The Englishness of English Dress

The Englishness of English Dress

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The Englishness of English Dress

Edited by Christopher Breward, Becky Conekin and Caroline Cox

Oxford • New York

First published in 2002 by Berg Editorial offices: 150 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JJ, UK 838 Broadway, Third Floor, New York, NY 10003-4812, USA

© Christopher Breward, Becky Conekin and Caroline Cox 2002

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of Berg.

Berg is an imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Englishness of English dress / edited by Christopher Breward, Becky Conekin, and Caroline Cox. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-85973-523-1 (cloth) -- ISBN 1-85973-528-2 (paper) 1. Costume--England--History. 2. Costume--Social aspects--England. I. Breward, Christopher, 1965- II. Conekin, Becky. III. Cox, Caroline. GT733 .E64 2001 391'.00942--dc21 2001005947

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 1 85973 523 1 (Cloth) ISBN 1 85973 528 2 (Paper)

Typeset by JS Typesetting, Wellingborough, Northants. Printed in the United Kingdom by Biddles Ltd, Guildford and King’s Lynn.

Contents Acknowledgements

vii

Notes on Contributors

ix

Illustrations

xiii

Introduction: ‘Dyed in the Wool English?’ Christopher Breward, Becky Conekin and Caroline Cox

1

Part I: Towards a History of English Style 1

2

3

4

On Englishness in Dress Aileen Ribeiro

15

Englishness, Clothes and Little Things Carolyn Steedman

29

Dressing like a Champion: Women’s Tennis Wear in Interwar England Catherine Horwood

45

Strawberries and Cream: Dress, Migration and the Quintessence of Englishness Carol Tulloch

61

Part II: On Designing Englishness 5

6

‘What a Deal of Work there is in a Dress!’: Englishness and Home Dressmaking in the Age of the Sewing Machine Barbara Burman

79

Rural Working-Class Dress, 1850–1900: A Peculiarly English Tradition? Rachel Worth

97

–v–

Contents 7

8

9

The Wardrobe of Mrs Leonard Messel, 1895–1920 Lou Taylor

113

The Spirit of English Style: Hardy Amies, Royal Dressmaker and International Businessman Edwina Ehrman

133

Gilded Brocade Gowns and Impeccable Tailored Tweeds: Victor Stiebel (1907–76) a Quintessentially English Designer Amy de la Haye

147

Part III: Representing Englishness 10

11

12

Vivienne Westwood’s Anglomania Rebecca Arnold

161

English-style Photography? Penny Martin

173

Fashion Stranger than Fiction: Shelley Fox Caroline Evans

189

Appendix: The Korner Archive Bronwen Edwards and Clare Lomas

213

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Acknowledgements The editors are grateful to the Pasold Research Fund, the Design History Society Small Event Award, Marks & Spencer PLC, Laura Ashley Ltd and the London College of Fashion for financial, material and administrative support during the curation of the exhibition and conference which spawned the publication of this book. The editors also owe a great debt of gratitude to Judith Clark of Judith Clark Costume Gallery, the Korner family and all of the contributing authors for their enthusiasm, generosity and dedication. Final thanks go to Kathryn Earle and the staff at Berg for their continuing faith in the project. The contributors, editors and publishers have gone to every effort to seek out copyright holders for the images included in this book. Berg would however be happy to credit in future editions any who have been overlooked.

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Notes on Contributors Rebecca Arnold is a senior lecturer in the Cultural Studies Department at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London. She has written widely on twentieth-century fashion, including her book Fashion, Desire and Anxiety: Image and Morality in the 20th Century (I.B. Tauris 2001). Barbara Burman teaches at Winchester School of Art in the Faculty of Arts, University of Southampton where she is director of the Centre for the History of Textiles and Dress. Her publications and principal research interests focus on the production and consumption of fashion, dress and textiles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She edited The Culture of Sewing: Gender, Consumption and Home Dressmaking (Berg 1999). Work in progress includes a book on the social life of the sewing machine. She is currently chair of the Design History Society. Amy de la Haye is a senior research fellow at the London College of Fashion, Creative Consultant to Shirin Guild and Curatorial Consultant for the Fashion and Style Gallery at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery. From 1991 to 1998 she was Curator of Twentieth Century Dress at the Victoria & Albert Museum, where she curated Streetstyle (1994) and The Cutting Edge: 50 Years of British Fashion (1997). She has lectured and published extensively on various aspects of twentiethcentury fashion. Bronwen Edwards is a research assistant at the London College of Fashion where she works on archival projects. Her ongoing doctoral research explores the relationship between fashion, identity and retail architecture in twentieth-century London. Edwina Ehrman has worked at the Museum of London since 1992. She is currently Curator of Costume and Decorative Arts. Caroline Evans is Reader in Cultural Studies at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London. She has taught and written widely on the history and theory of fashion and is on the editorial board of Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture. With Minna Thornton she is co-author of Women and Fashion: A New Look (Quartet 1989). She is currently working on a book on – ix –

Notes on Contributors contemporary fashion and its historical origins in modernity to be published by Yale University Press. Catherine Horwood is a graduate of the MA in Women’s History at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she is currently completing a PhD on the social implications of dress among the middle classes in interwar Britain. She teaches part-time at the University of North London and has published on early twentieth-century women’s history. Her most recent article is ‘ ‘‘Girls Who Arouse Dangerous Passions’’: Women and Bathing 1900–1939’ Women’s History Review, winter 2000. Clare Lomas is a research assistant at the London College of Fashion where she works on archival projects. Her ongoing doctoral research examines the relationship between fashion and gay male identities in post-war Britain. Penny Martin is a PhD student attached to the Royal College of Art and the Victoria & Albert Museum’s joint programme in the History of Design. She is researching a thesis on the production of fashion magazines. She is also a curator at the Women’s Library, London. Aileen Ribeiro is head of the History of Dress Section at the Courtauld Institute and Professor in the History of Art at the University of London. She lectures widely and has acted as a costume consultant to a number of major portrait exhibitions. She is the author of many books and articles on the history of dress, including Ingres in Fashion: Representations of Dress and Appearance in Ingres’ Images of Women (Yale University Press 1999) and The Gallery of Fashion (National Portrait Gallery and Princeton University Press 2000). She is currently researching a book on clothing in Stuart England. Carolyn Steedman is Professor in History at the University of Warwick. She is the author of The Tidy House (Virago 1982), Policing the Victorian Community (Routledge & Kegan Paul 1984), Landscape for a Good Woman (Virago 1986), The Radical Soldier’s Tale (Routledge 1988), Childhood, Culture and Class in Britain (Virago 1990), Past Tenses (Rivers Oram 1992) and Strange Dislocations (Virago 1995). She is currently working on eighteenth-century servants, service and servitude in the making of modern identity. Lou Taylor is Professor in Dress and Textile History at the University of Brighton. She is author of Mourning Dress: A Costume and Social History (George Allen & Unwin 1983) and co-author with Elizabeth Wilson of Through the Looking Glass: A History of Dress from 1860 to the Present Day (BBC Books 1989). Her work –x–

Notes on Contributors on the methods and development of the discipline of dress history is shortly to be published by Manchester University Press. She is a member of the editorial board of Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture. Carol Tulloch is Curator of the Archives and Museum of Black Heritage, London. She has contributed to a number of exhibitions on fashion, design and photography and to several publications on the culture of dress in the African Diaspora. Her recent publications include ‘My Man, Let me Pull your Coat to Something: Malcolm X’, in Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson (eds) Fashion Cultures (Routledge 2000), ‘That Little Magic Touch: The Headtie’, in Amy de la Haye and Elizabeth Wilson (eds), Defining Dress (Manchester University Press 1999) and ‘There is No Place like Home: Home Dressmaking and Creativity in the Jamaican Community from the 1940s to the 1960s’, in Barbara Burman (ed.), The Culture of Sewing (Berg 1999). Rachel Worth is Programme Director for BA (Hons) Fashion Studies and HND Fashion / Fashion Marketing at the Arts Institute at Bournemouth. Her research interests lie in the history of working-class dress in the nineteenth century and the history of retailing in the twentieth century. She has published on the importance to the dress historian of representations of the clothing of the poor in the nineteenthcentury novel and on the history of fashion at Marks & Spencer.

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Illustrations I.1 3.1 3.2 3.3 4.1 4.2 4.3 5.1 5.2 6.1 6.2 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 8.1 8.2 8.3 9.1 9.2 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 11.1 11.2 11.3 12.1 12.2 12.3 12.4

Mrs Cecile Korner, c.1950 Group of tennis players, Shepton Mallet, Somerset, pre-1914 Fashion-conscious tennis players, North London, early 1920s Above-the-knee divided skirt worn for tennis, 1937 African–Caribbean migrants, Victoria station, 1956 Victoria station, 1956 ‘Notting Hill Riots’, 1958 Singer sewing machine shop, Brighton, 1914 Padding a dressmaker’s dummy, 1928 Smock-frock, late nineteenth century Sunbonnet, late nineteenth century White satin evening dress, c.1912 Appliquéd ‘Turkish’ embroidery on white satin evening dress, c.1912 Madame Ross white satin bodice with false waistcoat front, c.1907 Blue velvet cloak with gold embroidered and tasselled medieval collar, c.1920 Sir Hardy Amies, 1989 Design and embroidery sample for HM the Queen, 1957 Hardy Amies menswear design, 1968 Victor Stiebel tailored suit in black and white tweed, 1960–1 Victor Stiebel evening gown in green silk, 1962 Vivienne Westwood, Anglomania Collection, 1993 Vivienne Westwood, Café Society Collection, 1994 Vivienne Westwood, Time Machine Collection, 1988/9 Vivienne Westwood, Time Machine Collection, detail Norman Parkinson, ‘Hobnails Inn, Little Washbourne’, 1951 John Cowan, ‘Monumental Ideas about Dressing’, 1962 Jason Evans (Travis), 1991 Shelley Fox scorched lambs’ wool felt high-necked dress, 1996 Shelley Fox printed felt gather neck top and arc skirt, 1997 Shelley Fox heat transfer press printed Elastoplast shirt, 1997 Shelley Fox scorched Elastoplast angel dress, 1999 – xiii –

2 47 49 58 65 70 71 88 92 99 99 120 120 127 127 133 139 142 155 155 162 164 169 169 176 181 185 193 193 194 195

Illustrations 12.5 Shelley Fox car-spray twinset and muslin wadded skirt, 1999 12.6 Shelley Fox candle wax twinset with knitted full circle skirt, 1999 12.7 Shelley Fox morse code drop skirt with olive leather high-slit cardigan, 2000 12.8 Shelley Fox burnt sequinned skirt with peat felt ruffle top, 2000 12.9 Printing imprint left behind on back cloth, 1997 12.10 Shelley Fox cotton viscose petal dress, 2001 A.1 Blue and white cotton gingham housecoat, 1950s A.2 Mattli pale blue slub silk suit, 1950s A.3 Green silk evening gown, 1967

– xiv –

196 197 198 200 201 202 216 217 218

Introduction: ‘Dyed in the Wool’ English

Introduction: ‘Dyed in the Wool English?’ Christopher Breward, Becky Conekin and Caroline Cox

Writing in the 1950s, the German émigré, Nikolaus Pevsner, from whose book The Englishness of English Art (1956) we have rather presumptuously borrowed our title, was alive to the constructed and disguised nature of national identity and its imagery. He argued that: no one is at a loss when it comes to enumerating the characteristics of the English today . . . It is sufficient here to remember a few: personal liberty, freedom of expression . . . the eminently civilised faith in honesty and fair play, the patient queuing . . . windows that will never close and heating that will never heat . . . and the demonstrative conservatism of the wig in court, the gown in school and university. (Pevsner 1956: 15)

Pevsner also noted that although these national characteristics may have seemed as ‘eternal as the rock of Gibraltar’, they quite patently were not. Instead, he suggested that the idea of ‘Englishness’ (like all other national identities) is predicated upon a collection of mediated memories and ‘inventions of tradition’. Where better then to seek out the remnants of an imagined and constructed English identity than among the cast-off clothing of its self-confessed proponents? Pevsner looked for the fluid characteristics of Englishness in the enduring qualities of painting and architecture. In extending his field of inquiry the present book suggests that the ephemeral surfaces of fashionable dress are as heavy with nationalist sentiment as any of the plastic, visual and folk arts. It is thanks to the generosity of the family of Mrs Cecile Korner, another German émigré, that this project owes its genesis (Figure I.1). Her surviving collection of clothing and related ephemera, bought between the late 1940s and the 1980s, provides an extraordinary insight into ‘conservative’ middle-class mores during the post-war years. It raises all sorts of intriguing questions regarding clothing design, production and consumption in London and the role of dress as a form of autobiography. Furthermore the garments highlight the material practices of a particular kind of femininity, rooted in notions of ‘Englishness’ that still endure as a kind of unproblematized sartorial shorthand in the realms of fashion journalism and product promotion. In 1999 the London College of Fashion gratefully received the donation of this collection from Mrs Korner’s sons. Following a period of cataloguing and some initial research, a selection of items was displayed in –1–

C. Breward, B. Conekin and C. Cox

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure I.1 Mrs Cecile Korner, c.1950. (Courtesy of the Korner Family)

simultaneous exhibitions at the college and at Judith Clark Costume Gallery in London’s Notting Hill. From the moment of its delivery we realized that the content of the collection, though not of museum standard, nevertheless allows us a privileged glimpse at the fashionable choices of one woman whose tastes and needs were informed by her social context and period. Indeed, it was the seeming ‘ordinariness’ of the archive which, while off-putting to those curators whose storage space might be limited or whose remit constrained by considerations of rarity and ‘quality’, made it so attractive as a teaching and research collection. The provocative chapters published together in this book were generated from papers presented at a conference engineered to place the Korner Archive in an appropriate discursive context. They respond to the questions posed jointly by Pevsner’s insights and Mrs Korner’s clothes in inspirational ways. Before considering their arguments, however, we feel that the extraordinary circumstances of Mrs Korner’s own life story provide as generous a guide as any to the proper consideration of Englishness in dress. Contrary to appearances, Mrs Korner was born in Germany in 1911. She was educated in a Catholic convent and after graduation worked as a secretary in a –2–

