Dress History

Students of dress history will benefit from reading this book from cover to cover. Each chapter provides insight into fascinating topics, while as a whole the book is a solid illustration of how different approaches within dress history rub alongside, borrow from and bounce off one another; it leads by example encouraging readers to be brave apply multi-source and material culture enquiry, embrace a broad mind-set, and bring new methods to their subject ... This book supports and promotes a continuation of dress historians as passionate, rigorous and all-embracing scholars. * Costume * This important collection breaks through familiar boundaries of writings on dress in terms of time and place and with an admirable diversity of approach. Focused studies offer insights on topics that, thanks to their specificity, paradoxically enlarge the sphere of knowledge of dress. It is excellent for students; each chapter serves as a model of exemplary scholarship conveyed in authoritative but very readable language. * Nancy B. Deihl, New York University, USA * Dress History: New Directions in Theory and Practice is an engaging collection of essays that address the etymology and methodology of the burgeoning field of dress history. This book is a must read for all fashion and dress historians. * Clare Sauro, Drexel University, USA * This study of dress, from many points of view, serves to acknowledge the contribution and application of object study to the cultural understanding of dress. * Jean L. Druesedow, Director of Kent State University Museum, USA * This book, edited by Pollen and Nicklas, eminent scholars of dress and appearance theory and history, powerfully argues that the fields maturity has delineated a new position for the field, one far from the borders of scholarship. It provides new research and methods, and importantly the book defines multiple avenues for the fields further forward movement. It features case studies of marginal and silent areas of dress history, examines the critical role of interdisciplinarity, and with brilliant clarity stakes a claim for the fields centrality to humanistic studies. For scholars and serious students of dress and appearance theory and history, this book is a must read. * Abby Lillethun, Montclair State University, USA *

Charlotte Nicklas is Senior Lecturer in History of Art and Design at the University of Brighton, UK Annebella Pollen is Principal Lecturer in History of Art and Design and Director of Historical and Critical Studies at the University of Brighton, UK

List of Illustrations Preface Notes on Contributors Introduction Dress History Now: Terms, Themes and Tools, Charlotte Nicklas and Annebella Pollen, University of Brighton, UK 1. Dress Thinking: Disciplines and Indisciplinarity, Jonathan Faiers, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, UK 2. Gloves of the Very Thin Sort: Gifting Limerick Gloves in the Late-Eighteenth and Early-Nineteenth Century, Liza Foley, National College of Art and Design, Republic of Ireland 3. All Out in the Wash: Convict Stain Removal in the Narryna Heritage Museums Dress Collection, Jennifer Clynk and Sharon Peoples, Australian National University, Australia 4. Traje de crioula: Representing Nineteenth-century Afro-Brazilian Dress, Aline T. Monteiro Damgaard, Denmark 5. The Empresss Old Clothes: Biographies of African Dress at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Nicola Stylianou, The Open University, UK 6. Picturing the Material/Manifesting the Visual: Aesthetic Dress in Late-Nineteenth- Century British Culture, Kimberly Wahl, Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada 7. Dress, Self-Fashioning and Display at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Christine M. E. Guth, Royal College of Art, UK 8. At Once Classical and Modern: Raymond Duncan Dress and Textiles in the Royal Ontario Museum, Alexandra Palmer, Royal Ontario Museum, Canada 9. An Unexpected Pearl: Gender and Performativity in the Public and Private Lives of London Couturier Norman Hartnell, Jane Hattrick, University of Brighton, UK 10. From Kays of Worcester to Vogue, Paris: The Womens Institute Magazine, Rural Life and Fashionable Dress in Post-war Britain, Rachel Ritchie, Brunel University, UK 11. Radical Shoemaking and Dress Reform from Fabians to Feminists, Annebella Pollen, University of Brighton, UK 12. Dress and Textiles in Transition: The Sungudi Sari Revival of Tamilnadu, India, Kala Shreen, Centre for Creativity, Heritage and Development, India Index