Furthermore, some couples had their first child before wedlock.2 Having an illegitimate child was not deemed problematic until the late-nineteenth century as registrars were permitted to amend the register of births to legitimize a child when their parents later married.3 White, associated with purity and virginity, would not have been the appropriate choice for these mother brides. The dress worn by Mrs John Marshall, probably 21-year-old Helen Clelland, a farm servant and daughter of a grocer, at her wedding on 28 December 1866 is typical of other 1860s bestday wedding dresses in the collection.4 It is made from brown silk taffeta warp-woven with narrow black stripes and followed the cut of modest contemporary day dresses: the neckline high and round, the bodice fitted with darts at the front, fastening down the centre front with a row of buttons, the sleeves slightly large around the upper arm and elbow and the fullness of its wide skirt gathered evenly into the waist. An accompanying photograph of the new bride and groom captures the dress as it was first constructed and how Mrs Marshall sometimes styled it with a white collar, crossed over and held in place with a large brooch, with matching cuffs.5 Here the bodice is trimmed with black braid over the bust and on the outer edge of the sleeves. The full-skirt is not stretched over a large cage-crinoline of the mid-1860s to the limit of its circumference, but is allowed to fall in gathers to the floor. The overall appearance is neat and modest, smart yet practical. From the cut and construction of the surviving dress it is evident that it continued to be worn over the following years, with the wearer altering it to mirror changing fashions in the years following her wedding. The braid on the bodice was removed and replaced with black

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Bedfordshire bobbin lace decorated with black glass beads. The buttons were also replaced with black silk-covered ones embroidered with brown flowers. The skirt was unpicked and reattached flat at the front with the fullness gathered into the centre back to go over the late1860s crinolette and re-hemmed. Finally, a new tablier apron over-skirt decorated with four silk bows and edged with black lace together with a belt with large peplum bow completed Mrs Marshall’s updated look.

Notes 1

Before the Marriage (Scotland) Act 1856 it was also possible to have an irregular marriage that only required a declaration of vows before two witnesses.

2

Glasgow Museums E.1978.15 and E.1985.49.1 were worn in 1858 and 1861, respectively, by brides who had already had their first child.

3

Scotland’s People, ‘Registering illegitimate births’, available online: https://www.scotlandspeople.gov. uk/guides/registering-illegitimate-births (accessed 24 February 2021).

4

Glasgow Museums E.1974.104.1.a–c; Statutory Registers Marriages 626/A1 16, National Records of Scotland. Available online: https://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk/images-pdf/M1866_626_ A1_0008Z (accessed 28 September 2021). The bride’s name was not supplied by the donor. Genealogy research by the author has not been corroborated conclusively.

5

Glasgow Museums E.1974.104.2.

22 ‘Fustian jackets, unshorn chins, blistered hands’: Fabric and political feeling in the Chartist Movement, 1837–48 Vic Clarke

The Chartist Movement was, at its time, the largest expression of political discontent by the working classes in Britain. Dorothy Thompson, introducing The Chartists, wrote that ‘[it] might perhaps be called the political facet of that total experience of the working people in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. […] [Their] thoughts and beliefs as well as in [their] actions.’1 The name of the movement comes from the six-point document, The People’s Charter, published by the London Working Men’s Association in 1837. The six points were universal (male) suffrage for those aged over twenty-one, of sound mind, unless imprisoned, equal electoral districts, abolition of property qualification for MPs, secret ballots, payment for MPs and annual parliamentary elections. A large proportion of active Chartists were employed in the textile manufacturing industries, from flax-dressers to cotton-spinners to wool-cutters to seamstresses to shoemakers, who literally created the fashions of the early nineteenth century.2 The six points were not brand-new ideas in 1837 – nor was the name, the ‘People’s Charter’.3 However, the publication of The People’s Charter represented a turning point in workingclass and Radical politics. Calls for these six points, as well as affiliated campaigns for the repeal of the Corn Laws (1815), had been the driving force behind the peaceful protest in St. Peter’s Fields, Manchester, in August 1819 which became Peterloo. The Chartist Movement was a direct descendent of the meeting and platform culture of these earlier Regency radical movements, but entered the Victorian era with a new focus on literacy, producing the first mass

I am grateful to Arththi Sathananthar for her feedback on an early draft of this piece, and for AHRC competition studentship funding from the White Rose College of Arts and Humanities to undertake the original research. I am also grateful for the Royal Historical Society, who generously awarded me an Early Career Fellowship Grant to support the writing of this piece, and the Pasold Society for the award of an image reproductions grant.

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petitions in Britain, as well as a wealth of pamphlets, books and periodicals. Perhaps the best surviving record of the movement is its leading newspaper, the Northern Star (1837–1855), founded in the wool manufacturing town of Leeds, and equidistant from the literary capitals of Edinburgh and London. The Star enabled radical platform culture to have a new kind of mobility; whereby local branch meetings were recorded by secretaries and correspondents and reproduced in print, to be consumed by others all over England, Scotland, Wales and sometimes further afield. The Star offered space to advertise ‘Chartist’ merchandise, a kind of noticeboard for readers to correspond with the editors and each other, and offered portraits of leading figures as promotional giveaways.4 The Star was not just a vehicle for the content of political meetings, but an important object in itself. Likewise, clothing is much more than a cover for the body. It is sensory: though we most often consider its visual appeal, it has texture, sound, and particularly when access to bathing may be an issue, it has a smell. Fabric has an intimate relationship with the body, both with the consumers and the factory ‘hands’ behind its production. When Star proprietor and ‘gentleman leader’ of the movement Feargus O’Connor addressed his readers as ‘the fustian jackets, unshorn chins, and blistered hands,’ he made icons of his working-class male supporters, they became the embodiment of this political protest movement.5 Dorothy Thompson referred to Chartism as the ‘thoughts and beliefs’ of society, I argue that the ‘everyday’ clothing of the working class was also an expression of Chartist activism. In this chapter I uncover the material culture of the Chartist Movement as it was expressed through fabric and textiles, reported in its ‘national organ’, the Star during its height in the 1840s. The sensory nature of material objects, including periodicals, pamphlets and textiles, evokes near-universal sensory experiences through which communities of activists were built. The ‘blistered hands’, made so through manual labour, are united by holding their copies of the Star, their fustian jackets and the acts of giving and receiving ceremonial medals, cards of membership and garments. This chapter will explore the visual and textual aspects of Chartist material culture as a means of building community, creating intimacy between geographically disparate, but politically alike activists.

Texture and tradition Writing on the political symbolism of clothing in the early nineteenth century, Kristina Navickas identifies the relationship between clothing and the body politic, noting that, whereas the public sphere relies on an individual’s engagement with debate in text or discussion, the body politic suggests the formation of a group identity through collective expressions of self. Political clothing was an articulation of both individual self and collective identity.6 When Feargus O’Connor first addressed his readers as the ‘men with fustian jackets, blistered hands, and unshorn chins’, as well as ‘their wives, and children,’ he does just that; creating a body politic out of his readers.7 Taking advantage of the mobility of print, O’Connor is able to not only address individual readers and supporters all over Britain, but unifies them into the same body. He condenses the many into the few, not by his fustian-jacketed readers politicizing their own clothing, but by him seeing their clothes as a political symbol. The ‘articulation of

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both individual self and collective identity’ observed by Navickas is not done by the readers of the Star, the wearers of the fustian jackets, but by O’Connor, a class outsider. Feargus O’Connor was by no means the first ‘gentleman leader’ of a largely working-class political movement in British history. However, as Paul Pickering has observed previously, O’Connor broke with paternalist tradition in his choice to sartorially align himself with his working-class followers.8 The ‘fustian jacket’, if not the ‘unshorn chin’ or ‘blistered hands’, represented an expression of class solidarity through dressing down, rather than working-class finery being dressed up. Dressing up was part of the Radical tradition throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As Navickas has argued in her study of the same, dressing up in Sunday best or holiday clothing not only aligned radical protest with celebration and festivity, but was used to convey respectability when occupations of public space were particularly contentious.9 At what became the Peterloo massacre, ‘women in white’ were used to indicate the respectability of the meeting, a performance of the purity of self, which combined collectively into a vision of an uncorrupted body politic. The ‘martyrdom’ of the ‘women in white’ at Peterloo was an image that was propagated by newspaper reports and correspondence, and it resonated deeply with reformers across England.10 Not only does this evoke imagery of angels, enthusing good Christian faith and ‘purity’ into the women wearing the dresses; but white is an impractical colour to wear out in the streets. This choice thus heightens the suggestion of good domestic industry and feminine virtue in the wearers’ ability to maintain a clean white dress. Likewise, their presence in the crowd was to dilute the perceived ‘roughness’ of the rest. When the massacre ensued, the white dresses took on an even greater power, the angelic imagery even more potent following the deaths of seventeen attendees at the hands (or, rather, the sabres) of the infantry.11 The ‘Gentleman leaders’ of radical movements, including Henry Hunt at Peterloo, and Feargus O’Connor, strike the twenty-first-century reader as odd considering the heavy workingclass makeup of these movements. However, using what we would now think of as privilege, turning their income, education and platform to the improvement of working-class lives makes sense. These paternalist figures used their popularity and, importantly, time, free from long days labouring, to create radical iconography. Much changed between Henry Hunt’s infamous gentlemanly white top hat, worn so that he could be seen from far away, and Feargus O’Connor’s evocation of ‘fustian jackets, unshorn chins, and blistered hands’. Pickering notes that ‘the presentation of the self was of crucial importance as a means of communication’ in platform culture.12 Political meetings, and especially processions, were not treated as the ‘everyday’ but as special events. At one ‘great procession in honour of the Dorchester Labourers’ in 1838, ‘several thousand operatives arrived, all in their holiday-clothing. […] [The trades] preceded by their colours and bands of music. Amongst those the most distinguished for their gaiety of display were the farriers, the whitesmiths, the bricklayers, the blacksmiths, the tinplate workers, and the glass-blowers.’13 If the working people, as evidenced by the organization of this procession into trades groups, wore their Sunday best, suggesting that this procession is given the same importance as a religious holiday, why was Feargus O’Connor, their aristocratic leader, so keen on the everyday in his political rhetoric? As Pickering suggests, in ‘dressing down’, O’Connor does not align his readers with him, but aligns himself with them. He attempts to humble himself firstly through the evocation of, then the wearing of working-class everyday clothing. O’Connor’s first extended use of the

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epithet, which occurs frequently in the Star, appears in May 1840 during his trial for publishing seditious libel in the paper. He writes to ‘the men with fustian jackets’, My Dear Friends, – I call you my dear friends, and my only friends, because you are the only class of society who cares for me, or for whom I care a single straw. […] Now I begin to tell my story to you, because I don’t want the rich or comfortable to read it.14 Pickering’s hypothesis that O’Connor dressed down is supported by the class divisions O’Connor draws in this letter. He intimately addresses his readers as ‘dear’ and ‘only friends’ (all 40,000 of them, if 1839 sales figures are to be believed15), and emphasizes tensions between the upper/ middle and working classes. O’Connor suggests that he is estranged from his own social class, and is so by choice. By sharing his ‘story’ in his own paper, the Star, he tells us that his readers are poor and uncomfortable; and that this ‘comfort’ level applies not only to wealth but to their surroundings. The ‘fustian jackets’, ‘unshorn chins’ and ‘blistered hands’ signify discomfort. This dual evocation of both emotional feeling and texture as a means of universally understandable political rhetoric. It is a shared sense of touch, both emotional and sensory.

FIGURE 22.1 Feargus O’Connor (1795[?] – 1855), engraving by William Read, 1840. Part of a promotional giveaway of ‘Chartist Portraits’ to subscribers of the Star. Image courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery [NPG D21605].

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The ‘fustian jacket’ of O’Connor’s ideal is later used as self-identification by his readers in the Star. One contribution to the Star’s poetry column in June 1840 uses this work attire to align himself with O’Connor’s body politic, prefacing his entry with an apology that ‘the accompanying lines are the production of one of the men in fustian jackets, and having been composed on the miserable and noisy loom, may be deficient in that polish from the learning and the leisure of the lazy sons of affluence and pride.’16 The weaver has ‘produced’ the poem, foregrounding his background in factory manufacture, ‘on the loom’, suggesting that this craft and work must be side by side, that the loom is the tool with which he weaves his words, the noise of the factory contrasting with the ideal of a desk in quiet study at which other poets perform their ‘labour’. This kind of labour is manual, and thus situates the fustian jacket and its wearer in a particular context of the industrialization of manufacture in Britain; a contrast from ‘the rich and comfortable’ evoked by O’Connor. This contrast suggests to us a target demographic of the Chartist Movement, creating an imaginary everyman figure with whom all could identify, while also establishing a specific ‘Chartist’ type. ‘Blistered hands’ are ungloved, either due to expense or choice, and tangible evidence of industry, rather than ‘laziness’. This takes on particular significance given that ‘hands’ was frequently shorthand for factory labourers; divorcing the body part engaged in production from their minds. Furthermore, the ‘unshorn chins’ are explicitly male, not bearded intentionally or even ‘clean shaven,’ but unshorn, again suggesting a lack of time or money to do so. The ‘fustian jacket’ is the tip of the iceberg, or the jacket on the mannequin: a ‘jacket’ rather than an overcoat or greatcoat, as would be standard for a middle-class man, fewer layers suggesting exposure, and most importantly, a working fabric. Fustian, similar to corduroy, was a woven fabric usually made from wool, but could be made from cotton. It was however, warm, durable, a staple of working-class men’s dress, and can be coarse and itchy to the touch. This application of coarse textures applies to the whole working man as described by O’Connor, the ‘fustian’ fabric matching the rough ‘unshorn’ chin and dry, ‘blistered’ hands; creating an ideal of hardy working-class masculinity as the ideal Chartist. This ‘coarseness’ is further emphasized as a Chartist ideal in a letter written to the Star in support of O’Connor and his leadership: I fear there is much paltry jealousy respecting Feargus. […] There are some who assume to go ‘the whole hog’ but I fear it is without bristles, or they are of such a soft and silky texture that a practical workman can do nought with them. The ‘bristles on the hog’ of a thorough Chartist are as stiff as ‘quills on a porcupine,’ and present an ‘armed front’ everywhere.17 ‘Whole hog Chartism’ refers to an internal divide within the movement, with O’Connor’s philosophy being ‘whole hog’ compared with William Lovett’s ‘New Move’ approach in late 1842, partly a debate over ‘physical force’ and the use of arms in the movement.18 In the ‘Woolwich Cadets’’ support of O’Connor’s philosophy, they praise the ‘coarseness’ of O’Connor and his fustian jacket iconography in terms of the bristles of the ‘hog,’ the bristles contrasting with the ‘soft’ aristocrats in power against whom the Chartists are positioned politically. Indeed, the use of ‘Cadets’ as a pseudonym strongly suggests support for use of physical force in the movement, their evocation of ‘silky texture’ a subtle dig at the ‘soft’ masculinity of either the financially powerful aristocrats or dissenting ‘knowledge’ Chartists, compared with the ‘practical workmen’ of O’Connor’s persuasion in the movement. The use of coarse textural imagery creates a recognizable icon out of the existing masses: the signs themselves have become O’Connor’s symbol of working-class, labouring, political masculinity, rather than meaning being transferred onto them. In this way O’Connor subverts political tradition to win at a numbers game.

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Gift-giving and tradition If we see O’Connor’s adoption of the ‘fustian jacket’ as a subversion of radical traditions, in themselves a subversion of holiday traditions, we ought to see how these are present in the Chartist Movement. Even the smallest markers, such as ribbons, could carry political significance. Navickas notes that ‘[d]uring the Chester election of 1784, for example, the Tory Grosvenor party alone spent up to £1,500 on colours [sic], ribbons, and cockades,’ although the violence that ensued from such small but mighty signifiers resulted in ‘[a]n 1827 act of Parliament’ which ‘forbade the distribution of ribbons, cockades, and other emblems of partisanship at elections in order to prevent such disturbances.’19 Just as colours and ribbons were used to suggest political leanings, trade guild regalia, or even the joy of holiday festivities, it was used as a public display of mourning: following the death of a monarch, ‘fostered [sic] a powerful expectation to join in its public symbolism, although the working classes could simply wear a black ribbon to spare the expense of full mourning dress.’20 Of course, death was and continues to be politicized. Some of the most ostentatious processions in the radical movement in this period were funerary processions. Following the Peterloo Massacre, Chartist Benjamin Wilson recalls in his autobiography that his ‘uncle, along with other people, took the decision to wear grey hats as a sign of mourning. A great procession was organized, the mourners marching in silence and bare-headed through the streets of Halifax to pay tribute to the victims.’21 Reports of radical meetings, and the ceremonial aspects of such, must be taken with a pinch of salt; the Star operating as a kind of Public Relations machine for the movement. Pickering has noted that ‘often a comparison between reports of the same meeting – especially one of great significance – makes one doubt whether the reporters had attended the same event.’22 In one event from ‘Collins, White, and McDouall in Scotland’, part of a lecture tour, the Star reports on a ‘Glasgow Grand soiree’ in September 1840, for which ‘the doors of the Chartist Christian Church were thrown open’, after which it ‘was completely filled by a most respectable audience’.23 Following an introductory speech on the role of women in creating Chartist households, the soiree featured thanks from several members of female radical associations in the region. Miss Muir, for example, ‘congratulated the patriots upon their liberation’, and ‘addressing Mr. Collins’, spoke ‘of his patriotic virtues, his fearless advocacy of the rights of man […] (Cheers, and waving of handkerchiefs)/Miss Ludsy then stepped forward and fixed the plaid around Mr. Collins, and then hung a splendid silver medal about his neck, by a beautiful silk tartan ribbon.’24 The emphasis on respectability is made in the first lines of the report, introducing the audience as such, and setting the tone for the remainder of the piece. Even if we take Pickering’s warning to heart, exercising caution in believing either the respectability of the audience or that the room was ‘completely’ full, the report of the ritual gift-giving is extremely detailed in its imagery of the gifted medals. Former Chartist R. G. Gammage, critical of the Star, argued that even speeches made by amateurs ‘were dressed up with as much care as though they were parliamentary harangues fashioned for the columns of the daily press’, but does not comment on the literal dressing up of speakers at such events.25 The giving of medals foreshadows the militaristic nature of the ‘Woolwich Cadets’ letter years later, and reappropriates state ritual celebrations for radical purposes, even through to the use of ‘patriot’ to mean Chartist. Just as lavish funerals celebrated the Chartist activists ‘martyred’ to the cause by dying in prison; the presentation of a medal – specifically ‘silver’ – rewards Chartist ‘warriors’ who have returned. The parenthetical ‘cheers’, a rhetorical device common in such reports, describes the ‘respectable audience’s’ reaction to the performance, and in the ‘waving of handkerchiefs’ again foregrounds

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the materials at play. The ‘Scotch plaid’, or ‘tartan’ ribbon, heightens the significance of the language of ‘patriotism’, uniting the English John Collins with his Scottish followers, literally interlinking the two as the ribbon is placed around his neck. Furthermore, the gendered dynamics of male ‘martyrs’ being ‘dressed’ or ‘crowned’ by women has ritual significance. All of the women involved in the gift-giving ceremony are unmarried, being identified by their ‘Miss’ titles. Jutta Schwartzkopf has noted the importance of women’s involvement in the social aspects of the Chartist Movement, including organization of refreshments at meetings and social events, such as the ‘Glasgow soiree’, as an extension of domestic labour. ‘[B]y attributing political significance to women’s domestic skills, Chartism enabled women to participate in the movement without, however, opening up forms of activity that transgressed the boundaries of female domestic responsibilities.’26 It is this domestication of political activity, and politicization of domestic labour, Malcolm Chase has argued, that allowed the Chartist Movement to permeate everyday life, and contributed to the longevity of the movement.27 In light of this role of domesticity, and the appeal of Chartism as important to families, the involvement of unmarried women in ‘dressing’ Chartist heroes takes on a sexual context. Tom Scriven, exploring the influence of famously handsome Chartist Henry Vincent, noted that in an 1838 visit to Trowbridge, he ‘was presented with a handsome green silk scarf by a pretty smiling young lady who trembled from head to foot’.28 Scriven argues that ‘the girl,’ in Vincent’s anecdote ‘[…] was presented in terms of [her] radicalism, class and availability, but in being the object of the presentation, so too was Vincent’s attractiveness, youth, and status as a well-known politician being celebrated and implicitly sexualized.’29 Likewise, Miss Graham’s ‘crowning’ of White not only elevates him in status from working-class Yorkshireman to Scottish king, but an eligible ‘Highland’ bachelor. The performance of these exchanges suggests a kind of voyeurism, an erotic charge from the public display of the ‘dressing’ rituals. These rituals contain extra national significance in Scotland. ‘Gift-giving was an important ritual in radical demonstrations and meetings and was often performed by women,’ and had a long tradition, noting that the presentation of tartan in Scotland by women was a ‘way of celebrating not only Scottishness, but the weaving industry, in which women often formed a majority of the workforce’ in these regions.30 Later on in Collins and White’s tour, at a soiree in Dundee, in the same year, ‘a Deputation of the Female Association was produced, and gave a tartan waistcoat-piece each to Collins and White.’31 Rather than a bonnet or ribbon, the ‘waistcoat-pieces’ given by the Dundee Female Radical Association are perhaps designed for everyday wear, literally encircling Collins and White, held close to the body. Unlike the ‘fustian jackets’ evoked by Feargus O’Connor, the description of waistcoat-pieces and ribbons in these ceremonies is not specific to a kind of fabric, but of a pattern, available ‘in different types of materials, from wool to silk, and the varying check sizes and colour combinations […] [were] relatively uncomplicated and easily reproduced.’32 The ‘waistcoat-piece’, furthermore, indicates the gifts were to be a surprise: the tartan frontpieces can later be trimmed to fit the wearer and made into a waistcoat by a seamstress or tailor (either in the domestic circle or a professional), without having to give the organizers any measurements.33 The sexual suggestion of single female radicals ‘dressing’ and ‘decorating’ these radical male ‘heroes’ in public is heightened by the intimacy created by the sharing of clothes, the skin-to-fabric contact of these fabrics rich in symbolism. These textile gifts from female artisans were likely made themselves, and is thus a show of skill, too. The ‘handsome silk scarf’ given to Henry Vincent ‘represented the women’s roles as labourers within the declining weaving industry [of the West of England]’,34 while the tartan ribbons represent Scottish industry. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Sally Tuckett notes, ‘tartan’s associations with rebellion

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were being replaced with ones of valour, loyalty and historicism,’ but the presentation of tartan material as gifts (or part of gifts) at Chartist ceremonies suggests an intermingling of these associations in Scottish radical and labouring communities.35 The production of these garments enables the givers to reclaim the ‘artisan status’ of their weaving and spinning work back from the industrialized process, again, transferring the sense of touch from manufacturer to wearer.

Political feeling, action and agency Within the Chartist Movement, and activism more generally, emotion forms an important part of political rhetoric, or ‘political feeling’ as the Chartists called it. First appearing in the Star in 1838, the term ‘political feeling’ refers to shared political values. An extended letter in the Star’s ‘original correspondence’ column reminds readers that ‘[y]ou have a great middle class avowedly opposed to you; and still more you have a little middle class, who possess an identity of political feeling with you, but who dread your acquirement of power, because they could not then plunder you at will.’36 The term is later used in a variety of contexts, including as a column header ‘state of political feeling’ to introduce reports of regional Chartist and radical group meetings, providing readers with an overview of radical activity across the country. The emotional attachment to Chartist symbols, then, is reflected in this sense of intimacy and solidarity created by shared physical touch through gifting or sharing fabrics and garments. ‘This is informed by how the object is actually used and consumed in relation to other objects and the context in which it is viewed, considering the social and cultural signifiers that accompany the object’s use and the physical context in which it is placed,’ writes Sonja Andrew.37 Following O’Connor’s release from York Castle Gaol, where he was imprisoned for publishing seditious libel in the Star, he publicly wrote of ordering a new ‘suit of fustian’ to wear to his freedom celebrations. One letter published in the ‘Chartist Intelligence’ column of the Star, from 1841, even asks for details about the proposed outfit: my dear Sir, my great object in writing was to know what colour of fustian or moleskin you would come out of prison in. You will oblige many friends by publishing it in the Star; and buttons also. If we poor devils are ever permitted to have another new jacket, we would like the same colour. I could write columns of thanks from your fustian-jacket friends, but you know that we all love you!38 ‘Humble and devoted friend,’ E. Swindlehurst’s letter reads something like fanmail, and is illustrative of O’Connor’s iconic status among his readers and the Chartist Movement more widely. While there is obviously a level of mediation at work with the Star’s editors choosing to publish this letter over others, and specifically, in their ‘Chartist news’ column rather than with other correspondence, we can see this letter as a means of building anticipation for O’Connor’s release as part of an activist strategy. The ‘Fustian jacket’ is a signal of solidarity. Pickering writes that this was indeed a strategic act, contrasting with his appearance just five years previously in a ‘frock coat’ and ‘rings on all his fingers’, and that by donning this suit on his release from prison, not only did a fustian-jacketed leader symbolically renounce his gentlemanly status and thus his right to lead by virtue of that status alone, but he entirely departed from the traditional pattern of symbolic ritual by adopting an item of clothing peculiar to working men.39

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O’Connor is dressing down to his working-class followers, and yet, as E. Swindlehurst’s letter illustrates, his followers were also dressing up to meet him. They meet in the middle: the ‘new jacket’, down to the ‘buttons’, that Swindlehurst writes of is a compromise to O’Connor’s full suit. We might consider that O’Connor, in dressing in an entire suit of fustian (presumably each piece made to match), was going ‘whole hog’ in his ‘Chartist’ dress. There is, importantly, a difference between O’Connor’s acquisition of an especially-made suit of Fustian fabric for a ceremony to celebrate him and the everyday fustian of everyday Chartists, but the imagery of the everyday is what counted in this visual spectacle. Given that O’Connor was given the ‘privilege […] of wearing [his] own clothes’ while imprisoned, by donning this new suit he performs a kind of rebirth.40 The intimate relationship between O’Connor and his new clothes, protecting the body from the outside elements, is heightened in significance. The imitation of this clothing is an extension of this intimacy, the shared experience of the feeling of the fabric, as well as the emotional feeling of connection and camaraderie of matching outfits. By donning a suit of Fustian, O’Connor asserts his identity as one of the ‘fustian-jacketed’, and shares the sensory experience of the clothes. Likewise, Swindlehurst’s hope for a matching jacket enables him to publicly communicate his support for O’Connor and their shared political ‘feeling’ on an everyday basis. This shared intimacy of matching cloth is a recurrent motif throughout Chartist pageantry. O’Connor continued to be seen as a Chartist leader, and, indeed, a fashion icon. In 1842 an article in ‘Local and General Intelligence’ states: Bannockburn – Trade is in a wretched bad state; the people have nothing to do, and very many are in a state of starvation. A new tartan has just been started here, after our champion – ‘the O’Connor tartan.’ It will be much worn in Scotland by the working classes, and will turn out a good speculation to the manufacturer.41 Chartist merchandising was nothing new, even in 1842. Several brands of Chartist ‘blacking’ (shoe polish), and even ‘breakfast powder,’ were established in the early 1840s, all of which competed with each other and advertised in the pages of the Star.42 Much of this branding was defined in terms of its contribution to the Chartist economy, with advertisements stating percentages of proceeds being donated to various Chartist funds.43 The Bannockburn Chartists’ notice is much more passive, with no direct address to the Star’s readers or similarly pointed or active language. ‘Our champion’ unites writer and reader through a shared admiration of Feargus O’Connor, but only passively suggests readers purchase some of the tartan. By stating only the poor conditions of the Bannockburn labourers, mere months before the General Strikes that would dominate the summer of 1842, the writer of the notice uses the power of suggestion rather than of direct action, in noting the ‘good speculation to the manufacturer’. Co-operative movements and exclusive dealing were strategies within the radical tradition of this period, and were happily used within the early Chartist Movement, as Peter Gurney writes, ‘it promised to reconstruct relations between producers and consumers by connecting political demands to economic grievances’.44 This notice plays with conventions of respectability and entrepreneurial spirit, using middle-class values as a means of performing deservedness of the franchise in the description of the weavers using initiative to design a Chartist tartan. Likewise, it used O’Connor and his evocation of working masculinity to create a role model and shared ideal. ‘Chartist men,’ notes Matthew Roberts, ‘asserted their masculine independence, and thereby their fitness for the franchise, by casting their wives and children in a dependent position […] [k]ey here was the construction of an ideal manly type and the projection of this onto the radical hero.’45

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The Bannockburn O’Connor Tartan contributes to a working-class, labouring Chartist community economy. Likewise, in 1847 another ‘O’Connor tartan’ was got up by ‘the Chartists of Kilbarchan,’ this being a weaving district, we have resolved (and we hope with your concurrence) […] that every Chartist may wear an O’Connor tartan, if he or she wishes to do so. […] To make it really a national tartan, we have introduced orange and green, party colours of the two greatest parties in Britain and Ireland, Protestants and the Catholics, […] as we hope those two great parties will yet harmonise and unite, for the attainment of their just and inalienable rights, and that too, through of the instrumentality of the powerful and great O’Connor.46 The ‘champion’ O’Connor is evoked again, with this description going into detail about the design of the tartan. ‘Nationalism’ is evoked again, once again framed in a specifically Chartist way, to signify religious unity. ‘Orange’ and ‘green’ furthermore have extra political significance within radical communities; with green being ‘the established colour of political descent in England,’ used by the Levellers and Jacobites, and in the late eighteenth century ‘to connote the wearing of laurels in classical history and to denote political independence.’47 By the late 1840s, Navickas reminds us, ‘green was predominantly associated with the Irish, a product of the influx of immigrants and heightened sectarian parading in many industrial towns,’ but in this case also appeals to O’Connor as an Irishman.48 In England, orange represented the Whigs and William of Orange since 1688, as opposed to the ‘“true” blue’ Tories, but by the nineteenth century had also had radical significance.49 In Scotland and Ireland, however, Orange represented Protestantism in sectarian battles for control. The ‘orange and green’ for O’Connor’s ‘really national’ tartan, then, needs this explanation to translate the colours for English readers and wearers. The Kilbarchan notice is inclusive in marketing its tartan, with ‘he or she’ explicitly acknowledging female Chartists, when ‘he’ was the normative assumptive pronoun at the time, as well as its call for ‘harmony’ between religious sects for the greater good of the Charter. Just in time for Christmas, in December 1847 the ‘Readers and Correspondents’ column informs readers that the O’Connor is available to purchase in England: The O’Connor Tartan To several correspondents, we understand that the directors of the Land Company, in connection [sic] with some friends, have ordered a quantity of the O’Connor Tartan, which will be on sale at the Land Office, 144 High Holborn. […] Thos. Jones has been appointed agent in Liverpool for the sale of the O’Connor Tartan. The Chartists of Liverpool can be supplied with the Northern Star, the Labourer, and other Democratic periodicals, all the profits being devoted to Chartist purposes.50 The ‘Land Company’ was the official headquarters of the Chartist Land Society and Labour Bank, part of the ‘Land Plan’ of O’Connor’s vision to enfranchise the working classes through entering a lottery for a two, three or four-acre plot of land, from which to become self-sufficient agrarians.51 The sale of the O’Connor tartan through this office suggests a ‘one-stop shop’ approach for London Chartists, cementing the Chartist economy. Likewise, ‘Thos. Jones’ sale of the tartan, along with ‘Democratic periodicals’, is evidence of a continuation of ‘Chartist’ merchandise and branding, and the commodity culture of activism. The notice also functions as free advertising for both the Land Company and for the Labourer, O’Connor’s monthly magazine about the land plan. The green in the tartan might therefore also be considered in light of the idyllic imagery of the land plan, while the ‘blending’ of these vivid hues makes the fabric

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deliberately eye-catching and easily identifiable. While the fabric could theoretically be made into anything, from a handkerchief, ribbon or shawl for everyday use to a waistcoat or dress for Sunday best, it is ostentatious, making a bold political and stylistic statement. The fabric, as with Chartist activism, could manifest in many creative ways.

Conclusion This chapter has emphasized the importance of ‘political feeling’ symbolized though dress, fabric and texture in reports of the Chartist Movement. ‘Fustian’, associated with the workingclass everyday, was elevated to political iconography by gentleman leader Feargus O’Connor, and by conflating the ‘men with’ fustian jackets with the iconography of the jacket, the readers of his Northern Star became the embodiment of a hopeful political movement. The national community of the movement, brought together though the mobility and medium of the Star, was united around O’Connor, and enabled the transference ‘national’ and ‘patriotic’ Scottish tartans to signify a radical political citizenship. The ritualistic presentation of garments and the wearing of particular fabrics to connote celebration at Chartist gatherings further elevates the everyday working dress within a middle-class culture of respectability that included the division of private and public gender roles, and honest, hardworking patriarchs. The association of Chartist merchandise with the Land Plan, furthermore, demonstrates a recognition of the importance of property and commodities as performance of respectability within early Victorian capitalism. It is this negotiation of the relationship between producer and consumer, and transference of the ‘hand’s’ touch in ceremonial gift-giving, that gives the physical feeling of touch in textile labour to a shared ‘political feeling’ across a labouring political community.

