Understanding Fashion History E-Book

Valerie Cumming

• Herausgeber: Batsford
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 376

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

The generous reception given to Understanding Fashion History when it was first published in 2004 recognised it as a timely reappraisal of the role of fashion and its place in society. The book introduces the reader to the ways fashionable dress has been defined and studied since the late 17th century, considering the theories that surround the subject, the assembling and use of collections of fashion and textiles, the significance of dress and art, the tension between uniformity of appearance and disguise, and the purpose of theatrical costume.  This book has been read and recommended by academics, collectors, curators, students and general readers who want context for the contemporary obsession with fashion. Constantly in demand, it has become a classic text in its field.

Leseprobe

UnderstandingFashion History

UnderstandingFashion History

Valerie Cumming

Contents

Acknowledgements and picture credits

Introduction

1   Defining dress and some early authors

What is dress?

Why is dress studied?

How is dress studied?

2   Theories and the new dress history

Laver’s Legacy

An ‘internalized’ approach?

The ‘cultural construction of the embodied identity’

3   Collecting dress

Public and private: early collecting

Forming public collections of dress 1850–1970

Collectors and their museums: three English examples

4   The use of collections 1970 to the present

Permanent and temporary: galleries and exhibitions

Lost opportunities or new directions?

Closures and partnerships

5   Dress in art and dress as art

Dress in art

Prints and photographs

Dress and fashion as art

6   Uniformity and disguise

Uniformity

Uniforms and occupational dress

Ceremonial dress

Vintage: playing with the past

Re-enactment: living the past?

7   Theatrical dress: costume or fashion?

Definitions and attitudes

Performers, audiences and clothes

Theatrical collections

Conclusion

Notes

Appendix: concepts, disciplines and people

Glossary

Select bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements and picture credits

Acknowledgements

This book has been gestating for over five years and I am grateful to everyone with whom I have discussed some of its content, though any errors in transmission are wholly mine. Several projects I have been involved with over that period have offered me opportunities to reconsider dress in different contexts, and I am grateful to Gilli Bush-Bailey, Mireille Galinou, Philippa Glanville, Ralph Hyde, Dennis Kennedy and Aileen Ribeiro for their interest as I developed these ideas. Particular thanks are due to everyone who helped me with information as I emailed and telephoned them at various stages, usually at short notice, seeking factual evidence and illustrations. My thanks go to Barbara Burman, Rosemary Harden, Anthea Jarvis, Miles Lambert, Alexandra MacCulloch, Ann Saunders, Margaret Scott, Phillip Sykas, Philip Warren and the efficient photographic library staff at the V & A Picture Library, the Museum of Costume, Bath, the National Museums Liverpool and Buckinghamshire County Museum.

I owe an especial debt of gratitude to Grace Evans and Emma Warren at Chertsey Museum for providing me with access to the Olive Matthews Collection and the other collections that they curate. Without their interest and the considerable time spent by Grace Evans on my enquiries, and the fine photography of John Chase, this book would lack crucial information and the range of illustrations that it needed. As ever, I am grateful to Batsford, in particular Tina Persaud and Roger Huggins who liked the idea for the book and never interfered in its development.

Last, but not least, I thank John Cumming, who was also writing a book but offered me unstinting support and unlimited use of the computer when it was needed.

Picture Credits

I am indebted to the following museums, collectors, publishers and institutions for the use of their images.

Bath & North East Somerset Council; Museum of Costume: Figs 26, 36, 56

Batsford Archive: Figs 3, 5, 7, 8, 15, 16, 20, 29, 51

Buckinghamshire County Museum Collections: Fig 53

Downing Collection of Textile Pattern Books at Manchester Metropolitan University: Figs 13, 54

National Museums Liverpool (Lady Lever Art Gallery): Fig 41

National Museums Liverpool (the Walker Art Gallery): Fig 59

Olive Matthews Collection, Chertsey Museum: Figs 1, 2, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37, 38, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 52, 57, 58, 60, 61, 63, 65

Private Collections Figs 4, 6, 39, 40, 55, 62, 64

Victoria & Albert Museum Picture Library: Figs 24, 25, 43

Introduction

In the late 1970s I wrote a short illustrated book for Batsford called Exploring Costume History. It used a traditional format in order to give students an introduction to the techniques and information they might need for undertaking projects in what was then almost always termed ‘costume history’. The book gave basic instructions on how to choose and write a short project, and manageable amounts of information on male and female fashionable dress in England between 1500 and 1900. There were also sections on fabrics, technical innovations, prices, shopping and useful museum collections to visit. It was a work aimed at a specific audience – the interested reader of secondary school level and above – and it covered, if superficially, a good deal of the ground which, nearly 25 years later, I think is central to understanding the history of dress. This new book is not a revised version or even a sequel. Its aim is more ambitious in scope, using a series of thematic but linked chapters to discuss the evolution and scope of the discipline from the 1660s onwards.