Introduction: ‘Dyed in the Wool’ English Berlin chemical factory. But for the unsettling circumstances that prevailed in earlytwentieth-century Europe, Mrs Korner might well have spent her life in the comfortable cultural milieu of the German bourgeoisie. As it turned out, her romantic attachment to Mr Korner, the son of an Austrian Jewish family, meant that the two of them were forced to flee to England in 1935. They married that November in Marylebone Registry Office, Mrs Korner wearing a simple black suit. At the onset of war in 1939 and with two young children now in tow, the couple left London for the relative safety of Bath. However, their proximity to an Admiralty base, coupled with the Korners’ status as ‘enemy aliens’, meant that they were required to return to London, where Mrs Korner enrolled as a member of the Women’s Royal Voluntary Service (WRVS). On the return of peace Mr Korner resumed his work as an international banker, focusing on business interests in South America and travelling widely as a delegate at World Bank conferences. Mrs Korner would join him regularly, though the two would always make separate journeys – Mrs Korner preferring sea passages and Mr Korner the air. Aside from professional commitments the Korners also travelled for pleasure, to Greece in the summer, to Salzburg and Strasbourg for music, and in February to watch winter sports in the Austrian Alps. In London the Korners established a family home in Kensington, keeping a country house on the Surrey/ Sussex borders for weekends. Behind the stuccoed façade of Queensgate Place, Mrs Korner made the care of husband, home and children her primary responsibility, devoting much of her free time to voluntary work at a local hospital. She had a small circle of female friends including Madge Garland (editor of British Vogue) with whom she attended the London fashion shows of Norman Hartnell and Hardy Amies and courses at the Singer School of Sewing, which was located next door to Harrods department store. Another close friend was Marianna Stann, an assistant to Hartnell and an independent designer of unusual belt designs. In most respects then, Mrs Korner’s life after Berlin took on the genteel and unostentatious rhythms of upper-middle-class post-war London which have become familiar to us through the novels of Elizabeth Bowen, Barbara Pym and latterly Anita Brookner. The characteristics of her surviving wardrobe duly reflect the parameters of such an existence. Her acquaintances in the fashion world perhaps influenced some of her decisions, introducing her to the chic salons of Mayfair, and her duties as a banker’s wife explain the occasional ‘trophy’ item. But otherwise the clothing that she left reveals a quiet restraint, whose surfaces are resistant to ‘unseemly’ probing. The items make most sense when they are considered as components of the daily routines which her youngest son recalls:1 My mother always dressed for dinner, I mean she always dressed for my father when he came back from the office. In the morning she would get up and wear a white blouse, dark blue skirt, flat shoes and usually a dark blue cardigan and that was her uniform

–3–

C. Breward, B. Conekin and C. Cox until lunch time, and that was how she did the housework and got the day going . . . At lunch time she would change into a day dress if she went out to lunch or whatever, and then in the evening she would wear something very simple like . . . black velvet.

Like the repeating familiarity of her daily rounds, Mrs Korner’s wardrobe stands in the manner of a subtle memorial to a life that was in many ways entirely typical, but which also contained elements of the extraordinary. At its heart sit three formal black dresses: a cocktail dress by an unknown maker from the 1950s, a formal dress by Miss Worth from the 1960s and a cocktail dress by Hardy Amies (boutique) from the 1970s. These represent the elegant style adopted by Mrs Korner at dinner, and in their growing proportions (though not in their details) trace the transition from early to late middle age. In a sense their fossilized features strike against the idea of fashion per se, showing the persistence of a clearly defined preference in dress that takes little notice of superficial ‘trends’. Their blackness is also significant, seeming to mourn an earlier life whose facts could not be spoken. Nothing in the collection, bar a few dress and embroidery patterns, survives from Mrs Korner’s time in Germany. Such absences lend credence to her son’s recollections of his mother’s deliberate and selective amnesia: My mother felt very negatively about Germany and it was only with great, I won’t say heart searching exactly, but reluctance that she went back on visits. My parents made a point of not speaking German to each other . . . they didn’t forget it, but they spoke English with us, we didn’t learn German.

Beyond its highly personal connotations, the archive also offers some insight into the material circumstances of clothing provision and use for the middle and upper classes in post-war London, and by extension for those in provincial England and its ‘dominions’ overseas. Its range stretches from the home-made to the bespoke, and while it lacks accessories like shoes and underwear, its combinations of seams and surfaces, fastenings and finishes, allow us to reach some indication of the varied ways in which a wardrobe and an identity could be pieced together. These components clearly evolved to conform to the expectations of respectable living in mid-twentieth-century England and as such leave a fascinating remnant of a style of life and attitude to dressing which has all but disappeared. A serene home-life was of primary importance to popular constructions of ‘Englishness’ and the domestic stage allowed women like Mrs Korner to display their skills as wife, mother and hostess. The rituals of ‘housework’ (often symbolic rather than actual for women of Mrs Korner’s class) and leisure time dictated a soft and relaxed series of outfits that celebrated the qualities of freshness and a light-hearted conviviality. Mrs Korner’s blue gingham housecoat with white machine-lace collar of the early 1950s is iconic in this respect (see Figure A.1, p. 000). Such items denoted the world of the dutiful housewife and accrued –4–

Introduction: ‘Dyed in the Wool’ English powerful emotional resonances for schoolboys and young husbands. As her son recalls: that of all the things I remember very well, she made her dresses when we were at school, because the school colour was bright blue and she tended to wear that colour . . . there was one with cornflowers . . . cornflower blue with black spots . . . and the hat that went with it and I remember she looked amazing.

Beyond the world of the family, London’s West End during the 1950s and early 1960s offered the salons and boutiques, the teashops and department stores, parks and galleries in which women like Mrs Korner and her friends could replenish their wardrobes and exchange their news. It was in this sphere that dress took on a tailored, architectural severity. Such characteristics have been used to identify the distinctive English style of Norman Hartnell, Hardy Amies and Victor Stiebel – a style that was marketable for its ‘exotic’ qualities in competing centres such as Paris and New York (Hume 1996). In the archive a 1950s blue silk suit by Mattli (Figure A.2, p. 000) and an unlabelled grey silk wrap-around coat dress of the same period must have offered practicality for getting around town, while their subtle palette reflected the leaden colours of London skies. A studied, yet easy formality also dictated the style of garments made to be worn at those private and public functions which still marked the summer season, even as the aristocratic practices of ‘coming-out’ and court presentation for debutantes which made them relevant went into inevitable decline. A swansdown hat worn by Mrs Korner for a family wedding in the late 1950s and a green silk evening dress (Figure A.3, p. 000), made by a private dressmaker from material possibly purchased on one of Mr Korner’s business trips in the late 1960s, are redolent of a world which for Mrs Korner’s class and generation were suffused with a nostalgia for the ‘old’ ways. She often told her sons of summer evenings in the late 1940s when her neighbours in Queensgate Place would promenade in the communal gardens in romantic formal dress. For her children, however, reaching maturity in the early 1960s, such glamour palled. Mr Korner junior remembers his parents saying, ‘You will have dancing lessons because you will have to go to dances’. He continues: I went to about four or five debutante dances as an escort but I hated every minute of it! And funnily enough, much to my parents’ disappointment, I never really felt involved. Whether it was the foreign-ness of my parents, or just the fact that I didn’t like it, I honestly don’t know.

This final sentence on the ‘foreign-ness’ of his parents is a key one. It supports an understanding of Mrs Korner’s clear desire to ‘pass’ in her adopted country through an appropriation of its sartorial rules and bolsters the thematic direction of this –5–

C. Breward, B. Conekin and C. Cox book, which rather than offering a prescriptive reading of the links to be drawn between national identity and dress, aims to open up the field for debate and contestation. Mrs Korner’s sons were well aware of the ironies posed by the fashionable identities of their ‘alien’ parents, illustrating in their responses to our questions how contingent and fragile the whole notion of an ‘English’ style is: My father got on extremely well with very, very English types . . . they really were ultra English . . . In fact we were put down for the MCC [Marylebone Cricket Club], which neither of us were in the slightest bit interested in joining, but my parents thought it was shocking that we didn’t want to because all their friends . . . tended to want this kind of lifestyle. It was very strange . . . my parents never tried to be English . . . they didn’t imitate anything. They had a lot of refugee friends too of course, who they knew from before . . . But Madge Garland, she couldn’t have been more English, but she was actually Irish wasn’t she? But I mean . . . there was a typical example of their closest friend being completely ‘dyed in the wool’ English.

‘Dyed in the wool’ is such a suggestive phrase for our purposes, hinting at permanence and authenticity, yet also, by the very nature of dyeing, indicative of tinting, of artificial substitution, of one shade replaced by another. In The Englishness of English Art Pevsner restricted his analysis to the fields of the fine and decorative arts, though definitions of what constitutes ‘English’ dress are plentiful. Many attempts at providing an outline, however, have tended to fall back on the familiar clichés: that the English are innately conservative, in love with tradition and obsessed with a set of classic items derived from the sporting arenas of hunting, shooting and fishing. In this scenario consumers are seen to veer with an almost physiological attraction towards the wearing of natural fibres in muted colours, accessorized by a string of pearls. This reactionary, pseudoaristocratic, ‘well-mannered’ and essentially rural or ‘provincial’ identity, which has seen its commercial equivalents displayed on the racks of Laura Ashley and previous incarnations of Marks & Spencer, has been used as evidence of Albion’s quiet opposition to ostentatious ‘continental’ or ‘urban’ registers of style. Vestiges of such popular ideas find an echo in the journalist Alison Settle’s meditations on English fashion published in 1948. She suggested that ‘it is probably the unselfconsciousness of English fashion which is its most enduring characteristic’ (Settle 1948: 48). She believed that this was derived from the stability of traditional English lifestyles, a world ‘largely of men’s activities, of sport, the love of animals, of the open air, and always of the home and its comforts’ (Settle 1948: 48). This is a nostalgic trajectory which has endured to the present. In 1996 the style commentator Peter York repeated the ‘traditionalist’s mantra’ in Country Life, the bible of the landowning classes. ‘Tradition’, he stated, ‘is what we’re best at, and the dominance of tradition – whether real or theme park – is more marked now than at any time since the Second World War. Just see how those mainstream –6–

Introduction: ‘Dyed in the Wool’ English classics power on!’ (York 1996: 28). His classics included Jermyn Street shirts, the uniforms of guardsmen and cricket players, the Clark’s desert boot and the Land Rover: all masculinist icons which are seen to embody an easily identifiable English ‘feel’. Naturally the danger of such definitions lies in their tendency to essentialize concepts of identity. As Mrs Korner’s sartorial biography demonstrates and succeeding chapters will suggest, the lived experience of race and nationhood as expressed through clothing and fashion is far more complex and contingent an affair than the rather nebulous concept of promoting a rather exclusive ‘feel’ of Englishness would infer. This is not the place to enumerate the many and more critical studies of national and cultural identities which have emerged in recent years, largely in reaction to prevalent debates about globalization (the authors included in this collection make useful references to the key texts; see also Samuel 1989, 1994, 1998; Nava and O’Shea 1996; Storry and Childs 1997; Hunt 1998; Easthope 1999; Cannadine 2000; Owusu 2000; Goodrum 2001), but it would seem to be appropriate to cite the most influential thinker in this respect. Stuart Hall’s comments on the definition of culture, community and nation offer an apposite framework for considering the fractured and multilayered meanings of supposedly ‘English’ ways of dressing at the start of a new century already marked by ‘ethnic’ conflict, sectarian violence and continuing racism in the ‘Englishspeaking’ world: It should not be necessary to look, walk, feel, think, speak exactly like a paid-up member of the buttoned up, stiff-upper-lipped, fully corseted and free born Englishman, culturally to be accorded either the informal courtesy and respect of civil social intercourse or the rights of entitlement and citizenship . . . Since cultural diversity is, increasingly the fact of the modern world, and ethnic absolutism a regressive feature of late modernity, the greatest danger now arises from forms of national identity which adopt closed versions of culture or community and refuse to engage with the difficult problems that arise from trying to live with difference. The capacity to live with difference is, in my view, the coming question of the twenty-first century. (Hall 1999: 42)

In a sense this was also the challenge set for Mrs Korner in her attempts to adapt to a new way of life in the London of the 1930s. The fashionable models which she adapted as a means of ‘passing’ were rooted in a longer history which is mapped out in Part I of this book, ‘Towards a History of English Style’. Looking also to Pevsner’s work, in the opening chapter Aileen Ribeiro utilizes some of his definitions of Englishness to interrogate the ways that dominant ideas and representations of dress developed in England from the sixteenth century onwards. These include the political prevalence of notions of pragmatic liberalism, a fondness for aesthetic extremes and a literary sense of poetry and romance. The chapter moves from Renaissance conceptions of Englishness through to a questioning of what is English about English dress today. In the modern period Ribeiro argues –7–

C. Breward, B. Conekin and C. Cox that the idea of Englishness in dress is a state of mind rather than a geographical expression in terms of specific clothing usages in England. Carolyn Steedman contends that if we want to bracket issues of dress with questions of Englishness in the past, then we are forced up against two major historical theses concerning national identity – indeed the cultural and political emergence of ‘Englishness’ itself – in the late eighteenth century. She considers the ideas of Benedict Anderson and to a lesser extent Linda Colley in relationship to the payments in kind (of clothing, haberdashery and accessories) made to the series of maidservants employed by the Heaton family, merchant-manufacturers of Pondon House near Howarth in the 1770s and 1780s. Steedman’s chapter illustrates that although the study of material artefacts – their distribution, sale, use and meanings – is an important aspect in late-twentieth-century accounts of the development of nationhood, an attention to the category of clothing in this respect is curiously absent. This leads her to argue that the absence of dress from such debates causes us to question a similar ‘sartorial’ silence in relation to sociological and psychoanalytic accounts of the meaning of things in the formation of the self. Moving from broader historiographical questions, Catherine Horwood’s chapter provides us with a very specific instance of English clothing as it was understood in the interwar years. Through the assembly of an impressive array of newspaper and other printed sources, Horwood examines images of dress, gender and modesty associated with what she terms ‘the quintessential English sport of tennis’. She shows how the wearing of the correct ‘kit’ for the game was of great significance in terms of the development of sporting fashions and standards of social decorum. This was bolstered by the growing visibility and popularity of tennis, as exemplified in the expansion of tournaments such as Wimbledon and a thriving social network of middle-class devotees. Contemporary players emerge as role models, whose images suggested national standards of femininity which were frequently contrasted favourably to French and American styles of behaviour and presentation. Carol Tulloch also offers a discrete case study of Englishness, but in a very different tone and register. Tulloch astutely employs post-colonial theory, with particular reference to Stuart Hall’s ground-breaking work on the ways in which West Indian migrants negotiated ‘ways of being English’ upon their arrival in the United Kingdom in the 1950s. She reads photographs of Black British women arriving at Victoria station from the West Indies in May 1956 in juxtaposition with the white, establishment symbols of Englishness which were prevalent throughout the Commonwealth in the post-war period. Tulloch argues that the ‘split self’ of the colonized subject is unified by the styling of the body and by clothes such as the ‘English all-wool coat’. In essence, her chapter explains how Black identity is heterogeneous, and how for many it is affected by the journey of migration, for which individuals prepared their appearances with great care, –8–