Notes 1

Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 1.

2

Shoemakers and tailors, thanks to the relatively quiet nature of their work, had in the nineteenth century a particular tradition of political engagement and radicalism. Eric Hobsbawm and Joan Wallach Scott, ‘Political Shoemakers’, Past and Present 89 (1980): 86–114.

3

Malcolm Chase, Chartism: A New History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 7–8.

4

Malcolm Chase, ‘Building Identity, Building Circulation: Engraved Portraiture and the Northern Star’, Papers for the People: A Study of the Chartist Press, ed. Joan Allen and Owen R. Ashton (London: Merlin Press, 2005), 25–53.

5

The first reference to ‘fustian jackets, blistered hands, and unshorn chins’ comes from a response to ‘Original Correspondence’ printed in the Star from the London Working Men’s Association, the printed response being signed by Feargus O’Connor. (‘The Working Men’s Association to Mr. O’Connor’, Northern Star (henceforth ‘NS’), 24 February 1838, 4). This was later adopted as a recurring address to readers from 1840 onwards, in O’Connor’s regular letter to readers, in lieu of a regular editor’s letter. The first instance of this is headlined ‘To the men with fustian jackets, unshorn chins, and blistered hands, their wives, and children,’ and signed ‘your true and faithful friend, Feargus O’Connor’ (NS 16th May 1840, 6).

6

Katrina Navickas, ‘“That sash will hang you!”: Political Clothing and Adornment in England, 1780–1840’, Journal of British Studies 49, no. 3 (2010): 540–65, 543.

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7

NS, 16 May 1840, 6.

8

Paul Pickering, ‘Class Without Words: Symbolic Communication in the Chartist Movement’, Past and Present 112, no. 1 (1986): 144–62, 160.

9

Navickas, ‘“That sash will hang you!”’, 549.

10 Ibid., 547. 11 Robert Poole, Peterloo: The English Uprising (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 346–350. See also M. L. Bush, ‘The Women at Peterloo: The Impact of Female Reform on the Manchester Meeting of 16 August 1819’, History 89, no. 294 (2004): 209–32, 50, 53, 56; Robert Poole, ‘The March to Peterloo: Politics and Festivity in Late Georgian England’, Past and Present 192, no. 1 (2006): 109–53. 12 Pickering, ‘Class Without Words’, 156. 13 NS, 21 April 1838, 6. 14 NS, 16 May 1840, 6. 15 James Mussell, ‘NCSE: Northern Star’, Nineteenth Century Serials Edition (2007). (Accessed 9 March 2021). 16 NS 27 June 1840, 3. 17 NS, 29 January 1842, 4. 18 For a more thorough definition of the ‘New Move’, or ‘Knowledge Chartism’, spearheaded by William Lovett and John Collins, see Malcolm Chase, Chartism: A New History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 198. 19 Navickas, ‘“That sash will hang you!”’, 547. 20 Ibid., 548. 21 Benjamin Wilson, Struggles of an Old Chartist, 195, cited in Manon Nouvian, ‘Defiant Mourning: Public Funerals as Funeral Demonstrations in the Chartist Movement’, Journal of Victorian Culture 24, no. 2 (2019): 208–26, 208. 22 Pickering, ‘Class Without Words’, 147. 23 NS, 29 September 1840, 8. 24 Ibid., 8; John Collins; Peter McDouall, and George White had recently been released from prison for political activity, with Collins and McDouall serving twelve months and White serving six. 25 R. G. Gammage, The History of the Chartist Movement (London: Holyoake & Co., 1854), 17. 26 Jutta Schwarzkopf, Women in the Chartist Movement (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1990), 177–8. 27 Malcolm Chase, The Chartists: Perspectives and Legacies (London: Merlin Press, 2015), 184, 188–9. See also Anna Clark, ‘The Rhetoric of Chartist Domesticity’, Journal of British Studies 31, no. 1 (1992): 62–88, 77. 28 Labour History Archive and Study Centre, Manchester, LP/VIN1/1/11, Vincent to Miniken, 23 September 1838, as cited in Tom Scriven, ‘Humour, Satire, and Sexuality in the Culture of Early Chartism’, The Historical Journal 57, no. 1 (2014): 157–78, 165. 29 Scriven, ‘Humour, Satire, and Sexuality’, 165. 30 Mark Nixon, Gordon Pentland, and Matthew Roberts, ‘The Material Culture of Scottish Reform Politics, c.1820–c.1884’, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies 32, no. 1 (2012): 28–49, 37. 31 NS, 14 November 1840, 5. 32 Sally Tuckett, ‘Reassessing the Romance: Tartan as a Popular Commodity, 1780–1830’, The Scottish Historical Review 95, no. 2 (2016): 182–202, 184.

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33 I am grateful to Veronica Isaac, Sally Tuckett, Madeleine Seys, and others in the textile history community on Twitter for helping me clarify the etymology of ‘waistcoat-piece’. 34 Scriven, ‘Humour, Satire, and Sexuality’, 165. 35 Tuckett, ‘Reassessing the Romance’, 185. 36 NS, 13 February 1838, 4; the essay in question, on ‘The Scotch Patriots’, calls for the Star’s Chartist readers to support the five Glasgow cotton spinners who were sentenced to transportation following their trial for conspiracy to murder after the Cotton Spinners’ strike of 1837. See Alex Wilson, The Chartist Movement in Scotland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1970), 37–40. 37 Sonja Andrew, ‘Textile Semantics: Considering a Communication-based Reading of Textiles’, Textile 6, no. 1 (2008): 32–65. 38 NS, 21 August 1841, 2. 39 Pickering, ‘Class Without Words’, 159. 40 Correspondence: Feargus O’Connor to [???], York City Archives, York Castle Gaol box 5, item 1 [19 May 1840]. Accessed May 2019. Emphasis original. 41 NS, 15 January 1842, 4. 42 Paul Pickering, ‘Chartism and the “Trade of Agitation” in Early Victorian Britain’, History 76 (1991): 221–37, 224. 43 Victoria Clarke, ‘Reading and Writing the Northern Star, 1837–1847’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Leeds (2020), 102–3. 44 Peter Gurney, ‘Exclusive Dealing in the Chartist Movement’, Labour History Review 74, no. 1 (2009): 90–110, 98. 45 Matthew Roberts, ‘Chartism, Commemoration, and the Cult of the Radical Hero, c.1770–c.1840’, Labour History Review 78, no. 1 (2013): 3–32, 18. 46 NS, 9 October 1847, 4; the tartan is thenceforth regularly advertised in the Star until February 1849. 47 Navickas, ‘“That Sash Will Hang You!”’, 552. 48 Ibid., 553. 49 Ibid., 544. 50 NS, 4 December 1847, 5. 51 For more on the Chartist Land Plan, see Alice Mary Hatfield, The Chartist Land Company (Newton Abbott: David & Charles, 1970); ‘Chartism and the Land: “The Mighty People’s Question”’, in The Land Question in Britain, 1750–1950, ed. Matthew Cragoe and Paul Readman (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 57–73; Chase, The Chartists.

FIGURE 23.1 Dr Fairweather’s ‘Apterna’ Progressive shoes, NWHCM: 1992.204.35. © Norfolk Museums Service (Norwich Costume and Textile Collection).

23 Dr Fairweather’s ‘Apterna’ progressive shoes Ruth Battersby-Tooke

My first project as curator of the Norwich Costume and Textile collections was to develop a shoe exhibition, and selecting candidates for display was the perfect way to get to know the collections. I worked chronologically, lining up the shoes decade by decade, and one pair proudly stood out in their difference from the crowd of slender almond toes and waisted heels. They follow the prevailing footwear fashions of the late 1920s in fabric and design with alternating bands of black ribbed silk and satin reflecting the contemporary fashion for contrasting textures. However, the overall shape of the shoes is radically different. The almond-shaped toe is roomy and broad, about 2.5 cm wider than a conventionally fashionable evening shoe of the same date, and there is absolutely no heel. The gold-stamped label inside tells us these are Dr Fairweather’s Apterna Progressive Shoes, the writing enclosed in a suitably optimistic, new dawn, sunriseshaped logo. Dr Sylvester Davidson Fairweather (1876–1947) practised as a podiatrist, served as a Captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps during the First World War and then filed for a US patent for his ‘heelless boot’ to cure and prevent flat feet on 6 November 1918. He dedicated his postwar career to crusading against the perils of heels. An advert for specialist shoe fitters Charles H. Baber in Regent St proclaimed that ‘Dr. S. D. Fairweather is in attendance daily for the purpose of consultation’. In an article published in the British Medical Journal on 21 September 1918, Fairweather expounds on his theory that heels are the cause of flat-foot, myalgia and a condition called ‘soldier’s heart’, first observed in the American Civil War, which presented symptoms of shortness of breath and heart palpitations. By the end of the First World War, many psychologists believed that ‘soldier’s heart’ was a form of neurasthenia, one of the blanket terms used to describe psychological responses to warfare.1 Fairweather claimed that even a low heel of a quarter of an inch threw the centre of gravity forward, causing the back muscles to over-exert, leading to pain, fatigue and the collapse of the natural curve of the arch. He describes the impact of wearing heels on women’s bodies as being so great that it ‘must play a part in producing hysteria [and] neurasthenia’ and throw the body so far off its axis that the muscles

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cannot regain the perpendicular until ‘she is obliged to use corsets’.2 Of course, Fairweather’s answer was to wear the Apterna Footprint shoe, which, according to an advert placed in ‘Good Health’ magazine in 1934, ‘allows the foot to exercise the way nature intends’. This reference to being natural makes connections with the progressive reforming spirit these shoes conjure up. The shoes were donated in the early 1990s as part of an extensive collection of typical family clothing from three generations, the list in the accession register describes them as dance shoes, but no named wearer or a specific association with dance is recorded. They are well-worn, the smooth leather sole is scuffed and has dirt ingrained in the surface, and there are creases across the satin band of the uppers just 4 cm from the end of the shoe consistent with standing on tip-toe rather than creasing at the ball of the foot from walking. In the absence of provenance, it is tempting to project a narrative of a progressive woman, maybe a member of the Women’s League of Health and Beauty or someone interested in Eurythmic dance or even a student of the Ginner-Mawer school in London famed for its interpretations of early Greek dance. My connection with them comes from the relationship curators develop with these orphan objects with no name or biography attached to their documentation. The lack of provenance leaves us a blank space in which it is tempting to construct an imagined identity built from the feet up based on a sartorial choice. They can become an heirloom in a fictional biography, a solid embodiment of cultural associations usually encountered in image and text.

Notes 1

Ben Shephard, A War of Nerves (London: Pimlico, 2002), 66.

2

Dr S. D. Fairweather, ‘Boot Heels as a Cause of Myalgia, Flat-Foot, Soldier’s Heart, Myalgia Etc.’, British Medical Journal, 21 September 1918.

24 ‘They go around the country making in the homes of the people’: Travelling tailors and shoemakers and the production of everyday clothing in rural Ireland, c.1850–1914 Eliza McKee

The production of dress in the domestic space might be assumed to have been a largely female activity associated with their unpaid domestic labour or part of their waged work as textile and clothing outworkers. However, in Ireland men also produced clothing and footwear inside dwellings. Travelling tailors and shoemakers moved around the Irish countryside making clothing and footwear by hand in the homes of rural non-elites. These outputs were a very important element of domestic clothing and footwear production in rural Ireland. Most people in Ireland lived, worked and were tenants on rural landed estates. Edward McCarron described living in one of Ireland’s poorest counties in his memoir, Life in Donegal 1850–1900. He recounted the practice of male travelling tailors and shoemakers visiting the homes of the rural lower classes. He highlighted the excitement generated in his family home: The tailors generally went from house to house in those days as required. Perhaps he would be expected a week or so before he would put in an appearance as tailors and shoemakers are often at variance with the eighth commandment; when he did actually arrive there was quite a flutter among us youngsters. Immediately the house put on a cheerful appearance; the floor was better swept and sanded the fire burned up better, a connack of oat bread was soon

National Folklore Collection (NFC) 755: 314 (County Donegal).

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baking before it, and the teapot had its own little place on a few coals to the one side, and all contributed to a general comfortable appearance. Mother looked happy and busy. She put on a Sunday white cap with its lace and tailored, fringed border all round the front and a newly done up checked apron.1 The arrival of a travelling tailor or shoemaker was an event to be celebrated, indicating the acquisition of new clothing for members of a family unit and social interaction with a welcomed guest for all within the home. New clothes were not always fashionable clothes, but they often were. John Styles asserted a three-part definition of fashion: ‘regular changes in visual appearance of any type of good to stimulate sale’, ‘the annual or seasonal manipulation of normative appearance specifically through dress’ or ‘the self-consciously extreme/exclusive innovation in dress pursued as a form of cultural and economic self-promotion by a narrow elite – court fashion, haute couture, runway fashion’.2 In this chapter, fashion is understood as Styles’ second definition, the annual or seasonal manipulation of normative appearance through dress. The word ‘everyday’ as an adjective means ‘happening or used every day; daily’. The clothing made by travelling tailors did not usually start as ‘everyday’ dress, but as ‘best’ dress, later being relegated to everyday clothing when an individual acquired new clothes from the tailor. Acquisition of ‘best’ dress displayed a form of respectability and it highlighted financial capacity to afford multiple outfits of clothes. If we also consider everyday fashion as the way fashionable clothes were made, remade and remodelled across time, and allow space to include continuity and tradition in clothing practices as well as regional and national differences, then the work of travelling makers can be considered everyday fashion.3 While the word ‘fashion’ implies change, in rural Ireland the pace of change in local clothing styles was slow, but clothing constituted fashion among localized groups or peer groups enabling individuals to fit in with sartorial expectations in their class community. The new clothes made by travelling tailors were popular and fashionable within class communities, bringing the wearer community inclusivity. Styles were not simply emulated from elite modes, there were strong personal, regional preferences and local notions of fashionability underscoring the clothing acquired from travelling makers. The work of travelling makers explored in this chapter demonstrates that lower-class men regularly – usually annually – acquired new tailored clothes from these travelling makers. There was a yearly flow of fashion production by travelling tailors and acquisition from customers. Acquiring dress in the home from these makers was an important clothing strategy utilized by the rural Irish. This form of clothing production and acquisition was of significant importance in rural Ireland despite the increasing availability of new ready-made clothing during the second half of the nineteenth century. Alison Toplis, Laura Ugolini, Vivienne Richmond and Christina Fowler have shown that non-elite consumers in England continued to purchase bespoke clothing from tailors and dressmakers despite the increasing availability of ready-made clothing.4 As Richmond states, ‘it should not be assumed that poverty prevented all use of bespoke services.’5 In an Irish context, rural non-elites, including some of the poorest sections of Irish society living in remote areas of the island had access to custom-made clothing and footwear made by itinerant shoemakers and tailors. Despite the importance of travelling tailors and shoemakers in the production of clothing and footwear in rural Ireland, they have not received much academic attention. Bríd Mahon in her publication Rich and Rare: A Story of Dress in Ireland wrote a small section on travelling tailors.6 In her book, Dress in Ireland, Mairead Dunlevy made passing references to the existence of travelling tailors and shoemakers but she did not explore their work in detail.7 This chapter centres the work of travelling tailors and shoemakers to examine their importance in the production of everyday fashionable clothing and footwear in

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rural Ireland in the post-Famine period (c.1850–1914). It assesses the way the makers operated their trade, the type of clothing and footwear they produced, the production processes involved in the manufacture of the clothing and footwear, the gender and family connections of the makers and contemporary attitudes towards the producers.

Sources As the itinerant tailors and shoemakers worked inside their lower-class customers’ homes their labour was largely hidden and has thus rarely made the historical record. As the makers moved on foot across the land to their customers, carrying the tools of their trade and they were paid for their work during their visit, there was no need to carry registers to document money owed to them. A survey of local and national museum collections on the island of Ireland revealed that there are no known surviving examples of clothing or footwear attributed to having been made by travelling makers in Irish or Northern Irish museums. This chapter utilizes nineteenth-century memoirs that document travelling makers visiting the home of the writer. Additionally, Ireland’s extensive folklore sources are used to recover the significance of travelling tailors and shoemakers. Folklorists and ethnologists have long valued the spoken word as a tool to document the everyday lives of lower-class people whose activities and practices were not usually documented in other historical sources. Folklore sources provide us with the voices and words of the lower classes describing their own clothing traditions and customs, which are so difficult to access through traditional archival sources. The chapter draws primarily from the records at the National Folklore Collection (NFC). It uses the ‘Schools’ collection’ which contains about 740,000 pages of folklore collected by over 50,000 school pupils from 5,000 primary schools between 1937 and 1939. This chapter also uses information collected by individual folklorists held in the Manuscript Collection at the NFC and responses to a county-by-county survey entitled ‘Dress’ that was sent to folklore collectors in rural areas in 1940. The information contained in the responses generally relates to the period 1870–1920 and they have a strong rural and Irish-language bias. Sometimes the responses are in the words of the non-elite informants, other times their words are mediated and compiled by the collectors who were often from the community or had local knowledge of the area where they collected and were thus cultural insiders. These folklore sources provide a rare and vital insight into the work of travelling tailors and shoemakers not available in other sources.

The makers Itinerant tailors were known by various terms including travelling tailors, jobbing tailors, journeyman tailors, needlers or ‘tramp’ tailors.8 Travelling shoemakers were also known as ‘tramp’ and journeyman shoemakers. When plying their trade, the makers circulated the land on foot moving from house to house and from townland to townland. Tailoring and shoemaking were traditionally gendered professions with men fulfilling these making roles. The mobility and freedom of movement enjoyed by travelling shoemakers and tailors, moving as they did between homes and districts, was enjoyed by them because they were men, and this independence was not considered inappropriate for their sex. Such independent travel moving freely in and out of other people’s homes was less acceptable for women. Dressmakers made clothing inside their

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customers’ homes too, but they worked within their local area and there is no evidence of them staying overnight in the homes of their customers. Travelling and sedentary makers worked alongside each other, evidencing that there was enough work for the fixed and moving bespoke maker. Most travelling makers worked independently and were self-employed. However, some settled tailors who plied their trade from a fixed business premises or from their own homes employed journeyman tailors to acquire additional business available in rural communities. While some travelling tailors and shoemakers worked and travelled alone, others took an apprentice to train who travelled with them.9 Apprentices rarely travelled with an itinerant shoemaker to the homes of their customers if the work was to last a week or more owing to the cost of feeding and hosting two men in the home of the lower-class customer. Instead, the apprentices usually learnt the skills of the trade in the home of their shoemaker master.10 It was quite typical for apprentices to be related to the maker they trained with. Particular family names became heavily associated with the tailoring and shoemaking trades in certain areas. Folklore sources also show that it was quite common for sons to train under their father and carry on the family’s work in the trade. This further added to the associations of particular family names with particular trades. The itinerant makers circulated an annual route, visiting the same houses that they had the previous year, and enquired from their regular customers if they wanted any clothing or footwear produced. The length of the routes travelled varied between makers. Some travelled within county lines, whereas others crossed them. There was even some movement of makers between Ulster and Scotland.11 There was some uncertainty and insecurity in their work as the makers travelled without being guaranteed custom when they called on houses. However, as they circulated an annual route their arrival was expected and they found enough business to make their journeys viable. Other travelling makers plied their trade in their local area and could easily be called on by a family when required. All travelling makers were affected by the economic fluctuations in a local community as requests for their services could drop when a community or a family were struggling financially. While they produced clothing and footwear, the travelling makers stayed inside the dwelling of their customers and their family. The length of stay depended on the amount of clothing or footwear that they had to make.12 Folklore informants highlighted that tailors usually stayed for between three days and two weeks, but the average stay was generally a week.13 Itinerant shoemakers also stayed in dwellings of their customers. However, the length of their stay was usually less than the visit of a tailor as the production of shoes took less time than the production of tailored clothing. Depending on the number of pairs of shoes required in a home, travelling shoemakers usually stayed with their hosts for between three days and a week. While the itinerant tailors usually resided with their customers, they sometimes resided in one house in a townland and produced all of the clothing or footwear for people in the area that sought the services.14 While informants did not usually provide reasons for the practice, it could have been for practical reasons because a family had a bigger dwelling and had the space and furniture to house a guest, as well as space for a travelling maker to work effectively. A family may have enjoyed the company of the tailor and they may have been pleased to host the maker longer. Additionally, as discussed later in this chapter, it was a mark of prestige in rural communities to have the travelling maker stay in the home and there seems to have been some community competition in securing them as a guest in the home when they visited the area. Given that the itinerant shoemakers and tailors were commonly called ‘travelling’ makers, it would be easy to assume that the makers were from the Irish Travelling community, but

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they were not. The travelling makers were itinerant in their work, but they were settled in their personal home life as they typically had fixed dwelling homes to return to once they had finished their work circuit.15 Furthermore, folklore informants also often identified the district that travelling tailors and shoemakers were from, further suggesting that they had a fixed abode home.16 The historic Irish Traveller economy centred around horse-dealing, tin-smithing, the peddling of small goods and begging, not around tailoring and shoemaking.17 Instead, travelling tailors and shoemakers were a part of Ireland’s many forms of moving labour that existed as people sought to make a living on the margins of the economy.

Clothing and footwear produced During the second half of the nineteenth century, wearing shoes become more common and widespread amongst non-elites in Ireland. Dunlevy argues that ‘by about the 1870s every male down to the poorest labourer had “well-polished boots on Sundays” and these working boots, replaced brogues as footwear worn in fields in much of Ireland’.18 While the majority of people owned footwear, it was quite common for lower-class people in rural Ireland not to wear footwear on the land around their home and locality. Folklore respondents highlighted that it was not common for children to wear footwear until they were eight or nine years old.19 Increasingly, wearing footwear was important for adults visiting towns to attend markets, fairs and, most importantly, church. Wearing footwear in these spaces where rural people interacted in urban spaces and there were cross-class interactions became more important for the maintenance of a respectable appearance in these places. Itinerant shoemakers took the production of footwear into remote and rural areas not well catered by retailing outlets at a time when the wearing of footwear was becoming more widespread. Customers of the itinerant shoemaker purchased the raw materials required for the production of the footwear they desired. Visiting a tannery, a fair where leather could be purchased, or a shop selling leather was essential. Some itinerant shoemakers arranged to meet their customers in towns on fair days to help them select the raw materials for the shoes. Then the shoemaker travelled to the home of their customers to construct the footwear. Travelling shoemakers also visited fairs to acquire customers. Regular attenders of the fairs knew that the shoemaker would be there seeking work, he would help them to select the raw materials and they would arrange a date for him to visit their home to construct the shoes. An informant from Killymarly, County Monaghan described the practice of a local itinerant shoemaker: up to fifty years ago [in 1938] … A shoemaker named Pat Duffy came into Monaghan on Fair days and if you wanted any work done you went to town and watched for him. He went with you to the shop and picked the leather for which you paid. You arranged with him when to come to the house and make the shoes … His charge was one shilling and sixpence per pair.20 The prices charged by different makers varied, but what they had in common was the affordability of the clothing and footwear they produced compared to purchasing new items from other sources. Michael J. Murphy recorded the average price for a pair of boots as two shillings and sixpence for the cost of the making and a similar amount was required for the purchase of the raw materials.21

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Travelling shoemakers made footwear for all genders and ages. In addition to producing new footwear for their customers, they repaired, cobbled and resoled boots and shoes. Regarding the type of footwear they produced, they most typically made working boots as shoes were less popular. Indeed, working boots, as opposed to the traditional Irish brogue, were most commonly worn in rural areas by the second half of the nineteenth century. Michael J. Murphy provided a description of the footwear typically produced by itinerant shoemakers in c.1900 in rural County Tyrone: These boots, for both men and women and children, were the legged-type which reached midway between the ankles and the calf of the leg, and were pierced with a few laceholes [sic] and laced with ‘a whang’. Shoes were rarely made and were not considered substantial.22 It was not a standard practice across all shoemakers to make distinct shoes for left and right feet.23 Therefore, the boots were not necessarily comfortable to wear, which partly explains why the wearing of footwear was not a consistent practice. Nevertheless, the itinerant shoemakers were respected for the durable quality of the footwear they produced. In addition to working boots, some itinerant shoemakers also made clogs. Clogs were worn in rural Ireland by men, women and children.24 As children did not usually get a pair of boots until they reached eight or nine years of age, clogs were sometimes worn as footwear.25 The clogs were made from wooden soles that were usually purchased by the customer from a shop or they were homemade, and leather uppers. Old boots were often recycled and used for the uppers in the construction of clogs.26 Itinerant tailors altered and mended clothing for the families they visited if required. As they engaged in repair, the work of travelling tailors was not all centred on making new ‘fashionable’ clothes. They also sometimes cut material using their shears or scissors, whether homespun linen or flannel, to be used for shirts that would then constructed by women in the home.27 This was an important contribution because lower-class households might not contain shears or scissors suitable for cutting fabric. The clothing travelling tailors produced primarily included new tailored items for men and boys including trousers, suits and outerwear. It was typical that the itinerant tailor would make the clothes required for the next twelve months.28 While the clothing they made was not expensive, they produced this clothing for men and boys except in cases of extreme poverty.29 This contrasted to the role of women producing clothing in the home, who typically made men’s shirts and undergarments. Folklore informants frequently highlighted that there were makers with different levels of skill, but it was accepted that travelling tailors made clothing that was of a better quality than could be acquired from other sources, especially for the price.30 Itinerant tailors commonly made a boy’s first pair of trousers when they reached this important clothing graduation. The age at which a lower-class boy received his first pair of trousers was dependent on the locality as traditions across districts varied. A boy was typically ‘breeched’ between the ages of six and thirteen.31 A boy’s mother was responsible for making their clothing before they were breeched. The exception to this practice was if the mother was a particularly gifted seamstress and clothing maker, then she might continue to make her boy’s trousers and suits.32 It was more typical that if a family had the financial capacity, a travelling tailor was employed. Thereafter, the boy was entering manhood and most tailored clothes were made by the itinerant tailor. The skill of some itinerant tailors was highlighted by some informants and their ability to ‘size up’ the children and not have to measure the body for a pattern. An informant in County Donegal stated: ‘I remember an older tailor who used to go

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around the Termon district during the first decade of the present century, and he never troubled to take a boy’s measure. It was sufficient for him to have a look at the boy in order to make suit of clothes for him’.33 The journeyman tailor also made a lot of men’s trousers. Knee breeches of corduroy were commonly made and they were gradually supplanted by trousers, which became more popular with lower-class men towards the end of the nineteenth century. Age affected the style produced, as younger men increasingly acquired trousers rather than knee breeches that remained popular with older men. Heavy woollen fabric of local manufacture in black navy, or dark brown was most typically used, including homespun tweeds and frieze. Fabrics with a wool-cotton mix that were purchased were also popular, particularly corduroy and moleskin.34 When using a travelling tailor, lower-class men could choose the style of clothes they wanted. Factors such as quality, durability, protection, material, affordability and climate were important in clothing decisions, but practical considerations did not mean style did not matter. Their use of bespoke makers demonstrates that clothing was significant to poorer men and that they cared about the fit, style and appearance of their clothes. Using travelling tailors to acquire dress offered the opportunity for self-fashioning. Customers made decisions with the tailor regarding the style, fit and finish of the clothes. The customer had to provide materials and trimmings themselves, giving them control over the appearance of the clothes. The tailors made new clothes that were often similar but not identical to the clothes they had produced for the customer previously. The clothing items acquired became the best new clothes for a man and older clothes were relegated to everyday use. Itinerant tailors made men’s outwear. The styles varied according to their customers’ wishes. Some of the styles that remained popular in rural Ireland in the second half of the nineteenth century were longer standing garments worn in early nineteenth-century Ireland. There was a slow pace of change in clothing practices and popular designs produced by travelling tailors. The common items made by travelling tailors show some familiarity with changing elite fashions, but tastes and circumstances were adapted to and were popular with the lower classes within their own social class. Frock barrow and swallow-tailed coat styles made of frieze or tweed paired with knickerbockers remained popular, while increasingly men moved to more modern trouser and jackets. Regardless of style, homespun and locally woven flannin (flannel) and frieze were used, as well as broadcloth, pilot cloth. An informant from County Tyrone described the frock coats commonly worn in the area and made by itinerant tailors as follows: This was woven from wool and dyed either blue or grey, all home spun of course … given as having two buttons at the back, a split in the back also. In style some were doublebreasted … it was fitted with normal side pockets, and with further pockets on the breast, and more inside, one at each breast.35 Swallow-tail coats were also tight-fitting and split at the back with two buttons above the split. They had deep collars, wide lapels and were double-breasted with three buttons on each side with two pockets.36 These were similar to barrow coats also made by travelling tailors described by an informant in Bawnboy, County Cavan: ‘Barrow’ coats were worn. They were made of tweed and frieze mostly … There was a split in the tail of them. There were two buttons on the back and six buttons on the front, three on each side.37

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Itinerant tailors could make a whole suit of tailored clothes for their customers, including jackets, vests, trousers and even hats. They were noted for being quick and efficient in the clothing construction. An informant from Swanlinbar, County Cavan noted that a travelling tailor that visited their district could produce the following: ‘He [the travelling tailor] was able to make a suit in a day. They [local men] wore round hats, without a peak also made by the tailor. The suit usually consisted of a pair of knee breeches, a sleeved waistcoat lined with flannel and a long coat split up the back’.38 Some folklore informants stated that travelling tailors that visited their area only made clothing for men and boys.39 However, in some districts, they also made a form of women’s outerwear, the hooded cloak.40 These were heavier and more tailored garments than usually made by dressmakers or by women in the home and they required tailoring skills.41

Production processes Travelling tailors and shoemakers carried the tools of their trade while they walked the Irish countryside between customers’ houses. The tools a travelling tailor carried with him included a ‘goose’, which was a large flat iron used to press fabric and finished clothes.42 They also carried a tailor’s square, a measuring tape, scissors or shears for cutting material, an additional iron, chalk to mark the cloth, thimbles and needles, and additionally, a long, wide wooden board for resting cloth on whilst they ironed it, in case the homes they visited did not have a suitable clean and flat surface for ironing.43 Demonstrating their ingenuity with few resources, instead of using tailor’s chalk some travelling tailors used a burned stick to mark fabric.44 Travelling shoemakers similarly carried their tools with them. Their kit was carried inside a ‘wite’, which functioned as a tray to hold the tools whilst the maker worked. A ‘wite’ was typically made from dried and limed goatskin which stiffened the animal skin. The kit contained several types of awl, including closing, square and pegging awls which were used to close and reinforce joins in the leather.45 They also carried a measuring tool called a size stick that they used to measure their customer’s feet, knives, multiple hammers of different weights, waxed threads, nails, wooden pegs, ‘sprigs’ to nail the sole of the shoe and to prolong the wear of the leather sole, nippers to punch eyelet holes in leather, piners to secure eyelets and finishing irons.46 The stick had sizes marked on it and it could slide up and down to determine the shoe size required. They carried wooden lasts made to differing foot sizes, which were used to shape the leather.47 All of the clothing and footwear produced by the travelling makers were made by hand. For the tailors, constructing clothing in dwellings in rural Ireland that did not possess good light or electricity presented challenges. To overcome the issues of inadequate light they typically sat cross-legged on a table or chair by a window or doorway to access outdoor light. If the house contained little furniture, then they completed their work sitting on the floor or they took a door of its hinges propped it up with straw and sat on the door to work.48 The following description from an informant from Bellanagall in County Monaghan described the typical practice of a travelling tailor: ‘the kitchen table was placed near the window and he sat on the table with his legs crossed in tailor-fashion while he sewed … All the sewing was done by hand a suit made in this way would last four or five years’.49 The tailors were, however, adaptable in their work practices, utilizing the objects and furniture available in a dwelling to complete their work. In a home that did not contain tables large enough for material to be laid out, an informant from Kilcrossduff in County Cavan stated: ‘they would get two tubs and turn them upside down. Then they would put a door on the tubs and sit on it, and sew’.50

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To begin the production process, the tailors would first ‘take the measure’ of their customer so that they could make a pattern.51 McCarron described this process in his memoir: The cloth, the threads, home-made, no spools in those days, the buttons all were produced. The tape-line was made by strips cut from a newspaper and hung round the neck of the tailor. The measuring commenced; every measurement taken was indicated by a nick cut out in the side of the tape. No grand array of the number of inches was shouted out and entered in a book as is done now-a-days. Then the cutting out commenced and in a short time the tailor was at work on the kitchen table with his legs across.52 This extract demonstrates that the family had to have the raw materials for the production of the clothing ready for the travelling tailor on his arrival. Moving as they did on foot, itinerant tailors did not provide material for the clothing they constructed. Their customers typically had to acquire the cloth required separately.53 A lot of the material used for the production of clothing in the home by these tailors was homespun or locally woven materials including frieze, flannel, other woollens or linen. However, sometimes shop-bought fabric was purchased from draperies. While most travelling tailors carried needles and thread as part of their kit, folklore informants reveal that some tailors expected their customers to provide thread, needles, buttons and the outer and lining fabrics for the clothes.54 The non-elite customer of the travelling shoemaker similarly had to purchase the main raw materials required for the production of their shoes and boots separately from the shoemaker. McCarron described how footwear was acquired once a year and how the production of shoes with itinerant makers occurred: In our house shoes were made once a year for all the family; other houses adopted the same custom. The leather was bought in the shop rough and smooth, nails and tips – what would make perhaps nine or ten pairs. There were no brass eyes, no shop laces. The shoemaker cut the ‘whangs’ as they were called, off a long strip of leather got for the purpose, or perhaps for the purpose of a razor strap.55

Reception As itinerant tailors and shoemakers travelled routes annually, they became well known and could be named by people in the rural communities they visited decades later. Furthermore, some travelling makers lived within a district but made in their customer’s homes, making them well known to people in the local area. The travelling makers were typically well received in the communities they visited, and people looked forward to their arrival. The itinerant makers and their customers were relative social equals, which contributed to them being welcomed in the homes of their customers. They could relax in the dwellings of their customers while engaging in their work and they could also enjoy social interactions with the residents. There were rituals around acquiring clothing from these travelling makers, demonstrating that the process of getting ‘best’ dress was important to people. McCarron noted the positive reception of the travelling tailor in post-Famine Donegal highlighting how their arrival interrupted the mundanity of routine farming chores: What happy cheerful faces we all had as we ran out and in and stood looking at our new suits being made. Indeed there was little else done on those occasions by old or young except

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the necessary attendance to the cattle; talking to the tailor, and some neighbours who would drop in just because the tailor was there, absorbed all the time and interested. Then when night set in some neighbours came, and relatives generally, and with candle light and a good fire, we at least, young folks, felt very happy.56 Itinerants had an important social and cultural role in addition to their important function in the production of clothing.57 McCarron’s description shows how the visit of an itinerant maker represented an occasion when family and neighbours gathered and socialized with each other. The movement of itinerant shoemakers and tailors, travelling as they did between townlands, districts and counties in Ireland, meant that they collected news, gossip, stories and songs. They were often literate and read newspapers to the residents in a dwelling. Folklorist Michael J. Murphy noted that: ‘Most of the shoemakers were learned men. They could read the newspaper, and it would be brought to them; and now and then they’d leave the people talking about it while they worked again, and then read another bit when they had no more to say’.58 They played an important part in the spread and dissemination of this information across rural areas. They were known as storytellers and some as notable musicians and singers. The communication of stories, songs, news and the entertaining of their hosts were expected parts of the work. These talents for amusement were also desired characteristics at a time when people had to generate their own entertainment. Storytelling and singing were also very respected abilities in rural Irish culture. These social and entertaining roles were considered to be one of the key benefits of opting to acquire clothing and footwear from itinerant makers instead of using an alternative method. Folklore informants regularly highlighted the social and cultural role of the makers. An informant from Swanlibar in County Cavan stated that status in a community was gained by hosting travelling tailors in the home: ‘It was considered an honour to have him stay in the house for moving about from place to place as he was he had all the news of the different parishes and was always sure of a welcome’.59 Another informant said their local travelling tailor was ‘a great storyteller and he was also the bringer of news from other places. He was always welcome’.60 Travelling shoemakers and tailors were also valued and well received because of the affordability of their services and the flexible methods of payment they accepted.61 Shoemakers were typically paid for each pair of shoes or boots that they made. In contrast, itinerant tailors were usually paid a daily rate for their work instead of charging a fee for each clothing item they constructed. An informant from County Cavan stated that the daily rate for a travelling tailor was about three shillings a day.62 Reflecting the flexibility of payment methods that were offered, some makers accepted payment-in-kind.63 The system was economical for the makers who did not have to pay for a premises and the consequent overheads having a sedentary business would incur. Using a travelling maker was considered to be a very economical way of acquiring and maintaining dress. An informant in rural Donegal stated: I was shown the amount of work that tailor turned out and I certainly thought it was a fine week’s work and an economical way of keeping up the wardrobe, especially as the material was for the most part home manufactured, a full suit of grey homespun had been made for a school boy, trousers and vest for the old man, also two pairs of drawers of strong white flannel and other trousers for some grown up member of the family.64 Similarly, an informant from Cooladawson, County Donegal reflected the benefits of the payment system as follows: ‘an economical way on the part of the farmer and not always a loss to the tradesmen, as in addition to their pay they were well treated, well fed, and on their

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return home they often had a gift from the produce of the farm’.65 Indeed, the lodgings and food given to the travelling makers were also a part of their payment.66 The fact that the travelling makers were well fed during their stay represented another reason that travelling makers were welcomed as the whole family benefited from the hospitality.

