Disseminating dress: Britain's fashion networks, 1600-1970

Abstract

"Fashion travels. Every new shape of sleeve, each novel method of cutting and any innovation in fabric has spread through complex networks of makers, retailers and consumers. Disseminating Dress represents the first historical study of how these networks of fashion communication functioned and evolved in an increasingly global material world. Focusing on Britain - separated from mainland Europe, yet increasingly globally-linked - this volume will trace how dress was disseminated in and out of one island nation. The paths made by print, image and commodities around the globe have enabled historians to reimagine a connected material world. The influence of innovations in dissemination shape this volume, which asks urgent questions about the extent of global influence on fashion, and the intertwining nature of written, printed, visual and material fashion news. This collection brings together innovative scholarship from an interdisciplinary group of historians, art historians and fashion scholars to consider how global and local networks of dress dissemination converged to shape fashionable dress in Britain, and how British methods and aesthetics spread outwards across the world. From the drawing rooms of 19th-century London, to the verandas of 19th-century Australia, contributors to Disseminating Dress develop narratives of commodity and knowledge exchange to consider how fashion circulated."-- Page 4 of cover.

Contents

1. Introduction: Fashion Travels / Serena Dyer, Jade Halbert, and Sophie Littlewood -- Part I: Modes of Dissemination. 2. Dolled Up: The Material Dissemination of Dress in Early Modern Europe / Sophie Pitman ; 3. A Shared World of Words? The Circulation and Dissemination of Clothing Descriptions in Eighteenth-Century England / Elizabeth Spencer ; 4. Fashions of the Day: Materiality, Temporality and the Fashion Plate, 1750-1879 / Serena Dyer ; 5. The Talking Page: Dress Dissemination in the Writings of Jane Austen / Hilary Davidson ; 6. Global Fashion Networks: The Design and Circulation of British Printed Textiles for Export to West Africa, c.1850-1914 / Josephine Tierney ; 7. Propaganda, Patriotism and Rivalry: How the Interests of the Trade Press Shaped British Fashion Following the Second World War / Bethan Bide ; 8. Location, London: Promoting British Ready-to-Wear 1959-1966 / Liz Tregenza -- Part II: Dissemination in Practice. 9. Making Doublets and Disseminating Fashions in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries / Rebecca Unsworth ; 10. Lady Charlotte Campbell and Fashionable Neoclassicism / Amelia Rauser ; 11. Sent to the Other Side of the World? The Fashion for Shetland Fine Lace Knitting in 1920s Australia / Roslyn Chapman ; 12. Reporting Royal Dress: Queen Alexandra and Royal Image Making / Kate Strasdin ; 13. Birmingham’s Twentieth-Century Clothing Wholesale Trade and the Dissemination of Mass Fashion in and the Black Country / Jenny Gilbert -- 14. Conclusion / Serena Dyer, Jade Halbert, and Sophie Littlewood.