Introduction: ‘Dyed in the Wool’ English composing an ensemble of, for example, a patterned circle skirt, best hat and bag from ‘home’ along with the ubiquitous wool coat. A similar process of self-construction for working- and middle-class women is evident in Barbara Burman’s examination of home-dressmaking practices as they impinged on ideals of English femininity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This chapter heads Part II of the book ‘On Designing Englishness’, which moves from argument and idea to a consideration of practice and object. In a very literal sense the ‘look’ of many English women in this period was determined by the technologies of the domestic sewing machine and the mass-produced paper pattern. As Burman argues, beyond the local and domestic nature of homedressmaking production, which bound it geographically to a sense of place in the face of pan-global distribution networks, the practice of sewing was also imbued with loaded cultural connotations concerning motherhood, kinship and fashionable display which contributed equally to overarching concepts of English tastes and habits. From Burman’s consideration of the sort of women who might have played a pivotal role in questions of urban philanthropy and citizenship we turn to Rachel Worth’s examination of those rural myths which have underpinned Albion’s selfimage throughout the modern era. She notes how the work of writers such as Thomas Hardy established the distinct idea that the (rapidly changing) appearance of rural working people was wedded to the landscape and was thus integrally ‘English’ in style, yet under threat from the forces of ‘progress’. This raises a number of interesting questions that place the clothing of nineteenth-century English farm labourers in juxtaposition with that worn in other areas of the British Isles and in Europe. In such a context Worth asks whether rural dress in England can be viewed as part of a broader traditional folk culture. Certainly artists, photographers and writers including Helen Allingham, Myles Birkett Foster, Henry Peach Robinson and Flora Thompson imbued the iconic smock-frock and sunbonnet with a nostalgic and patriotic patina which was not necessarily in tune with the harsh realities of industrialization, unemployment and migration, but can perhaps be explained by them. Lou Taylor also focuses on particular items of the wardrobe dating from a similar moment of cultural change in the early twentieth century. Her chapter uncovers a largely unseen dress collection now owned by Brighton Museum and Art Gallery but previously belonging to Mrs Leonard Messel, the daughter of Punch illustrator Linley Sambourne and mother of Anne, Countess of Ross. Taylor shows how Mrs Messel’s upbringing on the highly respectable peripheries of London’s artistic society and her patronage of high-class West End dressmakers imbued her sartorial choices with a faintly bohemian flavour that was distinctively English and as yet unacknowledged in fashion histories which prioritize Paris as the fount of all innovation. –9–

C. Breward, B. Conekin and C. Cox The final two chapters in this part extend Taylor’s timely re-examination of the elite London clothing trades to the post-war period. Edwina Ehrman looks to the well-known career of Hardy Amies, a couturier who has established a reputation for the ‘Englishness’ of his signature style, not least because of his work for Queen Elizabeth II. However, rather than provide another hagiography, Ehrman analyses the interdependence of Amies’ couture business and his world-wide licensing operation and shows how the house’s reputation for classic women’s clothing has been marketed to create a highly successful menswear business. Although this marketing maximizes the ‘Englishness’ of his style, the main thrust of the collections has always been to provide comfortable and appropriate clothes suitable for an international context. Thus as the chapter illustrates, it is the house’s ability to respond to general trends while retaining a traditional and conservative identity that has enabled it to develop and maintain two very different businesses for whom the idea of ‘Englishness’ is highly contingent. Now less well known than Amies, Victor Stiebel also provided elegant and wearable clothing for women like Mrs Korner. The London College of Fashion houses a grey formal day dress of hers with intricate pleated details designed by Stiebel for Jacqmar in 1950, and three sales books dating from 1960 to 1963 which chart through watercolour illustrations the repertoire of the house. Suits and blouses, Ascot and cocktail dresses, evening dresses and coats are all depicted on the impeccably groomed, mature female model that became an enduring standard bearer for understated ‘English good form’. Amy de la Haye’s revelatory chapter shows how Stiebel, although South African by birth, rapidly established himself as a purveyor of those romantic evening gowns and impeccably tailored day suits that have become the hallmarks of the English designer. Fittingly, on his retirement in 1963, all 120 of Stiebel’s staff were taken on by Hardy Amies – a gesture which underpinned the sense of tradition and continuity associated with this sector of English trade. Part III of the book on ‘Representing Englishness’ looks to the ways in which those ciphers and symbols of ‘English’ style established in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been utilized and subverted in recent creative practice. In her chapter Rebecca Arnold views Vivienne Westwood’s distinctive take on the paraphernalia of ‘Englishness’ as a form of masquerade. This, she argues, is a consistent project, where a clear obsession with the emblems of national identity provides the linking rationale for devoted consumers of her work to dress up as the mythical ‘heroes’ of England. Arnold sees Westwood’s vision coming to fruition in a series of collections from the mid-1980s on, which drew upon the dress codes of traditional elites, the iconography of royalty and the ‘Swagger’ portrait of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She argues that through the use of such genres Westwood exposed the reductive definitions of national identity that constitute popular conceptions of a unified ‘Englishness’. – 10 –

Introduction: ‘Dyed in the Wool’ English Penny Martin also suggests that notions of a consistent, permanent and immutable national character are not borne out by the evidence of fashion imagery. Like Steedman, she draws on the work of Benedict Anderson, who has posited the idea of nationhood as an ‘imagined community’ whose inhabitants share collective visual memories rather than actual experiences. Her chapter addresses the difficulties inherent in attempts to define a coherent sense of ‘Englishness’ in photographic practices that are specific to particular social geographies and commercial institutions. Focusing on two key periods when England was regarded as a creative centre for the production of fashion photographs, Martin discusses the ways in which the iconography of dress was used to sustain and critique aspects of nationhood. She argues that though there is a continuity in the methods of representation adopted by photographers, the ‘communities’ they have represented are in a constant state of flux and revision. This ‘iconography of Englishness’ has been a rich image bank for younger generations of designers as well. The Union Jack for example is an enduring sign that has in turn variously represented mod culture, ‘Swinging London’, 1990s ‘Brit-pop’ and the more recent ‘Cool Britannia’ phenomenon. Similarly the ‘classic’ label Burberry, once patronized only by tourists, has undergone a radical transformation in the hands of Russell Sage, in much the same way that Karl Lagerfeld redefined the signifiers of Chanel in the 1980s. Caroline Evans in her chapter looks at the work of designer Shelley Fox, whose clothing references a very different London from the glossy city of the Blairite millennium. She shows how Fox evokes an aesthetic of ruination which links the decaying social fabric of the East End where she lives and works, her interest in cryptography, Morse code and Braille, and her use of scorched and shrunken felted fabrics. Fox’s fetishizing of craft practices, which can barely square with the commercial demands of the marketplace, illustrates the difficulties faced by conceptual designers within the voracious business of fashion, where cultural capital is not sufficient to sustain profits. This reveals the ‘lie’ of a supposed ‘English’ design renaissance, but does not detract from Fox’s own poetic interpretation of ‘Englishness’ itself. For her it is a case of fragile historical traces, the transience of lives lived and an obsession with the element of decay that is always present in London’s culture. Through Evans’s work we become aware that English identities are hybrid and synthetic. Having thus demolished the supposition that there can ever be a stable definition of style as concrete and confident as ‘the Englishness of English Dress’, in the appendix of this book Bronwen Edwards and Clare Lomas return to the material evidence of Mrs Korner’s wardrobe. In an edited catalogue listing of its content, we are brought back to a consideration of the ‘stuff’ of Englishness itself. In the seams and textures of her garments do we come any closer to understanding the ways in which our landlocked yet free-floating identities are woven into the dress we wear? We hope that the chapters in this book lead us some way towards tentative answers and future debates. – 11 –

C. Breward, B. Conekin and C. Cox

Notes 1. All quotations from Mrs Korner’s sons are taken from an interview with them conducted by Bronwen Edwards and Clare Lomas in October 1999. The full transcript is available in the Korner Archive, London College of Fashion.

References Cannadine, D. (2000), Class in Britain, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Easthope, A. (1999), Englishness and National Culture, London : Routledge. Goodrum, A. (2001), ‘Land of Hip and Glory: Fashioning the Classic National Body’, in W. Keenan (ed.), Dressed to Impress: Looking the Part, Oxford : Berg. Hall, S. (1999), ‘Culture, Community, Nation’, in D. Boswell and J. Evans (eds), Representing the Nation: A Reader, London: Routledge. Hume, M. (1996), ‘Tailoring’, in A. de la Haye (ed.), The Cutting Edge: 50 Years of British Fashion 1947–1997, London: Victoria and Albert Museum. Hunt, L. (1998), British Low Culture: From Safari Suits to Sexploitation, London: Routledge. Nava, M. and O’Shea, A. (eds) (1996), Modern Times: Reflections on a Century of English Modernity, London: Routledge. Owusu, K. (ed.) (2000), Black British Culture: A Text Reader, London: Routledge. Pevsner, N. (1956), The Englishness of English Art, London: Architectural Press. Samuel, R. (1989), Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, London: Routledge. —— (1994), Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture, London: Verso. —— (1998), Theatres of Memory: Island Stories, London : Verso. Settle, A. (1948), English Fashion, London: Collins. Storry, M. and Childs, P. (eds) (1997), British Cultural Identities, London: Routledge. York, P. (1996), ‘Icons of Identity’, Country Life, 1 February: 28–31.

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Part I Towards a History of English Style

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–1– On Englishness in Dress Aileen Ribeiro

Any theoretical discussion of national identity has been made more pertinent against a background in which the United Kingdom may be on the verge of splitting up into its constituent parts, and where even the regions of England – in the not too distant future – may get their own form of limited self-government. It is in this context that considerations of Englishness are relevant, and have attracted a number of writers, both popular and academic. Among the former is the journalist Jeremy Paxman, whose book, The English (1999), a rather facile discussion of a complicated subject, lists a number of his own definitions of Englishness: perhaps the making of such lists (‘listism’?) is a peculiarly English idiosyncrasy? These include – in no particular order – irony, brass bands, Shakespeare, Elgar, bad hotels and good beer, drinking to excess, civility and crude language, punk and street fashion, gardening, Cumberland sausages and so on (Paxman 1999: 22–3).1 A more academic version of Paxman’s glib generalizations is contained in Paul Langford’s (2000) Englishness Identified: Manners and Character 1650–1850, an anecdotal and repetitive work concentrating on the late Georgian period, with a bias towards ‘things identified’, rather than with the processes of identification. His ‘things’ – manners, deportment, pastimes, etc. – make up certain wide themes such as ‘energy, candour, decency, taciturnity, reserve, and eccentricity’, which form the chapter – headings in his book. The most interesting work, both popular and scholarly, is Ian Buruma’s (2000) Voltaire’s Coconuts (to which I shall refer later in this chapter), which is a discussion of Anglomania as much as Englishness. It may be that it takes an outsider (Buruma is half-English, half-Dutch) to see England and assess Englishness with an intelligently critical eye.

Pevsner and Englishness Nikolaus Pevsner, too, was an outsider, a German art historian who settled in England in the mid-1930s, and became after the Second World War, a highly influential critic, lecturer, and writer on architecture (his multivolumed work The Buildings of England – ‘a remarkable document of Anglophilia’, claims Buruma – 15 –

Aileen Ribeiro (2000: 258) – made him famous). A disciple of Bauhaus modernism, in some ways he soon became an admirer of the essentially conservative and traditional forms of much English culture (he even dressed like a typically shabby, politically left-leaning English don, in tweeds and knitted pullover), and it was perhaps as a kind of homage to his adopted land that the title of his 1955 Reith lectures (first published the following year) was The Englishness of English Art. This book, described by a recent critic as ‘a series of stimulating and perceptive generalizations’ (Mowl 2000: 141), is popular and thought-provoking, perhaps because Pevsner writes from the outside, as an architectural historian rather than as an art historian, prepared, where artists were concerned, ‘to reveal far more of his emotional reactions than he was over architects’ (Mowl 2000: 128–9).2 He has been attacked over the years for a lack of humour, for dogmatism, and for pedantry, for preferring buildings to people (a trait surely not unique to architectural historians), and for what has been perceived as a kind of Germanic obsession in trying to track down the very essence of Volk, of national character. This might be an idea with which today we feel uncomfortable, as the very notion can seem excluding and inclusive, but – as Langford (2000) points out – was very much a concern in the past, part of the ‘search for the defining terms of the modern state and its fascination with the science of manners’ (Langford 2000: 7). To do Pevsner justice, he admitted his difficulty in pinning down a sense of Englishness – ‘is there such a thing at all as a fixed or almost fixed national character?’ (Pevsner 1964: 15) – concluding that national characteristics were constantly in a state of flux. In terms of art history, however, the theme of The Englishness of English Art is how far certain elements were constants; these he defined as reticence, a love of extremes, and a propensity for the poetic. Pevsner’s interpretation of reticence was a kind of reserved but liberal pragmatism which he linked to a liking for practicality and realism (this he found in a range of art, the landscapes of Constable, nineteenth-century portraiture, and so on). With regard to extremes, he found this in Hogarth and in the taste for satire, which reflected the rough and ready ‘democracy’ of English politics and society. And as for the poetic, this he discerned in art where imagination was the key factor, for example, in the ‘dim, druidical Albion’ evoked by Blake (an artist who signed himself ‘English Blake’).