In many ways that period of the late 1970s offered opportunities to all dress historians to redirect their work. A good deal of the basic knowledge was in the public domain and it was not, even then, a narrow discipline. Curators, collectors, lecturers, researchers and students had many sources of information they could use and a number of differing techniques with which they could approach the subject, but it was a relatively unfashionable area of study. The perceptions we have now about glossy designer retrospective shows, the constant media spotlight on how people look, dress and reinvent themselves with natural and surgical means were in their infancy, as was the impact of the feminist movement. The explosion of academic interest in the body, clothing and gender had not yet occurred, and practically no-one had heard of, let alone read, Roland Barthes’ The Fashion System. There were subtle changes in emphasis, nothing seismic, and there was still a great deal to discover about what archives, collections of dress and textiles, and images in all media could tell us about the dress of the past. Of course, hindsight suggests that dress historians lacked an interlinked series of theories that would change the whole landscape of how dress might be studied. Might is an important qualification in this context because there is no agreed method for studying the subject at the beginning of the 21st century, just a great many writers, from a variety of disciplines, who are interested in carefully selected aspects of it. Such approaches can be described as a type of ‘intellectual tourism’, which like other forms of tourism often disregard the customs of the country that is being visited. This is not to disparage what is being attempted, but just to present a view from the perspective of those who care about all aspects of the discipline, most especially collections of dress. Curators, collectors, students and informed enthusiasts are often hard-pressed, in terms of time and opportunity, to make the case for the plurality of the subject and to argue for parity in all approaches, not just those that suggest new theories can replace all those that have gone before.

In the 1970s and 1980s there were relatively few new publications each year, unlike today when we are burdened with a mass of books dealing with the body, clothes, costume, dress, fashion and textiles. Why is this so? In part, the words themselves are central to the fragmentation of the subject. We all wear clothes, we dress ourselves, we may or may not be intrigued or amused by the vagaries of contemporary fashion, and given that we are not covered with fur, we cannot exist comfortably without fabrics or textiles, out of which clothing or fashions are created. This is not a word game, and it certainly is not a dictionary of terms relating to dress in all of its many forms. The main text of this book and the bibliography will point in the direction of reliable dictionaries and glossaries. Even the use of words has changed and can be confusing, being either highly theoretical or so slipshod as to suggest that any word will do, however anachronistic. Everyone wears clothes, so surely it cannot be too difficult to discuss their significance? In fact many different methods can be used, several of which have only gained acceptance in the last 25 years. Clothing can be viewed as personal property with many successive lives or as a theoretical construct, more abstract than real. The latter view fits neatly into a post-modern belief that all previous approaches lack meaning, and that historians of dress who have actually studied, analyzed and described it across several centuries have contributed little of substance to the understanding of the subject. This book will suggest that the complex history and diversity of the discipline are worthy of respect and that understanding its many strengths, as well as weaknesses, is a skill acquired incrementally by looking at, reading and thinking about evidence with an open mind.

So why and how did these changes occur over the past 25 years? How did the study of historic and contemporary dress become one of the new ‘hot’ subjects for academics and theorists? There are several reasons for this, one almost certainly being the fact that fashion journalism rarely adopts the critical stance found in other areas of analytical journalism, such as architecture, art, literature, music and science. This encouraged the belief that fashion has no real status as a discipline and could be absorbed into other subject areas, such as cultural history, gender studies, literary analysis and philosophy, often divorcing it from most previous texts on dress history and from surviving collections of dress and textiles. Mainstream historians, including those who study economic and social history, tended to emphasize the importance of cloth production, trade (which introduced new fabrics and techniques) and patterns of consumption. However, they rarely bothered to examine surviving dress or textiles, or even to consider their importance as evidence of changes in knowledge and skills. In his excellent Europe, A History, a book of over 1300 pages, Norman Davies included minimal allusions to dress in the main text, and offered three highlighted topics: the codpiece, the cravate (sic) and jeans.1 The choice is amusing, but as a summary of major movements in dress history it is hardly a balanced selection.