Conclusion As the nineteenth century drew to a close, travelling tailors and shoemakers became less common in Ireland, but their operation did not cease evenly across the island. The majority of respondents stated that the practice ended between 1900 and 1920, correlating with the increasing availability of ready-made clothing and the expanding popularity of shop-based consumption of clothing and footwear in Ireland.67 There were, however, distinct regional variations in the decline of the practice and some informants reported travelling makers visiting their area in the 1930s.68 Another factor leading to the decline of the travelling tailor in particular was the increasing use and availability of the sewing machine. Over time, customers expected their clothing to be machine-made, consequently itinerant tailors increasingly worked from a fixed place, as sewing machines were too heavy for a tailor to carry on foot.69 Nevertheless, into the twentieth century, itinerant shoemakers and tailors were very important to the production of clothing and footwear in the homes of non-elites in rural Ireland. The extensive reach of these travelling makers illustrates that some of the poorest sections of Irish society living in some of the most remote areas of the island had a lot of their everyday clothing and footwear made bespoke. The work of these makers was desired by the lower classes. Clothing obtained from travelling makers was usually ‘best’ dress, and it was typically relegated to everyday dress when new clothes were acquired the following year in the annual flow of fashion production. There was a slow pace of change in clothing styles produced, but the clothes were understood as fashionable within the class communities and local areas travelling makers serviced. Itinerant makers were an important clothing and footwear acquisition option for the rural lower classes, particularly in the most rural and remote areas of the island. They were affordable and catered to people in areas that were not well-serviced by alternative sources of clothing and footwear. The affordability and accessibility of travelling makers shows that the lower classes were adaptable and had a means to acquire the clothing and footwear they liked whilst navigating their limited financial capacity.

Notes 1

Edward McCarron, Life in Donegal, 1850–1900 (Dublin: Mercier, 1981), 33.

2

John Styles, ‘Response’ in Fashion and Modernity, ed. Caroline Evans and Christopher Breward (London: Bloomsbury, 2005), 35.

3

Cheryl Buckley and Hazel Clark, ‘Conceptualizing Fashion in Everyday Lives’, Design Issues 28 (2012): 19.

4

Vivienne Richmond, Clothing the Poor in Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 78; Alison Toplis, The Clothing Trade in Provincial England, 1800–1850 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 33–37; Laura Ugolini, Men and Menswear: Sartorial Consumption in Britain, 1880–1939 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 147; Christina Fowler, ‘Robert Mansbridge, a Rural Tailor and His Customers 1811–1815’, Textile History 28, no. 1 (1997): 29–38.

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5 Richmond, Clothing the Poor, 78. 6

Bríd Mahon, Rich & Rare: The Story of Irish Dress (Dublin: Mercier, 2000), 51–4.

7

Mairead Dunlevy, Dress in Ireland (Cork: Collins, 1999), 163–65.

8

NFC 755: 410 (Cloughaneely – Raymunterdoney, County Donegal); NFCSC (The Schools’ Collection) 755: 49 (Currin, County Monaghan); NFC 755: 443 (Upper Fanad, County Donegal); NFCSC 736: 271 (Ballinea, Mullingar, County Westmeath).

9

NFCSC 1100: 33 (Cooladawnson, County Donegal).

10 NFC 1219: 449–50 (Teebane East, County Tyrone). 11 NFC 749: 39 (Knockbride Parish, Bailioeboro, County Cavan). 12 NFC 755: 129 (Ballybay, County Monaghan). 13 Ibid. 14 NFC 755: 49 (Currin, County Monaghan). 15 NFCSC: 547: 132 (Roscrea, County Tipperary). 16 See for example: NFCSC 211: 272 (Garvagh, County Leitrim); NFCSC 538: 193 (Aughboy, County Tipperary). 17 Aoife Bhreatnach, ‘Fair Days and Doorsteps: Encounters between Travellers and Settled People in Twentieth-Century Ireland’, in Portraying Irish Travellers: Histories and Representations, ed. Ciara Bhreatnach and Aoife Breatnach (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2006), 2. 18 Dunlevy, Dress, 165. 19 NFC 1221: 448 (Munterloney, Greencastle, Gleely and Rousky, County Tyrone). 20 NFCSC 957: 256 (Killymarly, County Monaghan). 21 NFC 1221: 448 (Munterloney, Greencastle, Gleely and Rousky, County Tyrone). 22 NFC 1219: 449–50 (Teebane East, County Tyrone). 23 NFC 755: 314 (County Donegal). 24 NFCSC 855: 94 (Drumreask, County Monaghan). 25 NFC 1221: 448 (Munterloney, Greencastle, Gleely and Rousky, County Tyrone). 26 Ibid. 27 NFC 1221: 467 (Munterloney, Greencastle, Gleelly and Rousky, County Tyrone). 28 McCarron, Life in Donegal, 34. 29 NFC 749: 74 (Upper Loughtree, County Cavan). 30 NFCSC 1124: 242 (Malin, County Donegal). 31 NFC 755: 49 (Currin, County Monaghan); NFC 1221: 462–3 (Munterloney, Greencastle, Gleelly and Rousky parishes, County Tyrone); NFC 749: 14 (Castleraghan, County Cavan; NFC 755: 180 (Glencolmcille, County Donegal). 32 NFC 755: 161 (Glencolmcille, County Donegal). 33 NFC 755: 304–5 (County Donegal). 34 NFC 749: 205 (Ballyconnell, County Cavan); NFC 925: 209 (Moyrusk and Maheragall, County Antrim). 35 NFC 1221: 460 (Munterloney, Greencastle, Gleelly and Rousky parishes, County Tyrone). 36 NFC 755: 94 (Domhnach, County Monaghan). 37 NFC 749: 133–4 (Coratillon, Bawnboy, County Cavan). 38 NFCSC 969: 122–3 (Swanlinbar, County Cavan).

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39 See for example: NFC 755: 73 (Domhnach, County Monaghan); NFC 755: 304 (Iniskeel, County Donegal); NFC 755: 161 (NFC 749: 74 (Upper Loughtee, County Cavan); NFC 749: 225 (Killeshandra, County Cavan). 40 See for example: NFC 755: 328–9 (Inbhear, County Donegal); NFC 749: 152 (Muineal, Bawnboy, County Cavan); NFC 755: 100 (Cremorne, County Monaghan). 41 Laura Jones, ‘Dress in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: An Approach to Research’, Folk Life: The Journal of Ethnological Studies 26 (1978): 51. 42 NFCSC 1000: 88 (Dunancory, County Cavan). 43 See for example: NFCSC 351: 248 (Lyraneag, County Cork); NFCSC 966: 314 (Muineal, County Cavan). 44 NFC 755: 387 (Boylagh, County Donegal). 45 NFC 1219: 457–8 (Teebane East and Currainalt, County Tyrone). 46 NFC 1219: 459–64 (Teebane East and Currainalt, County Tyrone). 47 NFC 1219: 457–69 (Teebane East and Currainalt, County Tyrone); NFC 1221: 448 (Munterloney, Greencastle, Gleely and Rousky, County Tyrone). 48 NFCSC 1013: 59 (Glasleck, County Cavan). 49 NFCSC 957: 257 (Bellanagall, County Monaghan). 50 NFCSC 1013: 233 (Kilcrossduff, County Cavan). 51 Ibid. 52 McCarron, Life in Donegal, 33. 53 NFC 749: 225 (Killeshandra, County Cavan). 54 NFCSC 1118: 506 (Moville, County Donegal). 55 McCarron, Life in Donegal, 34. 56 Ibid., 33–4. 57 See for example: NFC 755: 304 (County Donegal). 58 NFC 1221: 448 (Munterloney, Greencastle, Gleely and Rousky, County Tyrone). 59 NFCSC 969: 123 (Swanlibar, County Cavan). 60 NFCSC 1029: 207 (Lissacholly, County Donegal). 61 See for example: NFCSC 211: 272 (Garvagh, County Leitrim); NFCSC 615: 109 (Gortaclare, County Clare). 62 NFCSC 969: 123 (Swanlibar, County Cavan). 63 NFC 755: 410 (Cloughaneely Raymunterdoney, County Donegal). 64 NFCSC 1100: 34–5 (Cooladawson, County Donegal). 65 NFCSC 1100: 33 (Cooladawson, County Donegal). 66 NFC 755: 410 (Cloughaneely – Raymunterdoney, County Donegal); NFCSC 1119: 343–4 (Moville, County Donegal). 67 NFC 749: 102 (Corlough, Bawnboy, County Cavan). 68 NFCSC 1100: 34 (Cooladawson, County Donegal); NFC 866: 292 (Ballyoskill, County Kilkenny); NFCSC 351: 248 (Lyraneag, County Cork). 69 NFC 755:72–3 (Domhnach, County Monaghan).

FIGURE 25.1  Page from David Thomas’ drawing book, 1915. © Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales.

25 Tailor’s drawing book, 1915 Elen Phillips

In the early 1900s, most rural communities in Wales had a resident tailor, ranking in importance alongside the local blacksmith, wheelwright, saddler and shoemaker. This drawing book belonged to David Thomas – a tailor from Tregroes, near Llandysul, in west Wales.1 Born with a club foot, it is believed that his disability may have influenced his choice of career.2 In 1915, he briefly left Wales to study at the Tailor and Cutter Academy in London. The drawing book dates from this period and contains course notes on cutting techniques and hand-drawn technical sketches of various garment types. Known as the ‘university’ of the tailoring trade, a six-month diploma from the Academy involved tuition in measuring, designing, drafting, cutting, tailoring and fitting. Such was the intensity of the course, a student who had completed the diploma was considered of equivalent skill to an apprentice who had been indentured for three years.3 On completing the diploma, David Thomas returned to west Wales where he established a tailoring business in the rural village of Cross Inn, near New Quay. In the early 1920s, he purchased and converted a small wooden animal feed store into a tailor’s shop. The interior was divided into three parts: the front had a retail area and shelving for storing bolts of cloth; the middle section contained a small fitting room; the rear of the premises housed a workroom where David Thomas stitched cross-legged on a bench near the window. From here, he worked a 12-hour day, from 9:00 am until 9:00 pm, making agricultural breeches, shirts and waistcoats, best suits, mourning clothes, women’s costumes and riding habits for the local population. The shop had a large selection of suit linings, locally woven flannels and tweeds in stock, and numerous swatches of fabrics which could be ordered from suppliers. In the 1940s, he also began to sell ready-made clothing, hats, shoes and other accessories. Over the years, David Thomas was assisted by various apprentices and shop assistants, including at one time his daughter, Nesta Thomas. She later recalled: Selling things was quite interesting – meeting local people, farmers. For making clothes, they came from all over. Aprons were very popular at that time. Socks for working on the farm, lighter socks, frocks, underwear. He sold ready-made suits as well, and raincoats – all

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sort of hats and caps and spats. They used to wear spats, people who worked in banks and solicitors. I remember him selling a lot of those. There were all sorts of people, it was a village meeting place.4 In 1967, after more than fifty years in the tailoring trade, David Thomas retired from the business. Unused bolts of cloth and unsold garments from the ‘closing down sale’ remained on the shelves until 1988 when his two daughters offered the shop and its contents, together with their father’s drawing book and diploma certificate, to the Welsh Folk Museum, near Cardiff.5 Four years later, the building was dismantled and reopened at the museum – preserved as a typical example of the country tailors’ shops which were once a familiar sight throughout rural Wales.

Notes 1

Tailor’s drawing book, St Fagans National Museum of History (F92.47.4).

2

Oral history interview with the tailor’s daughter Nesta Edwards (neé Thomas), St Fagans National Museum of History (7558/1).

3

C. Stevens (1992), ‘The Country Tailor’. Accession file F92.47, St Fagans National Museum of History.

4

Oral history interview with Nesta Edwards (née Thomas), St Fagans National Museum of History (7558/1).

5

The Welsh Folk Museum is now known as St Fagans National Museum of History. It is a constituent museum of Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales. Over forty historic buildings have been moved to St Fagans since it opened in 1948.

26 I am an ordinary man: Getting and wearing suits in Britain, 1945–80 Danielle Sprecher

In 1964, Raymond Fox bought his first suit from the Leeds multiple tailor Hepworths for around £20, which was a large sum when he only earned about 30 shillings a week.1 He bought this made-to-measure, navy-blue, pinstripe, three-piece suit because he had started work at the Yorkshire Electricity Board as an apprentice after leaving school aged fifteen. Seven years later he bought another Hepworths suit for his wedding, this time in grey. The two suits (Figure 26.1) show the combination of his personal taste (both jackets are single breasted with three buttons and the waistcoats have the same design) along with his adherence to fashion. They feature changing style details such as varying widths of lapels and pocket flaps: narrow for the mid-1960s and much wider for his 1971 wedding suit. In 2015 they were accepted into the collection of Leeds Museums and Galleries as examples of everyday men’s dress made and worn in Yorkshire. Getting and wearing such suits was an experience common to most men in the post-war period in Britain, with millions sold every year and tailored suits ubiquitous in men’s wardrobes.2 The very routine of men’s suit wearing – for work, for leisure and for special events – has created a perception of masculine sartorial blandness; the ordinariness of their matching jackets and trousers deflecting attention from how men have enacted fashion.3 This chapter questions these assumptions by exploring the everyday and mutable role of the suit in men’s lives through object study and personal accounts. By focussing on the consumption of garments made and sold by Leeds multiple tailors, companies who built their businesses on creating suits for as broad a range of men and function as possible, this chapter reveals the layered meanings men attached to their dress and how unassuming tailored suits could be used to construct changing masculine fashionable identities. The chapter concentrates on men’s suited experiences and their worn garments in three sections: the first suit, as young men and as older men. Personal accounts and oral history sources provide tangible links and additional insights into men’s lived experiences of fashion making them central to the analysis contained in this chapter. In particular, I draw on oral history interviews I conducted with Bob Entwistle, Brian Hill and Bryan Rayner.4 These three interviews (out of six in total) were undertaken as part of

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FIGURE 26.1 Two suits in ‘Golden Talisman’ wool made by Hepworths from their Hardy Amies range bought by Raymond Fox, Leeds. Navy striped suit, 1964–5, and grey herringbone suit, 1971. LEEAG.2015.0047.1–2. © Leeds Museums and Galleries (hereafter LMG).

research into the Leeds tailoring industry. The men interviewed were involved in the industry from the 1950s to the 1970s (except for Bob Entwistle who was a personal acquaintance) while the interviews also considered their experiences of acquiring and wearing suits. What emerged most strongly from these oral histories was the emotional and subjective responses that some men expressed about their everyday clothing histories and how these related to their lives more generally. These emotional resonances and meanings were also found in personal accounts from men connected to surviving garments in museum collections and in archival sources relating to the Leeds tailoring industry. This aspect of the importance of everyday clothing within life narratives has been written about more commonly in terms of women’s experiences, as women ‘frequently describe their lives in terms of the clothes they wore’.5 However, Laura Ugolini has shown the usefulness of this approach to men’s dress in her study based on autobiographies.6 While work by Shaun Cole and Clare Lomas on gay men’s experiences through their memories of dress using oral history, combined with other sources such as photographs and surviving garments, demonstrates the value of this methodology, especially as it sheds light on experiences that have typically been ignored or understated.7 Ania Sadkowska’s practice-led research exploring older British men’s fashion practices also adds significantly to our understanding of this aspect of men’s lives.8 I argue that utilizing the men’s suits made and sold by the Leeds multiples, along with personal accounts and archival sources, produces a richer more nuanced understanding of not just men’s ordinary dress and fashion, but fashion as a whole.

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Multiple tailoring was a method of menswear production and retailing developed in Britain during the second half of the 1800s to make made-to-measure and ready-to-wear suits and tailored outerwear. It was a model which came to dominate the menswear market across the UK until the 1970s, with many of the companies based in the West Yorkshire city of Leeds.9 The Leeds multiples’ business model was based on the idea that ordinary men should be able to afford and purchase good quality, well-styled tailoring throughout their lives: it epitomized everyday men’s fashion in the twentieth-century Britain. As Burtons – arguably the most prominent of all multiple tailors – boasted in 1953: ‘Burtons are responsible for clothing over two million men a year and they have to satisfy each and every one of them on every detail of cut, style, finish and fit’.10 Paul Jobling has argued that the menswear industry, including the Leeds multiples, had to pull off ‘a delicate balancing act: how to provide similar types of clothes for distinct age groups and how to build brand loyalty across the generations by respecting their different needs and desires, while turning neither sector off their products in the first place’.11 One of the key ways the multiple tailors managed this was by their made-to-measure offering which allowed individual detailing and adaptation according to fashion, choice, desire and age-appropriateness while making and selling suits in their millions. As Burton Group commercial director Peter Gorb stated: ‘When you bought a Burtons suit … you were saying, basically, I am an ordinary man and that’s what most Englishmen really wanted’.12 For many men in post-war Britain, the process of becoming an ‘ordinary man’ started with their first piece of tailoring, frequently from a Leeds multiple.

First suit The acquisition of a first suit remained an event that was notable enough for it to be frequently remembered. The first suit performed multiple roles by denoting changes in men’s lives and their identity, such as from school to work, and an opportunity to be initiated into the rituals of menswear consumption and masculinity. As Ugolini has argued, for numbers of men, clothing anecdotes in autobiographies highlight ‘the consumer practices associated with particular “moments” in an individual’s life, particularly as he progressed from childhood to full masculine adulthood’ and this was particularly the case with a new garment such as a tailored suit.13 Many of these men’s stories also include the role of a family member in their clothing histories, particularly when it resulted in having a suit style or detail forced on them by their parent. This was a material reminder of external authority and conflict as young men tried to assert their own fashionable independence alongside the need for pragmatic necessity. Often purchased for special occasions or marking a period of transition, these suits fulfil the cultural meanings of masculinity attached to men’s tailoring, meaning that for all occasions they can act as a ‘uniform, an invisibility cloak of sorts, allowing the wearer’s existence in a space to be instantly accepted and immune from comment’.14 The adherence to stylistic and fashionable norms was important when suits were relatively expensive garments and for the majority of young men their first suit would come to be worn with regularity. In 2013 I interviewed Bob Entwistle as part of my wider research into the Leeds tailoring industry. Bob, who grew up in Liverpool, well remembers his first suit. It was bought for him in the early 1970s by his older sister in Derby when he was 14. As he recalled in interview, Well I went – They said I needed one for some do we were going to … And it was quite nice actually, I remember that, it was grey with uh red, red, red-check line through it; that was quite, quite nice.15

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He did not feel confident about what to wear so accepted the advice of the salesman and his sister despite being teased beforehand by his older brother. As he remembered, ‘he was very homophobic, my brother, for some reason and he’d say, “Yeah you watch yourself, goin’ to those place of droppers, watch yourself”’.16 He continued: Yeah, they took me and I went into the shop again … went into this place and the bloke was very nice, he was obviously a bit camp but he was very nice and he said, ‘What we need with that, young man,’ he says, ‘is a nice pink shirt.’ I said, ‘Whoa! Pink shirt!’ And my sister said, ‘It would be nice a pink shirt with that,’’cause she was with me, ‘It would go well.’ I said, ‘Would it?’ ‘Yeah. And a nice big, big kipper tie. Big, big, it would look really nice.’ And it did, you know,’cause – And that guy dressed me, really.17 For Entwistle, this experience was especially positive and memorable, despite the homophobic associations his brother tried to taint it with. He respected the expertise and authority of the sales assistant in dressing and accessorizing him as this was something that he found difficult to do for himself. As he grew older he had a clearer sense of what was in style but felt a lack of connection between the fashionable menswear silhouette of the time and what worked with his body shape; flared trousers were especially problematic as he felt they looked best on long legs. Throughout the rest of Entwistle’s interview he commented on how dispiriting he found it choosing and wearing clothes that he liked, felt comfortable in, and that fitted the fashionable norm of the 1970s. Unsurprisingly, given Burtons’ ubiquity on British high streets, the Labour politician Roy Hattersley and Guardian journalist Ian Jack have both written about the acquisition of their first suit from Burtons, and both noted the assistance of their mothers in the process.18 In 1975, Stephen Collins was 15 when, after a year of saving money from his Saturday job, he went to a Burtons branch and bought a made-to-measure suit. Collins remembers exactly what had inspired him: I was on a winter school museums trip in the West End of London and for some reason the class ended up in St. James’ Park … I was sat on a park bench with my mates, when this bloke walked past us. I don’t really think I’d ever seen a really smart City gent before, but his suit looked different to the ones I’d ever seen – it just had something very modern and different about it. He was wearing black highly polished low-ish platform shoes with it and carrying an umbrella. I do remember that it was blue pinstripe and the tie was wide and pale grey with a pattern. I have no idea why this image stuck with me or how I remember all the detail, but I suppose it made an impression on me as a youngster for some reason.19 Collins was also certain about what kind of suit he was going to order: ‘I was clear about what I wanted – slightly rounded big lapels and a high-ish waistband and trousers flared from the knee down with turn-ups. It had to be quite fitted, because that was the style at the time and I wanted something different – I had the memory of that suit in St James.’20 This style of suit reflected the contemporary vogue for tailoring that harked back to styling of earlier in the twentieth century which had entered men’s fashion at the beginning of the 1970s.21 However, he had not counted on his father insisting on accompanying him, nor on his father’s interference with his choices: it turned out he had his own ideas of what I should get … Dad didn’t understand what I was doing – it makes me laugh to remember him getting more and more exasperated in that shop

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as he tried to enlist the support of the tailor who desperately tried to agree with both of us. In the end I gave up on the turn-ups!22 The survival of his suit (Figure 26.2) means we can see the detailing so clearly remembered by Collins. The peaked lapels of the jacket, usually found on double breasted styles, are of a fashionable width, it is fitted to the waist and features angled hip pockets with wide flaps to balance the lapels, and two vents at the back. The trousers, while not having the turn-ups that he wanted, are high-waisted with an extra-wide waistband fastening with three buttons. Despite the compromises, Collins was happy with his suit, ‘I felt the sharpest bloke on the Street when I first wore the suit – it felt as though I was wearing something that was really mine in every way for the first time,’ and he even bought a pair of dark blue platform shoes to go with it.23 For Collins, this first tailored suit was clearly part of his entry into adulthood, it was a garment that evoked this period of his life and represented his attempts to express his individuality and independence from his parents. He went on to wear it when he went out to nightclubs and for a summer job he got in a bank a couple of years later – the wear is evident on the dirt and staining to the bottom of the trousers and a missing button from one of the jacket

FIGURE 26.2  Stephen Collins’ first suit, made-to-measure by Burtons, 1975. 2012.84/1–2. © Museum of London.

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sleeve cuffs. Collins’ suit illustrates the significant role of the tailored suit in men’s everyday fashion practices during this period. It was a garment that allowed wearers to comfortably move between different spaces and fashion contexts, an experience that was echoed by many other young men.

Young men Roy Hattersley’s first suit purchase from Burtons was an important event in his life, and his second suit was just as well remembered. Four years after being forced into a suit in a cloth picked out by his mother, Hattersley ordered a suit entirely of his own choosing. After finishing university in Hull, he went to the local branch of Burtons for another made-to-measure, this time without any parental interference. However, the fitting revealed ‘that at the moment of purchase excitement had rendered me temporarily colour-blind. The suit was electric green. But I did not care. At last I was tailor-made’.24 Hattersley’s experiences demonstrated not only the advantages and disadvantages of the Leeds multiple made-to-measure and the potential for creative personal style, but also the possibility of being confronted with an unexpected and unwelcome result. They reveal the pleasure that could be enjoyed in the purchase of a suit, especially one that had been planned for and chosen independently. Predominantly single and with disposable income, young men had long been recognized as a group in society who notably spent on their appearance and were style leaders who actively engaged with fashion change.25 It was this cohort of young men aged from their teens to mid-twenties who became increasingly important to the menswear industry after the war.26 The social researcher Pearl Jephcott found that these were young men who, despite their financial constraints, considered clothing and personal appearance to be ‘extremely important’ and ‘one of the leisure-time fillers which they pursued consistently and skilfully’; some boys ‘even listed “clothes” as their chief hobby’.27 Drape, Teddy Boy, ‘sharp’ Italian and Continental, beat, Mod and Rocker were some of the labels given to cultures of appearance and fashion of young men from the 1950s to the 1960s.28 The youths who wore these styles and participated in these fashion cultures were recognized by their distinctive sartorial expressions: a collective visual manifestation of clothing, hairstyles, stance and attitude, transportation and use of public space together with new musical styles and consumerism.29 Many of these looks required suits tailored with particular details and cuts, making the Leeds multiple tailors with their relatively affordable made-to-measure offer an attractive option for young men seeking to achieve the appropriate style.30 Brian Rayner, who began training at Burtons as a cutter in the 1960s, had a suit with an Italian short jacket and remembered discussing tailoring choices with his colleague, nicknamed Ginner: Ginner would say how many suits have you got Rayner? I said six, he said I’ve got nine. And he said I’m just having another one, I’m thinking of – and he’d describe I’m going to have these half-moon pockets or I’m going to it this way or that way and you’d think, Right.31 Having a suit for best, worn to go out in that was distinguished from more workaday tailoring, became a marker of working-class male identity and feature of less affluent male dress in the twentieth century.32 These suits were able to be both special and everyday as they were regularly worn, but for social occasions, demonstrating the mutability of men’s tailoring. This regularity

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of wear also meant that they would then shift in status, from ‘best’ to a garment worn more frequently for work or other activities. Brian Hill, who started at Leeds multiple Alexandre aged sixteen in 1962, described the differences: Everybody. You know, I mean you had your best suit, which is you know usually what you wore on a Saturday night when you went out. And then well I, I mean well because I was in the business I didn’t have a best suit as such because I had lots of them so I would you know I would have two, three, four suits on the go … But dressing up you know Friday, Saturday night, there was always, usually the newest suit that you had that you wore you know to go out.33 Brian Rayner had similar memories: Most of the guys there would have two or three suits and one for best, so on a Saturday night you would be putting on your best suit on, going out to the Mecca … You might go to work in a blue suit and something a bit more jazzy you know for the uh Mecca.34 Despite the decline in tailoring, for some young men in the 1970s the suit was still a desirable rather than obligatory sartorial choice as it retained its aura of masculinity, and for a few years formal tailoring became particularly fashionable. Bob Entwistle saved up from his job in a pub in Liverpool collecting glasses and was given money by his father and brother to buy his second suit, a brown ready-to-wear three-piece that cost around £50. He bought it on a shopping trip with friends when he was about 17 in 1976 or 1977, as he recalled: I went in with a couple of friends and we all chose suits and you know you couldn’t choose the black one’cause Frank had the black one and he couldn’t have the blue one because um, because Tony had the blue one, so you had to have the brown one [laughs].35 These suits operated as markers of homosocial manhood; Entwistle and his friends felt they needed suits to fit in with their group and the current fashion. It also meant they could get in to nightclubs as they were underage, as he explained: ‘Everybody bought suits and we’d all go out to Tiffany’s [nightclub] and try and chat up women … we could get in there’.36 Throughout his interview he expressed his awareness of fashion trends and the potential of dress to be significant, particularly as a young man who wanted to be accepted and conform to the style of his social group. He was eloquent when describing the different looks of his friends and why he felt they were cool: ‘they knew how to carry clothes off that they wore and they knew about fashion and they knew what suited them … They might have been no good at anything else, but they were good at that and when you’re about 16 or 15 or 14, that’s really, really important, your image’.37 Suits and tailoring were a far less important part of a young man’s wardrobe in the 1970s than they had been in the three decades prior. However, throughout the post-war period acquiring and wearing a suit remained significant for many young men, from a best suit to go out in to a suit for work. It was an essential part of their everyday lives. Men’s memories of suit shopping and wearing provide valuable insights into masculine identity, emotion and agency. They also provide understanding of men’s points of view as consumers of the Leeds multiples. Buying a suit independently, especially a made-to-measure suit, gave young men the opportunity to express their identity through their clothing, a process which could evoke lasting memories and become intertwined in the narratives of their lives.