Interpretations of Englishness Before considering how far we can transfer Pevsner’s perceptions of Englishness in art to Englishness in dress, it might be worth pondering the semantics involved in any discussion of clothing. The theme of the conference (on which this book is based) was the Englishness of English dress and ‘dress’ I interpret as habitual, even passive, as distinct from ‘fashion’, a more determinist concept invoking innovation and choice which, in the Barthesian sense, is ‘uttered’ through text – 16 –

On Englishness in Dress and analysis. Whatever we call it – and dress/fashion is so complex, so contradictory (a bit like the weather which Pevsner concluded was the only really immutable English characteristic) notions of Englishness are difficult to define in this context. It proves impossible to arrive at, say, the kind of philosophy of dress which Thomas Carlyle initiated in Sartor Resartus in the 1830s (perhaps the first work of true fashion theory), which attempts to make sense, even by admitting it, of the apparent randomness of the history of clothing. Furthermore, if we agree with Benedict Anderson that nationalism is about ‘narratives of identity’, then it follows that we might define Englishness as ‘romantic’ (to do with perception, feeling and emotion), rather than Britishness, which as a political construct, a description of ‘the State or of other institutions and practices in which all the constituent parts of Britain . . . shared’ (Langford 2000: 14). Thus, just as laws and institutions create a political entity, so they might – let us say – be the equivalent of ‘political’ costume, such as peers’ robes, knightly regalia, legal and academic costume, and so on, along with clothing for formal occasions, such as morning dress and business suits. Then, in contrast, the ‘romantic’ notion of Englishness in dress is about perceptions and attitudes, rather than the facts of such conventional usage. These categories are, however, not mutually exclusive, and can often overlap. This sometimes happens in surprising ways. If, for example, we accept, along with Anglophiles like Voltaire, that the romantic concept of Englishness involves the idea of England rather than England itself, then, for example, the Protestant Orange Order in Northern Ireland, who march in their dark suits, bowler hats and furled umbrellas, embody this notion to some extent, demonstrating a kind of lost, Edwardian Englishness, a defiant buying into nationality through clothing.3 A more obvious example of the romantic might be folk costume – red, hooded cloaks and linen smocks come to mind in terms of the limited English context here – considered to be archetypally ‘picturesque’ in our perceptions of rural life in the late eighteenth century, but such garments have their origin in real localities and communities and came into being for practical reasons. There is not much specifically regional clothing, however, in England (a fact regretted by many commentators in the early nineteenth century, as they made comparisons with the situation in much of Europe, where such costume thrived), precisely because there was an early consciousness of the nation-state, an idea forged by war and politics, and in terms of dress, underlined by the Industrial Revolution which fostered the commercial benefits of the mass market.

The Renaissance It may be helpful at this point to look back at earlier notions of what constitutes Englishness in dress, although here the evidence is somewhat vague and spasmodic, largely construed with the virtue of hindsight and our aesthetic perceptions of the – 17 –

Aileen Ribeiro historic past. If, for example, we think of the beautiful, wired, floating white linen ‘butterfly’ headdresses which we see recorded in late-fifteenth-century stained glass windows and tomb effigies, we take them to be peculiarly English because they remind us of the soaring, spiky structures of the late Gothic churches which house such art forms, and partly because they do not seem to exist in precisely this form elsewhere. Another example might be Elizabethan and Jacobean embroidery, with its flower and insect motifs, designs taken from herbals and from the borders of illuminated manuscripts which fell into secular hands at the Reformation; in view of our proclaimed love of gardens and of nature, such embroideries look quintessentially English. To us, such things look English because they are beautiful, insular, charming, quirky even – all qualities which over the years we have come to think of as English, but which were not necessarily thought so at the time. At this time, the Renaissance, whatever notions people had about the concepts of Englishness, they were more interested in specific identifications than in notions of identity, being especially concerned with a sense of place, as travel and better communications opened up new physical and mental vistas. Increasingly, clothing served to underscore both national identity and – more stylishly at this time perhaps – the sartorial identity of the powerful city states which were places where the wealthy and educated gathered, places too where a new sense of fashion could be discerned, described and transmitted either in the traditional accounts of individuals (letters, diaries, personal communications) or in what Anderson calls the ‘print capitalism’ of the early modern period (Anderson 1991: 43–44). Anderson refers here to the spread of the vernacular printed word, but in terms of visual information, the new, printed costume plates of the second half of the sixteenth century were much more significant, and their impact on the comparative knowledge of dress has still to be explored. We assume that most contemporaries could easily recognize people by their dress, even if the nuances of such sartorial games are lost to our eyes; clearly, at times, especially at court, the choice of costume became part of power play. A limited amount of anecdotal evidence suggests that the English were particularly perplexed at the variety of dress styles open to them, and popular images of the Englishman showed him either naked, unsure what to wear, or adopting items of clothing from all over Europe, having failed to establish a convincing ‘national’ identity.4 By the late sixteenth century a greater sense of visual internationalism (as distinct from regionality both in countryside and cities) had, paradoxically perhaps, helped to promote a true nationalism in dress. However, there was no one overriding fashion centre until the seventeenth century, when a kind of Anglo-French consensus was created, that, in time, superseded the elite styles of other European countries; the first court in England where fashion was a major concern, was that of Charles II. After the turmoils of Civil War and Interregnum, England began to – 18 –

On Englishness in Dress play a major role on the international scene, a position confirmed by the important constitutional revolution later in the century.

Civility and Freedom As Lipovetsky (1994) argues, fashion from this time onwards can increasingly be regarded as a progressive force, drawing people away from religion and fanaticism into ‘an open public space’, where ‘a more mature, more skeptical humanity’ could operate (Lipovetsky 1994: 12). There was a new political climate where Englishness was defined both in practical and philosophical terms, and the role played by dress was underlined by a more widespread literacy. By the eighteenth-century newspapers and novels were enabling devices which, in Anderson’s words, furthered the idea of ‘thinking’ the nation (Anderson 1991: 21), a concept which could be visually expressed by the rise of the first great native English artists of the period. The eighteenth century liked to explain and to codify, and the English were increasingly explained both by themselves, and by the growing number of foreign visitors who wrote accounts of their travels in England, viewing the country as radically different from the rest of Europe (Langford 2000: 10ff).5 What interested the majority of these visitors – both Anglophiles and Anglophobes – was what Buruma (2000), in his thoughtful critique of Anglomania, Voltaire’s Coconuts, (the ‘coconuts’ are English liberties, which Voltaire claimed would grow, even in the most unlikely climates, given time and patience) calls the ‘remarkable combination of civility and freedom’ which existed alongside social and economic inequality, insularity and ‘cultural philistinism’ (Buruma 2000: 17). This ‘civility and freedom’ echoes Pevsner’s identification of the English love of the practical and realistic in art, and in terms of eighteenth-century dress, manifests itself in the development of relatively inexpensive materials such as wool and cotton into fashionable fabrics, and the creation of functional garments, such as free and easy clothing for children, the riding habits (based on masculine styles), worn by women (both of which were regarded as uniquely English), and the sober-coloured frock coat for men with its stylish economy of tailoring. It was the frock coat, along with a buff waistcoat and riding boots which constituted the ‘English’ appearance of Goethe’s hero, Werther, in his novel Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers (1774) and symbolized notions of freedom and progress, the antithesis of ‘reactionary’ court or formal costume with its luxury fabrics and concomitant mannered deportment. Thus, it is easy in this context to understand how such informal English dress came to be associated with the growth of the demotic, a trend heralded by the adoption of such styles by those in power in the embryonic ‘democracy’ of the French Revolution. In fact, throughout the eighteenth century (with sumptuary legislation long abandoned) the English pioneered the ‘political’ – 19 –

Aileen Ribeiro concept of dress, exploring notions of class in clothing (it features prominently in the novels, critical essays and journalism of the period) and creating a flexible society, sartorially speaking, in which on the one hand, upper-class young men could playfully adopt certain elements of working-class clothing (leather breeches, a coachman’s caped coat and so on), and on the other hand, the middle classes (and to some extent some members of the working class also) could evidence their upward mobility by wearing versions of elite costume. In the case of the working class, one must underline the fact that they were not merely motivated by pure emulation of the upper class, but made a deliberate selection of certain items of elite costume which they wore alongside the clothing of their own peer group, creating tribal identities which form an essential element in the Englishness of English dress.6

Eccentricity, Extremes and Affectation The originality and individualism of much English dress of the eighteenth century was cause for both celebration and alarm. Celebration, for to Anglophiles like Voltaire, such a love of the irregular indicated a deep-seated desire for freedom, which government could not deny. Pevsner quotes a famous passage from Voltaire’s Letters on the English Nation (1734) in which English ‘poetical genius resembles a closely grown tree planted by nature, throwing out a thousand branches here and there and growing lustily and without rules. It dies if you try to force its nature and trim it like the gardens of Marly’ (Pevsner 1964: 183). Other critics, particularly at the end of the eighteenth century, and with the example of the French Revolution to hand, took alarm at what they considered the anarchic tendency in English dress. ‘Foreign admirers might be charmed by its whimsicality, but none the less found its anti-social potential disturbing’ (Langford 2000: 293). Eccentricity (the term came into being in the 1770s, and was defined as taking characteristics, including dress and appearance, to extremes) was a particularly English trait. It was celebrated in the equally English vogue for satire and caricature, which Pevsner discusses at some length, citing Hogarth as typical of the genre, (Pevsner also, correctly I think, singles out a moralistic, preaching element in Hogarth, complementing the same theme in English culture).7 Inevitably, where dress and morality, convention and aesthetics, were so closely linked, women’s fashions were the target for most satire, but during the great age of caricature, the late eighteenth century, men also came in for critical commentary. Eighteenth-century caricaturists often portrayed Englishmen as somewhat buffoonish characters whose propensity for familiar, comfortable, country clothing matched their lack of sophistication, the absence of the social skills necessary to shine in polite society. The point of the many caricatures making fun of the macaronis of the 1770s (ultra-fashionable young men-about-town who adopted flamboyant, – 20 –

On Englishness in Dress brightly coloured, tight-fitting clothes and towering wigs) was their rejection of the increasing orthodoxy in male clothing, the seemingly inexorable trend towards plainness and sobriety. The macaronis were noted for what we might refer to today as a rather ‘camp’ manner, but effeminacy in this context did not necessarily imply homosexuality but referred to what was increasingly considered to be an undue taste for lavish consumption and an overemphasis on personal adornment which could veer towards the grotesque. (Vast expenditure was less the problem than the correct – understated – aesthetics of display.) Contemporary journalism noted that the macaronis were both womanizers and men with more interest in themselves than in the opposite sex – traits which have never been incompatible. Interestingly, this kind of male narcissism was regarded as very English – it was copied by the French equivalents of the macaronis, the élégants or merveilleux later in the century – and became a few years later part of the concept of the dandy. (Whereas the English dandy was flamboyant, sometimes to the point of vulgarity, the French dandy was more restrained and intellectual, an instance of the French taking up an English idea and changing it into something different.) On the whole, nineteenthcentury dandyism, as befitted the tenor of the times and the muted palette of the male wardrobe generally, was restrained and understated, showing itself in a kind of world-weariness and affected nonchalance, with attention to the subtle details of dress and accessories (an increasingly select and private dialogue between the tailor and the client): the quality of the fine woollen cloth, the slope of a pocket flap or coat rever, exactly the right colour for the gloves, the correct amount of shine on boots and shoes, and so on. It was an image of a well-dressed man who, while taking infinite pains about his appearance, affected indifference to it. This refined dandyism continued to be regarded as an essential strand of male Englishness, and features frequently in literature from Oscar Wilde to P.G. Wodehouse. At the ˜same time that many Englishmen were happiest to be in comfortable clothing (including sporting costume – English innovations in this sphere would be, for example, knitted sweaters, blazers, the Norfolk jacket and plus-fours), they could equally be at home in the niceties of traditional ‘Establishment’ dress, such as uniform, frock coat (metamorphosed by the mid-nineteenth century into formal wear), top hat and tails. One of the defining forms of Englishness in dress has surely been the triumph of male tailoring, both in its apogee (from the midnineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries), and as a perception and signifier of Englishness even in the early twenty-first century. Pevsner’s notion of the English love of extremes in art, which he found particularly in graphic satire of the eighteenth century (it could equally be found also in nineteenth and twentieth-century cartoons), can also be seen in dress over an even longer period of time. With regard to women, one might pick out the different ways in which femininity has been heightened and parodied, from the vast hooped skirts of the late Elizabethan period (revived in the eighteenth and – 21 –

Aileen Ribeiro nineteenth centuries), the Victorian bustle, the miniskirt of the 1960s and so on. This is not to say that these styles were unique to England, but in most cases, they were either native inventions or carried to exaggerated proportions, or continued after they had become out of vogue elsewhere.

Dress as Theatre Clothes have the chameleon ability to create character, status, and mood. Using dress in all its forms is a kind of role-playing, a theme perhaps particularly appropriate for women (denied, until the last hundred or so years, the major professional parts played by men), but a not insignificant element in male culture as well, although research remains to be done in this whole area. As has been pointed out, one of the elements in English art that Pevsner noted was a love of the real – the pragmatic. In this context one might remember Dr. Johnson’s often quoted comment that he preferred to see ‘a portrait of a dog than all the allegories you can show me’; on the whole the English tradition in portraiture has been for fairly straightforward representations of reality. But Pevsner points out, that the English sense of humour involves a feeling that clothes are not meant to be taken too seriously (this may explain why caricature is prized as an art form in England), and one aspect of being tongue-in-cheek in the past was to dress up in portraiture. This tendency can be seen particularly in portraiture from, say, Lely to Reynolds, where many sitters wear vaguely ‘classical’ draperies (largely the products of the studio) or actual fancy dress, either designed by the artist, or painted to commemorate a particular occasion such as a masquerade.8 Pevsner admits to some irritation apropos the English penchant both for inconsistency in approach (that artists’ theories were not always in line with their practices),9 and for what he called the ‘anti-aesthetic’ obsession with the past, which he found especially in nineteenth-century art and architecture. In particular, he disliked the work of the Pre-Raphaelite artists, both for their unreal realism and for their love of historical narratives (Pevsner 1964: 80). But the English tradition (in literature as in painting) was linked to a well-established taste for biography, a taste which, of necessity, involved representations of the past; as Anderson points out, an ‘image of antiquity [was] central to the subjective idea of the nation’ (Anderson 1991 [1983]: 44). A deep-seated concern for the past, by the English in particular, is surely a prime definition of the poetic and the romantic which Pevsner found such key components of Englishness. And the ways in which the past was used in the English cultural context – for example, in gardens littered with ‘classical’ temples and statuary, and landscapes inspired by Poussin and Claude, in railway stations built to look like medieval cathedrals, and so on – found a ready echo in the ways in which historic costume inspired both fancy dress and high fashion. Visiting country houses was a popular pastime from the eighteenth century onwards; these were places – 22 –