Another reason for the fragmentation of studies related to dress and physical appearance can be traced to the blossoming of many more universities and the need to find new courses and topics to attract students. The discovery that the history of dress was relatively under-taught, and that it could be fitted into a variety of new disguises, propelled it firmly into an arena where lecturers are required to write prolifically in order to gain those much-needed research assessment points. This is not a condemnation of this development; nature abhors a vacuum, and shrewd young academics spotted this particular vacuum and began, with energy and originality, to fill it. Unfortunately it took rather too long for more traditional dress historians to spot this trend and to lobby for their approach to be taken equally seriously.

The words used to describe the study of dress history may also have contributed to the belief that it was an under-developed discipline. The Costume Society of Great Britain intermittently agonizes over whether the word costume is a deterrent to those who perceive clothing, dress and fashion as more inclusive words. However, the name of the society remains the same, and its distinguished history – it celebrates its 40th anniversary in 2005 – is built upon its tradition of fostering all aspects of costume, from antiquity to the present day. It has published extensively, with an annual journal, special papers and occasional conference papers. An early publication was a general bibliography in 1966, revised in 1974. This is still an excellent starting point for any student of the subject if read in conjunction with the articles, book reviews and listings that offer an annual overview of the changing approach to the discipline. In 1974, Costume 8 offered reviews of 11 books and listed 41 recent publications. By 2003, Costume 35 contained 25 book reviews, listed 76 new titles and in a selective list gave titles of 35 articles published in periodicals in 2002. Statistics alone do not mark shifts in approach; the change in publishing practice between 1974 and 2003 is as interesting as the quantity of reading listed. In 1974 most of the books were either produced by commercial publishers or by museums; in 2003 museums and commercial publishers were in the minority. University presses or publishers affiliated to academic institutions are now the principal publishers. In 1973 the late Janet Arnold wrote a book entitled A Handbook of Costume but, by 2001, the changed approach to the discipline is aptly summarized by the title of Diana Crane’s book: Fashion and Its Social Agendas, Class, Gender and Identity in Clothing. Arnold was an admired traditional costume historian; Crane is a sociologist. Both books were well received, but other offerings by some academic authors with new theories have attracted fierce criticism for content and writing skills. Publishers cannot avoid the blame for this, as a reviewer wrote in 2001: ‘Apart from more rigour in their editing, those responsible for commissioning titles and authors should remember that a good academic book is precisely the same as any other good piece of writing: its success depends on its ability to enlighten, entertain and inform’.2 No-one would disagree with this view, but a ‘good piece of writing’ is not easy to achieve: it takes years of effort and practice and, of course, care in the choice of words that are used.

In 1997 in the United Kingdom there was an attempt to reconcile the differing approaches. In conjunction with the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Gallery of English Costume in Manchester, a conference was held. Its theme was ‘Dress in History: Studies and Approaches’, and six papers given at that conference were published in a special edition of Fashion Theory in December 1998 under the rather less explanatory title of ‘Methodology’. Although the content of the published papers is uneven, taken together they offer a snapshot of the differing and divergent agendas of traditional and new dress historians in 1997. This is summarized succinctly in the title of John Styles’ contribution: ‘Dress in History: reflections on a Contested Terrain’. At this time, albeit briefly, it seemed possible that the various schools of thought might grow closer, with more co-operation between museum curators and academics, using their complementary skills, ‘to recognize and embrace the conceptual diversity of current historical scholarship’.3 A wholly admirable sentiment, but unfortunately two of the papers given at Manchester by leading costume curators did not appear in Fashion Theory but in Costume. Whatever the reasons for this, the result emphasized disunity rather than diversity. Last year I spoke to an experienced curator who was collaborating with a couple of academics on an exhibition and a book. One of the academics was the lead consultant and was to edit her work, which made her role seem reduced. I enquired whether this was a two-way street: might she be seconded to the college to teach and offer students her expertise? The answer was no. Such inequality indicates that scholarship acquired with collections is peripheral to a college curriculum, though many students undertake occasional visits to look at museum collections. The idea that academic respectability can only be conferred by a lectureship in a college, in which relevant collections are rarely if ever curated, indicates an odd set of priorities. Fortunately, changes are beginning to occur and these will be referred to later in this book.

Although there are over 100 collections in the United Kingdom, containing varying quantities of dress and textiles, the number of specialist departments is relatively few in number. Frequently such material is curated as applied or decorative arts, or as social history within much larger departments. In the 1970s and 1980s there was a general growth in museum provision in the United Kingdom, and many more displays of dress, some in designated branch museums or galleries, were opened to the public. This halcyon period was relatively short-lived and by the time of the Manchester conference in 1997, there was already a worrying downturn in the funds available for such collections. The balance was shifting against this type of collection and the expertise needed to curate it properly within museums. This left little time for hard-pressed curators ‘to embrace the conceptual diversity’ and use it to realign their work. Little of this was discussed in print: few dress historians have the time or the luxury of being independent enough to collate such evidence. Instead the field seemed even more open to the new approaches developing in universities in Europe and North America.