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Older men In a pub, I met a research chemist, thirty-one-years-old, who was married and had two children and earned around £40 a week. He didn’t follow fashion but owned seven suits, all bought at Burtons, and chose them with care. He thought that they mattered, not as objects but symbolically, and each purchase was a major event. ‘When I buy a new suit,’ he said, ‘it’s almost like getting promotion.’38 The anonymous research chemist described in this anecdote at the end of Nik Cohn’s journalistic 1971 book about men’s fashion was an example of the ordinary men whom the Leeds multiples saw as their customers. At thirty-one, he was past the age of the youth market which has dominated the discourse about men’s fashion in the post-war period. Nevertheless, his suits were an important part of his identity and an emblem of a particular form of masculine work. As Julia Twigg has pointed out with regard to dress history: ‘Mainstream, particularly middle aged or older styles, have received little attention in this literature, reflecting the wider neglect of age as a dimension of identity’.39 This element of men’s clothing was observed by Michael Roper in his study of the ‘organization man’ of post-war Britain, where he argued his interviewees’ business suits functioned as a means of creating neutrality, hiding the male body and deflecting attention from it.40 However, the obvious excitement and emotional connection to the suits Cohn’s anonymous research chemist bought from Burtons highlight the value in exploring men’s experiences of their clothing beyond the styles of the attention-grabbing teens and twenties.41 The menswear industry’s perceptions of older men’s consumption patterns and stylistic preferences were that they spent less, were conservative in their taste and that their ageing bodies meant that fashionable styles were not appropriate. As one contemporary guide to style put it: ‘Emphasised fashions are for the young and shapely; the middle-aged and elderly, and the disproportionate and ungainly, should be dressed with circumspection’.42 A 1959 study reported that married men’s fall in spending on their clothing was ‘often the result of affection for their families, whom they insist upon dressing well – even at the expense of their wardrobes’.43 In 1965, one industry insider told Men’s Wear that he felt there were ‘two distinct style groups … the younger man who is fairly adventurous and the older man who is most certainly not. For the latter we still have to make more conservative clothes’.44 Discussion of the clothing and tailoring of men who did not fit the ideal of the sought-after youth market could be negative for these reasons. However, while it is true that men did not tend to buy suits with the same frequency and enthusiasm as they aged, older men were still important consumers. An undated Burtons cartoon (Figure 26.3) illustrated the positive potential of older men’s suit-buying as a meek flat-capped balding husband is shepherded into a Burtons by his wife and transformed into a confident stylish man by his resulting made-to-measure.45 In 1953, Burtons conducted a sales survey of all the suits sold in fifty selected branches over six weeks and the age of the customers.46 The sales revealed that the number of suits bought by men did decrease as they aged but it also demonstrated the significance of older customers. Out of a total of 27,287 suits sold, men aged between twenty-six and forty comprised around 41 per cent of sales (11,206 suits) as did men aged forty-one and over (11,141 suits).47 Figures from survey research for the Daily Herald newspaper in 1961 reflected similar findings, with older men less likely to have bought a suit in the previous year than younger men but also demonstrating that men in their thirties and older were still active consumers.48 A suit sales consumer survey by Mintel covering the 1970s

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FIGURE 26.3  Undated Burtons cartoon advertising their made-to-measure tailoring. LEEDM.P.2003.1.1810. © LMG.

showed that the weighting by age of suit sales remained relatively constant within the context of declining sales over all.49 These figures reinforce the balancing act that the Leeds multiple tailors had to continue to perform between older men and appealing to the trend-setting younger male. There was sensitivity to the existence of age ordering in men’s dress, where particular suit cuts and styles were thought to be appropriate to men of different ages. Partly it was due to the changes in men’s bodies as they aged, as one tailoring guide explained: ‘The problem of how a stout man can be clothed is the most common, because legions of respectable citizens tend to grow portly in the forties’.50 There were also considerations of personal choice and preference where men became comfortable with particular styles of tailoring or details to which they adhered even as fashions changed and they aged. This had the effect of creating an image of conservatism in older men’s clothing choices and condemning them as having no interest in fashion. For example, men continuing to choose heavier weight cloths for their made-tomeasure suits when lighter weights became more common – a detail remembered by cloth buyer Brian Hill.51 An observational trouser survey undertaken by John Collier in 1964 highlighted

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these issues for the menswear industry and the Leeds multiple tailors.52 The company reported that men were continuing with styles such as wide trouser bottoms and turn-ups in contrast to the fashionable silhouette of narrow and tapered legs, the cut markedly distinguished from the fuller, baggier trouser of drape suits from ten years earlier. While John Collier despaired with what they considered to be a persistent lack of fashion consciousness by older men, the madeto-measure production of the multiples gave male consumers the option to choose these details. By looking at and interpreting older men’s suits through personal testimony and object study, meanings beyond a garment’s correspondence to fashionable modes can be understood, especially with ordinary clothing. Two items of tailoring which epitomize this type of garment are a lounge suit and sports jacket from Hepworths, owned and worn by a London accountant.53 Both madeto-measure, the suit (Figure 26.4) and jacket were bought by William Howarth (1919–2004) in 1975 when he would have been 56. The grey two-piece, single breasted suit appears appropriate to his profession, and the width of the lapels and the check cloth the most obvious references to contemporary styles, but otherwise it is understated. It shows clear evidence of wear: slight

FIGURE 26.4 William Howarth’s Hardy Amies for Hepworth’s lounge suit, 1975. 2005.93/1a–b. © Museum of London.

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fraying to the edges of one of the trouser pockets; loss of a cuff button; staining and possible cigarette burn marks to the trousers; damage to the jacket lining. Howarth’s choice of sports jacket shows quite a different look as it features distinctive patch pockets with rounded edges and inverted pleats, and is much less worn. The jacket fronts are angled away from the lapels, showing how they were cut to accommodate Howarth’s middle-aged stomach. It appears he wore these clothes until his early sixties, perhaps when he retired. These two garments provide insight into Howarth’s personal taste within the conventions of male white-collar work, the more casual sports jacket allowing greater freedom of expression but the well-worn tailored suit telling of everyday experience. They also are an example of clothing worn by older men, who by the 1970s were not the key concern of the multiple tailors as they actively attempted to attract younger men’s consumption. Howarth wore his Hepworths suit and jacket for around seven years, but other men wore theirs for far longer, thereby fulfilling all the anxieties of the menswear industry and conforming to the idea of masculinity as oblivious to style change. However, they also shed light on other significant aspects of the suits made by the multiples, including their quality of production. This was a wearing practice which was an anathema to the Leeds multiple tailors who exerted themselves to try to convince men that they needed to update their suits as fashions changed. Another example of this form of long-term relationship with a suit can be seen in a navy blue serge pinstripe suit which was originally bought from a Burtons branch in Norwich in 1936.54 Purchased by Mr D. Upham as his ‘Sunday Best Suit’ he wore it for formal occasions including interviews, funerals, ‘school anniversaries, informal dances, firms informal “get togethers”’ and in 1949 he wore it when he got married.55 He wrote that later on, ‘due to the TV series Steptoe & Son when “turn-ups” and 19” bottoms of the leg were outmoded and tapered legs were “in” my children always referred to it as “your Steptoe suit”’.56 The suit also became the formal dress of his eldest son who wore it on several occasions for interviews. Unsurprisingly, considering the suit was worn for more than thirty years, this can be read on the garment with fading and rubbing to the cloth at the back of the collar and the bottom of the cuffs on the jacket. It also has staining to the lapels and jacket front while the inside sleeve linings are coming away at the underarm and shoulder seam, and the trousers show dirt and marks (possibly splash marks from walking) on the turn-ups. The suit’s quality is also apparent as it is inherently sound. Mr Upham had expected to be buried in his suit, but instead it was donated it to Leeds Museums and Galleries. As a suit representing men’s fashion, this garment would be interpreted by its date of purchase – the square shoulders, double-breasted cut, defined waist and wide lapels of the jacket paired with the wide-legged trousers and turned up cuffs – all fashionable details of 1930s tailoring. However, the way it was worn by Mr Upham (and also by his son) tells of the possibilities of alternative narratives of men’s clothing, representing experiences and life events, as well as being a repository of family meanings and resonances. The tailoring choices of men such as Mr Upham who were satisfied with one suit to last nearly a lifetime represented the type of male clothing consumption that the menswear industry and the Leeds multiple tailors hoped to overturn with their emphasis on the youth market and greater fashion change. Both of these men’s suits and the way they continued to wear them long after fashions had moved on typify the kinds of complaints about men’s tailoring generally and older men’s dress in particular. However, they also showcase everyday clothing consumption. Men’s personal narratives and surviving garments from the Leeds multiples demonstrate how important suits were to men’s commonly held experiences of fashion in Britain from the 1950s to the 1970s. This began with getting a first suit, which often involved being dictated to

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by parents, even when a young man was spending his own money. The next stage concerned the period when men were teenagers and youths, when they tended to have greater disposable income and freedom in their choice of dress, manifesting itself in distinctive clothing styles and tailoring worn for going out. Finally, exploring the experiences of older men through their tailored garments has particular value, providing a fuller picture of men’s lives as they age and their relationship with fashion. By illuminating the role of the Leeds multiples as producers of tailoring in combination with the changing ways these garments were consumed and worn, this chapter broadens our understanding of men’s everyday fashion. The research approach positions the suits worn by men such as Raymond Fox, Bryan Hill or Burtons ‘ordinary man’ as significant, placing them at the centre of routine fashionability.

Notes 1

Leeds, Leeds Museums and Galleries (hereafter LMG), LEEAG.2015.0047.1–2, navy striped suit 1964–1965, and grey herringbone suit, 1971.

2

In 1960 there were 19.2 million men over the age of fifteen in the UK with 10 million suits sold; 45 per cent were bought from a multiple tailor. Economist Intelligence Unit, ‘Men’s Suits’, Retail Business 4, no. 46 (December 1961): 23–8. A 1965 Burtons customer survey found 80 percent of male customers owned three or more suits. ‘Woman’s Influence, Burton’s Plot It’, Men’s Wear, 9 January 1965, 7. In the 1970s suit sales fell from 8.4 million suits in 1970 to 6.8 million in 1980. John Christian Beasley, ‘A Study of Corporate Objectives for the Retailing of Menswear in the United Kingdom since 1970’, (MPhil Thesis, University of Leeds, 1985), 67.

3

For a history of the suit see Christopher Breward, The Suit: Form, Function & Style (London: Reaktion Books, 2016).

4

The interviews are transcribed and accessioned into the LMG collection. Robert (Bob) Entwistle interview, 25 March 2013, LEEAG.2012.0590; Brian Hill interview, 8 July 2013, LEEAG.2013.0165; Brian Rayner interview, 6 November 2012, LEEAG.2012.0589.

5

Julia Twigg, Fashion and Age (London: Berg, 2013), 76.

6

Laura Ugolini, ‘Autobiographies and Menswear Consumption in Britain, c.1880–1939’, Textile History 40, no. 2 (2009): 202–11.

7

Shaun Cole, ‘Don We Now Our Gay Apparel’: Gay Men’s Dress in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Berg, 2000); Clare Lomas, ‘“I Know Nothing About Fashion. There’s No Point in Interviewing Me”: The Use and Value of Oral History to the Fashion Historian’, in Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explorations and Analysis, ed. Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 363–70; Clare Lomas, ‘“Men Don’t Wear Velvet You Know!” Fashionable Gay Masculinity and the Shopping Experience, London, 1950–Early 1970s’, Oral History 35, no. 1 (2007): 82–90.

8

Ania Sadkowska, ‘Dis-Comforting, Pioneering, and Re-Materializing: Crafting Understanding of Older Men’s Experiences of Ageing through Their Personal Archives’, in Crafting Anatomies: Archives, Dialogues, Fabrications, ed. Katherine Townsend, Rhian Solomon and Amanda BriggsGoode (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 67–88.

9

Katrina Honeyman, Well Suited: A History of the Leeds Clothing Industry, 1850–1990 (Oxford: Pasold Research Fund and Oxford University Press, 2000).

10 Leeds, West Yorkshire Archive Service (hereafter WYAS), Burton Group Ltd, WYL1951/121 General Advertising File – sample of advertisement for the Daily Mirror, 27 March 1953.

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11 Paul Jobling, Advertising Menswear: Masculinity and Fashion in the British Media since 1945 (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 76. 12 Nik Cohn, Today There Are No Gentlemen (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), 14. 13 Ugolini, ‘Autobiographies and Menswear Consumption’, 209. 14 Joshua M. Bluteau, ‘The Devil Is in the Detail: Why Men Still Wear Suits’, in Dandy Style: 250 Years of British Men’s Fashion, ed. Shaun Cole and Miles Lambert (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2020), 64. 15 Bob Entwistle. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Ian Jack, ‘The Remarkable Story of the Immigrant Who Dressed British Men’, The Guardian, 16 April 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/16/montague-burton-lithuanianjew-transformed-british-men-burtons-clothing; Ray Hattersley, ‘Gone for a Burton’, Independent, 8 April 1994, 19. 19 Personal account by Stephen Collins. London, Museum of London (hereafter MOL), 2012.84/1–2, Montague Burton suit, 1975. 20 MOL, 2012.84/1–2. 21 Eric Musgrave, Sharp Suits (London: Pavilion, 2009), 170–1. 22 MOL, 2012.84/1–2. 23 Collins, MOL, 2012.84/1–2. 24 Hattersley, ‘Gone for a Burton’, 19. 25 Christopher Breward, The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion and City Life, 1860–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999); Laura Ugolini, Men and Menswear: Sartorial Consumption in Britain, 1880–1939 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 56–8. 26 Frank Mort and Peter Thompson, ‘Retailing, Commercial Culture and Masculinity in 1950s Britain: The Case of Montague Burton, the “Tailor of Taste”’, History Workshop Journal 38, no. 1: 106–27; Jobling, Advertising Menswear, 70–84. 27 Pearl Jephcott, Time of One’s Own: Leisure and Young People (Edinburgh and London: Oliver & Boyd, 1967), 91. 28 Robert K. Burton, Rebel Threads: Clothing of the Bad, Beautiful & Misunderstood (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2017). 29 Adrian Horn, Juke Box Britain: Americanisation and Youth Culture, 1945–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009); Kate Bradley, ‘Rational Recreation in the Age of Affluence: The Cafe and Working-Class Youth in London, c.1939–1965’, in Consuming Behaviours: Identity, Politics and Pleasure in Twentieth-century Britain, ed. Erika D. Rappaport, Sandra Trudgen Dawson, and Mark J. Crowley (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 71–85. Christopher Breward, ‘Style and Subversion: Post-War Poses and the Neo-Edwardian Suit in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain’, Gender & History 14, no. 3 (2002): 560–83; Keith Gildart, Images of England through Popular Music: Class, Youth and Rock ‘n’ Roll, 1955–1976 (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Richard Weight, Mod! A Very British Style (London: Bodley Head, 2013). 30 For more detail see Danielle Sprecher, ‘Fashion for the High Street: The Design and Making of Menswear in Leeds 1945–1980’ (PhD Thesis, University of Leeds, 2016), 171–204. 31 Brian Rayner. 32 Mass Observation, The Pub and the People: A Worktown Study (London: Victor Gollancz, 1943), 143 and Mass Observation, ‘Clothes’, File Report A17, 1939, Mass Observation Online, http:// www.massobservation.amdigital.co.uk/Documents/Details/FileReport-A17.

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33 Brian Hill. 34 Brian Rayner. Mecca were a national chain of dance halls. 35 Bob Entwistle. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 Cohn, Today There Are No Gentlemen, 172. 39 Twigg, ‘Dress and Age’, 59–60. 40 Michael Roper, Masculinity and the British Organization Man since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 84, 137. 41 Julia Twigg, ‘Dress, Gender and the Embodiment of Age: Men and Masculinities’, Ageing & Society 40, no. 1 (2018): 1–21. 42 A. S. Bridgland, revised by A. A. White, ‘Gentlemen’s Garments: The Art of Dress’, in The Modern Tailor, Outfitter, and Clothier, ed. A. A. White, 4th edn, 3 vols (London: Caxton, 1949), Vol. II, 48–51. 43 ‘Well-Dressed Man’s Decline and Fall. Family clothed first’, The Manchester Guardian, 9 February 1959, 5. 44 ‘Fashion’, Men’s Wear, 2 January 1965, 11, 16. 45 LMG, LEEDM.P.2003.1.1810. 46 WYAS, Burton Group Ltd, WYL1951/127 Tables: Census of Customers’ Ages: Sales Promotion and Stock Distribution Scheme, 1952–1953. 47 Figures collated from data in tables from WYL1951/127 Tables: Census of Customers’ Ages: Sales Promotion and Stock Distribution Scheme, 1952–1953. 48 Daily Herald Readers and the Market for Men’s Outerwear (London: Oldhams Press Ltd, 1961), Table 25, 41. 49 Figures from Mintel Market Intelligence, February 1983, 68 in Beasley, ‘A Study of Corporate Objectives for the Retailing of Menswear’, Table 3.7, 77. 50 Bridgland, revised by White, ‘Gentlemen’s Garments: The Art of Dress’, 49. 51 Brian Hill. 52 ‘Street-corner Survey Claim by Colliers – Men “Spurn High Fashion”’, Men’s Wear, 28 November 1964, 17. 53 MOL, 2005.93/1a–b, Hardy Amies for Hepworths suit, 1975–1982; MOL, 2005.93/2 Hardy Amies for Hepworths sports jacket, 1975–1982. 54 LMG, LEEDM.S.1987.0011.6, Navy blue pinstripe double breasted suit. 55 LMG, LEEDM.S.1987.0011.6, Mr D. Upham, note with suit donation. 56 Mr D. Upham.

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FIGURE 27.1 Prince of Wales check skirt suit in wool and camel hair, about 1970–3. Designed by Alannah Tandy for Alexon Youngset. Image by Malcolm Jarvis (Private Collection).

27 Two-piece skirt suit by Alexon Youngset, designed by Alannah Tandy c.1970–3 Shelley Tobin

Part of an Alexon Youngset collection designed by Alannah Tandy, this navy and white Prince of Wales check suit in pure wool and camel hair blend was purchased at David Morgan’s department store in Cardiff in the early 1970s by Jill Tobin (b. 1940), a teacher in South Wales. Worn for several years after the initial purchase, it was later re-worn by her daughter in the early 1990s. Alexon was founded in 1929 by Steinberg and Sons, a coat and mantle making company started by Russian Jewish immigrant Alexander Steinberg in 1904. Family ownership was reflected in the brand name, an abbreviation of ALEXander and sONs. The Steinbergs marketed their Alexon and Dellbury brands from the late 1920s, exporting to eight Commonwealth countries and on the Continent. They acquired other businesses and opened new factories with a head office at 120–122 Aldersgate Street, London after 1947.1 The main factories were in Wales and Scotland and between 1967 and 1970 they opened sixty shop-within-a-shop in-store concessions around the country.2 In 1949, as part of the post-war regeneration of the South Wales Valleys in the area now known as Rhondda Cynon Taf, Steinberg and Sons built Hawthorn, a modernist factory, employing 1200 people to manufacture Alexon women’s clothing … offering training and secure employment: the workers had their own purpose-built canteen, radio station, bus services and football team. Here was a vibrant yet compliant community, where you worked unquestioningly within the factory structures and systems, or you would not work at all.3 Alexon’s Youngset teenage label (1950s) was revived with a fresh new look in the mid-1960s by the young designer, Alannah Tandy. As Textile Manufacturer subsequently reported, Alexon’s Youngset had garnered a reputation as ‘a leading manufacturer of young style outerwear … excellently styled by designer Alannah Tandy’.4 Tandy (b. 1947) trained in Paris and worked for Sybil Connolly and Belinda Belleville before joining Alexon between 1966 and 1974. In an

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interview to promote her first collection she revealed, ‘The things you see in fashion magazines really are the TOPS in high fashion … But they’re not the items generally accepted by the working girl for everyday wear.’ Young women between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five were the target market. In her early twenties, the designer was ‘right in the middle of it’.5 Fashion writers praised ‘the trademark of her clean lines and well-defined seams’ and moderate prices, ‘designed to put any knowing girl knots ahead in the fashion stakes’.6 Others noted pleated skirts and flattering jackets, ‘crisp, fresh and easy to wear … add a touch of modern glamour to the pace of modern living … pleats, and yet more pleats … THE look for 1973’.7 Suits typically retailed from about £10 to £30; between £141 and £422 in modern pricing.8 Tandy recalls this particular suit fondly: I well remember that suit! … featured in Vogue magazine circa 1970. I designed Alexon Youngset for seven years – some of the happiest times of my life. I loved the buzz of the rag trade, all the people involved, regular trips to all the big collections in Paris; couture and ready-to-wear. As well as trips to New York for promotions and Germany for fabrics.9

Notes 1

Grace’s Guide to British Industrial History (accessed 29 August 2020).

2

Elizabeth Ewing and Alice Mackrell, A History of Twentieth Century Fashion (London: Batsford, 1992).

3

Wales Online, ‘End of an Era as More Jobs Go and Factory Shuts’, 19 February 2009, updated 29 March 2013 (accessed 29 August 2020). Alexon House was constructed in 1949 by Messrs E. Taylor and Co. Ltd. of Littleburgh and Treforest to the designs by D. M. Craig of Sir Alexander Gibb and Partners. The building is now listed: https://coflein.gov.uk/en/site/413721/. https:// christinemarfleet.wordpress.com/page-2/sculpture-and-installation/alexon-house/; the site was important for the local community; for the testimonies of women who worked at the factory over its lifetime see: http://www.factorywomensvoices.wales/search.php?func=search&searchfor=Treffore st&in_facplace=on.

4

Textile Manufacturer, vol 99, 1972: 45.

5

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 15 September 1967: 26 via www.newspapers.com (accessed 29 August 2021).

6

‘Maxi, Mini, Midi…London to Have Them All’, in The Leader-Post (Regina Saskatchewan Canada) 6 June 1970: 10; Lynn Advertiser 2 November 1971, advertisement, 1968.

7

Aberdeen Press and Journal, 5 January 1973: 10; Belfast Telegraph 26 January 1973: 8.

8

National Archives Currency Convertor, 1970; this is only a rough guide.

9

Personal email to Shelley Tobin from Alannah Tandy-Pilbrow, 20 April 2021.

28 À la mode in Maesteg: The fashion cultures of South Wales garment factories, 1945–65 Bethan Bide

There are certain places where we do – and, conversely, where we do not – expect to find fashion. We expect to find this season’s hemlines in evidence along New York’s Fifth Avenue and its handbags gracing arms on the Boulevard Saint Germain in Paris. In Britain people have historically looked to the West End of London to measure the temperature of emerging trends. The fashionable dominance of the West End can be traced to a number of factors through time, varying in importance as technologies of fashion manufacture and dissemination have changed. These include London’s role as the location of the Royal Court, its connections to international trade and migration, its high concentration of skilled makers of clothing and accessories, and its sheer size and wealth.1 It is not, therefore, a particular surprise to find London and Londoners represented in histories of British fashion. When the curators of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s 2019 Mary Quant exhibition issued a call for people to come forward with their memories of wearing Quant’s designs, responses from a large number of women from West London, not too far from the Kings Road location of Quant’s Bazaar boutique, were to be expected. Less expected was the emergence of another geographical concentration of responses, hailing not from an urban metropole, but from the industrial towns of the South Wales Valleys.2 Although the Valleys may not be front of mind when plotting fashion on a map of the British Isles, they played an important role as manufacturing centres for the garment trades in the second half of the twentieth century, and their omission from fashion histories betrays a tendency to locate the practice of fashion in places where it is designed and sold, rather than where it is made. While Mary Quant’s name is synonymous with ‘Swinging London’, her ‘Ginger Group’ label clothes were made in conjunction with Steinberg & Sons Ltd., at their factory just outside of Pontypridd, Wales.3

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Exploring the processes by which unassuming Welsh towns such as Pontypridd became sites at the forefront of youth fashion consumption requires a re-examination of the role of making practices in the everyday production of fashion cultures. Between the 1940s and the 1980s garment making boomed in industrial South Wales, and with it grew new local fashion cultures as inhabitants gained increased access to both material fashion objects and knowledge about the latest styles. This chapter explores how everyday practices of making fashionable clothes shaped the way garment workers practised self-fashioning in the early years of the Welsh garment industry, between 1945 and 1965, and asks what happens to our understanding of where and how fashion happens when we elevate the fashionable agency of garment workers and incorporate their stories into histories of British fashion cultures. Inspired by Hayden Lorimer’s calls to consider the ‘more-than representational’, this chapter demonstrates how researching the everyday embodied material experiences, routines and repeated actions of garment workers on production lines, broadens the way we think about where fashion happens and the types of fashion practice that grow fashion cultures.4 In order to access these everyday lived experiences of factory workers and situate them within the broader context of twentieth-century fashion and social history, the chapter combines archival research into the industrial history of Wales and the broader history of British ready-to-wear manufacturing, drawn from government records and the fashion trade press, with local newspaper articles and oral histories with former garment workers, collected as part of the ‘Voices from the Factory Floor’ project conducted by Archif Menywod Cymru/Women’s Archive Wales between 2013 and 2014.5 Although the types of repetitive manual processes involved in the mass-manufacture of garments are not usually considered in terms of creative fashion making, this chapter considers how the everyday labour practices of cutting, sewing, pressing and packing clothes shaped distinctive localized fashion cultures within the factories by influencing the way the women employed to do them used fashion in their own lives. As garment factories provided the main source of employment for women in the local areas, it also considers the impact of these factory fashion cultures on the wider local communities. Questions of what makes, and unmakes, a fashion culture lie at the heart of this chapter. The act of making – that is, the physical fabrication of fashionable goods – has long been an important, albeit frequently overlooked, component in what makes a place fashionable. In spite of the propensity of fashion businesses for concealing the processes by which their products are made, exploring the relationship between what Christopher Breward terms ‘Fashion’s Front and Back’ – the activities of the sales room and the work room – can illuminate our understanding of how fashion cultures thrive in certain places and at certain times.6 As Nancy Green’s research into the twentieth-century fashion industries of Paris and New York lays bare, manufacturing processes were hugely significant for the construction and functioning of those fashion cities.7 Yet the role of making activities in building creative cultures has historically been downplayed by both fashion businesses and cultural intermediaries such as schools of art and design.8 Instead, creativity and artistry are located in acts of design, rather than making, and many creative professionals actively work to distance themselves from associations with manufacture.9 But while the repetitive acts of stitching and shaping goods in mass-manufacture processes are not generally understood as creative, the generative, expressive, identity-forming and even subversive potential of those same acts are more widely recognized in bespoke and craft making, and particularly in home dressmaking.10 By highlighting this discrepancy and revisiting these practices in connection with their impact on individual and community identity, this chapter calls for a reassessment of the contribution made to creative fashion cultures by the everyday activities of making mass manufacture garments.

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Industrial South Wales and the garment industry Popular representations of twentieth-century South Wales conjure images of landscapes dominated by the chimneys of steel mills and slag heaps (Figure 28.1). However, while its economy is best known for heavy industries, light industry flourished in the years after the Second World War and the garment trades in particular made a significant economic contribution. In order to understand why the garment trades came quite suddenly to South Wales, a place with little historic relationship with the fashion industry, it is first necessary to situate their story within the longer industrial history of South Wales. The rich natural resources of the area have been exploited for the best part of 800 years, starting with the working of coal in the thirteenth century and copper smelting in the late sixteenth century.11 In the mid-eighteenth century, ironworks were established, first in Swansea and then up into the Valleys to be close to the sites of coal extraction as the growth of canal networks created faster and cheaper travel options.12 Both the economy and the population boomed during the first half of the nineteenth century, and the opening of the railway connecting Swansea to the Midlands and London in 1852 expanded coal extraction further still.13 However, improved transport connections brought goods in as well as out, and it soon became more profitable for metal works in South Wales to import iron ore from other places in England, leading to the closure of ironworks in many places and the conversion of the ironworks in Blaenavon, Dowlais, Ebbw Vale and Tredegar into steelworks.14 The coal industry expanded to make up for the loss of ironworks between the 1860s and 1880s, shifting the balance of economic activity and leaving many areas, such as the Aberdare Valley, dangerous reliant on coal mining as the sole source of economic activity.15

FIGURE 28.1  Map of Industrial South Wales, c.1940. Author’s own collection.

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It was this lack of diversity, particularly in the upper Valleys, that caused significant economic problems for South Wales in the aftermath of the First World War. The disruption of the export of coal and steel caused by the war and subsequent post-war collapse in demand saw mines and steelworks move away from the upper Valleys, leaving extremely high unemployment in their wake.16 Although many of the workers were highly skilled in their particular field, there were simply no other jobs available in these areas. The lack of economic diversity also made it difficult for women to find work in these areas, and high competition for jobs considered suitable for women, such as retail and domestic service, further suppressed their wages.17 But the legacy of South Wales’ nineteenth-century industrial revolution also offered opportunities. These areas had good transport connections to London and the Midlands by road and rail as well as large populations eager for work. This made South Wales an ideal site for inclusion in the government’s ‘Special Areas (Development and Improvement) Act’ of 1934, alongside Cumberland, Tyneside and parts of Southern Scotland.18 The act provided money for local authorities to invest in encouraging economic development, but as is evident from the Board of Trade’s yearly surveys on Industrial Development in the late 1930s and early 1940s, it had little impact on the problems of South Wales.19 At the same time, the area continued to import clothes and shoes due to a lack of local manufacturing.20 During the 1940s the processes and geographies of clothing manufacture in Britain started to change in a way that created new opportunities for South Wales. The assembly processes that began to be championed as the future for the ready-to-wear fashion industry in the 1930s were further encouraged by the British government’s wartime regulation of clothing production, which stipulated longer production runs of garments and more standardized sizing and quality controls.21 Heavy bombing of urban centres of fashion production, in particular London, encouraged many fashion businesses to more seriously consider relocating their factories and workrooms. This was the case for Steinberg & Sons Ltd., makers of Alexon brand clothing. Steinberg’s growing business had already outgrown its multiple small premises in London by the mid-1930s, and was aware of the difficulties of finding a site in the city big enough to build a modern, efficient factory. Drawn by its status as an Economic Development Area, the company built an exhibition factory on the Treforest estate, just outside Pontypridd, which began production in 1939.22 Disruption to their London operations by the Blitz and the availability of willing workers subsequently caused them to expand to nearby Hawthorn, Pontypridd. In the immediate aftermath of the War there was a shortage of garment workers in London, and rebuilding damaged premises was difficult due to a lack of labour and materials. In Wales, however, demobilization had driven high rates of female unemployment, which grew from 6,835 to 29,079 in the year between July 1945 and 1946, and South Wales’ status as an Economic Development Area made it easier to obtain materials for building projects.23 In the face of such challenges and incentives, other London-based firms were soon to follow Steinberg’s lead. Encouraged by government support, many firms invested considerable resources in relocation to South Wales, including Windsmoor, who opened a training school and state-of-the-art factory on Swansea Industrial Estate in 1948.24 The rapid ascent of South Wales as a centre for the garment trades was confirmed by the formation of a new branch of the Council of the Clothing Institute in Cardiff in 1953.25 The expansion of production in South Wales was given a further boost by new government incentives in 1958. The ‘Distribution of Industry (Industrial Finance) Act’ of 1958 gave the Treasury power to provide loans and grants ‘for purposes likely to provide more work’ – such as clearing sites, building approach roads and training staff – in areas in Wales with high unemployment, including South East Carmarthenshire, Rhondda, Milford Haven, Blaenau Ffestiniog, Caernarvonshire, Rhyl and Wrexham.

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While there was a readily available workforce keen for employment in the garment trades in South Wales, these potential employees lacked relevant cutting and sewing skills. Many firms temporarily brought in staff from established factories to train recruits for a few weeks or months. However, there was also a need to bring senior staff to South Wales on a more permanent basis in order to oversee production. As a meeting of the London Clothing Designers’ and Production Managers’ Association discussed in 1954, the inexperienced nature of recruits in South Wales posed challenges in achieving consistent quality standards.26 The range of small advertisements for roles in trade publications such as The Maker Up throughout the 1950s demonstrates the national recruitment effort to lure experienced staff to South Wales to combat this problem. These staff were either brought in to work in highly technically skilled roles such as ‘Top Grade Designer-Cutter’ or supervisory roles such as Production Managers.27 Alongside technical knowledge, they brought material literacy, understanding of fashion trends and connections to wider networks of national and global fashion. As South Wales became a hub for fashion manufacture, the arrival of these outsiders collapsed the distance between the Valleys and the fashionable world cities of London, New York and even Paris.