On Englishness in Dress where historical portraits could be seen, as well as in the public art galleries of the nineteenth century. Other sources of inspiration were costume plates (the Renaissance tradition of such images continued well into the nineteenth century) and books of costume history. As well as artists, costume designers for the theatre, film and TV have been equally infected with enthusiasm for the past, as were (and are) English fashion designers. From Gainsborough to Galliano, historical dress has been a potent source of Englishness. Alongside this trend is the linked concept of ‘artistic’ dress generally, an idea that arose as a kind of intellectual reaction to the perceived materialism in English society which, it was thought, the Industrial Revolution had engendered. The English Pre-Raphaelite artists (and, in some cases, their sitters) of the mid nineteenth-century, deeply in thrall to what Oscar Wilde described as the ‘maladies of medievalism’, designed costume inspired by historic dress, which on the one hand looked back, obviously, to the past, and on the other hand looked forward to the future (or at least to a concept of ‘timelessness’), proposing a more ‘natural’ look for women, closer to the body shape, and minus such fashionable understructures as the heavily whaleboned corset or the vast crinoline. As well as the, no doubt, genuinely held belief that such artistic dress was superior to high fashion, such styles, with their implicit rejection of vulgar displays of wealth, their dislike of the frivolity and mindlessness associated with fashion, were also evidence of the perennial strain of Puritanism long endemic in Englishness. Thus, the rather droopy and vaguely ‘historical’ aesthetic dress of the later nineteenth century which patrons could buy (or create for themselves) at Liberty (and which Punch loved to caricature) segued into the kind of loose and colourful ‘Bohemian’ dress worn, for example, in the circle of such artists as Augustus John in the early decades of the twentieth century. This vogue never quite died away, being reincarnated in the hippie styles of the late 1960s, and today being reinvented – particularly where intellectual and ‘progressive’ middle-class women are concerned – in the context of individual, unusual styles of dress often made of natural fibres, via the popularity of such designers as Issey Miyake and Shirin Guild, and specialist shops like Egg in London. For obvious reasons, mainly to do with the greater variety offered to women in their clothing, when set against the unimaginative conformity of much menswear, the wearing of artistic dress was more a female than a male concern. However there were some men, particularly from the late nineteenth century onwards, who adopted variants of artistic costume – unconventional, even eccentric garments of unstructured, comfortable styles and unusual colours; influences from workingclass clothing also appeared, such as the printed scarf knotted at the neck, and the blue shirts, which many members of the intelligentsia wore as a badge of their proletarian sympathies and political leanings, during the 1930s. Blue shirts have now lost their working-class connotation, and are equally to be seen worn with – 23 –

Aileen Ribeiro the pin-striped suit of the corporate lawyer, accountant or business executive as with the baggy tweeds, knitted pullover or cardigan (another English invention) of the patrician Englishman of a certain age and type. These styles, of course, have by now become uniforms – symbols of status and caste – and quite removed from the individuality which is an intrinsic part of artistic clothing.

Towards the Future One element of artistic costume which needs to be discussed is that of dress reform, adopted in late-nineteenth-century England and the USA by a relatively small but influential number of women in progressive circles, agitating for access to higher education and the right to vote (this group overlapped with ‘aesthetic’ women). Controversially, the agenda of the dress reformers, ever since the appearance of Amelia Bloomer in the mid-nineteenth century (her reform costume mixed baggy Turkish-style trousers with the kind of unstructured dress worn by female members of the Pre-Raphaelite circle), included bifurcated garments such as divided skirts, plus fours and so on. Trousers, where women were concerned, became associated with protest, although they eventually entered the mainstream of fashion more as a result of the popularity of sport than as a result of politics. But the linkage of clothing with political protest had become a particularly English concern (while it is true to say that the French Revolution evidenced the first real influence of politics on fashion, it is true also that it was primarily English styles of dress which set the agenda in this context), manifesting itself in such ways as, for example, the punk movement of the 1970s, the protest T-shirts of the 1980s, and so on. In a more global culture, notions of dress reform in the widest sense – encompassing gender ambivalence and identification, notions of futurism in style and fibres, new ways of accessing and consuming clothing and so on – are increasingly combined with such movements as animal rights and the preservation of the world’s natural resources, and are no longer just an English or an AngloSaxon phenomenon. Clearly, this is a long way removed from Pevsner’s conception of the romantic impulse in English art, but yet it has developed as a reaction to the mainstream and the conventional, and demonstrates the taste for the imaginative, which he found in the native culture; it also links with the trend towards extremes, which he discerned in the English psyche. Fifty years on from Pevsner’s The Englishness of English Art, England has changed so much as to be almost unrecognizable in some senses. In a complex, multicultural and increasingly international society, trying to define Englishness in terms of dress takes on the character of a hopeless quest, unless we begin to accept that images of Englishness are not mutually exclusive, hostile or contradictory, but complementary. Thus, the sartorial clichés of Englishness popularized by the English Tourist Board (lists again) – the kind of ‘heritage’ clothing, such as – 24 –

On Englishness in Dress Burberry coats, Savile Row suits, cashmere twinsets – are part of one kind of white Anglo-Saxon Englishness, in contrast to the kind of adventurous street style dress, initiated by English subcultures from the 1950s onwards, and linked to successive influences from the global worlds of popular music, video and film. Dress, if it means anything at all, concerns itself with social norms, which, although they may be modified by individuals, reflect the customs and aesthetics of any given age. Thus, our usage of clothing is rooted in the complexities of English cultural history. In this sense, it is easier to define, describe and discuss the dress worn at any given time in England (dress in England, or English dress) than it is to pin down what precisely makes it English (the Englishness of dress).

Notes 1. For a literary treatment of Englishness, it is worth glancing at Julian Barnes’s (1998) novel England, England, a rather heavy-handed satire on the heritage industry, and an exploration of notions of authenticity and replica. Set in the not-too-distant future, the novel imagines the Isle of Wight being taken over by a tycoon to become England in miniature (England, England), a historical theme park full of replica buildings, historical events and experiences. As part of the preparatory research, the ‘Concept Developer’ is asked to produce the ‘top fifty characteristics associated with the word England among prospective purchasers of Quality Leisure’; among these are: the Royal Family, the BBC, Harrods, Beefeaters, beer, cricket, emotional frigidity, bowler hats, bad underwear, homosexuality, the class system, shopping. Yet another example of list-making! 2. Timothy Mowl’s book is a somewhat hysterical anti-Pevsner tract, the gravamen of which is that as a ‘man with no English social background’, disliking the English class system and identifying with the austerities of post-war Britain, he was able to exert an ‘alien’ influence on English architecture by encouraging the erection of ‘some of the dreariest housing of twentieth century Britain’ (Mowl 2000: 115). 3. Other examples of this kind of cod-Englishness (a heightened and out-of-date perception) might be seen in some aspects of the dress (blazers, panama hats, and so on) worn by certain types of expatriate English communities, in places like the Algarve or southern Spain, where there is little identification with the host nation, and clothing is used to define self through difference. 4. There are at least two examples of the contemporary belief that the English were not self-confident enough to have developed their own styles of dress, or, snobbishly preferred to wear foreign clothing. The first is Andrew Borde’s – 25 –

Aileen Ribeiro doggerel account of his European travels in the 1540s, the First Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge, where the image of an Englishman (a woodcut showing a naked man with a pair of tailoring shears) accompanies this verse (quoted in Ribeiro 1986: 65): I am an Englishman, and naked I stand here Musyng in my mynde what rayment I shal were For now I wyll were thys, and now I wyl were that Now I wyl were I cannot tel what.

5.

6. 7.

8. 9.

The notion that the English were not sure of their identity via dress and clothed themselves in the fashions of other countries was a long-running joke which lasted well into the seventeenth century (frequently commented on in the literature of the time). In a masque of 1640 the nations of Europe are represented on the stage, the Englishman being shown ‘in a slasht french doublett . . . strayght Spanish hose, dutch felt hatt, short Italian cloake, long black Gretian haire’. See Raquaillo d’Oceano by Mildmay Fane, Earl of Westmorland, 1640, p. 67. Langford notes foreigners’ confusion over Englishness and Britishness, the latter being regarded as the former, even after the Union with Scotland in 1707. The English character, he notes, ‘was the dynamic force, squeezing out Celtic claims to determine what made Britain British’ (Langford 2000: 14). For example, the urban working class of mid-nineteenth-century London, as described by Henry Mayhew, or the Teddy Boys of a hundred years later. Hogarth didn’t in fact, consider himself to be a true caricaturist, and to our eyes he is not in the same league as, say, Gillray, in the late eighteenth century for savage distortion of body shapes and fashions. For a discussion of fancied/fancy dress in English portraiture, see Ribeiro (2000). As examples of the contradictions inherent in English art, Pevsner cites what he finds is the ‘far-reaching’ contrast between Reynolds’s theories of art (his love of history painting, and his ‘Grand Style’) and his actual practice of portraiture (Pevsner 1964: 59) and William Morris preaching socialism, while producing ‘the most wonderful woven stuffs so expensive as to be accessible only to a relatively few appreciative patrons’ (Pevsner 1964: 67).

References Anderson, B. (1991 [1983]), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso. – 26 –

On Englishness in Dress Barnes, J. (1998), England, England, London: Jonathan Cape. Buruma, I. (2000), Voltaire’s Coconuts or Anglomania in Europe, London: Orion. Fane, M., Earl of Westmoreland (1640), Raquaillo d’Oceano, ed. C. Leech, Materials for the Study of the Old English Drama, vol. 15, Louvain. Langford, P. (2000), Englishness Identified: Manners and Character 1650–1850, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lipovetsky, G. (1994), The Empire of Fashion, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mowl, T. (2000), Stylistic Cold Wars: Betjeman versus Pevsner, London: John Murray. Paxman, J. (1999), The English, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Pevsner, N. (1964), The Englishness of English Art, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Ribeiro, A. (1986), Dress and Morality, London: Batsford. —— (2000), The Gallery of Fashion, London: National Portrait Gallery.

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Englishness, Clothes and Little Things

–2– Englishness, Clothes and Little Things Carolyn Steedman

If historians (English social and cultural historians) want to think about Englishness in the last decades of the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century, then there are two major historical theses to guide them. In the case of this book and the conference that inspired it, it is imperative to acknowledge these theses and to bring them to the testing point of clothes and dress. Benedict Anderson first formulated his in 1983, in the first edition of Imagined Communities (Anderson 1991 [1983]: 37–46). He drew on the work of Raymond Williams, on Williams’s notion of the ‘knowable communities’ into which we are born and spend our life (Williams 1983; O’Connor 1989: 68–9, 124–5). Following Williams, Anderson proposes that all collectivities larger than face-to-face ones (and perhaps even these) have to be imagined in terms of the number of people whom we might – in principle – meet, and who are in some sense ‘like us’. They are ‘like us’ in belonging to the imagined community, and the way in which they are ‘like us’ haunts all our imaginings. This thesis places very great emphasis on developments in print capitalism, from the mid-sixteenth century onwards, and the logic of those developments, which was print in the vernacular. The vernacular speech of a particular region (in England, that triangle between London, Oxford and Cambridge, called by sociolinguists for some odd reason, the East Midlands) was fixed by print culture, and became the language of state and government, and the language of national consciousness. Print capitalism created ‘languages of power’ and powerful languages (Leith 1997: 7–57). The written and spoken word is central to ‘imagining the nation’. Much importance is assigned to newspaper publication and distribution (from the late seventeenth century) and on the literary form that rose to preeminence under the sway of print capitalism and standardized printed English – the novel (Davis 1983: 42–101; McKeon 1987: 41–7). This literary form helped to conceptualize a new kind of time, as ‘homogeneous and empty’ (Taylor 1989: 286–9, 463; Leslie 2000: 168–207). In this new kind of (imagined) time, many things can happen simultaneously, in different spaces and places. The ur-servant figure of the eighteenth century, Samuel Richardson’s eponymous Pamela, may be upstairs sewing letters into the lining of her bodice, as downstairs Mr B. plots

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Carolyn Steedman her ravishment; she may sit in the big house flowering a waistcoat for him, her dead mistress’s son, while not only do her aged and respectable parents wait for her in their humble cot, but also the very act of undertaking such a long job of embroidery signals her unacknowledged reluctance to leave (Richardson 1980 [1740]). The flowering gives the reader access not only to the place outside the action of the text, where her parents dwell and her childhood was, but also to the interior spaces of her self; moreover, it is access to a self and its movements of passion that you, the reader, can discern, in a way that Pamela, the character, does not. What is more, you can be in Bedford reading this story, and there, present to your imagination must be the idea of someone much like you, in some other place – Howarth perhaps, though you may not know its name – holding the same book, reading the same story. Written language, and a particular literary form, are then to be understood as part of a developing national consciousness. Gary Kelly (1992) made much of this thesis, in discussing the self-formation of the English middle classes. He describes a national identity emerging among men and women, quite widely scattered across the British Isles, meeting in the imagination through their experiences as writers, and as consumers of print (Kelly 1992: 1–22). But neither he nor the progenitor of the thesis pay detailed attention to the actual, material vehicle of these imaginings: the printed book – the printed book as mass commodity. The printed book was first among consumer durables, one of the first things produced in exactly the same form and of exactly the same appearance (the same inside and outside) and available to a large number of people. And it introduced a radically new understanding of the reading process, quite different from the experience of reading a hand-written manuscript, where the reader-at-this-moment must be the only possible reader. To read a printed book, or a printed news-sheet, is to know that there are others (potentially, many others) doing the same thing as you. A question is raised: if the mass-produced commodity fiction that we now call the novel could play a part in bringing into being national identity and national consciousness, why do we not attribute the same effects to drinking out of a Staffordshire teacup, nor to the many accessories and items of clothing discussed by John Styles in his account of one northern household of the late eighteenth century and its servants’ access to the world of sexy and fashionable goods (Styles 1994, 2001; Richards 1999: 35–126)?1 The account book of the Heaton family, manufacturers of Ponden Hall near Howarth, which was kept between 1768 and 1794 shows, in very great detail, the buckles, buttons, ribbons, stays and hats bought on their credit by the young women – like Sally Shackleton – who worked as their household servants (Styles 2001).2 Sally Shackleton lasted for eighteen months (average for this household and, it seems, for the region, but did not buy a new pair of stays on credit, as did many of her fellow workers, which is to our later purposes here). Why do we not understand the plated buckles that Betty Mason – 30 –

