Everyday Fashion

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.

Bethan Bide is Lecturer in Design and Cultural Theory at the University of Leeds. She is a design historian with a particular interest in fashion cities, the production and consumption of ready-to-wear clothing, and the role of fashion in museums. Bethan previously worked as a producer of comedy programmes for BBC Radio 4.
Jade Halbert is Lecturer in Design Studies at the University of Leeds, UK. She is a historian of the fashion industry and has published on black economies, cultural economies of knitting, and the treatment of dressmakers in the 19th century. She was an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker in 2019.
Liz Tregenza is a fashion and business historian. She is currently a lecturer at London College of Fashion and a Business of Fashion, Textiles and Technology Research Fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum, UK. Liz also runs her own vintage business and has written two books on vintage fashion.

List of Figures
List of Tables
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction: Negotiating the Everyday
Bethan Bide, Jade Halbert and Liz Tregenza
2. Counterfeit Fashion: An Eighteenth-Century Printed Silk Handkerchief
John Styles
Part I: Approaches to the Study of Everyday Fashion
3. Whalebone and Fashion in Seventeenth Century England: Changing Consumer Culture, Trade and Innovation
Sarah Bendall
4. Sophie Rabin's Blouse
Lucie Whitmore
5. 'In Want of a Capable Woman': Rediscovering Blouse Designers in the Wholesale, Ready-Made Trade in Britain Through Material Culture (1909-1920)
Suzanne Rowland
6. Wartime Swimwear
Ciara Phipps
7. Fading From View: Using Postcard Photographs to Reveal the Market for Female Workwear During the First World War
Jenny Richardson
8. Rosetta Rowley's Wedding Suit, 1952
Natalie Raw
9. Making Clothes for the Older Woman: Post-War Pattern Cutting and Dressmaking Home Instruction in Britain
Hannah Wroe
10. A Printed Summer Dress, c.1930-32
Pauline Rushton
11. Oral History and Everyday Fashion
Jade Halbert
12. Bryan's Shoes
Beatrice Behlen
13. A Pocket History: Interpreting Wearer Biography in the Francis Golding Collection
Cyana Madsen
14. Aprons
Lou Taylor
15. Learning Through Wear: Experiencing the Everyday Vintage Wardrobe
Liz Tregenza
Part II: Everyday Fashion in Practice
16. The Fabled Chintz: Global Entanglement and South Asian Agency in Everyday British Fashion, 1600-1800
Aditi Khare
17. Henry Wardell's Flannel Waistcoat
Hilary Davidson
18. The Everyday in Eighteenth-Century Women's Sartorial Life-Writing
Serena Dyer
19. An Open Robe Gown
Vanessa Jones
20. Accidental Remainders: Working Men's Fashion c.1730-1880 in National Museums Scotland
Emily Taylor
21. A Victorian Best-Day Wedding Dress
Rebecca Quinton
22. 'Fustian Jackets, Unshorn Chins, Blistered Hands': Fabric and Political Feeling in the Chartist Movement, 1837-1848
Vic Clarke
23. Dr Fairweather's 'Apterna' Progressive Shoes
Ruth Battersby Tooke
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
25. Tailor's Drawing Book, 1915
Elen Phillips
26. I Am an Ordinary Man: Getting and Wearing Suits in Britain 1945-1980
Danielle Sprecher
27. Two-Piece Skirt Suit; Alexon Youngset by Alannah Tandy c.1970-1973
Shelley Tobin
28. À la Mode in Maesteg: The Fashion Cultures of South Wales Garment Factories, 1945-1965
Bethan Bide
29. WVS Uniform Dress
Valerie Wilson
30. Wholesaling and Everyday Fashion in the Black Country
Jenny Gilbert
31. An Old Pair of Jeans
Rebecca Unsworth
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
33. A Tootal Paisley Scarf
Christopher Breward
34. Conclusion: Common Threads
Bethan Bide, Jade Halbert and Liz Tregenza
Index