Making, material knowledge and access to fashion The arrival of garment factories in South Wales changed the relationship between the local community and the materiality of fashion objects. In order to understand how everyday factory routines re-shaped local fashionable knowledge and the material literacy of entire communities, it is necessary to examine what employees were making and the processes and technologies they were using. Because these factories were established in areas without garment-making traditions there was a need for serious investment in training.28 Locals were recruited for their ability to do the work, not as a result of prior experience or knowledge of the garment trades. At Steinberg’s Treforest factory, interviews included an eye test to check candidates were physically able to do the detailed work, but there was no expectation of prior experience or skills.29 Instead, the Steinberg factory operated its own apprenticeship system from 1946 onwards, training staff on the job for four years by moving them through every department in the factory, after which they were considered ‘fully qualified tailors or tailoresses’.30 The new garment factories that were built in South Wales from the 1930s onwards utilized the latest technology and assembly line processes to improve efficiency and ran on a much larger scale than the urban factories and workrooms they replaced.31 Technological efficiency gave manufacturers a clear competitive edge during the immediate post-war period. Reflecting on how his operating costs had changed between 1939 and 1960, Leslie Berker, founder of Berkertex, explained that his business had achieved a dramatic drop in labour costs, down from around a third of total operating costs to only a quarter, through ‘improved production methods and machine usage’.32 Welsh factories were set up to maximize efficiency by breaking production down into individual tasks. Although this work was highly mechanized and comprised individual specialized workers making only parts of the garment, it was still pressured, skilled work. As a 1958 profile on the Windsmoor factory in Swansea details, the production process for coats and suits was complex and required different employees to have mastered skills including underpressing, sewing piped buttonholes and hand-finishing garments.33 The profile also indicates

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that Welsh employees were often working at higher skill levels and to higher standards than factories elsewhere, with Windsmoor choosing to produce tricky tailored outwear at their Swansea factory while the simpler job of making skirts was left to their Macclesfield facility. The highly developed skill-base of Welsh garment workers is further evidenced by their flexibility. Steinberg’s ‘Alexon House’ factory in Pontypridd was not only responsible for the production of quality coats for the discerning North American market, it was also set up in flexible units to allow the facility to quickly adapt to manufacturing many different types of goods – from jersey separates to suits – in response to consumer demand.34 Handling such a wide range of fabrics required strong material literacy and the ability to quickly master new processes, dispelling the idea that this was unskilled work. The high level of skills that were fostered in these factories changed local fashion cultures by equipping people with the skills to make their own clothes. Once they had mastered sewing skills at work, many factory employees invested in small machines to use at home, making clothing for themselves and their families.35 Often domestic sewing practices clothed the wider community too, with machinists producing clothes for friends and women who left their factory jobs in order to raise families subsidizing their household income by taking paid commissions.36 It was also widespread practice – if not official policy – for employees to be permitted to make clothes from their own materials on the factory machines during their work breaks.37 This was a particularly popular option for those making ‘something special’ since it was possible to get a far more professional finish using factory equipment than a domestic sewing machine.38 The workplace also offered opportunities for skills-sharing, and often the more experienced makers and supervisors would step in to assist in the production of special-occasion wear, such as wedding dresses. This enabled local women to attend significant functions in bespoke garments, made to their own designs and out of fabrics of their choosing – a luxury far beyond the financial means of other similarly paid factory workers.39 Working at or living near a factory could also facilitate greater access to raw materials for home sewing. Factories were known to donate remnant fabrics to local schools and community groups, such as a donation made by the Louis Edwards factory in Maesteg to the Nantyffyllon Young Married Women’s Guild, which the members used to make themselves garments.40 Such acts of charity were often mutually beneficial; encouraging former factory employees to maintain their sewing skills meant that there was a pool of ‘former staff with own machines’ in the local community that the factory could employ as outworkers at times of high demand.41 Not all of the material goods that found their way onto the sewing machines of the local community were obtained as legitimately. Much found its way out of the factory through ‘pilfering’.42 Although not strictly legal, at certain factories it was tacitly accepted that cotton and occasional cut fabric components would go missing, to be taken home and constructed by employees for their own use: We were always looking on jackets and you know. It’s so funny because they’d start on the line by here and by the time they got down to the bottom of the line, there was two jackets missing and nobody know where they went, isn’t it. Oh – they were taking parts so when they’d go home they’d sew them up … and make a jacket up when they’d go home you know? But that went on … I mean that went on … people knew … and cotton reels – you were allowed to take cotton reels home. You could have the cotton reels you know, they never stopped you … I mean nobody done a lot of pinching, but you could have a reel of white cotton if you wanted it like ….43

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However, most did not recall (or at least admit to recalling) theft being particularly prevalent. This was largely attributed to the regular sales of seconds and last-season stock held in the factories, where employees ‘could buy the material quite reasonably’.44 These sales were another means by which the factories increased local access to fashion goods. As a Louis Edwards employee explained, sales were a significant perk to working at the factory as the ‘imperfect’ garments only had ‘a little flaw here and there’.45 At Kayser Bondor these factory rejects were known as ‘NQPs’, or ‘not quite perfect’ and could be obtained at ‘ridiculous prices’ from a dedicated on-site shop.46 Windsmoor even went so far as to offer perfect garments for sale at cost-price, acting as a duel staff benefit and deterrent to stealing from the factory floor.47 Factory management recognized the significant appeal of sales as a staff perk. Some made extra efforts to ensure a wide range of styles and stock were available by shipping in garments from other factories they operated around the country. Horrockses’ factory in Cardiff hosted such sales around twice a year, generating excitement as employees got access to ‘lovely dresses’ in different styles and fabrics than those they had been making.48 Not all employees obtained clothes for their own wardrobes from their places of work. For some, the garments they were making were just too expensive for them to purchase, in spite of sales and concessionary rates, and for others the clothes were not to their taste: They didn’t so much make young people’s clothes in those days, in my day they mostly made men’s suits and uniforms and things like that. […] Maybe they did but they weren’t something I would buy. Because they were perhaps well you’re young and you don’t have a lot of money you don’t go for things that were going to last, maybe too posh.49 However, the presence of the garment factories still gave these employees an increased ability to participate in fashionable consumption by virtue of earning their own wage. While women generally earned less than men within the factories, the work was comparatively well paid for the local area, and many women machinists earned more than their husbands who worked in coal mining.50 This spending power could be transformative. Numerous interviewees who started work in garment factories as teenagers vividly remembered the sense of freedom they derived from their ability to choose and buy their own clothes for the first time, liberating their wardrobes from hand-me-downs or the garments their mother chose for them.51 Listening to their interviews, it is striking to note the strong memories they still have of specific details of their fashion purchases all these years later, even when other details of their social and work lives have faded.52 Equally striking are the memories of the places they travelled to perform their acts of consumption – ‘Went shopping, went to Cardiff, wonderful’ – contextualizing their purchases as fashionable through association and confirming their understanding of themselves as knowledgeable, well-connected fashionable consumers.53

Practice, performance and the development of local fashion cultures The looming presence of Cardiff as a shopping destination in the memories of former garment workers provides a reminder that access to fashion is not just about access to material goods – it also requires access to fashionable spaces, networks and communities. The presence of

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garment factories in South Wales provided access to these more intangible things alongside the tangible materiality of clothes. Workers in garment factories gained knowledge about what was fashionable through the things they made. Their confidence in this knowledge is evident in the clarity of the language used to describe the fashionable elements of both the clothes they produced at work and the ones in their own wardrobes: I did have some lovely dresses. I can remember one in particular what I was very fond of was an emerald green satin. Beautiful, beautiful dress with little diamantes coming down the front, full skirt, which was the fashion then, you know.54 This clarity is also apparent in discussions about what was not fashionable. When asked whether the Louis Edwards factory made clothes that young people wanted to wear, one interviewee was not only able to confidently answer ‘No’, but also to describe the details of the shape, construction and materials of the garments that led to her reasoning.55 While much of this fashionable knowledge relates to broader national trends, the oral histories also provide evidence of distinctive factory fashion cultures. As Anna Pollert has established, women factory workers alleviated the boredom of manual labour by developing unique shop floor social cultures and ‘informal codes of resistance’ in order to maintain their dignity as individuals within the monotony of the factory production line.56 The words of employees suggest that dressing practices formed as part of these shop floor cultures, allowing them to negotiate their own fashionable identity within the factory community. Where you worked influenced both what you wore and how you wore it. Kayser Bondor in Merthyr produced stiff netted petticoats as part of their lingerie offering, and many of the young women who worked there in the 1950s would layer these in order to achieve dramatically wide silhouettes under the full skirts that were fashionable at the time.57 Evidence of very localized, factory-specific fashion cultures can be seen clearly in photographs of groups of workers socializing. Comparing photographs from different factories suggests that the types of clothes women made influenced their choice of dress. As an image of a number of women wearing similar printed fabrics at the St Margaret’s factory in Bargoed indicates, this was likely influenced by the relative ease with which these women were able to obtain clothes and materials from the factory.58 But similarities between the way workers chose to style their garments – exemplified by the matching hair, accessories and dresses of two friends who worked at Windsmoor on a night out (Figure 28.2) – suggest that localized fashion practices were also about belonging in the factory community. Without the factories these communities of young, fashionable women would simply not have existed because many would not have lived in the area. Before light industry moved into South Wales in the 1940s and 1950s a lack of employment opportunities forced large numbers of women to move away to find work. As the supervisor of the Polikoff factory in Treorchy put it, ‘This factory has helped to keep Rhondda families together’.59 The built environment of the factories gathered these women in shared spaces, enabling new friendships and support networks to be forged through these shared acts of styling and cultural consumption. Music played a significant role in building a shared identity amongst workers on the factory floor. It was primarily played over factory sound systems to ‘motivate and improve afternoon productivity’, but it also served as a form of cultural education that bonded workers together over their shared tastes.60 Employees engaged in communal sing-along sessions, and the promise of ‘Music while you work’ was advertised as an incentive to attract new recruits.61 The Denex factory in Tredegar even encouraged employees to bring in their own records to be

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FIGURE 28.2  Patricia Ridd and friend on a Windsmoor Factory night out. © Archif Menywod Cymru www.lleisiaumenywodffatri.cymru/Women’s Archive Wales Voices www.factorywomensvoices.wales.

played out to the entire floor, allowing staff a hand in shaping the work environment by sharing their tastes with colleagues.62 Away from the factory floor, many employers provided specific facilities, sports clubs and social opportunities to foster community in order to create a productive and loyal workforce.63 Canteens were key social spaces. They were often subsidized to encourage workers to spend time together and acted as a venue for special events such as dances.64 There were also other, less formal spaces within the factory that employees claimed for socializing and shared practices of self-fashioning, including the toilets where they could congregate away from the prying eyes of their supervisors. More than one person who worked as a machinist at Polikoff’s Rhondda factory recalled washing and setting their hair in the toilets on Friday afternoons in preparation for an evening out.65 Work friends often went on to socialize together outside of the factory. Favoured social activities included trips to the cinema for the young machinists at St Margaret’s factory in Bargoed and ‘pubs and dancing’ for machinists from Berlei Bras in Merthyr.66 Participation in social activities with colleagues helped create a sense of belonging and identity that was entwined with work. Recognizing the value of this for staff satisfaction and loyalty, factory management arranged subsidized social events themselves. The most memorable of these were dinner dances, held at glamorous venues including the Connaught Rooms in

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Cardiff and the Grand Pavilion in Porthcawl.67 These social gatherings gave an opportunity to dress up, providing access to new fashionable experiences to women who would not otherwise have had occasion to don formal wear and cementing the practice of fashionable self-styling in the way people understood their relationship to their work community: that was my first ever dinner dance where I bought my first evening gown which we thought we were wonderful – having our hair done, then buying special shoes you know – it was lovely.68 The factory provided multiple opportunities for women to embody fashion within the workplace too. It was not unusual for young women from the factory floor to be used as occasional fit models. One machinist from Steinberg’s Hawthorn factory vividly remembered the experience of being called to model for management on a semi-regular basis. Although it was ‘a bit embarrassing you know. I wasn’t used to anything like that’, her lengthy description of the process of putting on the suits and walking up and down in them indicates that the experience left a strong impression on her sense of self.69 Glamour and self-fashioning were further encouraged through formal beauty pageants run by some factories, including St Margaret’s in Bargoed and Berlei Bras in Merthyr (Figure 28.3).70 The winner of these factory pageants would go on to compete against winners from factories operated by the company elsewhere.71

FIGURE 28.3 Anita Jeffery (second from left) coming second in the ‘Miss Polikoff’ competition. ©  Archif Menywod Cymru www.lleisiaumenywodffatri.cymru/Women’s Archive Wales Voices www. factorywomensvoices.wales.

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Recognizing that a wide range of employees found pride and enjoyment in the embodied experience of modelling fashionable clothes, beyond the small numbers selected to be fit models or compete in pageants, a number of factories also put on fashion shows where staff modelled clothes for an audience of their colleagues and, on occasion, reporters from the local papers. These events seem to have been particularly prevalent in Merthyr factories, where they often took place in the staff canteen and were open to members of the public as well as being covered by the Merthyr Express newspaper.72 At Berlei Bras in Merthyr, shows took place on the factory floor, in the aisles between the machines, and the models were able to choose what they wanted to wear from a selection of garments produced in the factory. Considerable effort was expended to make the event feel exciting, with supervisors organizing choreography and music as well as hair and make-up. These shows were inclusive and focused on celebrating workers’ connections to the garments they produced rather than showcasing industry beauty standards. Older married women and those with fuller figures took part enthusiastically and remember them fondly: ‘I loved doing all of that – yeah – although I wasn’t very skinny, so they didn’t give me any of the flimsy lingerie’.73 Factory workers in Tredegar expressed pride in their status as a garment workers in other, more self-effacing public activities. In the early 1960s machinists borrowed a large lorry and sewing machines from the factory to create a carnival float based on the British television sitcom The Rag Trade, which aired on the BBC from 1961 to 1963.74 In a conscious act of self-deprecation, the young women dressed themselves in hair nets and pinnies, using their material knowledge to style themselves as the feisty, unionized characters who terrorized their male supervisor. This joke encapsulates the pleasure factory employees felt in seeing themselves reflected in British popular culture and recognized for their role in the wider British fashion industry.

‘Wales helps to make a woman’s world’75 The role that making fashion plays in making you fashionable and connecting you to wider fashion networks is a theme that runs throughout the oral histories collected for the ‘Voices from the Factory Floor’ project. Interviewees repeatedly stressed that they made fashionable garments, not just any old clothes or textile products. This is particularly starkly expressed by people who worked at Horrockses’ Cardiff factory: It made dresses, we didn’t do sheets – I don’t know whether you’ve heard of Horrockses’ sheets, cotton sheets? They did them, but our factory was just making dresses.76 Interviewees then used these fashionable clothes to make imagined connections between themselves and other places they deemed to be fashionable. When asked where the clothes they manufactured ended up for sale, they described exclusive clothes shops in big cities and the distant and prosperous United States.77 But the choice of these locations was based more on conjecture than knowledge: somewhere like Howells and David Morgans in Cardiff, I believe they used to get them in. I’m not sure exactly. As I say, it was, once we made them they were taken away from us and we never knew exactly where they went.78

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Workers in these factories were actively encouraged to imagine themselves part of exclusive and extensive fashion networks. Alexon chairman Alexander Steinberg invited the film star Sally Ann Howes to open the Alexon House factory with him in 1950, drawing media attention and creating a local narrative that connected this factory with the arrival of modernity and a world of cinematic glamour very far away from the South Wales Valleys.79 Factory owners and managers from outside the local area were also keen to stress their own connections to other places, particularly to North America. Many employees assumed the bosses were themselves American, when in fact many were either first- or second-generation Eastern European Jewish immigrants who had settled in London.80 It is likely those bosses did little to correct this perception as antiJewish prejudice was rife in Britain at the time, but this connection was also advantageous in the way it made employees feel part of a global fashion system. This explains why Jack Steinberg, Alexon’s London director, devoted a significant chunk of his speech at the 1953 staff dinner dance in Cardiff to describing a recent American tour and reassuring the audience that they produced internationally competitive fashionable clothing.81 Factory management and the Welsh media and government worked together to stress the importance of Welsh garment workers in shaping both national and international fashions through their knowledge and skills. Significant local media coverage was generated in celebration of factories expanding export production. This coverage stressed how continental export connected factories in locations like Maesteg to great historic fashion centres such as Paris.82 These connections were framed in a way that highlighted the contribution factory employees made to creating not just clothes, but fashion. As Louis Edwards’ general manager in Maesteg, P. Pereths, told reporters, ‘We will now have to become stylists as well as machinists for the very essence of Continental fashion is in the style’.83 Such framing was a useful recruitment tool, persuading young women that factory work could be exciting and fulfilling, but it also reflects a reality about the access working in these factories gave women to the latest fashion trends. Geographical connections between South Wales and international fashion markets reversed the assumption that women in places like Maesteg were destined to learn of new trends after their counterparts in cosmopolitan urban areas. Instead, because Louis Edwards manufactured copies of the very latest styles emerging from Paris, the inhabitants of Maesteg became some of the first people in the country to gain access to, and knowledge about, those fashions.84 As the Glamorgan Advertiser told its readers of the presence of garment factories in their communities: ‘They Bring Fashions Home To You’.85 This fashionable access is framed in terms of agency by both employees and employers alike. It is notable that there is broad agreement between oral history interviews, trade reports and media coverage in the way different parties discuss the benefits that Welsh women derived from working in garment manufacture. These benefits clearly went beyond the economic, and the importance of the fashionable identity many people gained from their time working on the factory floor is exemplified by the sadness they expressed about having to leave that employment, commonly when pregnant or when made redundant when the factories closed.86 Making clothes empowered people to use fashion to craft both individual and collective identities, beyond the traditional roles available to them as wives and mothers.

The rise and fall of ‘Made in Wales’ The rapid ascent of South Wales as a centre of fashion manufacture in the middle decades of the twentieth century dramatically increased the exposure local people had to the fashion industry and its material products. As this chapter details, the presence of garment factories

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embedded the practice of fashion into the daily lives of both those who worked in them and those who lived nearby. Daily lived experiences of making and consuming fashion – both in the form of material products and knowledge – fostered distinctive local fashion cultures in previously ‘unfashionable’ industrial locations surprisingly quickly. Investment in training empowered people with the skills to cut and sew materials into fashionable outfits and sales of factory seconds and occasional ‘pilfering’ gave people the tools to engage with the latest fashions. Factories also brought together new communities of young women and fostered their fashionable confidence through social activities such as fashion parades, beauty contests and dances, leading to the emergence of localized fashion trends and the development of highly fashion-conscious consumers. The processes discussed in this chapter highlight the power of making as a catalyst for the creation of vibrant fashion cultures, the everyday routines of the factory equipping garment workers with knowledge about the latest styles and how to manipulate materials to achieve them. If everyday engagement with making fashion can build fashion cultures, then this chapter calls for fashion histories to pay more attention to shifts in manufacturing trends and to further explore the perspectives that can be gained from incorporating business and social history sources into cultural histories of fashion. This chapter also suggests the importance of looking to networks of making, in the form of commodity chains, to reframe our understanding of where fashion happens. These networks stretch the boundaries of what we consider to be fashionable spaces, connecting the urban, suburban, rural and international. They demonstrate that fashionable places are not static or isolated. People, materials and goods come and go, facilitating knowledge exchange through their everyday engagement with the work of the fashion industry. Although this type of fashion practice exists beyond the glamour of fashion industry events and urban cultural hubs, it is no less significant for the production of fashion cultures for that. As fashion manufacture later grew throughout Wales, some local Welsh cultures would come to influence broader British fashion cultures. When Laura Ashley opened a factory in Carno, Powys, in 1963, it changed the area’s fashion cultures (Figure 28.4). As the factory became the dominant local employer, so the younger (and sometimes also the older) people who worked there adopted the romantic, nostalgic styles they produced.87 In turn, the rural village itself came to epitomize Laura Ashley’s brand to consumers elsewhere, transforming Mid Wales into an unlikely fashion symbol with a network of shops that bore the signage ‘London, Paris, Llanidloes’.88 But the story of Welsh fashion manufacture is not just one of upward trajectory. Processes of deindustrialization accompanied the fashion industry’s ever-expanding global commodity chains between the 1980s and early 2000s, leading to massive reductions in the workforce and the shuttering of factories. Laura Ashley’s Carno factory and Alexon House in Pontypridd held out longer than many of their competitors, finally closing in 2005 and 2009, respectively. If manufacturing jobs brought fashion cultures to the South Wales Valleys, then logic suggests that the decline of those industries would have cultural as well as economic impacts on the local communities, stripping them of fashionable agency and access. Considering the key role that the practice of fashion plays in identity formation, the story of what happened when making fashion stopped being part of the everyday lives in these communities is not only worthy of further study, but of being considered as seriously as existing research into the impact of the decline of heavy industries such as mining and metal working.

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FIGURE 28.4  Laura Ashley ‘Made in Wales’ label. Photograph by the author.

Notes 1

Christopher Breward, Edwina Ehrman, and Caroline Evans ed., The London Look: Fashion from Street to Catwalk (London: Yale University Press, 2004).

2

Victoria and Albert Museum, Mary Quant (6 April 2019–16 February 2020).

3

Jenny Lister, Mary Quant (London: V&A Publishing: 2019), 96.

4

Hayden Lorimer, ‘Cultural Geography: The Busyness of Being “More-Than-Representational”’, Progress in Human Geography 29, no. 1 (2005): 83–94.

5

http://www.lleisiaumenywodffatri.cymru / http://www.factorywomensvoices.wales/en/index.php (accessed 5 May 2022).

6

Christopher Breward, ‘Fashion’s Front and Back: “Rag Trade” Cultures and Cultures of Consumption in Post-War London c.1945–1970’, London Journal 31, no. 1 (2006): 15–40.

7

Nancy Green, Ready to Wear and Ready to Work (London: Duke University Press, 1997).

8

Bethan Bide, ‘Class and Creativity in Fashion Education’, International Journal of Fashion Studies 8, no. 2 (2021): 175–94.

9

Angela McRobbie, British Fashion Design: Rag Trade or Image Industry? (London: Routledge, 1998).

10 Barbara Burman, The Culture of Sewing: Gender, Consumption and Home Dressmaking (Oxford: Berg, 1999); Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London: Bloomsbury, 2021).

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11 Philip Massey, Industrial South Wales: A Social and Political Survey (London: Victor Gollancz, 1940). 12 W. E. Minchinton, Industrial South Wales, 1750–1940 (London: Routledge, 2015), xii. 13 Ibid., xix. 14 Massey, Industrial South Wales, 22. 15 Ibid., 25. 16 Ibid., 32, 54. 17 Ibid., 72. 18 The National Archives, MH 61. 19 Board of Trade, Survey of Industrial Development (London: HMSO, 1938). 20 Massey, Industrial South Wales, 150. 21 Bethan Bide, ‘London Leads the World: The Reinvention of London Fashion in the Aftermath of the Second World War’, Fashion Theory 24, 2020, no. 3: 349–69. 22 Basil Wardman, ‘Flexible Units’, The Maker Up, April 1960, 292. 23 Catrin Stevens, Voices from the Factory Floor: The Experiences of Women Who Worked in the Manufacturing Industries in Wales, 1945–75 (Stroud: Amberley, 2017), 8. 24 Jean Samphier, ‘We Visit Windsmoor’, The Maker Up, April 1958, 227. 25 ‘New C.I. Branch Formed’, The Maker Up, May 1953, 450. 26 ‘Factories in Underdeveloped Areas’, The Maker Up, March 1954, 209. 27 ‘Classified Advertisements’, The Maker Up, July 1958, 571; December 1954, 1036. 28 Jean Samphier, ‘We Visit Windsmoor’, The Maker Up, April 1958, 227. 29 Stevens, Voices from the Factory Floor, 12. 30 Wardman, ‘Flexible Units’, 292. 31 This is evidenced by the frequency with which Welsh factories are profiled as exemplars of modernity and efficiency in the trade journal The Maker Up in the 1950s and early 1960s. 32 ‘Leslie Berker Compares His Operating Costs with Pre-War Position’, The Maker Up, February 1960, 111. 33 Samphier, ‘We Visit Windsmoor’, 227. 34 Wardman, ‘Flexible Units’, 292. 35 Marian Roberts, VN011. http://www.factorywomensvoices.wales/uploads/VN011.2.pdf (accessed 20 May 2021). 36 Margaret Gerrish, VSE080. http://www.factorywomensvoices.wales/uploads/VSE080.2.pdf (accessed 7 June 2021); Marian Roberts, VN011. http://www.factorywomensvoices.wales/uploads/ VN011.2.pdf (accessed 20 May 2021). 37 Anne Amblin, VSE022. http://www.factorywomensvoices.wales/uploads/VSE022.2.pdf (accessed 22 May 2021). 38 Caroline Isina Aylward, VSE055. http://www.factorywomensvoices.wales/uploads/VSE055.2.pdf (accessed 7 June 2021). 39 Marian Roberts, VN011. http://www.factorywomensvoices.wales/uploads/VN011.2.pdf (accessed 20 May 2021). 40 ‘Y.M.W.G. Social’, Glamorgan Advertiser, 23 October 1953, 5. 41 ‘LOUIS EDWARDS Require HOME MACHINISTS’, Glamorgan Advertiser, 11 November 1955, 7. 42 Sonia Gould, VSE002. http://www.factorywomensvoices.wales/uploads/VSE002.2.pdf (accessed 21 May 2021).

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43 Ibid. 44 Rosalind Catton, VSE060. http://www.factorywomensvoices.wales/uploads/VSE060.2.pdf (accessed 20 May 2021). 45 Caroline Isina Aylward, VSE055. http://www.factorywomensvoices.wales/uploads/VSE055.2.pdf (accessed 7 June 2021). 46 Maureen Williams, VSE030. http://www.factorywomensvoices.wales/uploads/VSE030.2.pdf (accessed 22 May 2021). 47 Samphier, ‘We Visit Windsmoor’, 227. 48 Marian Roberts, VN011. http://www.factorywomensvoices.wales/uploads/VN011.2.pdf (accessed 20 May 2021). 49 Yvonne Smith, VSE042. http://www.factorywomensvoices.wales/uploads/VSE042.2.pdf (accessed 22 May 2021). 50 Stevens, Voices from the Factory Floor, 56. 51 Martha Irene Lewis, VSE064. http://www.factorywomensvoices.wales/uploads/VSE064.2.pdf (accessed 7 June 2021). 52 Rita Spinola, VSE001. http://www.factorywomensvoices.wales/uploads/VSE001.2.pdf (accessed 20 May 2021). 53 Yvonne Smith, VSE042. http://www.factorywomensvoices.wales/uploads/VSE042.2.pdf (accessed 22 May 2021). 54 Marian Roberts, VN011. http://www.factorywomensvoices.wales/uploads/VN011.2.pdf (accessed 20 May 2021). 55 Caroline Isina Aylward, VSE055. http://www.factorywomensvoices.wales/uploads/VSE055.2.pdf (accessed 7 June 2021). 56 Anna Pollert, Girls, Wives, Factory Lives (Bristol: Macmillan, 1981). 57 Maureen Williams, VSE030. http://www.factorywomensvoices.wales/uploads/VSE030.2.pdf (accessed 22 May 2021). 58 Stevens, Voices from the Factory Floor, 18–19. 59 Norman Woodhouse, ‘Steelmen’s Sons’, Western Mail, 26 June 1958, 6. 60 Wardman, ‘Flexible Units’, 292. 61 ‘Louis Edwards: We Have a Few Vacancies’, Glamorgan Advertiser, 21 October 1955, 11. 62 Sonia Gould, VSE002. http://www.factorywomensvoices.wales/uploads/VSE002.2.pdf (accessed 21 May 2021). 63 Samphier, ‘We Visit Windsmoor’, 227. 64 Yvonne Smith, VSE042. http://www.factorywomensvoices.wales/uploads/VSE042.2.pdf (accessed 22 May 2021). 65 Stevens, Voices from the Factory Floor, 99. 66 Jill Baker, VSE066. http://www.factorywomensvoices.wales/uploads/VSE066.2.pdf (accessed 8 June 2021); Luana Dee, VSE015. http://www.factorywomensvoices.wales/uploads/VSE015.2.pdf (accessed 20 May 2021). 67 ‘Louis Edwards Eighth Annual Dance’, Glamorgan Advertiser, 18 December 1953, 11; ‘Louis Edwards’ Dinner-Dance, Glamorgan Advertiser, 24 December 1954, 5. 68 Rita Spinola, VSE001. http://www.factorywomensvoices.wales/uploads/VSE001.2.pdf (accessed 20 May 2021).

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69 Martha Irene Lewis, VSE064. http://www.factorywomensvoices.wales/uploads/VSE064.2.pdf (accessed 7 June 2021). 70 Luana Dee, VSE015. http://www.factorywomensvoices.wales/uploads/VSE015.2.pdf (accessed 20 May 2021). 71 Jill Baker, VSE066. http://www.factorywomensvoices.wales/uploads/VSE066.2.pdf (accessed 8 June 2021). 72 Anne Amblin, VSE022. http://www.factorywomensvoices.wales/uploads/VSE022.2.pdf (accessed 22 May 2021). 73 Luana Dee, VSE015. http://www.factorywomensvoices.wales/uploads/VSE015.2.pdf (accessed 20 May 2021). 74 Sonia Gould, VSE002. http://www.factorywomensvoices.wales/uploads/VSE002.2.pdf (accessed 21 May 2021). 75 Dorothy Dungworth, ‘Wales Helps to Make a Woman’s World’, Western Mail, 21 May 1957, 6. 76 Rita Spinola, VSE001. http://www.factorywomensvoices.wales/uploads/VSE001.2.pdf (accessed 20 May 2021). 77 Martha Irene Lewis, VSE064. http://www.factorywomensvoices.wales/uploads/VSE064.2.pdf (accessed 7 June 2021). 78 Marian Roberts, VN011. http://www.factorywomensvoices.wales/uploads/VN011.2.pdf (accessed 20 May 2021). 79 ‘Film Star Sally Ann Howes’, Pontypridd Observer, 29 April 1950, 10. 80 Cynthia Rix, VSE052. http://www.factorywomensvoices.wales/uploads/VSW052.2.pdf (accessed 22 May 2021). 81 ‘Steinberg’s Staff Dinner Dance’, Pontypridd Observer, 7 February 1953, 7. 82 ‘Off-the-Peg Boom Helps Local Firm’, Glamorgan Advertiser, 25 December 1959, 6. 83 ‘Local Firm Goes to Continental Market’, Glamorgan Advertiser, 7 June 1957, 12. 84 Dungworth, ‘Wales Helps to Make a Woman’s World’, 6. 85 ‘They Bring Fashions Home’, Glamorgan Advertiser, 28 February 1958, 11. 86 Stevens, Voices from the Factory Floor, 123. 87 Gwlithyn Rowlands, VN013. http://www.factorywomensvoices.wales/browse.php?ref=VN013 (accessed 24 June 2021). 88 Ceredigion Museum, ‘Laura Ashley: The Ultimate Cottage Industry’ (30 October 2017–6 January 2018).

FIGURE 29.1 WVS uniform dress, HOYFM.324.1982. © Collection of National Museums, Northern Ireland.

29 WVS uniform dress Valerie Wilson

This Women’s Voluntary Services (WVS) uniform dress of light jade green linen was worn by Kathleen Orr of Killyleagh, Co. Down as a member of the Women’s Voluntary Services during the Second World War. The WVS was founded in 1938 as a British women’s organization to recruit women into the Air Raid Precautions (ARP) services to provide assistance to the authorities and to the civilians in the event of war. After the outbreak of the Second World War and throughout the ensuing conflict the role of the WVS developed into one that provided support for evacuees, catering for service personnel, transportation and welfare services. The organization was administered through twelve regional centres across Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland, with smaller groups based in hundreds of towns and villages throughout the UK. Members wore a simple uniform of dress and cap, with appliqued badges on to denote the various regional groupings. This uniform dress was designed by the Dublin-born couturier Henry Digby Morton (1906–83). As a young man, Morton studied architecture at Dublin Metropolitan College of Art before moving to London in 1923, working first in the department stores Selfridges and Liberty before joining the couture house of Lachasse. In the 1920s his speciality as a designer was his use of Donegal tweeds and his reworking of ‘country’ clothing into fashionable ‘town’ clothing with streamlined cuts. In 1942, Morton was one of the founding members of the Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers (IncSoc). Responding, with other IncSoc members to a Board of Trade invitation to contribute to the war effort, he designed affordable and stylish civilian fashion and uniforms for the WVS including the wool and linen versions of this dress. The dress itself is in a simple shirtwaist style, of jade green linen, with short sleeves, patch pockets and a self-fabric belt at the waist. The appliqued fabric badges reflect the wearer’s voluntary service both at home and overseas. The WVS provided support to service personnel and civilians in both West Africa and India during the war and the cool linen of this dress would have provided a more comfortable alternative in warmer climates than its woollen equivalent. Although there is no manufacturer’s label, it is highly likely that it was made in Northern Ireland from locally produced fabric. During the War, flax growing in Northern Ireland increased greatly and over 200,000,000 yards of linen was produced collectively for

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everything from clothing, to fabrics for aircraft, ropes and parachute harnesses. Linen weavers and garment factories across Northern Ireland experienced a considerable boost to sales during the war years as they massively increased production to meet orders for service uniforms and civilian clothing. Factories that had previously been used to manufacturing men’s collars and shirts, aprons, blouses and pyjamas quickly recruited extra staff and switched to making new products. With predominantly female workforces, the emphasis on making service uniforms encouraged many young stitchers to seek out pen pals and sweethearts by posting notes in the pockets of uniforms. This little note was a firm favourite: This shirt was made by an Ulster lass, With lips just right for kissing, So hurry up and win this war, You don’t know what you’re missing. Kathleen Orr’s WVS dress captures in material form a turbulent moment during which design, industry, fashion, function and fabric came together in the service of the war effort. It also has local resonance and significance; I have chosen this dress as it reminds me of my mother’s first job as a stitcher in a shirt factory in Ballymena, Co. Antrim, where she started work at the age of fourteen, just a few weeks before the outbreak of war.