1. Brocade, French or Italian c. 1745–50

This fragment of brocaded silk has a pattern of roses on a damask ground, edged with silver lace and a lining of pink linen. Although originally acquired as a damaged stomacher, the cuts in the fabric and its curious shape are indicative of previous use on a religious effigy. It was probably acquired, as such pieces often were, as a pleasing flat textile.

2. A group of 18th- and 19th-century women’s dresses

Collectors bought large quantities of dresses such as these in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Once such garments enter a museum they quickly become invisible. Conservation requirements entail decisions about the best storage conditions for individual garments. Some can be hung on padded hangers with supporting tapes to take weight and tissue to prevent creasing. When they are stored like this they are usually covered with Tyvek bags, which are inert and do not attract dust. Other garments, textiles and accessories have to be stored flat in trays, drawers or boxes, interleaved with acid-free tissue and more Tyvek or calico. The possibilities of ‘open storage’, or glass-fronted storage units that enable the curators and researchers to see their collections at a glance, is not an option with light-sensitive and fragile textiles of any sort. This lack of quick and easy access may provide one of many reasons why academic writers on dress find surviving dress incomprehensible or disturbingly like sacred relics, cocooned in mystery.

There is no dress history equivalent to Professor Eric Fernie’s Art History and its Methods, A Critical Anthology, which was first published in 1995 but quickly became a key text for students, reprinting four times in subsequent years.4 This book is of relevance to anyone interested in the history of art; the glossary of concepts gives a balanced and lucid introduction to ideas that have become significant in the last 20 or so years, such as cultural history, discourse analysis and semiotics. The body of the book contains background information and short, well-chosen sections from the texts of authors writing between the mid-1550s and the 1990s. Professor Fernie’s example is unlikely to be followed by a dress historian. The diffuse nature of the subject does not lend itself to a sequence of 20 or so seminal works that would provide a widely accepted academic structure and methodology. This book is not an attempt to emulate Professor Fernie’s approach, and neither is it a conventional history of costume. There are already many of the latter, a number of which will be either discussed in later chapters or listed in the select bibliography.

This book is, however, an introduction to the rich and diverse literature on dress and its history, the knowledge of which has been, and can still be, relevant to anyone wishing to understand the subject. The diversity of the subject is both strength and weakness; it straddled too many disciplines from the outset, much like the Roman Empire, which even at its zenith was in decline: those who had no interest in its traditional history and methods saw its potential, while its exponents concentrated on minutiae and faced the threats to its existence ill prepared. This is a book about how dress history has been studied and an its many histories. Inevitably such an overview will look at extremes within the subject as well as the centre ground with which many dress historians feel most intellectually comfortable. This approach has made a standard chronology impossible. In part this is intentional: few books written in this discipline from about 1990 onwards use a chronological narrative, and the modern reader is used to thematic or modular texts.

The structure of the book allows individual chapters to be read as essays, on a range of themes that are crucial to comprehending the complexity of a subject for which there are multiple definitions. Discovering what dress is, how it has been defined, and how and why it is studied will offer traditional and some modern approaches for the reader to consider. It does, however, emphasize the links with surviving dress, which indicates the significance of material culture to the evolution and continuation of the discipline. Collections of dress and textiles offer more than attractive public displays; they are under-used resources that offer many entry points into the artistic, cultural, economic, political, social and technological trends of which they are part. Within such collections there were established hierarchies, with flat textiles being deemed more significant than textiles made into clothing during early periods of collecting. The arbitrary nature of past collecting poses problems that have to be counterbalanced with other types of evidence, but intelligent use of collections can offer insights into many aspects of the subject that theories alone cannot answer. Learning to look at surviving garments with an informed and critical attitude is an essential aspect of becoming a rounded dress historian.

The chapters on writing about dress and those on collections and how they developed precede three chapters that consider the relationship of dress to a number of areas with which it is associated. The first of these examines two interconnected areas in which the subject is frequently discussed: dress in art and dress as art. Some, if not all, art historians grudgingly accept that a thorough understanding of dress history is useful when dating works of art in which the dress and textiles are notable elements. The status of dress as an adjunct to the arts has changed with the belief in some areas that dress, or more specifically fashion, is an art. In part this reflects the closer links between all art forms in the 20th century, but the recent movement towards displaying the work of contemporary designers in major art galleries and museums has reinforced this idea.

