LAMAS 58th Local History Conference, 2024, Fashion, Clothing, and Textiles in London History

Speakers

Advertising Corsets: Dress Advertisements in the Late Nineteenth-Century Feminist Periodical the Women’s Penny Paper / Woman’s Herald, 27 Oct. 1888– 23 Apr. 1892 (Artemis Alexiou)

Baumeister and Leary (1995) argue that ‘human beings are fundamentally and pervasively motivated by a need to belong’. Halse (2018) explains that the term ‘belonging’ could be defined as ‘to belong or to possess or own something’, or be defined as ‘belongingness, denoting that one belongs to and is a member of a particular social group, solidarity, collectivity or organisation’. During the late 19th century, women activists utilized various communication media for the purposes of their diverse campaigns. Feminist periodicals, in particular, are understood to be the medium that allowed them to extent their ideas to different female readers, allowing women activists to construct organized groups to which they could belong to. This paper focuses on the most popular advertisements found in the Women’s Penny Paper/Woman’s Herald – a general feminist periodical printed and published weekly by the Women’s Printing Society, with Henrietta Müller as its sole proprietor and editor. It discusses advertisements promoting products related to women’s dress (namely corsets), examining the various concepts of womanhood that existed during this period. The paper argues that the advertisements in the Paper/Herald presented consumerist ideas of belonging, which sometimes were, and other times were not, at odds with the feminist ideas of belonging projected through the main content, revealing an intricate combination of messages communicated through women’s clothing.

Dr Artemis Alexiou has taught historical, critical and contextual design studies at Manchester Metropolitan University and other UK HEIs since 2013. She holds an AHRC-funded PhD in design, media and women’s history by the Manchester Institute for Research and Innovation in Art & Design. Her research concentrates on late-nineteenth-century feminist periodicals, especially to the manner in which their design, visual and material features co-functioned in relation to gender politics, and other intersecting concepts such as class and ethnicity. Her most recent publication is entitled Women in Print I: Design and Identities (Alexiou and Roberto, 2022).

Vinted in London (Liz Tregenza) This paper focuses on Londoner’s experiences of and attitudes towards secondhand clothing, and particularly their use of the re-sale app Vinted from both a buyers and sellers perspective. Vinted was founded in Lithuania in 2008, first arriving in the UK in 2014, however it did not reach widespread popularity in the UK until 2021. We have chosen to focus on Vinted specifically owing to its popularity. It has around a 40% share of the secondhand market in Europe. Globally there are around 75 million registered users in 18 countries, most of them women aged between 18 and 39. In August 2023 Vinted was the most downloaded fashion or beauty app in the UK, with over 800,000 monthly downloads. The current trends towards Vinted however must be seen as a part of London’s much longer history as a centre of the secondhand clothing trade. This paper will touch upon some of these key moments that have made London’s connections to the secondhand trade unique, demonstrating how secondhand clothing has been economically important in London and illustrative of wider social and cultural changes. Overall, our wider project seeks to explore the impact of Vinted on the wardrobes of Londoners: considering their spending habits, style, and attitude towards clothing, understanding the motivations of both sellers and buyers. This research is an early stage which hopes to reshape the way secondhand stories are being studied by students and recorded in the Museum of London collection.

Dr Liz Tregenza is a Lecturer in Cultural & Historical Studies at London College of Fashion. Liz’s research interests focus primarily on 20th and 21st century fashion and business history and contemporary design thinking in the digital sphere. Liz’s monograph Wholesale Couture: London and Beyond 1930-1970, was published with Bloomsbury in 2023. Her edited collection (co-edited with Bethan Bide and Jade Halbert), Everyday Fashion: Interpreting British Clothing Since 1600, was also published with Bloomsbury in 2023.