Englishness, Clothes and Little Things (another of the Heatons’ servants) had off the Scotchman in 1786, nor the paper box for hats that Nancy Holmes had during her second year of service in 1783, nor the new painted gown on which 18s was outlaid the year before, as vehicles of English national identity, in the way that Anderson (1991 [1983]) has taught us to understand the love stories, fortune-tellers and almanacs that the Scotchman also carried in his pack, or on his cart? I do not ask these questions of the lawn that Nancy Holmes bought for 10 ha’penny in 1781, and used in the caps she made for herself, because near Howarth, you know how fine linen is woven (though your direct experience is probably of cotton, serge and worsted weaving). But we should ask the question of those mass-produced items – buckles, buttons, fancy paperwork – whose production process might be only dimly understood, from somewhere else, where people you would never meet sewed on the same scarlet buttons and fixed the same plated buckles to their shoes. Can mass-produced items of clothing and haberdashery produce a notion – in this case an idea of Englishness – through innumerable acts of imagining others, rather like you, dressing themselves up with all these lovely little things? To claim this as a serious question, we need to consider the second historical thesis concerning national identity that focuses on the eighteenth century. Unlike Anderson’s (1991 [1983]), which relies on the assumption of an ability possessed by people in the past, to imagine and find similitude in others whom they would never meet face to face, Linda Colley’s (1992) thesis relies on a recognition of difference between individual people and populations. As her title indicates, her concerns are with British rather than English national identity, but we can still bring the hat-box and the buttons up against it, asking questions about dress and Englishness in the same period (Colley 1992). The idea of the Other provides the very framework of her Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837. Colley shows how enmity with another – how war – fashioned us, and how, in the early eighteenth century, a powerful pre-existing Protestantism was reformulated into Britishness, through a series of violent engagements with other societies, other nations, other religious formations. Anti-Catholicism was the most powerful articulation of this identity, and war with France both its literal expression and its metaphor. This perspective and framework (which is older than Colley’s articulation of it under the banner of the Other) has been and is quite conventionally applied to the history of dress in the formation of English identity, partly because it is so very easy to find contemporary comparisons made between the dress of English and French women, and the construction of national typologies of finery, adornment and decoration (Ribeiro 1984: 13–18, 20–42 and passim). And there is a third thesis concerning Englishness – a kind of development of the Otherness notion – that has begun to emerge as a framework in historical writing. It sets in place the idea of This, of Here, and its antithetical That, or There, and considers the ways in which national identity might have come into being in – 31 –

Carolyn Steedman the periphery or on the margins rather than in the metropole: over There. An exemplification of this thesis is Gauri Viswanathan’s work on the emergence of ‘English’ as a discipline and a field of study, not in England but in the colonial educational system of British India (Viswanathan 1988, 1989, 1991; see also Barrell 1991: 1–24).3 We know that the printed goods assigned the historical role of bringing Englishness into being spread along the same routes as the buttons, buckles, ribbons, tapes, kerchiefs, lace and laces that tied up, bound, held together, kept in place and decorated the larger lengths of fabric that made ‘the great reclothing of rural England’, from the end of the sixteenth century onwards. Margaret Spufford’s phrase – the title of her book – tells us as well of the bewildering variety of cloth and ready-made clothing, that the pedlars’ packs contained (Spufford 1984). There is argument among historians about Spufford’s dating of the ‘great reclothing’ in England, and her claims about the existence of a mass market among the poorer sort (‘among wage-labourers, cottagers and small-holders’) by the beginning of the eighteenth century. Spufford’s argument is that ‘the labouring classes found cash to spare’ for consumer goods in 1700 that had ‘had no place in their budgets in 1550’ (Spufford 1984: 1–22), which must be considered in the light of Lorna Weatherill’s (1988) severe criticism, that none of Spufford’s discussion of the goods bought from the chapman, none of her descriptions of their appearance, use and ownership, is actually drawn from data relating directly to wage-labourers (Weatherill 1988: 192–4). There is much better evidence (again from Margaret Spufford in England, and Roger Chartier and his colleagues in France) about the social status of the purchasers of the books – the cheap little books, ‘small books and pleasant histories’ – that were often carried in the same pack as the lace and laces, caps and cuffs, needles and threads (Spufford 1981; Chartier 1989). In Small Books and Pleasant Histories, Spufford is able to use direct testimony from the poorer sort who bought the chapman’s penny ‘histories’, almanacs and fortune-tellers (and sometimes, later, books of patterns for dresses). Sometimes the book trade established the route and the distribution network, and the haberdashery, calicos and linens followed; sometimes it was the other way round. The Scotchman (or probably, several Scotchmen) who called at the Heaton house between 1768 and 1794 was part of that great descent from the mountainous regions of Europe to sell petty wares, that Laurence Fontaine (1996) describes in his History of Pedlars in Europe (the other mountainous regions besides Scotland that were the homes of the men Fontaine deals with, are the Alps, particularly the high altitude villages, stretching from the Haute-Savoie to the Tyrol, and the Pyrenees). The Scots, who had long traded across the Baltic region and established a particularly noted trading and distribution network in Poland, found a new English market to open up, after the Act of Union in 1707 (Fontaine 1996). Overall, the British Isles were less – 32 –

Englishness, Clothes and Little Things dominated by the highlands than was mainland Europe, because of the very early existence of a peddling structure organized around the industrial zones. Nevertheless, says Fontaine, ‘Scotland invariably accounted for the largest number of pedlars’, even in the later eighteenth century, which also saw the emergence of a newer type of petty trader, the ‘Manchester Man’. He, according to Fontaine, ‘heralded a radical innovation, in that his ties with his home community were relaxed in favour of his firm, for whom he worked on a virtually exclusive basis’ (Fontaine, 1996: 92–3). The Scotchman who took in Howarth and its environs on his route was probably what Fontaine calls a ‘regular pedlar’, with established suppliers, faithful customers, and enough capital to guarantee credit, and to manage a credit timetable that he drew up for his own customers. It is with another type of petty trader – the man he calls the ‘destitute pedlar’ – that Fontaine starts to write about dreams and imaginings. He tells us about ‘the destitute pedlar’ (half-beggar, half-tramp), who ‘put on a show, and sold dreams’: As intermediaries between their public and other worlds, they took their audiences into the realms of the imaginary, into other ways of knowing oneself, to other places, and to new understandings. Ultimately, the pedlar was selling himself and all that his words . . . could stir in the imagination of his listeners . . . he crooned his wares and the new fashions – fashions with which he opened windows onto other ways of knowing oneself, other ways of life . . . (Fontaine 1996: 81–2)

Later in the book, all pedlars, respectable or not, take on these attributes, of belonging to another world, selling both ‘the stuff of everyday life, and the stuff of dreams’ (Fontaine 1996: 2). The question must be: what kinds of dreams were these? More specifically, and to our purposes here, were these dreams – could these dreams and imaginings – be of a nation, of a national identity, of ‘Englishness’? In order to think about the relationship of dress and adornment to the accounts of Englishness and national identity that I have briefly discussed, I want to return to the novel. For hardened novel-readers, whose pleasure in the text is of the hedonistic rather than the cerebral or academic sort, there is a question that literary theory never addresses, indeed, never poses: why is its description of clothes so very boring? Why does the eye slide inexorably away from anything that is not right now: away from 1940s skirt shapes, 1930s braiding, the pin-tucks on an Edwardian blouse? You can read about the depth of a crinoline flounce with a historian’s eye, and with great interest; but not when you are a novel-reader, whose expectations are of the delicious engagements of detail – of food, and feelings, but not it seems, of frocks and flouncing. Even those novelists whose business is dress, cannot deliver these kinds of goods. Nicholas Coleridge, of intimate relationship with Vogue,

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Carolyn Steedman with Harpers & Queen, and author of The Fashion Conspiracy (1988), delivers a total textual blankness in With Friends Like These (1997), when he describes the flat planes of his central character’s – Anna’s – shift-dresses. It is the same to my mind, with Lisa Armstrong’s (1998) Front Row (there is an even more intimate relationship with Vogue here), except for one extraordinary aperture in the text, which was the true progenitor of this chapter.4 Armstrong has a particular problem – in a novel about fashion journalism, in which frocks are rarely absent from the text – for everything, from the moment it was written, let alone read, was already last year, last season, last week. And yet, there is a moment, when Janie, the heroine, covets a pair of trousers, by a new young British designer, in a paisley fabric, with a row of little pearl buttons: Not only were the clothes strong enough to be featured regularly in lavish editorials in the likes of A La Mode and Italian Vogue, but they were commercial too: the Madeleine Peterson label was prominently displayed in Harvey Nichols and Joseph. On one of her rare trips into Knightsbridge, Janie had fallen in love with a pair of paisley trousers, fastened with tiny mother-of-pearl buttons up one side, which had haunted her for so many months that she vowed never to go window-shopping again. (Armstrong 1998: 113)

It is the mysteriousness of this item that makes it so interesting (as well as the shock of suddenly becoming a different kind of reader) and the instant recognition that it is interesting. For the paisley shrieks ‘not now’, so other time; and it is disturbing and exhausting to have to enter the text in this way, for until this moment it has not asked you to be a reader trained by the fashion magazines, with the fashion magazines’ knowledge, but just an ordinary, everyday reader of schlock fiction. So, the interest partly is, that it is interesting, despite the paisley pattern. The interest and new engagement could come from a momentary satisfaction of the Bildungsroman imperative, for Janie is a reluctant heroine of the fashion industry, and reluctant editor of a broadsheet fashion page, whose task in these pages is to learn to love fashion (at this moment she wants to do, what she has to do anyway; this, Franco Moretti has told us, is what the Bildungsroman does, to its characters and its readers) (Moretti 1987).5 Briefly, momentarily, Janie achieves wanting and loving fashion, and the reader loves and wants what she loves and wants. But after much pondering on my desire for a pair of trousers that seem to me to be quite objectively, foul, I decided that it was the buttons that did it; because they are little buttons, and because of what we know about the poetics of littleness. The attraction of the miniature object, the deep pleasures of littleness, have been noted by literary scholars attempting to create a poetics of relative size and smallness, and some years ago now, I attempted – not very successfully, I now think – a corrective to late-twentieth-century historians’ willingness to find

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Englishness, Clothes and Little Things explanations of nationalism and national identity through the notion of the Other, by using the idea of littleness (Steedman 1995). I was puzzled at the blanket acceptance of another idea, already introduced in these pages, that ‘by not being Others we define ourselves. We have always done so’ (Barkan 1994: 180) and the way in which historians started to use the idea of the Other in their accounts of national identity, quietly commandeering a thesis connected with literary studies through the work of Edward Said (1995 [1972]) and later elaborated in postcolonial theory. This Other is a very big thing, and undetailed. Littleness, on the other hand, is the something tiny that can be held, and appropriated and incorporated into the idea of who you are. (Crucially, the memory of once having been little, and in some way, carrying that childhood with and within you, as a kind of personal history, was essential to my – it now seems – very chancy and almost entirely unsubstantiated argument.) Anyway, I claimed that national identity has not always been made through the process of ‘Othering’ that I summarized particularly in relationship to Linda Colley’s work at the beginning of this chapter, but sometimes and also through a process of incorporation, an incorporation made possible by the remembered childhood, that is itself a part of the adult self, and the littleness that is its essential feature. I drew on some understanding of object relations theory, but much more than that, on what literary critics had to tell me about little things, and the imaginative uses to which little things have been, and indeed are, put.6 And I noted then, as I want to note now, that none of the academic work that we possess on the role of things in the making of identity mentions clothes, or little things. I think here, of course, of Pierre Bourdieu’s (1992) elaborate account of class taste in relationship to material objects, and of the wonderfully entitled The Meaning of Things (Czikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton 1981). The absence in this latter work is particularly striking, for the object relations theory the authors employ has a very great deal to say about the texture and feel of the (mainly woven) things that form our first identities (Winnicott 1971: 1–30). I was trying then, as I suppose I am trying now, to suggest that the links between the idea of national identity and objects – between Englishness and things – are always partly fanciful (perhaps that is their point, as theories: to be fanciful). And indeed, there is recent theoretical speculation to suggest that I should not ditch all of the fancy goods, not even my own. Historians need to look much more closely at the objects they contemplate as they write their history. It is odd, I know, to suggest that historians might have paid too much attention to the symbolism of things in the past, for a crass concern with literalness, a lack of interest in meaning, is what we are usually accused of. But consider for a moment the histories of eighteenth-century consumption that we possess, where every brass kettle, Worcester teacup, lawn handkerchief and packet of pins means something else: means purchasing power, credit system, social status, proto-industrialization, – 35 –

Carolyn Steedman division of labour (the pins are a particularly famous example here), economic take-off, household economy, surplus income, wage-level, cash-flow; never mean ‘packet of pins’, ‘yard of muslin’, ‘camblet lining for a bodice’. We need a history – and indeed, a poetics, which is what would follow from a history – of the things themselves. How they look, and felt; their surfaces and edges, how conveniently they fitted a pocket or the palm of a hand; smell, colour, the way some buttons (not all buttons) stay cooler than the bodice they fasten. If we were to write such a history (and make such a poetics) then we might be able to distinguish what is in the cheap version of Pamela in the chapman’s pack (a story, a dream, a fantasy, capable of exercising all the influences on the imagination with which Anderson ascribes it, in Imagined Communities) and the object itself, the little book, which has no power to tell its purchaser and reader about all the other men and women, who far away and in another county, picked and sorted the rags for its paper, set the type (and – if it were a more rarely carried leather bound volume – took part in all the filthy trades that produced it). I am travelling via Colin Campbell’s (1993) urgings that when historians consider the buying and ownership of things, they should abandon their existing theories, vaguely based on Theodor Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption, and their various beliefs about social emulation; I am travelling beyond his important suggestion that we look at the eighteenth-century vocabularies of self-construction (in contemporary terms, making ‘character’) that (perhaps) prompted desire for and purchase of particular types of thing (Campbell 1993: 40–57). I am suggesting that we look to those goods themselves, and consider the proposition that dress, and the little things that holds dress together and adorns it, cannot do it – cannot produce Englishness – because of what dress is (what clothes are): ways of dreaming, or imagining yourself, not others, in new ways. Fontaine says as much, when he describes how As they travelled, the pedlars offered objects and ideas which helped the recipient to consider his or her own personality and to mould it. Ultimately, whatever the manner in which these objects were used, the fact that they provided one and all with the opportunity of expressing his or her irreducible individuality is in itself something new and radical. (Fontaine 1996: 201)

And it would do no harm to remember the efforts of art historians, who in their extensive work on eighteenth-century portraiture, show us how painters used clothing and adornment, not to paint community, nor communal identity, but rather used a lace edging, a row of scarlet buttons, a loop of pearls, the five-tuck, tentuck, fifteen-tuck sleeve, to show that one-and-only, striking, originality, of personhood. Starkly then, a conclusion: clothes cannot make Englishness, at least not the Englishness that the current theses present us with, because of the way they are as

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Englishness, Clothes and Little Things things, and because of their meanings indeed, which were those people’s – their wearers’ – meanings, not ours, as social and economic historians.