The chapter on uniformity and disguise draws together a number of areas within which regulated or conservative styles of clothing are re-examined and reused as adjuncts to, or as inspiration for, mainstream developments in fashion. The dress, uniforms and occupational garments of the distant, intermediate or near past also provide a resource for a number of activities and enthusiasts. Clothing for re-enactment or living history, both immensely popular movements in Europe and North America, has revitalized research into the fabrics, construction and durability of historic clothing from many different periods. The actual wearing of the clothing of the recent past, not as fancy dress but as vintage elements within a personal wardrobe, contradicts any ideas that old or conservative styles deny modernity.

Costume for performance in theatres and at fairs is closely linked to the work of early historians of dress, collectors and artists, and allows consideration of how the past was represented to many different audiences. Influences between performers and their public were fluid; often the theatre was exploring and offering ideas about reform and personal presentation in advance of the views of its audiences. Throughout these essays there will be allusions to the growing interest in new theories and the impact these have had and are having upon the subject. Drawing these strands together may answer the question: what is the new dress history, and is it complementary to traditional costume history or wholly separate?

There are far too many sources of information for one book to encompass, but a range of these will be introduced within each chapter. In selecting and discussing source material of any type, the intention is to stimulate further discussion; the omission of some sources and the inclusion of others is part of this process. Surveying the entire literature of the discipline is impossible but, for the interested student of the subject and for the general reader, an overview of not just the contemporary complexity of the discipline but its long and respectable history seemed timely. Obviously much of this information can be found in reprints of classic works, both historic and modern, articles and essays in journals, in museum displays and on film but it is rarely drawn together to offer a spectrum ranging from the early work of an antiquary like Randle Holme to the schoolmarmish fashion directives of Susannah Constantine and Trinny Woodall.

The choice of dates for this book is not arbitrary. From around 1660 onwards the trading links between Europe and the rest of the known world became more dynamic, extending far beyond traditional European markets, and the importation of goods for re-export became a feature of economic life. These developments had a distinct and long-term impact on the types of fabrics, styles of dress and goods that could be acquired. In the 1660s the origins of the modern man’s suit can be found, along with the establishment of an almost factory-level approach to portraiture, within which a number of conventions about timelessness and quasi-antique fashions are explored. Female performers appeared for the first time on stage in public theatres in the United Kingdom and women are found within the arts, crafts and in business. Also, and particularly significant to the central purpose of this book, from the mid- to late-17th century onwards there are more surviving examples of dress. The gradual assembling of both information and artefacts by 17th-century collectors, such as the Tradescant family and antiquaries like Randle Holme, shift the origins of the history of dress much further back than the 1830s, a date given by a recent writer on fashion history.5

Some explanation about the illustrations used in this book will be helpful to the reader. As it is thematic in content rather than chronological the illustrations reflect, either directly or ironically, the discussion within each chapter. All of them have been chosen because they can do at least two jobs: offer a commentary on the actual dress or fabric depicted or photographed, and indicate a context or process within which each example can be understood (methods of presentation, textile manufacture, historical allusion and so forth). There are many examples of surviving dress and textiles, and a limited number of painted, printed and photographic material in public or private collections. The emphasis on surviving dress and textiles is wholly intentional, as separately or collectively they demonstrate the relevance of such material to any study of the subject. Wherever possible the choice of black and white or colour reproduction reflects how the original illustration was made. Of course, these illustrations offer only a minute fraction of the possibilities open to the assiduous student, but they were chosen to emphasize that visual evidence and captions can offer a complementary narrative to that in the text of the book.

3. Drawing by Randolph Schwabe, c. 1930; pen and ink on paper

This was used as an illustration in Kelly and Schwabe’s A Short History of Costume and Armour, Volume II 1485–1800. In his text Kelly discussed the length of the coat sleeves, the cap and the shoe buckles but did not give a detailed description of the clothing. A modern dress historian might use this as an example of the unstructured nature of early men’s coats and waistcoats, the excessive use of buttons, and the contrast between the formal wig, the informal ease of Captain Richard Maples’s pose and the casual way in which he is wearing his clothes.