30 Wholesaling and everyday fashion in the Black Country Jenny Gilbert

The wholesale clothing trade was instrumental in the mass and irreversible arrival of fashion into everyday lives and wardrobes during the early-mid twentieth century. This chapter demonstrates how two ‘general’ wholesalers responded to increasing demand for fashionable clothing and became influential in the consumption of fashionable dress within the everyday lives of women in the Black Country. Often depicted as ‘middlemen’ or mere ‘intermediaries’ between manufacturer and retailer, it will be argued that two large wholesale warehouses in Birmingham were active agents in the creation, distribution and diffusion of everyday fashion in the city and surrounding industrial towns. Their ability to widely distribute fashionable garments alongside more quotidian and practical items ideally positioned the wholesaler as a conduit for mass-produced fashion to permeate working-class communities via independent shop keepers. This research draws upon archival printed promotional material of two Birmingham houses: Bell and Nicolson and Wilkinson and Riddell. These two companies formed half of the Birmingham ‘Big Four’ – four wholesale textile and clothing houses based in the city that were considered industry leaders during from the late-Victorian period to the 1960s.1 Bell and Nicolson and Wilkinson & Riddell were prolific producers of printed catalogues and ephemera, distributed to their client base of small-to-medium-sized independent retailers, primarily across central and northern England. One such business was the Black Country independent drapery business, E. A. and F. S. Hodson General and Fancy Drapers, who were regular customers of both warehouses. While this chapter will focus upon wholesaler businesses based in Birmingham and their retailer-customers in the Black Country, it is pertinent to note that both Bell and Nicolson and Wilkinson and Riddell had branch warehouses located as far afield as Liverpool, Southampton, Cardiff, Manchester and Nottingham. This means that their influence spread far and wide, with their stock reaching consumers across England and Wales. Histories of both companies were produced internally in the 1950s and circulated to customers and shareholders. These texts

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provide detailed and useful economic descriptions of the companies’ operations though both provide little-to-no information on the types of goods being sold. The central English regions of Birmingham and the Black Country are not areas typically associated with the spectacle of fashion or clothing manufacture, with more attention paid to their histories of heavy industry and working-class social history. Yet through a number of conferences and a growing body of scholarly publications increasing attention has been paid to fashion within everyday, non-elite and working-class lives and in areas beyond ‘traditional’ cosmopolitan fashion centres.2 In examining the Birmingham wholesale trade and its relationships with local retailers, new insights can be provided as to how fashion was distributed and communicated to non-elite consumers during the early- to mid-twentieth century. Similarly, the often-anonymous clothing wholesaler has received little attention at the hands of fashion or retail historians, with the focus generally being upon the works of named and often elite designers, the process of manufacture or the workings of the retailer. The role of the wholesaler has been obscured or lost within museum clothing collections, with many garments being unlabelled or relabelled and own-branded by retailers, effectively erasing the source from which they were obtained. Walsall Leather Museum’s Hodson Shop Collection does however hold a number of items that carry wholesaler labelling or items that can be traced via invoices or catalogue images to individual Birmingham wholesalers during a specific month and year. Such items provide clear examples of the type, style and quality of the items distributed by the Birmingham clothing wholesale trade. This chapter draws upon examination of the Hodson Shop Collection and Archive – held by Walsall Leather Museum, the records of the Wholesale Textile Association – at University of Nottingham Manuscripts and Special Collections and catalogues within Birmingham City Council Archives and Collections, along with oral histories related to clothing retail held by Black Country Living Museum. These sources, along with the aforementioned corporate histories, provide insight to how Bell and Nicolson and Wilkinson and Riddell were aware of fashion and how they communicated this to their customer. This chapter argues that the wholesale trade were active agents in the creation and distribution of fashion. It demonstrates how they were crucially instrumental in solidifying fashion as an everyday reality of workingclass lives in Birmingham and the neighbouring Black Country. Firstly, Bell and Nicolson and Wilkinson and Riddell will be introduced. The companies’ histories, approaches to business, perceptions and standings within the local and national trade will be outlined. The companies’ stories will be traced alongside their increasing focus upon fashionable dress and fashionable spaces – ideas which reached their apogee during the 1960s, as the industry attempted to adapt to a rapidly changing fashion retail environment. Next, clothing wholesale will be situated within everyday life during the early- to mid-twentieth century. The nature, definitions and discourses of the ‘everyday’ will be discussed, especially in terms of its relationship with fashion. The types of goods offered, the nature of the wholesale clothing industry and the retailers that they supplied will be considered. Finally, the process of how this everyday fashion was distributed to women in the Black Country will be examined. The relationship between a Black Country clothing retailer, the Hodson Shop and the two Birmingham wholesalers will be outlined through archival evidence. Throughout this chapter, references will be made to the Hodson Shop Collection. This is a substantial and rare collection of around 5,000 items of mass-produced clothing, dating from c.1920 to the late 1960s. It is the unsold shop stock of E. A. and F. S. Hodson General and Fancy Drapers (‘the Hodson Shop’), a small family-owned drapery shop located in Willenhall – a Black Country town renowned for its lock-making trade. Edith and Flora Hodson, the sisters

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who ran the shop in the front room of their family home, sourced much of their stock from Birmingham wholesale warehouses, most notably from Wilkinson and Riddell and Bell and Nicolson. Many of the items that survive within the collection are likely to have been sourced from Birmingham ‘Big Four’ companies. The collection is accompanied by an extensive archive of around 3,000 documents that includes orders and invoices from wholesale warehouses alongside catalogues, promotional gifts and correspondence with wholesalers. The catalogues are a rich source of information – issued monthly and/or seasonally, containing illustrations of garments, text descriptions and pricing details sometimes alongside fashion commentary and insight from departmental buyers including their trend predictions for the season ahead. Both the collection and archive are held by Walsall Leather Museum (formally Walsall Museum) and have been described as nationally significant owing to the non-elite nature of the clothing. Such ‘everyday’ clothing would generally be worn and discarded as opposed to preserved in a museum  collection. The collection and archive combined provide a near-holistic view of a Black Country clothing retail business, including their relationships with wholesalers and other suppliers.

The wholesalers The history of the clothing wholesale trade in Birmingham is significant in understanding the nature of fashion in everyday life in the Black Country. They supplied the shops that sold the clothing that the majority of people were likely to be wearing on a day-to-day basis. In the early- to mid-twentieth century, the independent clothing and general drapery stores that the wholesalers supplied were the ‘most familiar type of shop in the trade’ nationally.3 Such shops were abundant in the small industrial towns and communities of the Black Country. From their very earliest days, the successes of the retailer and wholesaler were interconnected. The origins and histories of Bell and Nicolson and Wilkinson and Riddell are summarized below, showing how two family businesses grew and, ultimately, declined as shopping habits changed. Wilkinson and Riddell was founded in Birmingham in 1851 by brothers-in-law Henry Wilkinson and William W. Riddell. Both partners had worked in the Leeds drapery trade before moving to the Midlands. In around 1850, Wilkinson and Riddell purchased the drapery retail business of Smith and Whittaker at 78 Bull Street, Birmingham and opened their shop to the public in April 1851. From retail, they then ‘integrated backwards’ into wholesaling, opening their first Birmingham warehouse in 1863. Wilkinson and Riddell thrived during the late nineteenth century; by 1888 they were, as S. R. Hill writes, ‘the largest wholesale textile merchants in the Midlands’.4 Their forays into manufacturing their own branded goods began in 1893, when they ‘acquired a controlling interest in the firm Cockrill and Co., manufacturers of ladies’ and children’s dresses’. This move enabled the company to control the ‘methods and quality of production’ while meeting the growing demand for branded clothing.5 The company became publicly listed in 1902 and while they reported healthy profits, there was increasing competition, both abroad and much closer to home.6 Profits remained buoyant during the First World War. The inter-war years presented other challenges for the firm due to an ‘uncertain economic climate’ and changing consumer demands.7 Bell and Nicolson was founded in 1900, when Frederick H. Bell, a Manchester Warehouseman originally operating from premises on Scotland Passage, Birmingham from 1885, formed a

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partnership with John MacDonald Nicolson.8 Nicolson had been apprenticed to the firm of Walter Clark and Co., trading on Cannon Street, Birmingham, which Bell had purchased in 1889. During his apprenticeship, Nicolson had met and married Bell’s younger sister – facilitating the business partnership. The Cannon Street premises became the headquarters for Bell and Nicolson and, in 1904, the company was ‘incorporated as a joint stock company on 15th July’, with Bell as its founder and Nicolson as its Managing Director.9 Progress was slow during the first five years of the company though by 1913 they were reporting a yearly profit of over £10,000. The company biographer described a ‘grim and gloomy economic paradox’ that aligned economic prosperity more closely to war than peace which meant the Bell and Nicolson thrived during the First World War. Their 1918 Net profit stood at £20,340 and they reported sales of £1,236,000 – the first time their sales had exceeded £1,000,000. Like Wilkinson and Riddell, the interwar years proved challenging for Bell and Nicolson, ‘influenced by the variable, though mainly chilly, economic climate’. The year 1938 was to be amongst the company’s darkest trading years with net profits falling by 25 per cent.10 During the Second World War, the Board of Trade took ‘effective control of both the supply and demand’, with quotas controlling the former and rationing the latter.11 John Wills outlined how ‘rationing, taxation and controls’ combined to create ‘nightmare problems for the wholesaler. Bell and Nicolson’s warehouse escaped bomb damage, while Wilkinson and Riddell’s nearby Cherry Street warehouse was ‘severely damaged by enemy action’ in 1940.12 By 1965, Bell and Nicolson had established eleven branches in England and five subsidiary companies. Yet an article in their in-house staff magazine published in the same year struck what, with hindsight, is an ominous note: ‘as long as there are independent manufacturers and independent retailers, there must be a very definite place in the chain of distribution for the independent wholesaler’.13 The emergence of the wholesalers during the mid-late Victorian period and continued existence of the wholesaler had long been subject to what Levitt identified as ‘the effects of others’.14 Be it developments in manufacturing methods or changes to retailing, the wholesaler was vulnerable to change on both sides of the supply chain. However, from the 1860s until the 1880s, the wholesaler occupied a privileged and powerful position within this chain, as Wilkinson and Riddell’s biographer, Wills wrote: For, on one hand, the manufacturers depended on the merchants’ bulk orders to keep their machinery running, while on the other, he was the only source of supply for the retailers, and his hold upon the latter was the fact that he frequently financed them, especially beginners.15 While first and foremost wholesalers, Bell and Nicolson and Wilkinson and Riddell also offered their own ranges of branded goods, alongside a wide range of other companies’ merchandise that became increasingly significant as customer demand for branded goods increased. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Wilkinson and Riddell stocked both ‘all the bestknown proprietary brands’ such as Wolsey, Horrockses and Courtaulds, alongside their ‘own special brands’.16 Examination of Bell and Nicolson’s catalogues also shows a similar mixture of own and proprietary branded goods. Wholesaler’s own manufactured goods had existed since the beginnings of the wholesale trade, though they became of increasing importance and prominence during the 1920s and 1930s in response to the increasing threat of direct dealing between manufacturers and retailers and the rise of mass multiple retailers stocking their own branded goods (such as Marks and Spencer’s ‘St Michael’ range). Own brand names and logos were created, such as Bell and Nicolson’s ‘Bienna’ range of clothing and Wilkinson and Riddell’s ‘Pointer’ range of ladies’ hosiery. In direct dealing, retailers would typically buy merchandise

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from travelling salesmen employed by the manufacturer, effectively removing the wholesaler from the chain between producers and the retail trade. By offering competitively priced quality goods, available exclusively from their warehouses, the wholesalers were able to foster brand loyalty and, ultimately, protect their trade. After the Second World War, the national wholesale trade had attempted to reinvent itself; a process led by the Wholesale Textile Association. The industry was faced with increased direct trading; the rise of high street chain stores and increasingly globalized supply chains left the Birmingham houses vulnerable but still influential and viable. Margaret Wray described how, by the early 1950s, London wholesalers were of relatively limited importance due to increased retailer-manufacturer contact yet the houses of the ‘Midlands and the North’ remained active.17 Yet, by the 1960s, the Birmingham trade was to soon succumb to the same decline experienced by the London houses. For both Bell and Nicolson and Wilkinson and Riddell, the decline of the independent clothing retailer in favour of chain stores, mergers and acquisition by Courtaulds combined with increasingly complex and globalized manufacturing and supply chains meant that their dominance and relevance in everyday fashion consumption was to shortly end. In a bid to secure the survival of the Birmingham wholesale trade, a merger took place between R. Lunt and Co. Ltd. and Bell and Nicolson in early 1966. Wilkinson and Riddell merged with S.C Larkins and Sons in 1967. These four companies had historically worked closely together, cooperating to lobby for the Birmingham trade within the WTA. Yet tides were turning against the wholesalers. On 1 April 1966, the Birmingham Post reported on Wilkinson and Riddell’s Annual General Meeting. The chairman stated how 1965 had proven to be a ‘very difficult year for the trade’ due to rising costs placing increased pressure upon margins.18 Bell, Nicolson and Lunt, and Wilkinson, Riddell and Larkins were bought out by Courtaulds’ during the textile group’s period of multiple acquisitions that occurred between 1966 and 1968, a period referred to by Geoffrey Owen as ‘merger mania’.19 Courtaulds’ were, ostensibly, aiming to vertically integrate all aspects of the textile trade, from spinning to distribution, ensuring their dominance over the textile industry.20 The Birmingham wholesalers did not thrive anew within Courtaulds’. According to Stanley Chapman, the merger process was ‘a pretty disastrous experiment’ that, nationally, triggered a period of decline that led to the eventual obsolescence of the wholesale house.21 Bell, Nicolson and Lunt closed c.1983, while online records show that Wilkinson, Riddell and Larkin dissolved around 1996 (though it is unclear when the city centre warehouse ceased trading). The closure of the city centre warehouses marked a shift in the nature of city centres. They had occupied large and prominent city centre locations in Birmingham so both companies’ premises would have been highly visible amongst the everyday hustle and bustle of the city. Shoppers would likely have been aware of the warehouses due to either their scale within the city or, for those living in the Black Country and beyond, through the catalogues sent to shopkeepers and often made available in-store for customers to view. It is likely that the companies and their brands were a part of everyday life.

Wholesale fashion and the everyday The relationship between wholesale fashion and everyday life is a nuanced one – due in part to the multiple meanings of the term ‘wholesale’ within a fashion context and the complex relationship between fashion and the everyday. ‘Wholesale’ carries multiple meanings

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within the fashion industry. Generally, the term covers a distributive mechanism: a means of producing and buying ‘in bulk’ – a practice which can occur at many levels within the fashion industry, with the exception of haute couture. The mass-produced nature of the clothing distributed by Wilkinson and Riddell and Bell and Nicolson can be considered to define it as within the realm of the everyday, though its status as fashion is more complex and nuanced. Some have argued that fashion, by its very nature, can never sit within the realm of the everyday. Jukka Gronow and Alan Warde found fashion to be inherently at odds with the concept of ‘ordinary’, describing the consumption of clothing to be ‘extraordinary’.22 However, a number of historians and theorists have situated fashion firmly within everyday life. John Styles felt it appropriate to subtitle his work The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in EighteenthCentury England, suggesting a harmonious combination of fashion and the everyday during the industrial revolution. Cheryl Buckley and Hazel Clarke located fashion within the everyday, describing fashion as ‘being at the intersection of the personal and the social’.23 ‘Everyday’ is generally used to describe the commonplace, popular and unspectacular; what Stephen Johnstone described as a ‘vast reservoir’ full of ‘normally unnoticed, trivial and repetitive actions’.24 The clothing sold by Bell and Nicolson and Wilkinson and Riddell could be considered part of this ‘vast reservoir’; repetitive due to its mass-produced nature and largely unnoticed due to its proliferation – hiding in plain sight. As Buckley and Clarke identified, there is a ‘paucity of information about the ordinary, especially in comparison to the extraordinary in which fashion is typically located’.25 Lou Taylor highlighted dress history’s intense bias towards ‘the most glamorous levels of clothing production – the garments of the top 0.5 per cent wealthy of Europe and the USA’. She described this bias and lack of interest as ‘a scandal’. Rachel Worth, in her history of Marks and Spencer, reiterated this critique, emphasizing that the ‘primary focus of the dress historian and fashion commentator’ has long been on high-end fashion and specific elite fashion designers.26 The mass-produced day dresses, stockings, underwear and knitwear found in the wholesale warehouses of Birmingham falls outside this elite framing of fashion. Worth also argued that the rise of mass-produced clothing and clothing multiples during the twentieth century altered the meaning of the term ‘fashion’ by creating the concept of ‘high street fashion’.27 Elizabeth Ewing’s History of Twentieth Century Fashion also provided an account of the spread of ready-to-wear and wholesale clothing during the inter-war period. Ewing described how this period was marked by a shift away from ‘hard-wearing and ‘safe’ garments – those that were neither ‘drastically out of fashion but never really in it’ – towards inexpensive and constantly updating fashionable dress.28 Yet this mass-produced clothing was by no means equal to couture, in terms of the quality and fashionability. Ewing referred to the experiences of Julian Lee – a mid-range fashion producer, working during the 1920s and 1930s, who recalled that ‘popular fashion […] was still one season behind couture’.29 The Birmingham wholesalers were well aware of the shift Ewing described and the infiltration of fashion into the everyday lives of people in Birmingham and beyond. Writing in 1951, Wilkinson and Riddell’s biographer noted how, during the 1920s, customers began to shift away from traditional and predictable seasonal buying habits. In former days people had dressed more or less conventionally according to season, and this enabled retail drapers to place large orders at fairly well-defined periods of the year; which in turn permitted the wholesalers to envisage their retail customers’ demands and lay in stocks a long way ahead.30

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However, during the 1920s young consumers were proving to have far more ‘capricious’ tastes than their parents. Their demands were becoming increasingly influenced by ‘the mood of the moment’ and the ‘infinity of changes in minor details of fashion’.31 For the wholesalers, this was a considerable shift away from the previously predictable seasonal buying habits of retailers and their customers (such as serviceable winter coats, woollen undergarments and hose for winter, lightweight dresses and blouses for summer), a challenge discussed further below. Bell and Nicolson’s unnamed biographer reported similarly challenging trading conditions during the interwar period though no mention of fashion or changing tastes was made in explaining these. Instead, blame was placed on the economic climate ‘which produced rapid and wide fluctuations in the price of cotton, wool and other commodities’.32 During the 1937 Wilkinson and Riddell Annual General Meeting, Director and Deputy Chairman W. G. Riddell made a statement that showed the Birmingham company possessed an acute awareness of cultural change and its impacts upon clothing choices: The public, and especially the younger members of the public, have so many diverse ways of spending their money these days. The motor car, the cinema and various other amusements generally come first […] The best suit, the best Sunday hat, however, are rather things of the past. You have only to go on any of the roads a little way out of Birmingham on a summer day to see that. You realize that the amount spent on clothes these days need only be very small. And what is more, the weight and bulk can be very small too.33 Evidence of this new ‘popular fashion’ can be found in wholesale garments within the Hodson Shop Collection and in the garments illustrated in the wholesalers’ catalogues, as well as the copy accompanying them. Throughout the 1930s, Bell and Nicolson issued catalogues clearly positioning their womenswear as ‘fashion’. They even provided trend predictions in the form of ‘suggestions from our garment buyers’ on the opening pages of their catalogues, educating shopkeepers on key trends for the season ahead. A 1927 Wilkinson and Riddell spring clothing catalogue repeatedly emphasizes the newness of the goods: ‘Charmelaines, Poplins, Tweeds in latest Spring colourings’, coats were available in ‘the newest tweed effects’ and gloves could be purchased in ‘all the latest shades and styles’.34 Fashion theorist Yuniya Kawamura considered such newness and being ‘of the now’ as the ‘essence of fashion’.35 Thus, through these neophiliac tendencies, it is possible to locate the clothing sold by the wholesalers as fashion. In 1945, the Wholesale Textile Association’s report Textile Distribution in the Post-War World stated that ‘the element of fashion is fundamental to the success of the textile trade …’.36 In embracing and seizing the opportunities presented by a growing mass desire for fashion, the wholesalers helped to facilitate the embedding of fashion within everyday lives. In the 1960s, Bell and Nicolson made a bold declaration about the relationship between the wholesaler and fashion when they moved to a new Birmingham headquarters. In 1962, they moved from their Cannon Street warehouse to new custom-built premises at a more ‘fashionable address’ on the recently redeveloped Old Square.37 Close to Lewis’ Department Store and designed along sleek and modern lines with interiors by Heals, the new Cannon House was an attempt to create a fashionable environment for the wholesaling of fashionable goods. The decision was an attempt to shake free from the old-fashioned Victorian mercantile image of the wholesaler and to cling to relevance in a rapidly changing and increasingly complex global mass fashion industry. Bell and Nicolson and Wilkinson and Riddell both stocked clothing alongside more ‘general’ mass-produced goods – toiletries, household textiles and home furnishings. This combination

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of fashion alongside general goods was replicated in the stock of the retailers who sourced their goods from the warehouses. General Stores such as Gregory’s General Store, which traded in the Black Country town of Old Hill, would source stock from the Birmingham wholesalers – ordering everyday commodities alongside a small range of fashion items.38 While the goods distributed by these wholesalers were often fashionable, The Birmingham houses were more concerned with mass buying and distribution than the creative aspects of fashion. They would buy a mixture of non-branded and ‘proprietary brand’ goods in bulk, in order to sell on to small-to-medium-sized retailers. In certain forms of wholesaling, the retailer would also buy in bulk however in this instance the term is perhaps more applicable to the buying habits of the wholesalers than their customer – small retailers, like the Hodson Shop, simply did not require or possess the buying power to buy fashionable garments by the hundreds. Within the Hodson Shop Collection, multiples (more than one of the same item) of dresses or blouses are rare, while multiples of underwear and hosiery proliferate. The wholesalers, however, could buy in or manufacture garments in large quantities, which they could then sell on in smaller quantities to their retailer customers across the country. The ‘everydayness’ of the clothing they sold lies in its affordability, mass-production and mass distribution. The fashionability of the clothing is apparent, particularly during the interwar years and post-Second World War, albeit a popular and mass form of fashion. As the intermediaries supplying retailers during the early- to mid-twentieth century, it is possible to position wholesale houses, such as Wilkinson and Riddell and Bell and Nicolson, as instrumental in the shift towards popular and ‘high street’ fashion. This chapter now looks at how this fashionable clothing left the realm of distribution and entered women’s everyday lives in the Black Country by focusing upon the relationship between the Hodson Shop and the Birmingham wholesalers.

The Hodson Shop and the wholesale trade As already established, the success of the wholesaler was dependent upon the success of the small-to-medium independent retailer. These shops formed the final link in the wholesalers’ ‘chain of distribution’ and marked the point at which fashion left the world of distribution and entered everyday lives. The Hodson Shop had long-term trading relationships with both Bell and Nicolson and Wilkinson and Riddell. Based on surviving archived orders, the Hodson Shop’s relationship with Wilkinson and Riddell began when the shop first opened in 1920 and continued until around 1971 – a business relationship spanning fifty-one years. The sisters were also shareholders in the company, receiving regular corporate promotional gifts such as calendars, account books and blotters. The sisters dealt with Bell and Nicolson for thirty-five years, placing their first order in 1935 and their last in January 1969. While the sisters dealt with other, smaller and local warehouses, the majority of their stock was sourced from the Birmingham wholesalers. On Thursdays, Edith Hodson would leave her younger sister Flora and mother Sarah in charge of the shop and make her weekly buying visit to Birmingham. She would take the tram from Willenhall to the Bull Street terminus, located close to both Wilkinson and Riddell and Bell and Nicolson. The warehouses were deliberately situated close to the city’s main rail and tram stations to ensure easy access and dispatch for both customers and goods. Edith’s buying trips were frequent, perhaps in order to respond to customer requests, or in order to keep the stock in the shop current and fresh. As outlined above, more frequent orders

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from shopkeepers to wholesalers was a marker of the transition towards popular, everyday fashion consumption. Both Wills and James B. Jefferys identified that smaller, more frequent orders characterized the interactions between shopkeeper and wholesaler during the inter-war years.39 This can be seen as further evidence of customers’ desire for new, fashionable clothing and accessories. Initially, the wholesalers considered this a threat to their business. Wills stated how these more frequent, ‘finicky’ fashion-led and often smaller orders challenged the wholesale trade: ‘consequently the wholesalers found it more and more difficult to provide adequate stocks in advance without running the risk of being left later with heavy lines of unsaleable goods’.40 Jefferys points out how ‘deliveries to retailers became more frequent, being made weekly instead of fortnightly or monthly’.41 The quantity and frequency of invoices and picking lists in the Hodson Shop Archive support this statement – examples of what Wills labelled ‘a hand-tomouth policy of buying’ associated with more fashion-focused buying habits. Not everything that the wholesalers or the Hodson Shop stocked could be classed as ‘everyday fashion’. Many items were far more utilitarian and prosaic. In addition to clothing, the Hodsons stocked basic household objects such as toilet paper and toothbrushes, often sourced from the Birmingham houses. This diversification into other areas of retail was, according to Jefferys, a common feature in small town retailers during the inter-war years, offering greater convenience to customers.42 General drapers, such as the Hodson Shop, meant that fashionable dress could be obtained alongside daily staples, facilitating the rise of everyday fashion within the surrounding communities. It is very likely that wholesaler catalogues would have been made available on the shop’s counter, allowing customers to browse and request specific items perhaps with guidance from Edith or Flora. The copy and illustration provided by the companies would have been instrumental here. Samples could be obtained of the latest designs, enabling the customer to assess the quality and colour of garments before ordering in their size (crucial as catalogue illustrations were in black and white). The service provided by the shop was friendly though perhaps a little too familiar for some who considered it to be a ‘gossip shop’.43 The Hodson Shop stocked a wide range of goods from Bell and Nicolson, Wilkinson and Riddell and other Birmingham wholesale houses. These ranged from sturdy and practical basic attire such as woollen undergarments, socks and stockings to more fashionable day and evening dresses, 1920s trend-led knitwear, elaborate trims for hats and, during the late 1920s and 1930s, ornate lace blouses. Like the wholesalers, they too carried a mixture of branded and unbranded goods, though otherwise unbranded garments from wholesalers can often be identified by paper labels featuring the logos pinned on to the sleeve – a bell for Bell and Nicolson, a greyhound for Wilkinson and Riddell. The presence of these labels indicates that the Hodson sisters did not remove, relabel or rebrand garments pre-sale. This may be simply because the sisters did not think such an act was necessary or, perhaps, they felt that their customers would recognize and appreciate garments from specific wholesalers. More research is required to establish how recognizable these brands and companies were to consumers locally, though it is possible that the labels would have served as indicators of value and quality. It is also apparent that the fashionability of the shop stock decreased as the sisters became older, with the most ‘trend-focused’ items surviving in the collection being garçonne-style dresses and jumper suits from the late 1920s and elegant floral bias-cut tea dresses from the 1930s. Stock from the 1950s and 1960s, while not entirely without fashionable influence, is notably more subdued and ‘respectable’. While bright and busy prints predominate, the skirts and dresses in the collection are full and below the knee, bodices are modest and blouses are generally prim with high necklines. There are no mini or pencil skirts. By this point, the sisters’

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clients were likely to be older local women, with younger customers choosing to shop in the fashionable chain stores in nearby Wolverhampton or Walsall. The shop stocked a large range of aprons and overalls – an item that bridged the gap between practicality and fashion. While a largely functional and utilitarian garment, the wholesalers supplied the shop with a colourful and stylish range of aprons in a variety of cuts and novelty prints. Aprons and overalls were an essential item for working class women in the Black Country. Prints, cut, colour and trims added a playful and expressive function to the garment. Bell and Nicolson were renowned for their range of ‘Bell Overalls’, labelled with the logo of golden winged bell. A 1930s poster advertising the Bell and Nicolson’s collection of overalls and aprons outlines five different styles of ‘Bell’ available: A) an ‘all round skirt with button under arm’, B) a ‘slip-on overall’ with a ‘full-flared skirt’, C) a ‘wrap overall’, D) a ‘bi-tie shape’ that fastened with ties at the front and back and E) a ‘full all-round shape’ with ‘belt and two pockets’.44 The attention to detail clearly illustrates how even the most everyday item can be subject to fashionable influences.

Conclusion This chapter has demonstrated the role that two Birmingham clothing wholesalers played in the distribution and mass adoption of everyday fashion in the early- to mid-twentieth century. It has shown how they distributed fashion to the towns and communities of the Black Country via small independent drapery retailers. Little detail on fashion has been provided in the existing ‘official’ histories of Wilkinson and Riddell and Bell and Nicolson, though it is clear that a critical shift took place during the inter-war years; a shift that impacted upon the profits and mentalities of the wholesalers. The Birmingham wholesaler operated largely outside the realms of fashion during their early years. The inter-war years presented a turning point, in which shopkeepers and their customers began to demand fashionable items at a faster pace. These shifts, combined with the trying economic conditions of the 1920s and 1930s, impacted upon company profits, though both companies managed to stay profitable and viable into the late1960s and 1970s. The companies adapted and changed their own buying practices to fit with the new ‘infinity of changes in the minor details of fashion’. Their bulk buying and distribution model enable them to offer more rapidly changing fashionable lines, while also maintaining more practical and basic items. The Hodson Shop and its surviving collection and archive provides a valuable glimpse into how the wholesaler-shopkeeper relationship operated. The shop served as a transition point, from distribution to everyday life. Their position as a general and fancy draper meant that fashionable goods could be obtained while shopping for quotidian, mundane but necessary everyday objects such as toothbrushes or toilet paper, thus easing the transition of fashion into everyday lives. Clear parallels can be drawn to the presence of fashionable clothing in supermarkets today. Their relationships with Bell and Nicolson and Wilkinson and Riddell were long-running. The sisters’ buying habits became less fashion-driven as the wholesalers attempted to become more so. The shop ceased trading around the time that the Birmingham wholesale houses were also reaching their final years of operation. Demand for everyday fashion did not fade, rather it intensified. By the 1960s and 1970s, clothing manufacture had changed dramatically, along with consumer tastes and retailing, leaving the wholesalers vulnerable on both sides of the ‘chain of distribution’.

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Notes 1

Jenny Gilbert, ‘“Better Dressed than Birmingham?” Wholesale Clothing Catalogues and the Communication of Mass Fashion, 1920s–1960s’, Midland History 45, no. 2 (2020): 258–74.

2

Everyday Fashion: Extraordinary Stories of Ordinary Clothes, 27–28 June, 2019, University of Huddersfield and University of Leeds; John Styles, The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Yale University Press, 2007); Cheryl Buckley and Hazel Clarke, Fashion and Everyday Life: London and New York (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).

3

James B. Jefferys, Retail Trading in Britain, 1850–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954), 322.

4

S. R, Hill, The Distributive System (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1966), 48.

5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8

Nicolson would go on to buy Winterbourne House, an Arts and Craft manor house located in the Birmingham suburb of Edgbaston.

9

Anonymous, Bell and Nicolson Ltd., 1904–1954, 1; WBNIC.6.1, Archive of Winterbourne House and Gardens.

10 Ibid., 7. 11 Ibid. 12 John Wills, Wilkinson and Riddell Limited, 1851–1951 (Birmingham: Privately Printed, 1951), 56. 13 Anonymous, News and Views: The Bell and Nicolson Group of Companies, January 1965, not paginated. WBNIC.5.3, Archive of Winterbourne House and Gardens. 14 Sarah Levitt, Victorians Unbuttoned (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1986), 15. 15 Wills, Wilkinson and Riddell Limited, 15. 16 Wilkinson and Riddell, Wilkinson and Riddell, Diary and Accounts 1935 (Birmingham: privately published, 1935), 45. Author’s Collection. 17 Margaret Wray, The Women’s Outerwear Industry (London: Gerald Duckworth and Co., 1957), 178. 18 ‘Wilkinson and Riddell (Holdings) Ltd’, (1966); Birmingham Daily Post, 2 April: 8. 19 Geoffrey Owen, The Rise and Fall of Great Companies: Courtaulds and the Reshaping of the Man-Made Fibres Industry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 71–5. 20 Keith Cowling et al., Mergers and Economic Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 280. 21 Stanley Chapman, ‘The Decline and Rise of Textile Merchanting, 1880–1990’, Business History 10 (1990): 183. 22 Jukka Gronow and Alan Warde, ‘Introduction’, in Ordinary Consumption, ed. Jukka Gronow and Alan Warde (London: Routledge, 2001), 3–4. 23 Cheryl Buckley and Hazel Clarke, ‘Conceptualizing Fashion in Everyday Life’, Design Issues 28, no. 4 (2012): 28. 24 Stephen Johnstone, The Everyday (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2008), 12. 25 Buckley and Clarke, ‘Conceptualizing Fashion in Everyday Life’, 28. 26 Rachel Worth, Fashion for the People: A History of Clothing at Marks and Spencer (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 1–2.

