The New Dress Detective

The New Dress Detective updates and expands this highly regarded practical guide to analysing fashion objects.
Featuring seven completely new case studies - including an 18th-century gown, a man's 19th-century tailored jacket and pantaloons, a 19th-century boy's frock, a woman's Edo period uchikake, a 1927 homemade wedding dress, a Dior dress ensemble, and a mass-manufactured uniform of the 1970s - this invaluable guide has been revised throughout, to enhance its usefulness for readers and to reflect the state of the field.
The New Dress Detective offers tools to unravel the hidden stories in garments with a carefully developed research methodology specific to dress, with easy-to-use checklists to guide the reader through the process.
Beautifully illustrated, the varied case studies of fashionable western and non-western garments articulate the methodological framework for the process, illustrate the use of the checklists, and show how evidence from the garment itself can be used to corroborate theories of dress or to engage in alternative modes of interpretation such as making, wearing or other creative outputs.
Written in plain language, this book provides a structured approach to conducting object-based research in fashion for anyone interested in fashion including students and practitioners of fashion or museum studies.

Ingrid E. Mida is an art and dress historian with a PhD in Art History and Visual Culture and the author of The Dress Detective (Bloomsbury, 2015), Reading Fashion in Art (Bloomsbury, 2020), and Dressing & Undressing Duchamp (Bloomsbury, 2022). She is a Research Fellow at the Modern Literature and Culture Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada. Ingrid has acted as a consultant to museums and private collectors in helping date and interpret photographs, artworks, and dress artifacts and has lectured in universities and museums in North America, Europe, and the UK.

Foreword by Alexandra Kim
Acknowledgments
An Introduction to Object-based Research in Fashion
Chapter 1 How to Read an Object of Dress
Chapter 2 Observation
Chapter 3 Reflection
Chapter 4 Interpretation
Chapter 5 The Biography of an Object: An Eighteenth-century Spitalfields Silk Gown
Chapter 6 Fashion & The Dandy: A Man's Tailcoat and Pantaloons, circa 1820s
Chapter 7 Fashion & Gender: A Boy's Frock, circa 1855
Chapter 8 Creative Practice: A 1927 Wedding Dress
Chapter 9 Fashion & Glamour: A Dress Ensemble, Christian Dior Paris, Autumn-Winter 1958
Chapter 10 Fashion & Identity: A 1976 CN Tower Uniform
Chapter 11 The Language of the Kimono: An Edo-period Kimono (Uchikake)
Appendix 1
Appendix 2
Index