1   Defining dress and some early authors

‘Dry-as-dust fogies’ and ‘leisured pedants…’ Kelly and Schwabe1

As mentioned in the introduction, words present a number of difficulties to readers interested in the clothes of the past. As a student I studied the history of dress, but when I started working in museums I worked in costume departments. Costume history was the generally accepted description of a subject that covered all aspects of display, research and writing about clothing from antiquity to the present. It had a respectable pedigree: authors in America, England, France and Germany had written standard works using the word costume in the title. Carl Kohler and Emma von Sichart’s A History of Costume (1928, but based on Kohler’s work of 1871), J R Planché’s A Cyclopaedia of Costume, volumes 1 and 2 (1876–79), Millia Davenport’s The Book of Costume (1948) and François Boucher’s A History of Costume in the West (1967) indicate the usefulness of the word in English, and in translation, over a period of 100 years. However, over much the same time-span, the terms clothes or clothing, dress and fashion were used, with occasional recourse to mode (in the dictionary defined as ‘a prevailing fashion or custom, practice or style’), which works less well in modern English than it does in French and German. The title of this book Understanding Fashion History may suggest that a word normally associated with a specific period or a development in how clothing is designed, made or distributed is being stretched to cover a past in which fashion, as a term for clothing, was not much used.

This would certainly be the view of the authors of A Crash Course in Fashion published in 2000. In the late 1990s the American publishers Simon & Schuster commissioned a new series of books entitled A Crash Course aimed at busy people who wanted, in amusing, accurate and well-illustrated short books, enough information to bluff their way in subjects such as art, design and opera. A Crash Course in Fashion begins with the career of Charles Worth and its timeline starts in 1850. In the discussion of Worth’s contribution to fashion there is a telling, throwaway line: ‘And if his designs look more like costume history than high fashion…’2 The books on art, design and opera did not pluck an arbitrary date out of thin air, and decide that their topic must start in the 19th century or be considered tedious, but fashion history, as opposed to costume history, began with what the authors describe as ‘fashion’s first designer’, a term wholly alien to Worth and his contemporaries. No explanation is given for discarding all previous centuries into the realm of ‘costume history’, but the book, like many others that appeared from about 1990 onwards, focuses its attention mainly on the post-1850 era.

The end result is pleasing to look at, but erratic as a source of information. There is a let-out clause in the introduction, which admits that, ‘This book is an admittedly partisan attempt to reveal how fashion and the mood of the time fit hand in delicately embroidered kid skin glove and that to ignore the influence of what we wear is to ignore a vital element of 20th-century culture’.3 In essence, the reader is being offered A Crash Course in Modern Fashion, with centuries of achievement consigned to the dustbin of costume history without any attempt to define terms or offer guidance as to why the word fashion should be applied only to the post-1850 period. It must be assumed that neither author had heard of Samuel Pepys’ description of what he called ‘The king’s new fashion’ in 1666, or read any of the extensive modern interpretations of the use of the word in every century from the 16th to the present day.

For many readers of any book in which the word fashion predominates, it will conjure up the idea of supermodels and the fashion weeks around the world when contemporary designers, many of whom were trained at the influential London fashion colleges, show their new designs to the buyers and the press. In an ideal world this book would be called Understanding Clothes or Understanding Dress, but that appears to exclude fashion, all because of this problem with words. By considering the words first it may be possible to discover why some authors prefer the terms clothing, costume, dress or fashion when they write about this subject.

What is dress?

So what is the definition of dress, and why and how is it studied and written about? At the opposite end of the spectrum to the authors of the unashamedly popular Crash Course can be found the publicity description for a series of essays entitled Body Dressing. This states that: ‘Dress is a crucial aspect of embodiment, shaping the self physically and psychologically … [this book] investigates the varied ways in which western and non-western clothes operate to give the body meaning and situate it within culture’.4 What do these words mean and are they easier to understand if a dictionary is consulted? Dictionaries are imperfect and wholly dependent upon receiving input from enthusiasts or specialists in all areas of language, but they offer a useful starting point when defining words. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary tells us that embodiment means, among other things: ‘the action of embodying; embodied state’; ‘the concrete expression of an idea, principle etc.’; or ‘the incarnation of a quality, sentiment etc.’ So, when looking at embody we find: ‘To put into a body’. Do we assume, therefore, that dress expresses ideas and principles or that it is put in – contained – within the body? And when clothes ‘operate’ is this how they produce an effect, exercise influence? And is ‘situate’ the same as place, position? It would be possible to continue this investigation, but the point of this exercise is to emphasize that English is a rich and remarkably flexible language and rendering it opaque rather than clear is a disservice to the reader. To translate the sentence above into everyday English might offer: ‘Dress is a crucial expression of ideas and principles, which shape the individual both physically and mentally … clothes produce effects that give the body meaning and place it within intellectual development’. But are we any closer to a useful definition? This is not a word game, but an attempt to demonstrate that the growing interest in writing about dress from authors familiar with complex linguistic and philosophical theories can be flawed by an unwillingness to write for the widest range of readers.

