20th April 2023 Trinity House, The Newarke, De Montfort University, Leicester, LE2 7BY
Fashion and textiles capture narratives of people’s lives to form a material ‘archive of our intimate existence. Through objects, we can trace biographies and the often-complex stories of human lived experiences. Arjun Appadurai’s formulation of “the social life of things” (1986) established that objects themselves have lives and afterlives of their own; but objects – perhaps especially clothing – can also reveal the lived experiences of their human makers, owners, and wearers. Objects not only have biographies, but they can tell the biographies of people who are otherwise silent in the archival record. While guild records and written accounts tell stories of a white, straight, cis, and patriarchal past, objects themselves can reveal diverse stories from muted voices. Where pens are silent, garments speak.
From sweat stains and blood splatters to the carefully constructed records of a sartorial life, garments tell the emotional, visceral, and corporeal stories of human life. Yet the biographical power of objects stretches beyond the historical record and encourages consumers to reimagine their own sartorial biographies. The activism of the slow fashion movement attempts to recover the intimacy between clothing and wearer. This is a conceptual celebration of human use-value, leading to sustainable consumption, circular economies, and integrated communities of makers, activists, and consumers.
This one-day symposium offers a forum for cross and inter-disciplinary dialogues exploring creative material methods and innovative approaches to revealing biography through objects in the field of fashion and textiles. We welcome papers that explore narratives from the margins of fashion and textiles, and reveal lived experiences that have been fragmented, forgotten, silenced or just never recorded in written record.
STITCHES THAT SPEAK: BIOGRAPHY THROUGH OBJECTS
Symposium in Fashion, Dress and Textiles Programme Schedule
20th April 2023
Trinity House, The Newarke, De Montfort University, Leicester, LE2 7BY
9.30-10.00am – Registration and Coffee
10.00-10.15 – Welcome
10.15-11.15am – Keynote paper – Dr Bethan Bide, University of Leeds and Dr Lucie Whitmore, Museum of London
Fashion City: How Jewish Londoners Shaped Global Style – Foregrounding Jewish Experiences in a fashion exhibition
11.15-12.30 – Panel 1: Panel Chair Ruth Jindal
Professor Amanda Briggs-Goode, Dr Gail Baxter and Jayne Childs, Nottingham Trent University
Lace: Hand/machine/home-made objects of production
Dr Liza Foley, Independent Scholar
Animals in Artefacts: Uncovering the Non-Human Lives of Gloves
Ruth Singer, artist, writer and arts and heritage producer
Emotional Repair: personal stories in cloth and stitch
12.30-1.30pm – Lunch
1.30-3.00pm – Panel 2: Panel Chair Dr Rachel Neal
Vanessa Jones, Leeds Museum and Galleries
The clothing of Barbara Priestman: Redefining eighteenth-century sartorial narratives within the museum
Hannah Wroe, University of Lincoln
“The Cape of Hope”: Placing material culture within the archival investigation of interwar British couture house Isobel London & Harrogate Ltd
Veronica Isaac, University of Brighton
Dressing the Part: Ellen Terry (1847-1928)
Melangell Penrhys, Textile Conservator & Derw Thomas, Senior Collections and House Officer, Berrington Hall, National Trust.
Material Memories in Ann Harley’s court mantua
3.00-3.30pm – Coffee Break
3.30pm-4.45pm – Panel 3: Panel Chair Dr Serena Dyer
Diya Wang, De Montfort University, Leicester
The Interpretation of Oriental Collections in Western Museums: a late Qing Dynasty/early Republic Chinese underwear garment mistaken for outerwear
Chelsea Newton Mountney, Worthing Museum Dress Archive
Remaking the 1960s: Homemade Clothing in Britain, 1965-1970
Abigail Jubb, University of York
Altering Fashion: Biographies of Consumer Experience Through the Fitting Alterations of Extant Garment Sizing circa 1870-1930
4.45-5.00pm – Closing remarks