Selling British Fashion: The Rise and Fall of The British Model House (Hannah Wroe)

Opening in January 1926, the British Model House (BMH) went into liquidation only months later, reportedly for failing to meet building regulations. Few records exist of this ambitious fashion venture, but it was groundbreaking for its time. Funded by a conglomerate of Yorkshire textile mills and coordinated by the Bradford Chamber of Commerce, the BMH aimed to establish London as a fashion centre. Following the Empire Exhibition (1924), northern textile industrialists came together behind Jewish fashion designer Leslie Raymond to promote and produce British-made fashion from premises on the newly rebuilt Regent Street. Controversially, the BMH sold directly to the public, retailers, and wholesalers, gaining global media attention. The BMH was more than a trade initiative; it ideologically challenged how and where British fashion was produced, manufactured, and promoted. This paper will explore the motivations and context of the 1920s to produce British-made fashion amidst a fashion landscape dominated by Paris, and the significance of London geographies. The history of the BMH offers new understandings of British-made fashion and the role of Bradford textile manufacturers in establishing London as a fashion capital and British textiles as nationally and internationally significant. It also illuminates the significant contribution of Jewish immigrant populations, beyond tailoring, to developing the look of British fashion, and the anti-Semitic attitudes they faced. Despite its rapid failure, the ideals of the BMH were referenced into the following decade, making this micro-business history an important case study for the legacy of manufacturing and marketing British fashion.

Hannah Wroe is a Senior Lecturer in contextual studies at the University of Lincoln. Originally trained in made-to-measure womenswear, Hannah’s research explores the making, production, and education of bespoke dressmaking practices in both domestic and couture settings. Her research recovers lost, hidden, or overlooked contributors to the development of early to mid-twentieth century pattern cutting and couture fashion practices. Current research includes the British couture house Isobel London & Harrogate (1914-1955), historical needlework and pattern cutting texts, alongside remaking practices and object-based approaches to dress history research. Hannah served as a trustee of The Costume Society between 2019-2022.

The Uncovering Dressmakers Project (Sage Foley and Steph Haire)

Before the advent of the celebrity couturiers and fashion designers of the twentieth century, well-to-do women’s clothing was made bespoke for them by individual dressmakers. The names of these – mostly female – makers are now largely forgotten and under-represented in museum collections. This presentation will begin by exploring the reasons why the biographical information and garments linked to these makers have not always survived, considering the gendered history of textile-making, the historiography of museum collecting, and the fragility of garments. We will illustrate the need for a centralized database of makers pulling together the objects and information held by various organisations and collections. An accessible database is in the early stages of development, focusing on London dressmakers but in future expanding to encompass more geographical areas and represent the global connections created and exploited by the textile industries. It will feature object and ephemera timelines linked to individual makers to visually illustrate the details of the careers of dressmakers previously lost to history. Users will be able to chart an evolution of style and the birth of a fashion system with the individual contributions and personal flourishes of each dressmaker. This presentation will use examples of the work of nineteenth-century London-based dressmakers represented in both the Cosprop and V&A collections, such as Madame Elise, to illustrate how the database can we utilised. By linking objects in our collections and combining our research, we demonstrate the rich insights and new narratives that can emerge about these unknown dressmakers.

Sage Foley is the Assistant Curator of the John Bright Collection at Cosprop. She has a master’s degree in Dress and Textile Histories and brings an interdisciplinary perspective from her background in film and theatre costumes. Her work focusses on historical reproduction and the role of the maker.

Steph Haire is a Project Documentation Officer at the V&A, currently working on a project to make the museum’s collection more accessible. She has a master’s degree in Dress and Textile Histories, and her research interests include nineteenth-century textiles, dress reform, and female artisans.

A History of textiles in the London Borough of Newham (Laura Wilson)

A talk on my recent research as a V&A Fellow around the rich history of textiles in East London, with a particular focus on the clothes which woman would have worn in the manufacturing industries in the twentieth century for example: soap-makers, flour mills, oil storage, dye works, timber yards, munitions factories and the sugar-refiner Tate & Lyle. My particular interest is around the social and political history of workwear and the fabric used to construct it, to learn how it is made. I’m interested in how the cloth worn in the workplace draws attention to the increasing pace of mechanical production and often invisible, outsourced labour of today’s new technologies and unsustainable production of fabrics for fast fashion as well as the relationship between woman’s work and labour. This research follows my recent artwork exploring themes around craftwork, labour, embodied knowledge and how the body learns, adapts, responds and performs manual work.