4. John the Quaker from The Cryes of London Drawne After the Life by Marcellus Laroon, engraved by John Savage and published by Pierce Tempest, 1688–9

Although this type of engraved material would reproduce well in black and white it did not find its way into early costume books because it was not considered an example of fashionable dress. The 74 plates in the series covered a variety of trades and occupations and provide a rare late-17th-century sequence of dated depictions of non-elite styles of London clothing for both men and women.

So, let us assume for the sake of clarity, that dictionary definitions offer a starting point. Such definitions provide a number of interlinking ideas surrounding the word dress: ‘Clothing, especially the visible part of it, costume’. Clothing is described as ‘wearing apparel’ and costume as ‘style, fashion of dress or attire (including way of wearing hair)’. Fashion is defined as ‘prevailing custom, especially in dress’, a route that has brought us full circle back to dress. There is no mention of embodiment, how clothes operate or where they place the clothed body in culture. These are theoretical add-ons, which are not unimportant, but they can be considered in a later chapter. Drawing together the dictionary definitions into a summary could offer this definition: dress is visible clothing, costume or wearing apparel that can imply a style or fashion, which reflects prevailing customs. This is useful because it indicates that clothing has to be visible but does not have to be fashionable. This leaves some outstanding problems: often it is necessary to know what is worn beneath clothing to interpret it correctly, so for the purposes of this book underclothing will not be excluded from the discussion, nor will accessories. The latter are defined in the dictionary as ‘additional, subordinately contributive … things’, which could also be a useful definition for underclothing.

The dictionary is a useful tool when thinking about and discussing dress in all its complexities and manifestations. Today, for instance, a nightgown is something worn in bed; in the 17th century it was an informal garment, in which a person could relax in the daytime or wear among family and friends. The most useful general dictionaries for the student of dress are listed in the bibliography, but all reputable historic and modern dictionaries and specialist glossaries offer guidance to changing meanings. So, having found a plausible, if imperfect, definition of dress and its relationship within the family of terms – clothing, costume, dress and fashion – and having expanded it to include underclothes and accessories, the next step is to consider why we study it, before tackling the related question of how it is studied. The purpose of distinguishing between why and how will become clearer as this section unfolds.

Why is dress studied?

It is no coincidence, given the period covered by this book, that in England some of the most useful early sources are found in the period after 1660. The 17th century in its pre-Civil War phase can appear almost medieval in its concerns, but the last 40 years of the century contain recognizable elements of modernity in architecture, literature, public institutions, social fluidity and in philosophical and scientific thought. The first great museum collection opened to the public, and antiquarian assembling of knowledge and artefacts for both private and public use is a feature of a more analytical, enquiring intelligence. Among an array of authors who offer information about dress – diarists, letter writers, foreign visitors and playwrights – there are five of considerable significance; all are much cited and their work introduces themes that continue throughout subsequent studies of the subject and well into the 20th century.

The five authors are listed here chronologically. John Evelyn (1620–1706) kept diaries from the 1640s onwards, which were published in abridged form in 1904 and in a complete edited edition in 1955. His satirical papers on contemporary fashion were published during his lifetime. His friend, the naval administrator Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) kept detailed diaries between 1660 and 1669, which became available in abridged form in the 1820s and in their complete form in the 1970s. Randle Holme was an antiquarian whose Academy of Armory was published in an incomplete form in 1688. In the same year Gregory King’s Scheme of the income and expense of the several families of England was published. Celia Fiennes (1662–1741) recorded her Journeys, which took place between c. 1682 and c. 1712 but were not published until 1888 (and in a more complete form in 1947). The work of these authors covers a range of professional and personal interests: individual tastes, social comment and criticism in the work of Evelyn and Pepys, with the added dimension of an intelligent woman’s observation of local communities and industries in Celia Fiennes’ case. The antiquarian assembling of factual information about everything from heraldry to dress in Holme’s several volumes is a forerunner of many later studies. King’s economic analysis of the wealth of the nation by social grouping included estimates of how much was spent on clothing and fabrics, a field that has been developed by subsequent generations of economic historians.

