Material Culture, Dress and Fashion History
I’m excited to finally share that I’ve signed a contract with Bloomsbury Visual Arts (an imprint of Bloomsbury Academic) for my next book, The Women Who Clothed the Stuart Queens: Gender and Work in the Royal Wardrobe and the Fashion Marketplace The book examines the lives and changing work of the women who made, sold,… Continue reading Second Book Announcement: The Women Who Clothed the Stuart Queens
Quilted petticoats in England and America are usually attributed to and discussed in the context of the eighteenth century. This is likely due to the fact that all the earliest surviving quilted petticoats (to my knowledge) date from this period. Quilted Petticoat, c. 1740-60 (made), 1870-1910 (altered), British. Victoria and Albert Museum, T.430-1967. I am… Continue reading Quilted Petticoats in the Seventeenth Century
In the sixteenth century headwear mattered. Not only was headwear practical and sheltered the wearer from the elements such as the sun, rain or wind, but these garments also participated in a complex social system of etiquette that defined displays of status, power and masculinity. The most common style of hat worn by men during… Continue reading Hats, Headwear and Masculinity in Sixteenth-Century Europe
The first half of the sixteenth century was a period dominated by repeated conflicts in Europe. The immense amounts of practical and ceremonial arms and armour that these conflicts required fuelled this so-called golden age of armour production seen in key centres of production such as Milan, Augsburg, and Tyrol. During these times of occupation,… Continue reading Fortuna and virtù: Embodying Classical Concepts in Renaissance Armour
Shaping Femininity's book launch was held online on 4 November 2021. Chair: Rebecca Unsworth (Birmingham Museums Trust) Discussants: Hilary Davidson (University of Sydney / La Trobe) and Erin Griffey (University of Auckland) To watch the whole launch see the video below: https://youtu.be/JE5Z0BLKHnU
To celebrate the upcoming release of Shaping Femininity I've decided the post the pattern that I made of the garment when I examined it in 2017. A pattern for this garment has since been published by the School of Historical Dress in 2018's Patterns of Fashion 5. The School's pattern is much more detailed than… Continue reading Sittingbourne Bodies Pattern, c. 1630-50
The waistcoat is by far one of the most common pieces of clothing I have come across in the records of seventeenth-century women. While women did wear gowns during this period, if we look across the social spectrum we can see that waistcoats and petticoats were by far the most common garments that were worn… Continue reading Seventeenth-Century Waistcoats for Women: Jacobean Fashions
In 2018 I spent two months in the UK going through records relating to tailors, body-makers, and farthingale-makers at the Bodleian Library in Oxford and the Drapers' and Clothworker' Companies in London. While doing my archival research at the Drapers' Company hall, I mentioned to the archivist Penny that the unusual name of a… Continue reading The Life and Times of Theophilus Riley: Citizen, Civil War Conspirator and Body-maker.
Very excited to announce that my book Shaping Femininity has a cover image and pre-order links! See below for details! About Shaping Femininity In sixteenth and seventeenth-century England, the female silhouette underwent a dramatic change. This very structured form, created using garments called bodies and farthingales, existed in various extremes in Western Europe and beyond,… Continue reading Shaping Femininity Book Cover and Pre-order!
The 1680s was a decade of change in women's fashion. The new loose-fitting mantua gown vied for popularity with traditional gowns that contained structured bodices (a battle that the new style would win in later decades) and bodies slowly began to be called stays during this decade. One of the best written sources we have… Continue reading Randle Holme’s The Academy of Armory (1688) and late Seventeenth-century Women’s Dress Terminology