Bide Bethan, Halbert J., Tregenza L. (eds.) Everyday Fashion: Interpreting British Clothing Since 1600

Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2024. — 361 p. — ISBN 978-1-3502-3245-7.Ordinary clothes have extraordinary stories. In contrast to academic and curatorial focus on the spectacular and the luxurious, Everyday Fashion makes the case that your grandmother’s wardrobe is an archive as interesting and important as any museum store. From the moment we wake and get dressed in the morning until we get undressed again in the evening, fashion is a central medium through which we experience the world and negotiate our place within it. Because of this, the ways that supposedly ‘ordinary’ and ‘everyday’ fashion objects have been designed, manufactured, worn, cared for, and remembered matters deeply to our historical understanding.Beginning at 1550 – the start of an era during which the word ‘fashion’ came to mean stylistic change rather than the act of making – each chapter explores the definition of everyday fashion and how this has changed over time, demonstrating innovative methodologies for researching the everyday. The variety and significance of everyday fashion cultures are further highlighted by a series of illustrated object biographies written by Britain’s leading fashion curators, showcasing the rich diversity of everyday fashion in British museum collections. Collectively, this volume scratches below the glossy surface of fashion to expose the mechanics of fashion business, the hidden world of the workroom and the diversity and role of makers; and the experiences of consuming, wearing, and caring for ordinary clothes in the United Kingdom from the 16th century to the present day. In doing so it challenges readers to rethink how fashion systems evolve and to reassess the boundaries between fashion and dress scholarship.Introduction: Negotiating the everyday
Counterfeit fashion: An eighteenth-century printed silk handkerchief
Approaches to the Study of Everyday Fashion
Whalebone and fashion in seventeenth-century England: Changing consumer culture, trade and innovation
Sophie Rabin’s blouse
‘In want of a capable woman’: Rediscovering blouse designers in the wholesale, ready-made trade in Britain through material culture (1909–20)
Wartime swimwear
Fading from view: Using postcard photographs to reveal the market for female workwear during the First World War
Rosetta Rowley’s wedding suit, 1952
Making clothes for the older woman: Post-war pattern cutting and dressmaking home instruction in Britain
A printed summer dress, c.1930–32
Oral history and everyday fashion
Bryan’s shoes
A pocket history: Interpreting wearer biography in the Francis Golding collection
Aprons
Learning through wear: Experiencing the everyday vintage wardrobe
Everyday Fashion in Practice
The fabled Chintz: Global entanglement and South Asian agency in everyday British fashion, 1600–1800
Henry Wardell’s flannel waistcoat
The everyday in eighteenth-century women’s sartorial life-writing
An open robe gown
Accidental remainders: Working men’s fashion c.1730–1880 in National Museums Scotland
A Victorian best-day wedding dress
‘Fustian jackets, unshorn chins, blistered hands’: Fabric and political feeling in the Chartist Movement, 1837–48
Dr Fairweather’s ‘Apterna’ progressive shoes
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
Tailor’s drawing book, 1915
I am an ordinary man: Getting and wearing suits in Britain, 1945–80
Two-piece skirt suit by Alexon Youngset,designed by Alannah Tandy c.1970–3
À la mode in Maesteg: The fashion cultures of South Wales garment factories, 1945–65
WVS uniform dress
Wholesaling and everyday fashion in the Black Country
An old pair of jeans
To dance in my shoes: Music and the psychological influences of style choices in the London Caribbean diaspora, from Lovers’ Rock to Grime
The Tootal paisley scarf
Conclusion: Common threads