Pepys and Evelyn were from different social backgrounds (Pepys was the son of a tailor, Evelyn a gentleman’s son), but their shared interests in science and literature drew them into a friendship that lasted until Pepys’ death in 1703. Evelyn was more critical of fashion than Pepys; the latter was a natural shopper and enjoyed observing and acquiring new clothing. However, it is later generations of historians who have benefited from the publication of these diaries and of Celia Fiennes’s travels. The work of Pepys and Evelyn is well known, but Celia Fiennes’ Journeys provide a useful adjunct to the work of Gregory King, as she recorded industries throughout her travels in most English counties. She watched and described processes such as dyeing, knitting, lace making, spinning and weaving, and described the different regional products – textiles such as baize, serge, tammies, callimancoes, leather and items such as gloves and knitted stockings. She commented on quality: during her 1697 journey she wrote of Canterbury in Kent that it had ‘… good tradeing in the Weaving of Silks: I saw 20 Loomes in one house with severall fine flower’d silks, very good ones’.5 However, in Honiton in Devon in 1698 she recorded that, ‘… they make the fine Bonelace in imitation of the Antwerp and Flanders lace, and indeed I think its as fine, it only will not wash so fine which must be a fault in the thread’.6 Her comments on actual garments are fewer but she observes the special bathing dress worn at spas and the regional mantles of West Country women (red in winter and white in summer).7 This observant accumulation of evidence by a wide spectrum of individuals – intrepid travellers, like Fiennes, foreign visitors, antiquarians and diarists – offers some contemporary information about dress and textiles as both an economic national strength and as indication of social customs.

Randle Holme is the first identifiable English dress historian and his work, and that of other subsequent early dress historians, is discussed in an article by Aileen Ribeiro, ‘Antiquarian Attitudes – Some Early Studies in the History of Dress’ published in 1994.8 She surveyed the emergence of the subject and why it attracted a number of scholars from the late 17th century onwards. Taking Holme as a starting point and noting his considerable influence on later dress historians, she discussed the foundation of the Society of Antiquaries in 1717 as a forum within which the study of antiquities could be debated and, later, offer opportunities for publication of its members’ findings (inventories and other records were a regular element in its journal). At much the same time there was a growing interest in the history of the country, not as a puny adjunct to classical studies but as a means of harnessing national pride. As this process accelerated in the 18th century, the customs and inhabitants of past centuries and the visual evidence that depicted them was applied to history painting. This became a source of inspiration for masquerade costumes and influenced ideas on how best to represent the historical past in the theatre. It also provided information for private collectors of costume. Once Bernard de Montfaucon’s Monuments de la Monarchie françoise was published between 1729 and 1733 there was a natural sense of competition with the French. This included the first serious discussion of medieval French dress. An interest in medievalism, associated in the popular imagination then and now with Horace Walpole’s architectural experiments and early gothic novel, was a characteristic of English antiquarian studies from the second half of the 18th century.

The first serious history of English dress, based loosely on the encyclopaedic model of Montfaucon, was written by Joseph Strutt who, using his training as an artist and engraver, made a lengthy and detailed illustrated study of all sources available to him. This resulted in his monumental works: Compleat View of the Manners, Customs, Arms, Habits etc. of the Inhabitants of England, published in three volumes in 1774, 1775 and 1776; and Compleat View of the Dress and Habits of the People of England, published in 1796 and 1799. Subsequent authors of works on monumental effigies, sculpture, arms and armour and costume acknowledged his pioneering contribution. Throughout the 19th century a number of authors offered important contributions to growing knowledge about the dress of the past and these are mentioned later in the chapter. This outline is intended only to indicate that the subject was of interest less in its own right than as a servant to other preoccupations, not least the finding, collation and publishing of new documentary and visual sources of historical evidence. The great 19th-century dress historian J R Planché – opera librettist, playwright, herald and man of letters – acknowledged his debt to Strutt and others, but also acknowledged the substantial work that others were undertaking in France and Germany. Planché’s first History of British Costume appeared in 1834 but his masterwork appeared towards the end of his life. The two-volume A Cyclopaedia of Costume (1876 and 1879) appeared at much the same time as the works of a younger German dress historian, Carl Kohler.

5. Drawing by Randolph Schwabe, c. 1930; pen and ink on paper

The caption in Kelly and Schwabe’s book omitted the details at the bottom of the drawing: ‘Isabella (Sherburne?) Gt. Mitton Yorks, Crossley pl. 6931’. This refers to Frederick Crossley’s English Church Monuments of 1921. Kelly uses the illustration to discuss loose kerchiefs and hoods but said nothing else about the dress depicted. The tradition of using drawings or re-drawings rather than photographs is found in many early costume histories. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, if the artist was as skilful as Schwabe, they proved a better alternative to the more usual blurred black and white photographs.