Stays: Towards a Political Economy of the Corset This turned out to be not-very-much to do with the variety of titles I (most irritatingly) produced for the organizers over the six months prior to the conference at which it was presented. I gave them ‘Fictional Representations of English Dress’; cumbersomely titled projections for papers on servants’ clothes in the eighteenth century; I once and briefly had the snappy ‘Hat-boxes in Howarth, 1794’; but now, in the privacy of my own research project, I think of this as ‘Stays: Notes towards a Political Economy of the Corset’. So, what is it with stays, and servants’ stays in particular? Stays raise yet more questions about goods, apparel and desire. In the Heaton manuscript, so elegantly and thoroughly accounted for by John Styles (2001), thirty female servants’ purchases and wages were recorded. Stays (new – mostly new – or second-hand) were bought by or for fifteen of them. They were expensive items when they were new, ranging in price from 18s to £1 4s 6d. Ann Proctor’s new painted gown and lining put 17s 6d on the Heaton tally sheet in 1792; this young woman earned just £4 a year.7 Why these expensive and, it seems, absolutely essential garments? Are they garments, or objects of desire, or what? Why did these young women have to have them? Why does Hannah Glasse, writing in The Servant’s Directory in 1760, address the housemaid directly, and say Now . . . my little young House maid . . . take care to be up very early in the morning . . . lace on your Stays and pin your things very well tight around you, or you never can work well. (Glasse 1760: 23)

If we look back through the fog of tight-lacing and fetishism with which the corsetquestion has usually been addressed, we shall never find answers (Anon. n.d [Freaks]; Lord 1868; Leoty 1893; O’Followell 1905; Libron and Clouzot 1933; Kunzle 1982; McDowell 1998: 346–7; Farrer 1999).8 The least we can discern is that stays cannot have restricted movement, nor breathing, nor effort, very much at all (obviously, if you can lace a corset tight, you can also lace it loose). We may discern as well, that these young women wanted a pair of stays for reasons of practicality and comfort, as well as the foundation on which a contemporary sexiness à la mode could be fashioned. We may suppose that they fitted as well or ill as the brassieres that a majority of modern British women report as being uncomfortable, and perhaps that, from the 1780s onwards, they increased in comfort, with cutting on the bias and the introduction of gores, darting, flares and ‘slopes’ to their construction (Willimott 1841: 13 [and patterns]; Howell 1847: – 37 –

Carolyn Steedman 118–128; Cunnington and Cunnington 1951: 37–8, 115–118; Waugh 1954: 74– 85; Sorge 1998). Even the straight up-and-down stays of the earlier century (no shaping, no darting) held the breasts in place, stopped them bouncing around as women worked, and perhaps prevented the feeling of that horrible, sticky band of sweat that develops beneath them, and that is now absorbed by the bra, wired or not (Waugh 1954: 152–3). No wonder that Hannah Glasse connected stays and working hard. The polysemic ‘figure’ (shape, body, breasts, an outline presented to the world) could come to mean much more to us, because we would pay attention to the potential meanings it had for Ann Proctor. And the fact that these young women were servants raises particularly important corset questions. Servants are the category of worker that labour and social historians have been most embarrassed about and, at the same time, the unspoken category around which they have constructed most of their theories of consumption. Colin Campbell (1993) is particularly sharp on the historian’s blithe and uncomplicated use of eighteenthcentury employers’ routine condemnation of maidservants’ aping the dress, manners and desires of their superiors. Indeed, as Campbell (1993) says, an emulative theory of consumption contains many difficulties which are silently passed over (see also Styles 2001). And the stays themselves: what dreams did these complicated objects, the amalgam of so many industrial and craft processes, allow women to dream? Of English whaling ships on the high Atlantic seas? Or after 1790, the number of British whalers sailing the Pacific (but always, wherever their prey is hunted down, the seas stained red as the baleen is hacked from the corpse roped to the side of the ship) (Stackpole 1972: 386–7; Duncan 1977–8: 49)? The east coast ports? Or the baleen whale industries of Aberdeen and further north (Waugh 1954: 167–9; Duncan 1977–8; Lindquist 1997)? The horrible trades that produced the leather covering for the whalebone? And did the Scotchman carry in his pack a range of that scurrilous and satirical balladry that sneered at a stay maker for having anything to say about the constitution? For in the early 1790s, Tom Paine (1995 [1791–2]) had turned ‘From moulding forms and bolst’ring shapes . . . to shaping Laws, Sir’ (‘To be sung to the Tune of Bow, wow, wow!’) (Anon. 1792, 1793b; Keane 1995: 36–7). The Heaton servants often went over to Keighley, to visit family, go shopping, visit the Fair, perhaps (the account book is unclear) collect a pair of stays. Tom the Boddice-maker and indeed, The Rights of Man may have reached the town, and other Pennine metropole.9 There was no stay maker in town; or rather, no stay maker who insured his business with the Royal Exchange; indeed, there were no insured stay makers in the whole of Yorkshire, nor insured mantua makers. (Mantua makers were usually women and had certainly undertaken stay making by the early nineteenth century.) Stay makers insured businesses in London, and in the coastal counties where the last stages of whalebone processing took place on shore and at the docks. None of this is to say that there were no stay makers, male or female, and stay-making – 38 –

Englishness, Clothes and Little Things dressmakers in the Pennine towns.10 But we know nothing of the dreams, that Fontaine (1996) and Colley (1992) deal in, in their different ways, of whales and Revolution, nor whether they were dreamed at all. It is not that we know nothing about stays, for costume history turned via the corset question, to social and economic questions, and permits us to ask new questions about what it was you wanted and what it was you got when, in 1780, in your second year of service and on a wage of 1s 6d, you laid out (or someone laid out for you) £1 4s 0d on a pair. There is much more to discover, but we have enough information on corsets to begin to ask better questions than we have in the past, about experience, identity and dress. We may even be in a position to abandon the notion that dress can have anything to do with an emerging English national identity, as it has been described by historians and other students of the long eighteenth century. Stays must also make us consider again the theoretical framework of the ‘Englishness’ debate, as constructed by historians of the long consumer revolution. We might now ask where ‘the Other’, so blithely employed by them, actually comes from. Histories of philosophy may point to its origins in Husserlian phenomenology, and its working over in Existentialism in the 1950s and 1960s. The English-language reader of French existentialism may note with interest the 1953 introduction to a translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s La Deuxième Sexe, which compellingly emphasized her use of the concept (de Beauvoir 1997 [1949, 1953]: 16–21). But in its modern form and its use by historians it appears to be a construct begat on Foucauldian discourse theory by many readings of Edward Said’s (1995 [1972]) Orientalism.11 And, in this use, something hitherto unnoticed swims into view. If the Other supplies the notion of the Self (if, for example, Frenchness and Catholicism provide the self-image and identity of the English, or of the British nation), then the mechanism of this process must be the individual imagination. The argument depends on innumerable people doing this, in their heads, in much the same way as Anderson’s account of identity through recognition and similitude depends on individuals reading print, and figuring to themselves an Other, like their Self. The Other, in this manifestation, depends on certain assumptions about individual psychological processes in the past, to which historians have extremely limited access. Stays are particularly compelling in raising an objection: that while a story might do this, or the dear little engraving of a whaling ship on the whalebone-man’s trade card might allow you to figure yourself in another place, an other way of being (Sorge 1998: 20), while stories and images might enter the imagination, provide the material for ideation, and leave behind some evidence of its happening, a button, a length of ribbon, a black silk hat cannot: that dress cannot produce Englishness, in the way we currently understand it to have emerged. The easiest thing to do then, is to abandon the theoretical framework that supports the historian’s ‘Englishness’, and find a better one. – 39 –

Carolyn Steedman

Notes 1. Strange, the absence of attention to china as a vehicle of Englishness, for its purchase and use gave rise to one late-eighteenth-century discussion of Otherness and national identity conducted in the terms used by their modern historians. See Jane Austen (1972 [1818]: 179); Northanger Abbey was almost certainly drafted in the late 1790s. 2. West Yorkshire Archives, Bradford District. HEATON B149. Account book of Robert Heaton giving names of servants employed and wages paid. 3. It is, of course, perfectly possible to pursue the topic of Englishness without any reference to these theses. In English Identified, Paul Langford (2000) provides an audit of those habits and manners observed by those defining ‘the English’ between 1650 and 1850. 4. Though since that moment, I have learned a very great deal from Lynne Sorge, and her work on English tailoring from the 1680s onwards. 5. My examples are not elevated ones; but then, neither was Samuel Richardson’s Pamela to be understood within our modern categories of ‘high and low’ fiction (serious and schlock) for most of its existence as a text. 6. For a bibliography for the pursuit of a poetics of littleness, see Steedman 1995. 7. For the production and consumption of ready-made clothes by working women, see Lemire (1999: 23–35). 8. Freaks of Fashion (Anon. n.d.) is an abridged, cheaper version of Lord (1868). 9. In fact, there was surprisingly little scurrility found by his detractors in Paine’s staying-making past – rather more to do with his denying Mrs Paine ‘The Rights of Man’ (or, Woman – they meant). See Anon. (1793a) Life and Character of Mr Thomas Paine, put in Metre (n.i.). Balladeers and pamphleteers knew rather less about stays (how made, what they were for) than their modern historians do. 10. Royal Exchange and Sun Fire Insurance Register, Indexes 1775–87. Trade Index, p. 652, p. 125; Place Index, p. 461, p. 339. (Warwickshire County Record Office, CR 811/293). See also Warwickshire County Record Office, CR 811/293. ‘Misses Lloyd and Miss Woolmer. Agreement. Dated 10 May 1828’. Here Eliza and Martha Lloyd of Leamington Spa, ‘co-partners in the trade . . . of dressmakers’ acquired the services of Lucy Louise Woolmer ‘in the art and business of stay maker’. Deborah Oxley counts female stay makers and mantua makers among her ‘convict maids’ of the early nineteenth century (Oxley 1996: 118–23). 11. Phillip Dodd’s brief remarks about Said and Orientalism in his discussion of 1880s Englishness have had far-flung effects (Dodd 1988: 1–3).

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Englishness, Clothes and Little Things

References Anon. (1792), Pour Commençer: Tom the Bodice-maker. To the Tune of Bow! Wow! Wow! (n.i.). Anon. (1793a), Life and Character of Mr Thomas Paine, put in Metre and inscribed to the Society against Levellers and Republicans (n.i.). Anon. (1793b), Tom the Boddice-maker: A Satirical Song (n.i.). Anon. (1793c), Tom Paine, the Staymaker (n.i.). Anon. (n.d. [late 1860s]), The Freaks of Fashion: With Illustrations of the Changes in the Corset and the Crinoline, from Remote Periods to the Present Time, London: Lock & Taylor. Anderson, B. (1991 [1983]), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso. Armstrong, L. (1998), Front Row, London: Hodder & Stoughton. Austen, J. (1972 [1818]), Northanger Abbey, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Barkan, E. (1994), ‘Post-Anti-Colonial Histories: Representing the Other in Imperial Britain’, Journal of British Studies, 33: 180–203. Barrell, J. (1991), The Infection of Thomas de Quincey: A Psychopathology of Imperialism, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Beauvoir, S. de (1997 [1949] [1953]), The Second Sex, London: Vintage. Bourdieu, P. (1992 [1979]), Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, London: Routledge. Campbell, C. (1993), ‘Understanding the Traditional and Modern Patterns of Consumption in Eighteenth-century England: A Character-action approach’, in J. Brewer and R. Porter (eds), Consumption and the World of Goods, London: Routledge. Chartier, R. (ed.) (1989), The Culture of Print: Power and Uses of Print in Modern Europe, Cambridge: Polity. —— (1995), Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances and Audiences from Codex to Computer, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Coleridge, N. (1988), The Fashion Conspiracy: A Remarkable Journey through the Empire of Fashion, London: Heinemann/Mandarin. —— (1997), With Friends Like These, London: Orion. Colley, L. (1992), Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Colmer, M. (1979), Whalebone to See-through: A History of Body Packaging, London: Johnston & Bacon. Cunnington, C.W. and Cunnington, P. (1951), The History of Underclothes, London: Michael Joseph. Czikszentmihalyi, M. and Rochberg-Halton, E. (1981), The Meaning of Things, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. – 41 –

Carolyn Steedman Davis, L. (1983), Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel, New York: Columbia University Press. Dodd, P. (1988), ‘Englishness and the National Culture’, in R. Colls and P. Dodd (eds), Englishness: Politics and Culture, 1880–1920, London: Croom Helm. Duncan, W.R.H. (1977–8), ‘Aberdeen and the Early Development of the Whaling Industry, 1750–1800’, Northern Scotland, 3(1): 47–59. Easthope, A. (1999), Englishness and National Culture, London: Routledge. Farrer, P. (1999), Tight Lacing: A Bibliography of Articles and Letters Concerning Stays and Corsets for Men and Women. Part I, 1828–1880, Liverpool: Karn. Fontaine, L. (1996), History of Pedlars in Europe, Cambridge: Polity. Glasse, H. (1760), The Servant’s Directory, or Housekeeper’s Companion, London: Johnston. Howell, Mrs M.J. (1847), The Hand-book of Millinery; to which is Appended . . . an Essay on Corset Making, London: Simpkin & Marshall. Keane, J. (1995), Tom Paine: A Political Life, London: Bloomsbury. Kelly, G. (1992), Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft, London: Macmillan. Kunzle, D. (1982), Fashion and Fetishism: A Social History of the Corset, Tightlacing and Other Forms of Body-sculpture in the West, Ottawa: Rowan & Littlefield. Langford, P. (2000), Englishness Identified, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leith, D. (1997), A Social History of English, London: Routledge. Lemire, B. (1997), Dress, Culture and Commerce: The English Clothing Trade before the Factory, London: Macmillan. —— (1999), ‘“In the Hands of Workwomen”: English Markets, Cheap Clothing and Female Labour’, Costume, 33: 23–35. Leoty, E. (1893), Le Corset à travers les ages, Paris: Ollendorce. Leslie, E. (2000), Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism, London: Pluto. Libron, F. and Clouzot, H. (1933), Le Corset dans l’art et les moeurs, du XIIIe au XXe siècle, Paris: Libron. Lindquist, O. (1997), ‘The Auskerry Whale, 1777: Processing and Economy’, Northern Scotland, 17: 17–32. Lord, W.B. (1868), The Corset and Crinoline: A Book of Modes and Costumes from Remote Periods to the Present Time, London: privately printed. McDowell, C. (ed.) (1998), The Pimlico Companion to Fashion, London: Pimlico. McKeon, M. (1987), The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1640, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Moretti, F. (1987), The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture, London: Verso. O’Connor, A. (1989), Raymond Williams: Writing, Culture, Politics, Oxford: Blackwell. – 42 –