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27 Ibid., 5. 28 Elizabeth Ewing and Alice Mackrell, History of Twentieth Century Fashion, 4th edition (London: Batsford, 2008), 119. 29 Ibid., 126. 30 Wills, Wilkinson and Riddell Ltd., 54. 31 Ibid. 32 Unnamed author, Bell and Nicolson Ltd., 1904–1954, 7. 33 Wills, Wilkinson and Riddell Ltd., 55. 34 Wilkinson and Riddell, Wilkinson and Riddell Catalogue 1927 (Birmingham: privately published, 1927), not paginated. Author’s collection. (Charmelaine refers to a soft and lustrous mid-weight woollen fabric). 35 Yuniya Kawamura, Fashion-ology (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 25. 36 Wholesale Textile Association, Textile Distribution in the Post-War World 1945, 26. WTA20/4/1, Archive of the Wholesale Textile Association, The University of Nottingham Manuscripts and Special Collections. 37 Bell and Nicolson, New Warehouse Opening September 1962 (Birmingham: Bell and Nicolson Ltd., 1962), not paginated. HSR65, Hodson Shop Archive, Walsall Museum. 38 Black Country Living Museum, BCMTL1992/162/006, oral history interview with Mrs G Jenkins (1992). 39 Wills, Wilkinson and Riddell Ltd., 54; Jefferys, Retail Trading in Britain, 94. 40 Wills, Wilkinson and Riddell Ltd., 54. 41 Jefferys, Retail Trading in Britain, 94. 42 Ibid. 43 This is how the Hodson Shop was described in a 1998 oral history interview conducted by Joyce Hammond with Margaret, a neighbour of the shop; see Joyce Hammond, Memories of the Hodson Shop. Museum information document (Walsall Museum, 1998): unpaginated. 44 Bell and Nicolson, Bell Overalls: Five Useful Shapes Poster (Birmingham: Bell and Nicolson, c.1930s). B/105/8/1, Trade Catalogues and Business Literature, Birmingham City Council Archives and Collections.

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FIGURE 31.1  A pair of jeans by Gaultier Jeans and a pair of jeans by Warehouse, Birmingham Museums Trust, 2004.1028 and 2004.1012. © Birmingham Museums Trust.

31 An old pair of jeans Rebecca Unsworth

As a child, many of my clothes were hand-me-downs from my older cousins. Every so often on visits to their house in Cumbria, I was presented with a bin bag full of garments which they had grown out of. Whilst I no longer remember most of the contents of those bags, I do remember the palpable excitement of having a stash of new clothes to try on and sort through. One of the last items of clothing I received from my cousins still lives in my wardrobe today: a pair of widelegged Gap ‘Carpenter’ jeans from the late 1990s made of a non-stretch denim, with capacious pockets and red stitching on some of the seams. Initially they had to be taken in so that I could wear them, but the tucks my mother placed in the waistband were removed long ago, and now the jeans bear no sign of this previous alteration. For many of us, jeans are a quintessentially everyday item of clothing, and it is perhaps this which accounts for the relative lack of jeans in Birmingham’s collection. Although Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery was established in 1885, it was not until the 1930s that the museum began to acquire substantial quantities of dress. As dress was collected as part of the decorative art collection, initially there was an emphasis on procuring garments and accessories which were aesthetically pleasing and illustrated the stylistic changes in fashion over time. More recently there has been a shift in priorities, with the museum now primarily seeking to acquire clothes which were made, purchased or worn in Birmingham. Yet in my experience, people still do not seem to think of offering their old jeans from a few years ago to the museum in the same way that they would a designer dress from the 1950s or a Victorian christening gown. How can we persuade potential donors that objects which may lack a degree of visual impact or creative flair can still tell important stories about the history of a region and its inhabitants and about fashion? It is telling that almost all the jeans in Birmingham’s collection came from two donations, both by former employees of the museum, and are not what most people would consider to be ‘everyday’ in either brand or style. They include men’s jeans from Valentino, Versace, Evisu and CK, and women’s purple velvet Christian Lacroix jeans and printed Gaultier jeans, all dating from the 1990s to early 2000s.1

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Despite their frequent designation as a ‘style classic’, jeans are highly susceptible to changes in fashion. Even when they are not manufactured by a designer brand or sent down the catwalk, current trends determine the shape and style of jeans which can be purchased at any given moment. But it is difficult to represent the sartorial ubiquity and cultural acceptability of jeans over the last few decades in the museum context without examples of the objects themselves. In a recent small exhibition at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery on the topic of dressing up and going out from 1850 to the present day, artworks were displayed alongside garments and accessories, in part to allow for an exploration of fashions and themes not otherwise represented in the collection; a black and white photograph by Vanley Burke of three women at a party was used to illustrate some more contemporary fashions, including that of wearing jeans on a night out.2 While jeans are generally a mass-market object, they can also be a site for individualization. Sometimes the one can give the appearance of the other: a pair of Warehouse jeans in Birmingham’s collection may look as though they have been customized with pieces of embroidered pink fabric and sequin trimming, but they were actually manufactured to look like that.3 Each pair of jeans will gain its own patina of wear and tear over time, ripping, fading and staining in different places, being passed on or cut up at different points in its life. Even if jeans are often not associated with one grand event, unlike that staple of donation enquiries, the wedding dress, they can still be repositories for memories and life stories, and are therefore still deserving of a place in the museum collection.

Notes 1

Birmingham Museums Trust: 2004.1012; 2004.1028.1; 2004.1013.1; 2007.2354; 2007.2355; 2007.2356; 2007.2359.

2

Dressed to the Nines, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, 7 December 2019–5 November 2020; Vanley Burke, ‘Young Women at a Bashment Dance around Their Bottle of Brandy and Cans of Red Bull’, 2008, Birmingham Museums Trust, 2017.1.76.

3

Birmingham Museums Trust, 2004.1012.

32 To dance in my shoes: Music and the psychological influences of style choices in the London Caribbean diaspora, from Lovers’ Rock to Grime Rianna Norbert-David

As a Caribbean immigrant in London in the period between the late 1940s and the 1970s, your body was constantly under the ‘white man’s gaze’; scrutinized, judged and, sometimes, attacked. To counteract this and survive, Caribbean immigrants dressed smartly and always tried to look their best. This would project an image of respectability and could potentially determine success in a job interview or even avoid racist attack. This ‘smart’ appearance often ran counter to the expectations of a prejudiced society about what a Caribbean migrant might look like. In 1962, the now famous Howard Grey (then a young photographer) jumped at the opportunity to photograph the last batch of West Indians arriving on a train from Southampton to London’s Waterloo station. He expected to be met by a ‘rowdy’ crowd of people, but was taken aback by calm and orderly crowd of people dressed in their ‘Sunday best’.1 This practice of dressing smartly became deeply ingrained in London’s Caribbean communities. The art historian and designer Christine Checinska has examined the psychology behind certain Caribbean style choices. She explains that Caribbean migrants were ‘well dressed as a way of showing respect for ourselves and to others’, and that this notion was taught or passed down to children and other family members living in Britain.2 Because of this, it was normal within Caribbean society to be dressed up (and often overdressed).

Lovers’ Rock fashion According to the creative writer and lecturer Omolara Obanishola who has undertaken interview research in this area, clothing has always played an important role within the British Caribbean community and has long been connected with music.3 Lovers’ Rock is a distinctive

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genre of music formed by both Caribbean immigrants in London and first-generation British Caribbeans in the mid-1970s. The Lovers’ Rock style of dressing was seen as being ‘rebellious’, not least for the way it could transition between going out on a Saturday night and being able to attend church on Sunday morning without changing. One of Obanishola’s interviewees explained, ‘The best thing about the casual style was I could wear this to church on Sunday. […] Getting out of the house was one problem […] your friends calling was another so if I could stay out and not have to change, even better’.4 ‘Blues parties’ and ‘shebeens’ were places of liberation and community for many young people as they could freely express themselves. Lovers’ Rock was often the backdrop to staying out late and dancing extremely closely with the opposite sex as well as finding refuge from the outside world and pushing back against ideological constructs of ‘Britishness’. Although the style was often smart and conservative, the relaxed setting – away from prying eyes, and surrounded by like-minded peers – was formative for many British Caribbeans. This transitional potential of clothing remained an important part of Caribbean style in the 1970s and 1980s. For first-generation British Caribbeans, clothing provided a way to rebel against social expectations, both inside and outside the home. Inside the home there were often strict rules underpinned by religion (usually Christianity) and immigrant pride that dictated speech, dress and behaviour, especially when in public. Outside the home, there was the navigation of many negative stereotypes in terms of intelligence, promiscuity, violence and crime. To be a member of a new generation that was both British and Caribbean was complex; it required the adoption of a multicultural identity and there were pressures to fit into wider British society as well as staying true to their heritage. The rise of social and political groups such as the British Black Panthers (BBP) during the Civil Rights movement encouraged Black people to embrace this identity and fight against white supremacy. Many used dress to pledge their allegiance to the movement, wearing dark military-style clothing and natural hair as a way to show that they were proudly embracing both parts of their Black British identity. Although this was a step away from the more colourful and conservative style of Lovers’ Rock, it drew on the same understandings of the power of style to make a statement about identity and belonging in relation to community.

Grime and the evolution of style for young Londoners of Caribbean heritage Styles have continued to evolve over time as first – and in recent years second-generation Caribbean Londoners – have chosen more relaxed attire and moved towards casual wear. For example, streetwear – once seen as rebellious clothing only worn by punks and gang members – has risen in popularity. However, even within streetwear there has remained a focus on being well-dressed, with the style often described as looking ‘clean’ and ‘fresh’. There are also still close connections between style and music. Developing in East London and influenced by Londonoriginated Jungle and Garage scenes alongside Reggae and Dancehall, Grime is a music genre created in part by first-, second- and third-generation Caribbean Londoners. Many MCs and producers, including Wiley – the so-called ‘Godfather of Grime’ – have Caribbean heritage and have bought this into their music. The genre has even been described by writer Jesse Bernard as being ‘by extension … the grandchild of the Windrush Generation’ as it ‘wouldn’t be possible

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for Grime to exist without the foundations of Caribbean culture being laid in 1948, when the Windrush Gen were first invited by the British government’.5 Grime evolved from UK Garage in the late 1990s and early 2000s through the experimental work of groups such as the famous Pay as You Go Cartel, So Solid Crew, N.A.S.T.Y crew and Heartless Crew. It grew from this early ‘in between time’ of neither Garage nor Grime into a genre labelled ‘Dark Garage’. Unlike previous iterations of Garage which had a lighter and more celebratory feel with melodic overlays, this new music had a gritty and dark sound where MCs ‘spat’ about their lives as young inner-city kids; growing up on council estates, gang related content, girls they were interested in and competitive clashing against other MCs. It has been described as being accidentally born out of a need to find space within the genre (and in wider society as a whole) as the artists were disenfranchised and unwelcomed in the already established Garage scene. Like many artists developing work that explored the margins of mainstream society, they were seen as talking about distasteful subjects and attracting a dangerous, trouble provoking crowd.

Rebellious clothing and community Lovers’ Rock has been described by Menelick Shabazz as being ‘a coping mechanism for what was happening in the streets’ of London during that period.6 Similarly, Grime has also provided a way for those from marginalized and deprived Caribbean communities in London to express themselves. Joy White describes Grime as offering ‘a liminal space for young men with limited resources to create music that spoke to and of their surroundings; the street corners and council estates of East London but with a reach back into their Caribbean heritage’.7 The photographer, Simon Wheatley, created a ‘chronicle of the conditions that spawned the genre and an exploration of the discrepancy between perceptions of black culture as “trendy” and the harsh realities of urban deprivation’ in the form of his book and online platform ‘DON’T CALL ME URBAN!’8 His photographs, dating from 1998, highlight day-to-day life and demonstrate the close relationship between style trends, music and sense of community. The relationship between music, community and rebellious clothing has long been significant in British Caribbean style. Earlier styles of music such as Dancehall saw people form places of community where dance, music and dress were used to express a sense of rebellion and freedom. Dancehall sometimes had more explicit content and a grittier sound than its predecessor, Reggae. The ‘Dancehall Queen’ style of dressing was often promiscuous, including mesh, ‘batty’ riders (extremely short shorts) and other skimpy clothing promoting sexual liberation, body confidence and ease of movement to dance. These rebellious and liberating looks continue to influence style choices today.9 The earlier Dancehall sounds in London may have originated from Jamaica but birthed distinctly London-based Dancehall artists such as Tippa Irie, who grew up immersed in the Sound System culture as his father had his own sound system called ‘Musical Messiah’. The importance of Sound Systems once again highlights the interwoven relationship between community and rebellion as Sound Systems created places of congregation, whether in the downstairs basement of Tippa Irie’s family home in Brixton or on the streets of Notting Hill Carnival.10 From the late 1990s to the early 2000s, pirate radio was central in supporting and growing the underground music scene in London. Being an underground genre – with limited to no legal radio play – Grime relied heavily on pirate radio, as had Garage and Jungle. Some of the most

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well-known pirate radio stations of the time were Rinse, Heat, Flava, Mystic and, possibly the most highly credited, Déjà vu FM. They were enormously important in the distribution of Grime. DJs and MCs would self-fund the stations and club nights (raves) would be announced on the shows to raise money. Those wanting to perform would have to pay the station for a slot and depending on where they lived would spend money on travel as well as putting themselves at risk (there was the threat of altercations with locals of the area). Everything was kept secret due to a fear of being shut down, so to listen to the pirate radio stations you had to be in close proximity to the station as the low-budget equipment had a short reach (which also affected the overall sound quality). Many risked their lives to the set-up of equipment on the roofs of tall tower blocks and lift shafts. There was also the danger of being caught and convicted. These circumstances created a sense of comradery. Visiting pirate radio stations, whether performing or listening, was a time to gather and be a part of the scene, and embracing this opportunity to show off your outfit was a key part of demonstrating your belonging. Pirate radio stations were not the only venues for community gathering. Places such as the infamous record shop Rhythm Division on Roman Road in Bow, East London (now Zealand Road café) was a hub for creatives from the scene to hone their craft: filmmakers, DJs, MCs, producers and photographers came together to share ideas. The Grime legend Jammer’s basement in his family’s home in Leytonstone, East London, was also a place for community and teaching. His father had been in the Reggae scene as part of a Roots Reggae band and ran a sound system and ELRICS (East London Rastafarian Information Community Services), a community organization that supported local families. This organization helped many young men find positive and safe ways to direct their frustration and anger through various activities, keeping them off of the street and out of trouble.11 Jammer’s Basement was also the home of ‘Lord of the Mics’, an event founded in 2004, wherein grime MCs came head-to-head in a ‘clash’ or MC battle. These events were recorded and distributed by DVD. It is said that the crowds of people trying to fit into the house during these sessions were so large that they had to set up a live stream on a screen upstairs for people to view the battles. Similar to pirate radio stations, when people from the community came together at events such as these it was a chance to wear their freshest clothes – usually clearly branded so to be recognized. Grime was all about being real and authentic, no frills. So was the fashion. Although the style was influenced by New York streetwear, in comparison to American rappers there was no need for excessive jewellery but clothes still needed to look ‘clean’ (new). Some of these outfits were captured on Risky Roadz, a series of short films of Grime artists MCing filmed by Roony aka Risky Roadz who took to the streets to document the Grime artists of the day. Until he distributed these films on DVD, the voices of MCs had only been heard on pirate radio. The revealing of their faces on film was revolutionary and inevitably set clothing and style trends for their fans. One of the most striking and repeating trends visible in these DVDs is the presence of Nike Air Max 95s (Figure 32.1). Nicknamed 125s for their high price tag of £125, these were among the most sought-after trainers at the height of the Grime movement and remain among the most influential and popular footwear styles today. Nike’s 2015 film Air Max: The Uniform showcases the reciprocal contribution that Grime has made to the brand, and in turn the journey and significance of the shoe to the genre. The rebellious nature of Nike Air Max trainers and their significance as a marker of community can be compared to an earlier footwear style: the crocodile skin shoes, worn daily as well as ‘in the dance’ by both Caribbean men and women throughout the 1970 and 1980s (Figure 32.2). Like the crocodile skin shoes – which may have been popular due to the luxury associations around exotic animal skin – Nike Air Max 95s

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FIGURE 32.1  Intergenerational family footwear including a pair of Nike Air Max 95s. Photo courtesy of Amy Armstrong.

FIGURE 32.2  Van-Dal crocodile skin shoes. Photo courtesy of Omolara Obanishola.

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were a major fashion statement and wearing a seemingly high-end shoe was seen as a way to increase status and respect amongst peers and beyond. Both of these styles combined aspects of function and fashion. Air Max trainers were practical and could be comfortably worn for hours on end as well as looking good. Crocodile skin shoes would often be fitted with Blakeys or segs – protective metal additions for the toes and heels – that became popular as not only a fashion statement (they gave footwear an extra edge and amplified the sound of walking so that the wearer would be noticed), but also to extend the life of the shoes. The parallels between the way these two different types of shoes were worn and styled demonstrate how the attitude towards dress of early working-class Caribbean immigrants can be traced through the generations to Grime scene style. Although funds for fashionable items have often been limited for many British Caribbeans, who have often worked in lower-paid employment, there has been an enduring culture of working hard to acquire a certain fashionable item to make a statement and looking after it with care to make it last. The practicality and durability of crocodile skin shoes, as well as their style, were all important elements in their consumption. Locating Grime within this longer history of British Caribbean style demonstrates its cultural importance, both within the British Caribbean community and beyond. Grime continues to influence streetwear today with collaborations between prestigious Grime artists and global sports brands such as Nike. Grime star legend and style mogul Skepta, has had an ongoing collaborative relationship with Nike for a number of years where he has applied ‘his aesthetic to a handful of iconic Air Max designs’ named SkAIR. His latest creative pursuit with the brand was in creating the Air Max Tailwind 5 with fellow Grime artists Backroad Gee and Deto Black, modelling for the campaign which included a capsule collection of supporting apparel. There is also a new wave of young fashion designers such as Tihara Smith, Maximillian Davis and Grace Wales Bonner who are fusing together the different elements of living between two cultures and using fashion to tell the story of all that it encompasses to be a Londoner of Caribbean descent – politically, socially, emotionally and physically. Although, over time, fashion signatures have changed within London’s Caribbean community, the style choices of the community today still carry the history of the past in their emphasis on ‘dressing well’. In doing so they remain rooted in the immigrant culture of endeavouring to gain respect in order to be taken seriously as an outsider in a society and culture dominated by whiteness, as well as amongst their own contemporaries. Like their elders, new generations are finding ways to mix individual flair with elements from their heritage and blend style and music. These fashion practices continue the community’s tradition of using clothing to fit into London’s society at the same time as standing out.

Notes 1

Joy Sigaud, ‘Windrush Fashion’, EDITIONS Black History Month Lifestyle Magazines, 2019.

2

Christine Checinska, ‘Disobedient Dress: Fashion as Everyday Activism’, TEDx, 2016.

3

Omolara Obanishola, ‘To Style a Life for Oneself: Fashion Identities within the Lover’s Rock Reggae Scene’ (MA dissertation, London College of Fashion, University of the Arts, London, 2021).

4 Ibid. 5

Jesse Bernard, ‘The Windrush Gen’s The Reason Why Everybody’s Here’, Trench, 2018.

6

Menelik Shabazz, The Story of Lovers’ Rock, 2011.

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7

Joy White, ‘Growing up under the Influence. A Sonic Genealogy’, presented at the Reggae Research Network Symposium, University of East Anglia, 2017.

8

Simon Wheatley, Don’t Call Me Urban! The Time of Grime (Newcastle: Northumbria University Press, 2010).

9

Rachel Hann, ‘Tygapaw Reveals the’ 90s Dancehall Icons Who Shaped Her Rebel Style’, Vogue (UK), November 2017.

10 Cedar Lewisohn, ‘Interview with Tippa Irie’, Museum of London, 2020. 11 Bydaryoush Haj-Najafi, ‘Interview: Jammer’s “Lord of The Mics” Basement Themed Capsule Is History You Can Wear’, Complex UK, July 2015.

FIGURE 33.1 Tootal scarf in deep peacock blue with a printed paisley pattern of burgundy botehs, golden dots and a black filigree trace. © Christopher Breward.

33 The Tootal paisley scarf Christopher Breward

I’m not sure when I took it, without permission, from my father’s wardrobe. It must have been around 1982, my final year as a fifth-former at a Comprehensive School in Yeovil, Somerset, during a summer of O-Level exam results, teenage parties and those first tentative explorations in establishing a personal style. It was a deep peacock blue, with a frayed fringe and a printed paisley pattern of burgundy botehs, golden dots and a black filigree trace behind. Simply constructed in tubular fashion with one seam, its cotton fabric, soft and pliable like an old oil rag or my mother’s recycled dusters. The small black label read, simply ‘Tootal Regd: Made in England. Wash hand hot – Iron medium hot’. It went perfectly with the tweed jacket and formal cardigan (both with those plaited leather buttons) that I also retrieved from the back clothes hangers of his closet. I recognized the look from the box brownie photographs of my father in the family album from around 1964: paired with pale jeans, pointed boots and a short, neat parting: a newly married student approaching parenthood for the first time. But I was looking for a more contemporary affirmation of taste. I wanted to look like the actor Jeremy Irons in Karel Reiz’s French Lieutenant’s Woman and the Granada adaptation of Brideshead Revisited. Tweed and paisley cotton stood in for 1860s romanticism and 1920s homoeroticism in equal measure. Subcultural associations with New Romantic Pop and the Mod revival were at one step removed in provincial Somerset. I hadn’t quite discovered the Kings Road, Camden Market or Carnaby Street on my own steam back then. The true heritage of the clothing in that post-war moment of kitchen sink dramas and social revolution somehow felt closer. Fifty years on, of the whole ensemble, only the paisley scarf survives, still as vivid in its colours but slightly more pliable and creased. The extraordinary thing is its scent. It holds the warm, slightly earthy notes of my own skin, and with it my father’s inheritance (though in 1964 that would have been over-laid with his favourite tobacco). I knot it tightly about my neck now, protection against the Edinburgh wind. In 1982 one end would have been tossed over a shoulder in youthful abandon. Ten years later I took it, more seriously folded beneath my lapels, to my first ‘proper’ academic job as a lecturer in Design History at Manchester Metropolitan University and remember the frisson of seeing the Tootal sign high up on Oxford Street,

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embellishing the firm’s former warehouse and central offices designed in gothic grandeur by Joseph Gibbons Sanky in 1898. Then Tootal, Broadhurst and Lee were one of the largest cotton textile producers in Lancashire, a pioneer of integrated manufacture and branded menswear goods, with branches across the British Empire. Now the name is owned by Coats Viyella and the scarves, ties and cravats with which Tootal is most closely associated are the subject of obsessive collecting and online commentary. In the 1990s, I would have characterized the scarf’s ‘everydayness’ with reference to ideas of the democratized culture of consumption, subcultural style and nostalgia. Today, following the work of Sathnam Sanghera and others, cotton and paisley bespeak the weaving of Imperialism through the everyday life and fabric of British culture. Constant to its meaning through the intervening decades is its enduring presence in the quotidien rhythms of passing time and the way that memories sink into its surfaces and persist as insistently as human touch and smell.

34 Conclusion: Common threads Bethan Bide, Jade Halbert and Liz Tregenza

There remains an irresistible urge to define, once and for all, what is meant by ‘everyday’ when applied to fashion. But to attempt to arrive at any semblance of clarity in this respect would be to depreciate the richness and complexity of everything that ‘everyday’ implies and encircles. At the conference which preceded this volume, preoccupation with definitions of the ‘everyday’ dominated discussions. This desire to define has coincided with what Ben Highmore describes as ‘the transformation of the everyday from adverb into an adjective and finally into a noun’.1 This volume has highlighted the need to retain a broader perspective. As it stands, ‘everyday fashion’ represents myriad and varied meanings and values and is serviceable across a swathe of dress cultures and contexts. Other words relating to what we wear are mired in cultural baggage. ‘Fashion’ is contentious, ‘dress’ implies intellectual superiority and solemnity, and ‘clothing’ has been rendered almost obsolete within scholarly discourse. ‘Everyday fashion’, on the other hand, is flexible and mutable: it might refer to systems of design, production and retail; it may denote frequency of wear and ubiquity, or identity and belonging; it transcends seasonality and trend, but also indicates the importance of personal taste and personhood within these seasonal and trend-led cycles. In this way, its very lack of concrete delineation is what makes it such a useful phrase in studies of the non-elite, nonspectacular (but still thrilling) encounters we all have with clothes. Since 2019 and the Everyday Fashion conference that led, ultimately, to this volume, everyday fashion has enjoyed a rise in status. There has been investment (both intellectual and financial) in its study across a range of contexts, from museums to universities, and within fashion studies more generally. This shift of focus away from studies of elite fashion cultures is especially interesting because the range of projects being pursued speaks once more to the plurality of meaning contained within the concept of the ‘everyday’. Museum exhibitions including An English Lady’ Wardrobe (2019–20) at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, Fast x Slow Fashion (2020) at Leeds Museums and Galleries, Beautiful People: The Boutique in the 1960s (2021–22) at the Fashion and Textile Museum and Fashion City: How Jewish Londoners Shaped Global Style at the Museum of London (2023–24) have addressed themes relating to those explored by our contributors, including production, retail, style shifts and individual taste.

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These British exhibitions sit within broader national and international shifts towards a focus on the everyday in dress and textiles. Research projects including Refashioning the Renaissance (Aalto University) and The American Everyday (Columbia College) have considered the everyday within material histories and the embodied use of fashion. Most promisingly, a new generation of PhD researchers at universities across the UK are working on projects related to many of the themes suggested in this book. Doctoral research projects that centre the everyday in their analyses include those focused on manufacturing and production, people and their fashioned identities, place and business.2 This body of new work signals an important moment for the historiography of fashion; while the everyday has previously been dismissed, or bound as a subsidiary of other concepts (including class, economics, labour structures and gender), now there is opportunity for it to come to the fore in its own right. This overdue investment in the everyday presents an opportunity for a new diversity to emerge in fashion studies. As our contributors have shown, there is significant value in understanding the full complexity of ‘everyday fashion’. The contents of this book demonstrate that the value of everyday fashion cannot be calculated in monetary terms. Although prices for second hand – and particularly vintage – clothing have risen in recent years, high-end auction houses still predominantly deal in couture and premiums are paid for rich fabrics and one-off pieces. Instead, the value of everyday fashion lies in the stories it has to tell about people, places and societies. Indeed, this value is evident in the types of historical mass-market garments that do command high prices, such as British ‘CC41’ labelled Utility fashions produced between 1942 and 1952, which are highly desirable to collectors and museums for their ability to communicate the social and personal upheaval of life on the home front during the Second World War.3 It is the very everyday-ness of such garments that makes them so evocative, conjuring the past by confronting us with the sometimes mundane realities of daily life and highlighting how personal, embodied experience is materially connected to and shaped by broader geo-political events. In this way, everyday fashion endures as a powerful reminder of the agency of the people who shaped the past, many of whom are not recorded in written histories. Everyday fashion is also surprisingly enduring in material terms, although, as the object biographies in this book demonstrate, everyday fashion has not always been prioritized for preservation and collecting in the same way as elite and special occasion clothing. Many of the extant examples we do have are robust and well-made. Contrary to popular misconception, everyday fashion is not necessarily cheap or shoddy, nor is it ‘unfashionable’ in style. Many everyday garments were made to withstand extensive wear, and ‘best’ clothing was cycled into everyday wear over time. More recently, textile researchers testing the durability of highstreet jeans found that some of the cheapest pairs on the market were actually the most robust, challenging assumptions that inexpensive fashions are made to be disposable.4 This demonstrates that fast fashion is an attitude as much as a production system, once again highlighting the importance of exploring everyday fashion as both material and practice and refuting simplistic narratives that blame inexpensive fashion for the industry’s sustainability crisis. Although this book does not explicitly tackle issues of sustainability, its lessons from history have resonance to this contemporary debate. The research presented here repeatedly demonstrates the importance of everyday practices of making and consuming fashion to wellbeing, and in doing so provides a warning against blanket condemnations of the growth of a mass-market fashion industry that has democratized access to these benefits. The everyday fashion practices described throughout this volume clearly refute the idea that everyday dressing is about practicality and material need, while fashion is about the crafting of identity and style. They demand we interrogate the elitist construction of fashion as a system that excludes certain

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people and processes. In particular, they highlight the overlooked role of garment workers and makers in the production of fashion in its broadest sense. This has implications for the way workers are perceived in the contemporary global supply chain and serves as a reminder that truly sustainable solutions to fashion’s issues must consider both producers and consumers. In contemporary contexts, the systems governing how we consume, wear and appreciate clothing have been transformed. Clothes have, for many, become disposable commodities. According to one 2015 study by the British charity Barnardo’s, on average each garment will be worn seven times before being discarded.5 There are various reasons for this. The fashion cycle has significantly sped up, with clothes produced more quickly and at a lower cost. This new fashion system has been galvanized through desire, novelty and thirst for perpetual newness. Social media, too, has unquestionably had an effect; the daily capturing of versions of ourselves online has led to a desire to continually look different, and new clothes have become a conduit to instant gratification. Overall this means that in the twenty-first century, typically how clothes look – while always central to any purchase decision – has become significantly more important than how they feel. Technology will also surely continue to impact how we manufacture and consume fashion, and there are new opportunities for consuming fashion currently in development, particularly around digital dressing and the metaverse. This is the envisioned future iteration of the Internet that is made up of 3D virtual spaces linked within a perceived virtual universe. In a broader sense, it often refers not just to virtual worlds, but rather ‘the full spectrum of virtual worlds, augmented reality and the Internet’.6 In the future this means that we may see a persistent digital overlay on the real world. We may, in the next few years, be dressing digital versions of ourselves not only in games but for business meetings or social media, with entire outfits that do not (physically) exist. Emergent technologies such as this, could, in some respects offer a reduction of clothing waste as some online content creation for platforms such as Instagram could be created using digital, rather than physical clothes. However, even as we shift towards these opportunities the value and the power of real things remains central to the human experience of fashion. Will these technologies make real clothes redundant? No. People will still have to get dressed and the physical experience and power of clothes cannot be underestimated; rather, emerging technology and digital garments will offer new opportunities for creative, playful fashion engagement. What will fashion scholars looking back in 2050 consider representative of the everyday fashion of the 2020s? Fashion exists now as part of an incoherent, anarchic and ultimately liberated bricolage of styles, and, arguably, this has been the case for at least the last twenty years. The rise of ‘vintage’ as a popular style trend, the increased acceptance of second-hand fashion, the global dissemination of fashion images and information through the Internet and related processes of exchange of both fashion goods and fashion ideas have all contributed to a new era in which the everyday now is more influenced by the individual than by the collective. However, this does not mean that everyday fashion has become an individual pursuit. We are all consumers of everyday fashion, and participation in everyday fashion practices is central to negotiating relationships between the individual and the collective. Since sources for the study of everyday fashion are now so accessible and plentiful, this volume highlights the collective opportunity and indeed, responsibility, to preserve its history. Our contributors have demonstrated that paying attention to the everyday confirms the agency individuals have in shaping the world they live in, and their capacity to unpick the historical hierarchies and power structures inherent within fashion itself. By drawing together the common threads of our everyday fashion experiences we will reveal the potential of the everyday to tell new stories about the long history of British fashion.

322

EVERYDAY FASHION

Notes 1

Ben Highmore, ‘The Everyday Is Always a Question, a Problem’, Interview with Ben Highmore by Gianlluca Simi. University of Nottingham, Department of Culture, Film and Media (2018).

2

For example: Emily Gallagher whose thesis examines Victorian working-class fashion at Birkbeck, University of London; Lucy McConnell who is researching manufacture of Utility fashion at the University of Leeds; Rachel Neal who is studying everyday men’s fashion at De Montfort University; Abigail Jubb whose thesis considers department store and mail order fashions in the early twentieth century at the University of York.

3

At one Kerry Taylor auction, Passion for Fashion in October 2015, a Utility suit achieved a recordbreaking price of £1700 – almost ten-times its original estimate.

4

Durability testing by Dr Mark Sumner, 2021. Unpublished research.

5

Dana Thomas, ‘The High Price of Fast Fashion’, Wall Street Journal, 29 August 2019.

6

McKinsey & Co., The State of Fashion, report published in association with The Business of Fashion (2022).