Laura Wilson was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland and lives and works in London. She is interested in how history is carried and evolved through everyday materials, trades and craftsmanship. She works with specialists to develop sculptural and performative works that amplify the relationship between materiality, memory and tacit knowledge. Her interdisciplinary and research-based works have been exhibited at CCA Derry~Londonderry; Istanbul Design Biennial; V&A; British Museum; SPACE; RIBA; Delfina Foundation; Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery; Whitstable Biennial; Camden Arts Centre; Turner Contemporary. Wilson is a Fellow at the V&A Museum (2024-25), a Churchill Fellow (2011) and was awarded the Dover Prize 2021.

Selling Mid-Twentieth Century London Couture: ‘Mattli of Mayfair’ (Caroline Ness)

Today’s designer fashion houses have Facebook pages, blogs, twitter feeds, Instagram accounts and TikTok videos amongst their self-publicity arsenal as well as courting the traditional spaces of fashion journalism. Mid-twentieth century London couturiers relied upon attracting journalists through their smart Mayfair doors by personal invitation to their shows, creating what they hoped were outstanding designs and by grouping together to promote their businesses on the world stage. This took place in an increasingly competitive market that was producing good quality, affordable and accessible ready-to-wear clothing designs. London’s Incorporated Society of Fashion Designers, including Norman Hartnell and Hardy Amies, collaborated with British textile manufacturers, appeared in Pathé news reels and designed costumes for British films as part of their self or group promotion. Swiss-born, Parisian trained Mayfair couturier Jo Mattli did all this and more, courting publicity for his couture house in a variety of ways. If the internet had been around in 1954 he would have been the first to Instagram, ‘X’ and TikTok. Limited by the technology available to him, and having tried film and television, Mattli took another look at newspaper journalism but, unusually for a Mayfair couturier, this time as the author. Between 1954 and 1960 Mattli wrote a regular column for Reynolds News as ‘Mattli of Mayfair’. How this came about, the content of the columns, the connection with Manchester, and what he was attempting to convey and sell through them will be analysed. This surprising diversion from his haute couture work is seen in the context of his business diversifications and collaborations with his peers in London couture.

Dr Caroline Ness began researching the London couturier Jo Mattli for her MA at the Textile Conservation Centre Winchester in 2008. Further research into the contribution of the couturier to British fashion and textiles mid-twentieth century, formed the main theme of her PhD thesis with which she graduated from the University of Glasgow in 2014. An independent scholar and researcher, Caroline works as a consultant in museum collections management and curatorial research. She has worked for, and undertaken projects with, the curatorial team at the Fashion Museum Bath, worked on identifying and cataloguing private collections and is writing a book on Mattli and London couture. Caroline is Chairman of her local history group, Hungerford Historical Association.

‘The New Chintz Tradition’, modernity in floral textile design in London in the 1960s (Keren Protheroe)

By the mid-20th century, printed furnishing cottons had long offered a decorative and practical choice for chair covers and curtains in everyday English domestic interiors. Floral designs were a mainstay of British manufacturing, and commentary in the popular press and pictorial advertising highlighted the diversity of modern and traditional ‘chintzes and cretonnes’, emphasising their versatility and affordability with price options at all levels of the market. This paper introduces the British Cotton Board’s initiatives from 1960 to promote British-made cotton furnishing textiles, buoyed by the talent of a new generation of designers nurtured in the post-war, enlightened, technical education system. Beginning with the “The New Chintz Tradition” exhibition (1960), it discusses the work of freelance designers who were graduates of London art schools, notably the RCA and Central School. It considers the influence of key individuals selling modern floral work to London manufacturers and retailers, including Liberty of Regent Street and Arthur Sanderson & Sons.  Given a freelancers’ prerogative to design across markets (fashion and furnishing), this paper will also consider how and when ‘fashionability’ joined ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ as popular marketing constructs in the promotion of floral furnishing textiles. Surviving furnishings, manufacturer’s samples, magazine editorial, and evidence from designer’s personal archives, are evidenced to show how printed floral fabrics were designed, promoted and used as a modern choice for furnishing and upholstery in the 1960s.

Dr Keren Protheroe is an independent researcher who has worked in the museums and archives sector for 20 years, she was previously the Archivist at Liberty London, and Sanderson. Her interests include histories of British textiles from designer’s sketch to family heirloom. She has worked on exhibition and research projects in England (MoDA, V&A) and Scotland (University of Edinburgh). She has a special interest in histories of home, textile technologies, and everyday modernism in Britain.