Serena Dyer – författare

The making of fashionable women's dress in Georgian England necessitated an inordinate amount of manual labour. From the mantuamakers and seamstresses who wrought lengths of silk and linen into garments, to the artists and engravers who disseminated and immortalised the resulting outfits in print and on paper, Georgian garments were the products of many busy hands. This Element centres the sartorial hand as a point of connection across the trades which generated fashionable dress in the eighteenth century. Crucially, it engages with recreation methodologies to explore how the agency and skill of the stitching hand can inform understandings of craft, industry, gender, and labour in the eighteenth century. The labour of stitching, along with printmaking, drawing, and painting, composed a comprehensive culture of making and manual labour which, together, constructed eighteenth-century cultures of fashionable dress.

The making of fashionable women's dress in Georgian England necessitated an inordinate amount of manual labour. From the mantuamakers and seamstresses who wrought lengths of silk and linen into garments, to the artists and engravers who disseminated and immortalised the resulting outfits in print and on paper, Georgian garments were the products of many busy hands. This Element centres the sartorial hand as a point of connection across the trades which generated fashionable dress in the eighteenth century. Crucially, it engages with recreation methodologies to explore how the agency and skill of the stitching hand can inform understandings of craft, industry, gender, and labour in the eighteenth century. The labour of stitching, along with printmaking, drawing, and painting, composed a comprehensive culture of making and manual labour which, together, constructed eighteenth-century cultures of fashionable dress.

Processes of making in early modern Europe were both tacit and embodied. Whether making pottery, food, or textiles, the processes of manual production rested on an intersensory connection between mind, body, and object. This volume focuses on the body of the maker to ask how processes of making, experimenting, experiencing, and reconstructing illuminate early modern assumptions and understandings around manual labour and material life. Answers can be gleaned through both recapturing past skills and knowledge of making and by reconstructing past bodies and bodily experiences using recreative and experimental approaches., In drawing attention to the body, this collection underlines the importance of embodied knowledge and sensory experiences associated with the making practices of historically marginalised groups, such as craftspeople, women, domestic servants, and those who were colonised, to confront biases in the written archive. The history of making is found not only in technological and economic innovations which drove 'progress' but also in the hands, minds, and creations of makers themselves. First interdisciplinary collection of essays to: • Synthesise experimental history approaches used to investigate a wide range of objects – dress, cosmetics, cooking and art – and their makers or wearers in the early modern period. • Demonstrate how attention to objects and making, in both historical and modern experimental contexts, can uncover knowledge of embodied and gendered experiences that are otherwise difficult to access. • Contributes to the recently termed ‘making’ and ‘embodied’ turns in history.

Eighteenth-century women told their life stories through making. With its compelling stories of women’s material experiences and practices, Material Lives offers a new perspective on eighteenth-century production and consumption. Genteel women’s making has traditionally been seen as decorative, trivial and superficial. Yet their material archives, forged through fabric samples, watercolours, dressed prints and dolls’ garments, reveal how women used the material culture of making to record and navigate their lives.Material Lives positions women as ‘makers’ in a consumer society. Through fragments of fabric and paper, Dyer explores an innovative way of accessing the lives of otherwise obscured women. For researchers and students of material culture, dress history, consumption, gender and women’s history, it offers a rich resource to illuminate the power of needles, paintbrushes and scissors.

Fashion travels. Every new shape of sleeve, each novel method of cutting and any innovation in fabric has spread through complex networks of makers, retailers and consumers. Disseminating Dress represents the first historical study of how these networks of fashion communication functioned and evolved in an increasingly global material world. Focussing on Britain – separated from mainland Europe, yet increasingly globally-linked – this volume will trace how dress was disseminated in and out of one island nation.The paths made by print, image and commodities around the globe have enabled historians to reimagine a connected material world. The influence of innovations in dissemination shape this volume, which asks urgent questions about the extent of global influence on fashion, and the intertwining nature of written, printed, visual and material fashion news. This collection brings together innovative scholarship from an interdisciplinary group of historians, art historians and fashion scholars to consider how global and local networks of dress dissemination converged to shape fashionable dress in Britain, and how British methods and aesthetics spread outwards across the world. From the drawing rooms of 19th-century London, to the verandas of 19th-century Australia, contributors to Disseminating Dress develop narratives of commodity and knowledge exchange to consider how fashion circulated.

Fashion travels. Every new shape of sleeve, each novel method of cutting and any innovation in fabric has spread through complex networks of makers, retailers and consumers. Disseminating Dress represents the first historical study of how these networks of fashion communication functioned and evolved in an increasingly global material world. Focussing on Britain – separated from mainland Europe, yet increasingly globally-linked – this volume will trace how dress was disseminated in and out of one island nation.The paths made by print, image and commodities around the globe have enabled historians to reimagine a connected material world. The influence of innovations in dissemination shape this volume, which asks urgent questions about the extent of global influence on fashion, and the intertwining nature of written, printed, visual and material fashion news. This collection brings together innovative scholarship from an interdisciplinary group of historians, art historians and fashion scholars to consider how global and local networks of dress dissemination converged to shape fashionable dress in Britain, and how British methods and aesthetics spread outwards across the world. From the drawing rooms of 19th-century London, to the verandas of 19th-century Australia, contributors to Disseminating Dress develop narratives of commodity and knowledge exchange to consider how fashion circulated.

Longlisted for the Historians of British Art Book Prize 2023The 18th century has been hailed for its revolution in consumer culture, but Material Literacy in Eighteenth-Century Britain repositions Britain as a nation of makers. It brings new attention to 18th-century craftswomen and men with its focus on the material knowledge possessed not only by professional artisans and amateur makers, but also by skilled consumers. This book gathers together a group of interdisciplinary scholars working in the fields of art history, history, literature and museum studies to unearth the tactile and tacit knowledge that underpinned fashion, tailoring and textile production. It invites us into the workshops, drawing rooms and backrooms of a broad range of creators, and uncovers how production and manual knowledge extended beyond the factories and machines which dominate industrial histories.This book illuminates, for the first time, the material literacies learnt, enacted and understood by British producers and consumers. The skills required for sewing, embroidering and the textile arts were possessed by a large proportion of the British population: men, women and children, professional and amateur alike. Building on previous studies of shoppers and consumption in the period, as well as narratives of manufacture, this collection documents the multiplicity of small producers behind Britain’s consumer revolution, reshaping our understanding of the dynamics between making and objects, consumption and production. It demonstrates how material knowledge formed an essential part of daily life for eighteenth-century Britons. Craft technique, practice and production, the contributors show, constituted forms of tactile languages that joined makers together, whether they produced objects for profit or pleasure.

This book demonstrates the primacy of touch, smell, taste, sight and sound within the retail landscape. It considers embodied sensory experiences and practices, and it represents both a celebration and interrogation of the integration of sensory histories into the study of retail and consumption.

This book demonstrates the primacy of touch, smell, taste, sight and sound within the retail landscape. It considers embodied sensory experiences and practices, and it represents both a celebration and interrogation of the integration of sensory histories into the study of retail and consumption.