INDEX

Abrams, Lynn 99–101, 103–6 Oral History Theory 114–15 n.5 Act for Reformation of Apparel to be worn by Apprentices and maid-servants, within the City of London 23 Adams, Tony E. 140 Adamson, Robert 212 Alexon House factory 272 n.3, 278, 284–5 Alexon Youngset 271, 276 skirt suit 270–2 Alice Edwards dress 149–50 Allen, Marit 101 alterations 11, 81, 85, 87, 139, 141, 143–4, 148, 152–3, 162, 244 Anderson, Gregory 40 Andrew, Sonja 41, 230 aprons 70, 135, 222, 302 cheap and durable 136 homemade 134, 136–7 artefact, clothing as 141 Asia, flora in 165 Attfield, Judy 1 Baber, Charles H. 237 Bachelor, 38 (film) 118 back region 10–11 Baker, William 41–2 Bale, Bryan 117–18 baleen 21–2, 25–7, 29, 31 for dress reconstruction 29–30 ballen bodeyis 22, 32 n.7 Banks, Joseph, Sir 173 Barnes, Ruth 160 Barton, Tracey 126–7 bathing suit 54–6 Bauer, Ralph 159, 161 Bayly, William 194 Bell, Frederick H. 295–6 Bell and Nicolson 293–4, 298 branded goods 296 brand names and logos 296

catalogues 299 general goods 299–300 headquarters 299 history of 295–6 Hodson Shop and 300–2 popular fashion 299 profit of 296 with R. Lunt and Co. Ltd. 297 bents 21–2, 27, 30 bodies with 31 farthingale with 30–1 Berker, Leslie 277 Bernard, Jesse 310 ‘best’ dress 46, 193–4, 240, 247, 260–1, 320 Biddle-Perry, Geraldine 99 Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery 307–8 Birmingham wholesalers/wholesale trade 9, 293–6. See also Bell and Nicolson; Wilkinson and Riddell after Second World War 297 city centre warehouses closure 297 decline of 297 direct dealing between manufacturers and retailers 296–7 Hodson Shop and 300–2 mergers and acquisition, Courtaulds 297 Black Country, wholesaling in. See Birmingham wholesalers/wholesale trade Bleichmar, Daniela 167 blouse 37 cheapest 40 collar 41–2 cotton 47–8, 152–4 Debenham & Freebody 47–8 designer job advertisements in classifieds 45–8 design piracy and agency 47–8 J. Cowen & Co. 40 Jean Varon 152–4 museum archives research 42–4 N. Corah & Sons 42, 50 n.12

324

INDEX

Paris Model 47–8, 52 n.52 production 40–1 qualities 46 Rabin, Sophie 36–8 ready-made 38–40, 44, 48 sizes 41 Sportaville 150–1 St. Margaret 42–3, 45–6 style 687 St. Margaret voile 43 tailor-made shirt 41 types 41 wholesale designer 45–7 wholesale trade 10, 40–2 Wilson, Gertrude 48–50, 52 n.55 Wolsey 48 as workwear 40 Blout, Frances 194 bodies with bents 31 whalebone 22–4, 26, 28–9, 31 bodily space 9 body politic, clothing and 224, 227 Boitard, Louis Peter 190 Bombshell 62 boning 31 botanical drawings 161, 172–3 botanical knowledge 160, 167, 174 Bourdieu, Pierre 2 Braddock, Bessie 82–3, 91 Brade, Reginald, Sir 72 n.4 Britain and British fashion 4–6, 8–10, 59, 79, 101–2, 104, 122, 145, 159–60, 192, 273–4, 276, 285 British Caribbeans 310, 314 CC41 Utility Clothing Scheme 54–5, 77–8, 80, 83, 320 Chartist Movement in (see Chartist Movement) chintz and global entanglement (see chintz) livery waistcoat 209–10 London and 273, 276 multiple tailoring 255, 257 Munitionette 62–3 older woman (see older woman clothing) production of 10 re-fashioning 162 silk handkerchief 18 standard sizing 80–1, 87 suits in (see suits in Britain) Brodie, G. S. 207 Buck, Anne 135

Buckley, Cheryl 8, 13 n.2, 40, 62, 91, 135, 298 Burying in Woollen Acts of 1666–80 181 Campbell, Timothy 184 Caribbean communities 10, 309 British Caribbeans 310, 314 casual wear 310 crocodile skin 313–14 Dancehall 311 Dark Garage 310 Grime 310–12, 314 ‘Lord of the Mics’ 312 Lovers’ Rock fashion 309–11 Nike Air Max 95s 312–14 pirate radio stations 311–12 rebellious clothing 310–14 streetwear 310 Caswell, Michelle 42 CC41 Utility Clothing Scheme 54–5, 77–8, 80, 83, 320 Chapman, Stanley 297 Chartism 224, 229 whole hog Chartism 227 Chartist material culture 11 Chartist Movement 11, 223–4 Bannockburn Chartists 231 ‘dressing’ rituals 228–9 fustian jacket, O’Connor 227, 229 gift-giving and tradition 228–30 Land Plan 232 medals and rewards to Chartist 228–9 merchandising, Chartist 231–2 mourning dress 228 Northern Star 224–8, 230–1 The People’s Charter 223 political feeling 230–3 radical meetings, reports of 228 tartan 231–2 tartan material as gifts 229–30 texture and tradition 224–7 waistcoat-pieces and ribbons 229 women in white dress at Peterloo massacre 225 women participation in 229 The Chartists (Thompson) 223 Chase, Malcolm 229 Chaudhuri, K. N. 160, 164, 166 Cheang, Sarah 161 Checinska, Christine 309 chintz 9, 159–60, 192 aesthetic of 167

INDEX

banyans 160 botanical artists and 172–3 commodification of 165, 167–8 deception of visibility 161 decorative fabric 167 East India Company 160–6 English crewel work and Indian 161 in Europe 159, 165–6 exotic 168 and global textile trade 160–1 hybrid/cosmopolitan object 161, 165 South Asian floral culture 165–74 and tacit knowledge 160–5 woman’s jacket, eighteenth century 168–72 Chock, John 28 Clark, Hazel 8, 13 n.2, 40, 62, 135, 298 Clarke, Angela 118 Clelland, Helen 220–1 clogs 244 Cohn, Nik 262 Cole, Shaun 100, 129, 256 Collier, John 263–4 Collins, John 229 Collins, Stephen 258–60 Columbus, Christopher 165 Complete Herbal (Culpeper) 166 consumer society 2 Corn Laws 223 Costume Society 205 cotton 160, 181, 278, 317–18 Alice Edwards dress 149–50 aprons 134 in Barbara Johnson’s album 192–3 blouses 47–8, 152–4 Horrockses dress 147–9 man’s coat in cotton gingham 214–15 man’s cotton jacket 210 printed and painted (see chintz) Sportaville dress 150–1 sundresses 145 voile cloth 43–4 Courtaulds 297 Cox, Abby 29–31, 35 n.58 Craven, William, Sir 23 creative fashion 2 Crewe, Louise 143–4, 148 Crill, Rosemary 160 crimson satin 23 Culpeper, Nicholas 166 Cundey, Angus 101 custom-made garments 80–1, 87, 141, 240

325

Dancehall 311 Daniels, Stephen 5 Davis, Fred 3 Dean, Catherine 161 Debenham & Freebody 47–8 de Certeau, Michel 2 de Groot, Joanna 168 Dekker, Rudolf 128–30 de la Haye, Amy 60 design and fashion 11–12, 86 mixing and matching 90 piracy and agency 47–8 pocket 126 printed design dress 16–18, 97–8 tartan 229–32 digital recreations 142 displays, fashion 12–13 dissemination, fashion 12, 273, 321 Munitionette 62–3 tacit knowledge 161–5 domestic dressmaking practices. See home dressmaking Donaldson, David 102–14 Donaldson, Marion 102–14 Don We Now Our Gay Apparel (Cole) 129 dormant garments 145 The Drapers’ Record 42, 45, 47–9 dress 2, 319 diary 183–4 fashion vs. 3–4 reconstruction 29, 31 dressed self 119, 124, 127–9 Dress in Ireland (Dunlevy) 240 dressmaking 91. See also home dressmaking The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England (Styles) 298 Dryver, John 28 Dunlevy, Mairead 240, 243 Eames, Ray 126–7 East India Companies 18, 21, 25, 176 n.33 communications between brokers and Company officials 163 fabric samples/musters and instructions 162–3 factories in subcontinent 161–3 India, factories in 162–3 Indian merchants 162–3, 165 letter books 162 Pitt letter to London 164, 176 n.36 proximity of 163 South Asian merchants 161, 163

326

subcontinent, production centres in 161–4 subordinate factories 163–4 Surat factory 164 and tacit knowledge 160–5 East-India duffer 18 egodocument 128 Eicher, Joanne 127 ‘elite’ fashion 5, 11–12, 22–3, 79, 100, 183, 209, 245, 319 Ellis, Carolyn 140 embodied practices 2, 7–8 England 5, 11, 21–32, 232, 296 chintz 162, 166 English fashion 21–2 chintz 162 whalebone in 11, 21–32 Entwistle, Bob 255, 261 first suit 257–8 second suit 260 Entwistle, Joanne 2, 141 Europe 174 flora trading in 165, 167, 171 independent trading in 170 Indian apprenticeship 160 everyday dress 145 taxonomies of 194 everyday practices 8 in consumer society 2 in geography disciplines 2 in material culture 1 transformative power of 2 Ewing, Elizabeth 3, 48, 298 exceptional occasions dress 11–12, 183–4 extra-ordinary fashion 62, 70, 298 factory Alexon House 272 n.3, 278, 284–5 Cardiff 283 Carno 285 Denex 280–1 East India Company 161–5 government-controlled 63, 67, 73 n.18 Hawthorn 282 Horrockses 279 in India 162–3 Louis Edwards 278–80, 284 magazines 62–3 Merthyr 283 Polikoff 280 Steinberg’s Treforest 277 St Margaret 280–1

INDEX

in subcontinent 161–3 subordinate 163–4 Surat 164 Swansea 278 Treforest 277 Welsh 277–8 Windsmoor 277–81 Woolwich Arsenal 64 Fairweather, Sylvester Davidson 237 ‘Apterna’ Progressive shoes 236–8 farthingale with bents 30–1 Spanish 30 whalebone 22–3, 27–8 fashion 2–3, 319 Britishness in 4–6 diversity in 5, 62 vs. dress 3–4 as embodied practices 7–8 Ewing’s view on 3 history of 17, 99–100 meaning, evolution of 3 non-western clothing exclusion from 4 plate 183–4, 186, 189–91 production, acceleration of 143 Styles definition of 240 time and 184 Fashion Museum 189 female munition workwear 58–9, 73 n.25 archives research 59–61 boilersuit 63, 65 cost of 60, 66 Dolly 57–8 market and geographies 66–7 masculine garments 4, 60, 68 Mirry 64, 69 Munitionette 62–3, 65 online auction site, images for sale on 60 ‘On War Service’ badges 65, 67, 73 n.34 vs. other women workers 67 overalls and coveralls 66 postcard photographs (see postcard photographs, female munition workers) self-fashioning 68–9 stout canvas 63–4 supply and construction of 63–6 trousers 60, 64–7 Woolwich Arsenal and Gretna 64, 66–7 work dangerous level and types of 63 femininity 24, 40, 62, 189 Fendall, Wendell 214

INDEX

Fendall II, Philip Richard 214 Fennetaux, Ariane 160 Field Theory 2 First World War, female workwear during. See female munition workwear flannel waistcoat 180–2 Flügel, J. C. 12, 201, 214 footwear 243. See also travelling tailors/ shoemakers in Ireland clogs 244 shoes (see shoes) Foster, Vanda 117 Fowler, Christina 240 Fox, Raymond 255, 266 French fashion 4 Paris Model blouse 47–8, 52 n.52 whalebone 28 frozen garments 145 Fry, Elizabeth 82–3 ‘fuller figured’ woman 90 fustian jacket 11, 224–5, 227–31 Gallery of Fashion 189 Gammage, R. G. 228 genteel women’s sartorial life-writing. See women’s sartorial life-writing Gerritsen, Anne 61 Gill, Alison 143 Ginsburg, Madeline 143 The Girl’s Own Paper 40, 45 Glasgow 46, 49, 99, 102–3, 107–12 Glasgow Museums 102, 221, 222 n.2 global fashion capitals 7–8 Godey’s Lady’s Book 135 Godley, Andrew 41 Goffman, Erving 10 Golding, Francis 9, 119 autobiographical writing 120–1 as ‘bi sexual’ 120–2 body size 122 death 119–22, 129 egodocument 128 letter 120, 128 life and career 120 as ‘original’ dresser 122 Over 21 magazine photoshoot 122 Padiyar and 121–2 public and private dressed self 119, 124, 127–9 Golding garments collection 120–2 brown check wool blazer-style jacket 123–5

327

Padiyar in 122 photographs in Museum of London 123 Golding’s pocket contents 119, 122 Browns jacket 124–5 motivation for 128 Goodrum, Alison 5 Goody, Jack 165, 171 Gorb, Peter 257 Great Masculine Renunciation 12, 201 Green, Nancy 274 Gregson, Nicky 143–4, 148 Grey, Howard 309 Grime 310–12, 314 Gronow, Jukka 298 Gurney, Peter 231 Guy, John 160, 170–1 habitual wearing 183 Hall, Catherine 159 Hall, Stuart 6 handkerchief, silk 16–18 Hanshew, Norma May 40 Harella 77 Haslam, Grace A. 88 Haslam System of Dresscutting 80, 88–90 Hastings, Francis 163 Hattersley, Roy 258 first suit 260 Hayter, Catherine 81 Heinze, Lisa 145 Hepworths 255–6, 264–5 The Hidden Consumer Masculinities, Fashion and City Life 1860–1914 (Breward) 201 Highmore, Ben 1, 62, 135, 145, 319 high street fashion 298, 300, 320 Hilaire-Pérez, Liliane 161 Hill, Brian 255, 261, 263 Hill, David Octavius 212 Hill, John 26 Hill, S. R. 295 historical dress reconstruction 29 History of Twentieth Century Fashion (Ewing) 298 Hodson, Edith 294, 300 Hodson, Flora 294, 300 Hodson Shop Collection 294–5, 299–302, 304 n.43 Holcombe, Lyanne 135 Holker, John 17–18 home dressmaking 8–10, 80–1, 91, 244, 278 education provision 84–91

328

as empowerment 91–2 flat-pattern system 87 foundation pattern 87, 90 ‘Haslam’ chart 88–9 Haslam System of Dresscutting 80, 88–90 Making Clothes for the Older Woman (Miall) 84–6 raw materials from nearby factories for 278 remodelling 86 television dressmaking programmes 91 Vogue dressmaking promotions 83–4 Your Pattern Cutting (MacEwan) 86–8 homemade clothing 56, 66, 77 Horrockses dress 147–9 Hortus Indicus Malabaricus 167, 174 Houghteling, Sylvia 161 Hunt, Henry 225 Illustrated Book of Drafting Specially Designed for Fuller Figures 90 Indian apprenticeship 160 Indian botanical artists 172–4 Indian chintz 161, 168–9 Indian miniatures 169–70 Indian plants and flowers 166 Indian silk 18 Indian textiles, global trade in 160 indigo dyeing 178 n.67 industrialization in textile 160 Industrial Museum of Scotland 202–3 Ingold, Tim 44 inner-workings 11 intersubjectivity, oral history 103 interview, definition 100 Irie, Tippa 311 Irwin, John 170 Jack, Ian 258 Jackson, Betty 101 Jameson, Catherine 211 James Turcan 211–12 Jardin de Lorxia 173–4 J. Cowen & Co. 40 jeans 306–8, 320 Jefferys, James B. 301 Jenss, Heike 4, 142, 153 Jephcott, Pearl 260 Jobling, Paul 257 Johnson, Barbara 184 fabric samples and notes 190 life 190

INDEX

sartorial recording 190–4 self-regulation 190–1 Johnstone, Stephen 298 Jones, Stacy Holman 140 Juda, Hans 5 Kashmiri shawls 161 Kawamura, Yuniya 4, 299 Keettell, Hendrik 129–30 Kim, Alexandra 145 King, Gregory 24 Klaidungsbüchlein 128, 184 Kopytoff, Igor 127 Kumar, Deepak 167 Lanvin, Jeanne 48, 52 n.50 Laurent, Yves Saint 44, 49, 99 Lee, Julian 298 Leeds tailoring industry 255–6 Lefebvre, Henri 2 Leibsohn, Dana 161 Lemire, Beverly 160, 162, 165–6 Levitt, Sarah 296 Lewis, Ann Frankland 184 dishabille of the year 1778 188–9, 195 n.21 dog walking (1791 and 1795), dress for 186–7 fashion plate 189 knitting garments (1778 and 1785), dress for 187–8 life 185 morning dress (1791, 1795, 1785) 186–8 sartorial recording 185–9 Lincoln, Abraham 126 Lister, Jenny 12 Liston, Willie 212 livery outfit 208–9 Lokyer, Charles 164 Lomas, Clare 256 London 297 and Britain fashion 273, 276 Caribbean communities (see Caribbean communities) Steinberg & Sons Ltd. 276 whalebone regulations in 23–4 London College of Fashion 99, 101, 119, 122 Long, Timothy 122, 128 Lopes, Abby Mellick 143 Lorimer, Hayden 274 Louis Edwards factory 278–80, 284 Lovers’ Rock fashion 309–11 Lovett, F. R. 67

INDEX

MacEwan, E. Sheila 80, 86, 90–1 Your Pattern Cutting 86–8 Mahon, Bríd 240 Making Clothes for the Older Woman (Miall) 84–6 Mally, Lynn 84 Manchester Evening News 47 Manning, Edmund 25 Marion Donaldson project 12, 102 Donaldson interview 107–14 first meeting 102–3 memories 104 second meeting 103 subjectivity and intersubjectivity 103–4 transcription 106 working relationship 103 marram grass (Ammophila arenaria) 30 Marriage (Scotland) Act 1856 222 n.1 Marshall, John 220–1 Maskiell, Michelle 161 Massey, Doreen 8 mass-production 7, 10–11, 48, 79, 91, 142, 293, 298–300 material culture 1–2, 11, 40, 42, 44, 49–50, 140–1, 143, 145–6, 163, 165, 202, 224 material objects 3, 7–8, 12–13, 49, 66, 161–3, 166, 194, 224 McAleer, Margaret 126–7 McCarron, Edward 239, 247–8 McLoughlin, Marie 8 McRobbie, Angela 2, 45, 51 n.28 mending 169, 182, 187, 199 men’s fashion 12, 256–8, 262, 265. See also working men’s fashion (1730–1880) in NMS men’s suits. See suits in Britain Mentges, Gabriele 128 merchant tailor’s notebook 206–8 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 2 Miall, Agnes M. 80, 90–1 Making Clothes for the Older Woman 84–6 Mida, Ingrid 141, 145 Miller, Daniel 1 Milne, George 209 Milne, William 207 Monardes, Nicolás 165 mordant dyeing 169, 177 n.67 Morris, Ira 79 Morton, Henry Digby 291 mourning dress 228 Mughal miniatures 169–71

329

multiple tailoring 255, 257 Munitionette 62–3, 73 n.14 munition industry 62 female munition workwear (see female munition workwear) government-controlled factories 63, 67, 73 n.18 munition production 63 Murphy, Michael J. 243–4, 248 Muscovy Company of England 25–7 Museum of London 28, 119, 121–3, 125, 319 Myrobalani 166 National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland (NMAS) 202–3, 217 n.16, 217 n.18 National Museums Scotland (NMS) 12, 24, 202–3, 205–6, 209, 211–13 Navickas, Kristina 228 body politic and clothing 224–5 on tartan colours 232 N. Corah & Sons 42, 50 n.12 neckerchief 18 Nicolson, John MacDonald 296, 303 n.8 non-codified knowledge 161 non-elite clothing 7, 9, 12, 23, 194, 240, 294–5 non-representational theory 8 non-standard figured woman. See outsize woman Northern Star 224–8, 230–1 Norton, Marcy 159, 161 Obanishola, Omolara 309–10 O’Connor, Feargus 224, 226, 233 n.5 blistered hands 224–7 body politic 224, 227 dressing down 225–6, 231 freedom celebrations, suit of fustian for 230–1 fustian jacket 11, 224–5, 227–31 tartan 231–2 unshorn chins 227 whole hog Chartism 227 Woolwich Cadets 227–8 Oglander, John, Sir 194 older woman clothing 79–80 alterations 81 Braddock, Bessie 82–3 clothing rationing impact on 86 custom-made 80–1, 87 home dressmaking (see home dressmaking) Making Clothes for the Older Woman (Miall) 84–6 outsized/non-standard 79–83, 86–8, 90, 92

330

INDEX

ready-mades 79–81, 83, 85–7, 91 skirt styles, restrictions on 86 The Smart Outsize Dress Co. Ltd. 82 and Vogue dressmaking promotions 83–4 well-fitting clothing 81, 87 one-piece bathing suit 55 open robe gown 199–200 oral history 12, 15 n.55, 100–1, 105, 255, 280, 294 audio recordings 105 definition 100 in fashion 100–2 intersubjectivity 103 Marion Donaldson project 102 memories and stories 104 modes of interview 101 An Oral History of British Fashion 101 as recovery history 100 Silverman, Manny 101 subjectivities 103 Tailored Stories 101–2 transcription 105 ‘Voices from the Factory Floor’ project 283 ordinary fashion 62, 70, 100, 256, 298 Orr, Kathleen 291–2 outsize woman 79–83, 86–8, 90, 92 Owen, Geoffrey 297 Owen, Welshman Owen 97–8 Owen Owen 97–8 Padiyar, Satish 121–2, 128 Palmer, Alexandra 44, 49 Paris fashion 8 Paris Model blouse 47–8, 52 n.52 Parkinson, John 166 patriotic Munitionette 62 pattern cutting 47, 86–8 peony 171 The People’s Charter 223 Pereths, P. 284 Peters, Lauren Downing 81 physical fabrication 274 Pickering, Paul 225, 228, 230 on dressing down 225–6 pinafores 134 Pitt, Thomas 163–4, 176 n.36 place and fashion 7–10 pocket books 184, 190, 195 n.9 pocket contents 119 Eames, Ray 126–7 Golding, Francis (see Golding’s pocket contents)

Lincoln, Abraham 126 nature of 122, 127 object biography 127–9 Reed, Mark 126 Rubenhold, Hallie 127 self and 127 Strong, Roy, Sir 126 Poiret, Paul 48, 52 n.51 political symbolism, clothing 224 Pollert, Anna 280 Porter, Thea 99 postcard photographs, female munition workers 12, 57–9, 70 black-and-white photographs 71 choreography of 68–70 cost of 63 details on reverse of 61, 68 disadvantage of 61 Dolly 57–8 in factory magazines 62 and friendship, commemorating 68–9 Imperial War Museum photographs 59, 65–6, 72 n.6, 73 n.25 Lady Window Cleaners from Nottingham 67 Mirry 64, 69 Munitionette 62, 65 online auction site, images on 60, 65 self-fashioning for 12, 68–9 sitter 61, 63, 66–8 Woolwich Arsenal and Gretna munition worker 64 Yorkshire Evening Post 62 post-Second World War 10 Pouillard, Veronique 48 Presser, Jacob (Jacques) 128 printed design dress silk handkerchief 16–18 summer dress 96–8 production, everyday fashion 10–11 public symbolism, clothing 228 Pugh, Eileen 78 n.1 Rabin, Sophie 37 blouse 36–8 Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (Tressell) 214 Raj, Kapil 172–4 rattan 21 Rayner, Brian 260–1 Rayner, Bryan 255

INDEX

ready-made fashion 3, 37, 77, 79, 160, 240, 274, 276, 298 aprons 134 blouse 38–40, 44, 48 for older woman 79–81, 83, 85–7, 91 suits 253–4, 257 rebellious clothing 310–14 Reed, Barry 117 Reed, Mark 126 remodelling 86 re-placing, fashion 8–9 resist dyeing 169, 178 n.68 re-wearing garments 141, 143, 148 Rich and Rare: A Story of Dress in Ireland (Mahon) 240 Richmond, Vivienne 5, 100, 240 Riddell, W. G. 299 Riddell, William W. 295 Riello, Giorgio 49, 160, 162 Roberts, Matthew 231 Rocamora, Agnès 2, 4 Root, Deborah 167, 174 Roper, Michael 262 Rose, Gillian 58, 71 Rose, Sonya O. 159 Rowe, Hannah 8 Rowley, Rosetta 77 wedding suit 76–8 Roxburgh, William 172–3 Royal Scottish Museum (RSM) 202–3, 217 n.16 Rubenhold, Hallie 127 Rublack, Ulinka 21, 27, 30 Russell & Bromley 116–17 Sadkowska, Ania 256 salt prints 212 Sampson, Ellen 119, 139–40, 144–5 Samuel, Raphael 5, 105 Sandys, John 25 Sanky, Joseph Gibbons 318 sartorial life-writing 184 sartorial recording 184–5 Johnson, Barbara 190–4 Lewis, Ann Frankland 185–9 Savage, Percy 101 Schwartzkopf, Jutta 229 Schwarz, Matthäus 128, 184 Scottish United Services Museum (SUSM) 202 Scriven, Tom 229 seasonal buying habits 298–9

331

Second World War 10, 56, 64, 78, 275, 291, 296–7, 300, 320 Segal, Muriel 80 self-fashioning 12, 68–9, 245, 274, 281–2 sewing machine 10, 41, 108, 114, 146, 249, 278, 283 Shabazz, Menelick 311 Shaheen, Alfred 151 shoes 91, 243 Bale, Bryan 116–18 boots, accidental discovery of 212–14 crocodile skin 313–14 Fairweather’s ‘Apterna’ Progressive 236–8 Nike Air Max 95s 312–14 travelling shoemakers (see travelling tailors/ shoemakers in Ireland) working boots 244 Shoreditch Institute 45, 51 n.29 Shreeve, Sheila 135 Sibthorpe, Robert 28 silk and wool gown 198–200 silk handkerchief 16–18 Silverman, Manny 101 Simon Massey 145–7 Simplicity sewing pattern 31, 35 n.61 skin-like quality 13, 144 skirt suit 270–2 smart designer 45 The Smart Outsize Dress Co. Ltd. 82 Smyth, Susan 24 solo designer 11 South Asia cotton trade 160 global textile trade in 160 South Asian floral culture 165–74 South Wales coal industry 275 Distribution of Industry (Industrial Finance) Act 276 economic problems 276 female unemployment 276 industrial 275–7 Special Areas (Development and Improvement) Act 276 South Wales garment factory employees (1945–1965) 274 access to fashion goods 278–9, 284 Alexon House factory 284 decline of fashion industry 285 domestic sewing 278 fashionable identity 280, 284

332

fashion shows 282–3 female unemployment 276, 280 high level work skill 277–8 inexperienced employees 277 Laura Ashley ‘Made in Wales’ 284–6 Louis Edwards factory 278–80, 284 material knowledge 277–80 and media coverage 284 models and pageants 282–3 and national/international fashions 284 social activities 280–1 Steinberg’s Treforest factory 277 training 277, 285 using technology 277 ‘Voices from the Factory Floor’ project 283 wages 279 Windsmoor factory 277–81 women 274, 276 279–80, 282–5 women’s workwear 280–1 women vs. men 279 work environment 280–1 space and fashion 7–10 Spanish farthingale 30 special-occasion dress 220–2, 278 Spencer, Elizabeth 194 Spitalfields handkerchief 16–18 Sportaville dress 150–1 Stallybrass, Peter 127 standard size 80–1, 87 Stanford, Biddy 147–8, 153 Steell, Gourlay 209 Steinberg, Alexander 271, 284 Steinberg, Jack 284 Steinberg & Sons Ltd. 276 Stewart, Alexander McCulloch 214 Stewart, Charles William 205 St. Margaret blouse 42–3, 45–6 Strong, Roy, Sir 126–7 Stuart, Charles Edward 17 suits in Britain 12 acquisition of 257 best suit 260–1 Burtons 257–60, 262 Collins, Stephen 258–60 Entwistle, Bob 257–8, 260 first suit 257–60 Fox, Raymond 255–6 Hattersley, Roy 260 Howarth lounge suit and sports jacket 264–5 made-to-measure 257–60, 263–4

INDEX

older men 262–6 Upham 265 young men 260–1 summer dress 96–8 swimwear 54–6 Swindlehurst, E. 230–1 tacit knowledge 50, 140–1, 160–5, 167, 171 ‘tactile’ experience of wearing 140–1 tailor 29 drawing book 252–4 merchant tailor’s notebook 206–8 tailor-made shirt (blouse) 41 travelling (see travelling tailors/shoemakers in Ireland) Tananbaum, Susan L. 37 Tandy, Alannah 270–2 Tarrant, Naomi 205 technology and fashion 321 temporal patterns of dress 183 Theatrum Botanicum: The Theatre of Plantes (Parkinson) 166 Thirsk, Joan 165 Thom, Deborah 68–9 Thomas, David 253 drawing book 252–4 Thomas, Nicholas 161 Thompson, Dorothy 223–4 Thompson, George 190 Thomson, Paul 102 Tinne, Emily Margaret 97–8 Tobin, Beth Fowkes 172 Todd, Selina 60 Tootal paisley scarf 316–18 Toplis, Alison 240 traces of habitation 144 travelling tailors/shoemakers in Ireland 239–41 alteration and mending of clothing 244 annual route 242, 247 apprentices 242 clogs 244 clothing and footwear production 243–6 coats 245 cost of making boots 243 decline of 249 family names with trading 242 folklore sources 239 inadequate light, issues of 246 independent travelling 241–2 literacy 248 makers, travelling 241–3

INDEX

men’s outwear 245 payment methods 248 positive reception of 247–9 production processes 246–7 raw materials 243, 247 sewing machines as replacement for 249 social and cultural role 248 staying in customers house 242 style of clothes 245 tools 246–7 trousers, boy’s 244–5 women’s outerwear 246 working boots 244 Tressell, Robert 214 Troy, Nancy 48 Tuckett, Sally 229 Tulloch, Carol 5, 100 Turcan, John 211 Turcan, William 211 twentieth-century fashion 7–8, 12, 37, 101, 140, 143, 274 Twigg, Julia 262 two-piece bathing suit 54–5 two-piece skirt suit 270–2 Ugolini, Laura 240, 256–7 Upham, D. 265 Utility Clothing Scheme 54–5, 77–8, 80, 83, 320 utilization, clothing 143, 154 Vickery, Amanda 191 Vincent, Henry 229 vintage fashion, wearing 140 Alice Edwards dress 149–50 in archive or museum collection 141 digital recreations 142 experience of 141 frozen/dormant garments 145 Ginsburg on 143 Horrockses dress 147–9 Jean Varon blouse 152–4 online purchase of 142 reasons for choosing 142–3 second-hand consumption 143, 148 sensory experience of 143 Simon Massey jacket 145–7 “skin-like” quality 144 Sportaville blouse and short co-ordinate set 150–1 traces of habitation 144 value of 143 Vogue 83–4, 91, 147

333

waistcoat, flannel 180–2 Walsall Leather Museum 294–5 Warde, Alan 298 Wardell, Henry 181 flannel waistcoat 180–2 wearing 139–40 wedding dress 220–2 Welsh Folk Museum 254 n.5 whalebone 11 for army 24 artisans and innovation of 27–31 Basque whalers 25 with bents 31 bodies, stomacher, stays 22–4, 26, 28–9, 31 body-maker’s trade token 28 busk of 22, 32 n.7 crimson satin bodies and stomacher 23, 29, 31 decline in demand for 31 definition 32 n.1 import of 25–6 for men’s clothing 22, 24 price of 26–7 regulations on 23–4 in seventeenth-century fashion 22–4 Spitsbergen map (Thomas Edge) 25–6 trade and availability of 24–8 uses of 22–4 whale oil 25 whale fin 21, 29 whaling 21–2, 25, 27, 29, 32 n.3 Wheatley, Simon 311 White, Jerry 63 White, Joy 311 white-blouse work 40 whole hog Chartism 227 wholesale fashion 297–300 wholesalers/wholesale trade anonymous clothing 294 Birmingham (see Birmingham wholesalers/ wholesale trade) blouse 40–2 catalogues 299, 301 general goods 299–300 middlemen 163, 293 seasonal buying habits 298–9 Simon Massey jacket 145–7 Whyman, Benjamin 126 Why Women Wear What They Wear (Woodward) 144 Wilkinson, Henry 295

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INDEX

Wilkinson and Riddell 293–4, 298 branded goods 296 brand names and logos 296 catalogues 299 general goods 299–300 history of 295 Hodson Shop and 300–1 popular fashion 299 with S.C Larkins and Sons 297 supply and demand 296 Wills, John 296, 301 Wilson, Benjamin 228 Wilson, Charles 48–9 Wilson, Gertrude 48–50, 52 n.55 Windsmoor factory 277–81 women body types 85 Chartist Movement, participation in 229 munition workwear (see female munition workwear) older woman clothing (see older woman clothing) in white dress at Peterloo massacre 225 women’s sartorial life-writing 183 Lewis, Ann Frankland 185–9 sartorial recording 184–5 Women’s Voluntary Services (WVS) uniform dress 290–2 Woodward, Sophie 144–5, 150, 153 Why Women Wear What They Wear 144 working boots 244 ‘working class’ fashion 11, 45, 202, 213, 224, 294. See also Chartist Movement

working men’s fashion (1730–1880) in NMS 201 boots, accidental discovery of 212–14 coat in cotton gingham 214–15 collection of 203–6 contribution date 205 contributors 203–5 cotton jacket 210 gender binaries 203 gendered titling 203 livery outfit 208–10 merchant tailor’s notebook 206–8 narratives 202 Stewart, Charles William 205 Turcan merchants 210–12 workwear 12 advertisements in newspapers 66 blouse 40 cost of 66 female munition (see female munition workwear) men (see working men’s fashion (1730–1880) in NMS) whalebone for 24 white-blouse work 40 Worth, Rachel 5, 100, 298 Wright, Elizabeth 24 Young, James 206–7 man’s livery outfit 208–9 merchant tailor’s notebook 207–8 Young, William 206–7 Your Pattern Cutting (MacEwan) 86–8

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