Englishness, Clothes and Little Things O’Followell, D. (1905), Le Corset: histoire, médicine, hygiène. Etudes historiques, Paris: Maloine. Oxley, D. (1996), Convict Maids: The Forced Migration of Women to Australia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Paine, T. (1995 [1791–2]), Rights of Man, Common Sense, and Other Political Writings, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ribeiro, A. (1984), Dress in Eighteenth-century Europe, 1715–1789, London: Batsford. Richards, S. (1999), Eighteenth-century Ceramics: Products for a Civilised Society, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Richardson, S. (1980 [1740]), Pamela, or, Virtue Rewarded, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Said, E. (1995 [1972]), Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Sorge, L. (1998), ‘Eighteenth-century Stays: Their Origins and Creators’, Costume, 32: 18–32. Spufford, M. (1981), Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth-century England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (1984), The Great Reclothing of Rural England: Petty Chapmen and their Wares in the Seventeenth Century, London: Hambledon. Stackpole, E.A. (1972), Whales and Destiny: The Rivalry between America, France and Britain for Control of the Southern Whale Fishery, 1785–1825, Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Steedman, C. (1995), ‘Inside, Outside, Other: Accounts of National Identity in the Nineteenth Century’, History of the Human Sciences, 8(4): 59–76. Styles, J. (1994), ‘Clothing the North: The Supply of Non-elite Clothing in the Eighteenth-century North of England’, Textile History, 25(2): 139–66. —— (1998), ‘Custom or Consumption? Plebeian Fashion in Eighteenth-century England’, Paper presented to the Conference on Luxury and the Marketplace in Eighteenth-century Europe, University of Warwick (cited with permission of the author). —— (2001), ‘Involuntary Consumers? Servants and their Clothes in Eighteenthcentury England’, Textile History, in press. Taylor, C. (1989), Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Viswanathan, G. (1988), ‘Currying Favour: The Politics of British Educational and Cultural Policy in India, 1813–1854’, Social Text, 19/20. —— (1989), Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India, London: Faber & Faber. —— (1991), ‘Raymond Williams and British Colonialism’, Yale Journal of Criticism, 4(2): 47–66. – 43 –

Carolyn Steedman Waugh, N. (1954), Corsets and Crinolines, London: Batsford. Weatherill, L. (1988), Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain, 1660– 1760, London: Methuen. Williams, R. (1983), Towards 2000, London: Chatto & Windus. Willimott, Mrs T. (1841), The Young Woman’s Guide Containing Rules for the Pursuits of Millinery, Dress and Corset Making, London: privately printed. Winnicott, D.W. (1971), ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena’, ‘Playing: a Theoretical Statement’, ‘The Location of Cultural Experience’ and ‘The Place Where We Live’, in Playing and Reality, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

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Dressing like a Champion

–3 – Dressing like a Champion: Women’s Tennis Wear in Interwar England Catherine Horwood

Lawn tennis is becoming more than a cult, it will soon be a frenzy. I am told that no parlour-maid’s luggage is complete today without a racquet while even the new cook, despite her bulk, inquires pointedly, before agreeing to come, if the court is hard or soft, and behaves accordingly. Punch, 5 July 1922

In interwar Britain the game of tennis could be said to have epitomized middleclass Englishness. It appears that anyone with a racquet and a tennis ball aspired to be part of that English idyll playing doubles on hot summer afternoons on the grassy sward of the affluent suburban lawn (North 1989; Birley 1995; Hilton 1995). It was one of the rare sports played by both men and women, both individually and together at a social level. In addition, the competitive game was to produce some of the first internationally known female sports ‘superstars’. Certainly in 1922, it seemed that the British public had an apparently insatiable demand for what Punch termed ‘Wimbledonia’. As such, a review of the development of women’s tennis wear during this period is an invaluable window on to the changing English attitudes towards athletic decorum and gender relations. It is hard to find a period in the history of dress, for women in particular, that went through a greater cataclysmic change than that between 1900 and 1939 (Wilson 1985; Breward 1995: 181–213). This in turn necessitated the rewriting of the codes of behavioural standards by which women – and men – could adapt or otherwise to the changes in the formality and informality of their lives. These unwritten codes reveal dialogues not only of class insecurities but also of changing notions of modesty and body image together with conflicts of gender. These conflicts frequently came together in areas of sport where women were increasingly challenging the traditional boundaries of gender demarcation that had held them back from full and satisfying involvement in the physical activity of their choice (Hargreaves 1985; McCrone 1988). Whether their involvement was for health, social or competitive reasons, women faced a double-edged sword. First, they had to attempt to cross the gendered boundaries of the game itself and second, to

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Catherine Horwood overcome the restrictions of dress maintained in the name of feminine modesty. In this chapter I explore the developments in the design of women’s tennis wear in England during the interwar years. Starting with the pre-First World War norms, I shall then consider the more startling developments in tennis wear in the 1920s and the public and players’ reactions to them. The tensions between the establishment of a separate sportswear strand and a return to femininity in the fashions of the 1930s will also be examined. Finally, an understanding of the impact of competitive foreign players on the British tennis scene in general is crucial to an understanding of how these changes came about.

Anyone for Tennis? As the dust of war settled in 1919, leisure patterns re-established themselves and by 1924, it was said in Woman’s Life magazine: Of all the present day games . . . lawn tennis may be considered to have made the biggest strides during the past ten years, and from having been a pastime popular only with leisured people it has become the general favourite of all classes. (Woman’s Life, 3 May 1924: 3)

By 1929 it was estimated that 2 million people played tennis in Britain, or at least attempted to, because undoubtedly for the majority, tennis was seen as an opportunity to socialize and also get a little exercise (Daily Mail, 31 May 1929: 8). Throughout this time, tennis was central to many middle-class communities, not only as a spectator sport, but also as an activity that underpinned acceptance in local society, acting as a catalyst for social interplay (McKibbin 1998: 362). However, whether one played on a public court, at a club or on a friend’s lawn, wearing the correct ‘kit’ for the game was of great significance in terms of both fashionability and social decorum. As was pointed out by a magazine at the time, ‘there is probably no game in which clothes count for more nor in which there is less excuse for wearing the wrong ones, for all you have to do is carefully to copy just what the tennis champions wear’ (Woman’s Life, 31 May 1924: 5). Tennis was one of the first – and one of the few – sports in the twentieth century in which women were able to display their abilities to public acclaim. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, it was already one of the most popular sports for women. The Wimbledon Ladies’ Singles Championship had been initiated in 1884 (Little 1999: 11). Although there had been calls for the reform of ladies’ tennis dress as early as 1886, which echoed contemporary views being put forward at that time by the Rational Dress Society (Pastime, 19 May 1886: 329; Newton 1974), there were few concessions made to the corseted Edwardian style to improve speed on court (McCrone 1988). – 46 –

Dressing like a Champion Modesty and decorum were still the paramount considerations (Hargreaves 1985; Riordan 1985; McCrone 1988). Any frivolity of dress was also frowned upon, especially by the serious player. Dorothea Chambers, a pre-First World War Wimbledon champion, was concerned that the serious female tennis player avoided what she termed ‘a “garden-party” skirt, trimmed hat and dressy blouse’ which, she felt, was ‘a most unbusiness-like costume for the game’ (Lambert Chambers 1910: 64). A business-like attitude could be taken too far, however, and spectators were shocked by the daring of the American player, May Sutton, who in 1906 played with her sleeves rolled up in a shirt which, because of the looseness of its style, was rumoured to belong to her father (Little 1984: 7–8). Although Sutton had been born in Devon, she had emigrated to the USA as a child, so such behaviour was put down to a louche American upbringing.

The Vicar’s Daughter from Ealing versus Parisian Chic At championship level, Dorothea Chambers, the vicar’s daughter from Ealing Common, exemplified the English style for the serious tennis player (Figure 3.1).

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 3.1 A group of pre-1914 tennis players from Shepton Mallet, Somerset, conforming to English Wimbledon champion Dorothea Chambers’s recommendation that women’s tennis dress should be devoid of ‘frills and furbelows’ – although she would not have approved of the hats. (Author’s Collection)

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Catherine Horwood She dominated women’s tennis until the First World War ended, winning over two hundred titles in a period when entries to Wimbledon tripled (Little 1985: 1). When she wrote in 1910, advising on suitable dress for the game, her choice emphasized a formal attitude, ‘a plain gored skirt – not pleated . . . a plain shirt without “frills or furbelows”, both preferably white, no hat’, she commented, as ‘a girl’s hair is generally a good safeguard against sunstroke’ (Lambert Chambers 1910: 64). However by 1919, after the upheaval of the First World War, the image of the Edwardian lady tennis player, waist pinched in, hairpins flying and skirt flapping, appeared anachronistic. It was soon to be swept away by the new, young players arriving on the competitive tennis scene, especially those from abroad. In particular, it was the arrival in England of Suzanne Lenglen from France that was to change forever the public’s attitude to what was permissible on the tennis court. She was to spotlight the increasing influence of sportswear on everyday fashion. Lenglen’s first encounter with Dorothea Chambers was monumental both in terms of the match (Lenglen won) and the visible emancipation of women on the tennis court. In front of an audience of 8,000, including King George V and Queen Mary, Chambers arrived on court wearing her traditional near ankle-length gored skirt with a tightly buttoned, long-sleeved white shirt. Lenglen, on the other hand, appeared as a vision of modernity in a short-sleeved, loose, white tennis frock which barely reached her calves, worn with white stockings and a floppy linen hat – and most importantly – without a corset (Little 1988: 21–3). The contrast was dramatically obvious and proved a significant turning point in women’s tennis wear (Laver 1945: 178). What young girl now wanted to be associated with Chambers’s traditionalist style when Lenglen was seen as ‘the player for the Jazz age, gay, brittle and brilliant’ (Davidson and Jones 1971: 43)? She brought Gallic chic to the staid English tennis scene and gave confidence to other young players quite literally to loosen their stays. The British Wimbledon champion, Elizabeth Ryan, for instance, was reported to have removed the boning from her stays just before a game on a particularly hot day in 1921 (Green 1987: 34). As Lenglen’s status grew, so did her confidence. She bobbed her hair and was being dressed by Parisian fashion houses. She also went into print to explain that French ideas of the ideal tennis dress differed somewhat from English. What was needed, she said, was ‘a simple “piqué” dress, or one of drill or white linen, made in the old Grecian style, and fastened at the waist with a ribbon or leather belt. The sleeves should be short’ (Lenglen 1919: 28–9). Her hat she quickly replaced with a ‘bandeau’, made with several yards of georgette in colours such as heliotrope and lemon and held in place with a diamond pin (Little 1988: 27). The Lenglen bandeau quickly became the ‘must-have’ on-court fashion accessory. British girls followed her fashion style slavishly and were mocked by Punch for it (Punch, 2 July 1924: 25). But, undoubtedly, she gave British players the confidence to dress – 48 –

Dressing like a Champion more stylishly. In Norwood, South London, ‘Little Miss Colyer’, one of the tennis ‘Babes’, as she was called, ‘shortened her skirts and bobbed her hair, and was said to be one of the chief attractions on the upper courts’ (Lawn Tennis and Badminton, 31 July 1920: 308). The ‘Lenglen’ dress also quickly became established as the most popular style and by 1924 was worn ‘by nearly all players at the present day’ (Beamish and Beamish 1924: 25). Outside the competition courts, Lenglen’s influence extended beyond established players, with young girls of all classes coping the look (Figure 3.2). A contemporary tennis manual for women in 1920 explained that it was so popular because ‘it is the most comfortable and practical dress for all types of play’. There were significant design points, they continued:

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 3.2 French tennis star Suzanne Lenglen’s relaxed dress and bandeau styles were quickly adopted by fashion-conscious tennis players of all classes such as Emily Brooks (left) from North London, seen here in the early 1920s. (Author’s Collection)

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Catherine Horwood Since the whole weight of the dress is supported from the shoulders, it is very important that it should be short [original italics] and of a decidedly light material . . . Moreover, it should not be too thin or it will be troublesome in the wind. The sleeves . . . should be short and come to an end well above the elbow. . . This plain dress can be varied by the adoption of a number of small pleats on the skirt on either side, beginning at the hips, with the back and front left plain. Such a variation looks very smart on court and allows plenty of freedom for running, but is not advisable when there is a high wind. (Beamish and Beamish 1924: 25–6)

Contemporary photographs of female players in action show that rather than the wind, it was actually the new athletic style of play, particularly Lenglen’s, that was causing problems, as well as attracting audiences. For with every balletic leap, legs outstretched, a glimpse of the player’s knee-length combinations below was immediately visible. Indeed, in 1924 Lenglen’s style was pictorially compared to various dancing poses in the magazine Woman’s Life (3 May 1924: 21). While no allusion to such indelicacies was made in the press, it was reported that the Council of the Lawn Tennis Association (LTA) were said to be ‘troubled about certain undesirable photographs’ of female players that were appearing regularly during tournament press coverage. The newspapers rounded on what they (conveniently) saw as the ‘fuddy-duddies’ of the LTA council: Has anybody (except the Council) been shocked by lawn tennis photographs? On the contrary, this year’s Wimbledon was illustrated by pleasant pictures displaying the modern woman’s art in reconciling activity with grace. And we are sure that she would not complain of them. She is not the posing and artificially picturesque sportswoman of old who looked as though the game were merely an excuse for her decorative attitudes. The modern girl plays it with enthusiasm and will not, we feel sure, object to pictorial records of her athletic capacity. (Daily Mirror, 18 July 1923: 7)

This was an attitude echoed in readers’ letters: What is there in the least ‘undesirable’ in pictures of lawn tennis players? As long as they are suitably and respectably garbed I can see no reason why there should be any objection to photographs of respectable young women indulging in a thoroughly clean sport. (Daily Mirror, 19 July 1923: 5)

Women’s magazines were able to be more practical and offered free patterns for suitable ‘tennis knicks’: Dainty garments trimmed with lace do not look quite appropriate for a strenuous game, and in these days when the game is played really hard, lady’s undergarments often do not leave much to the imagination, therefore knickers made of silk stockingette seem to be quite the thing. (Woman’s Life, 31 July 1924: 12)

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Dressing like a Champion Not just one pair, however; girls were advised: ‘two pairs . . . made just alike . . . the under ones of white jap silk and the top ones of white silk tricot, elasticized at waist and knee’ (Woman’s Life, 31 July 1924: 5). Alternatively, all-in-one combinations could be worn which were less bulky under the new lightweight tennis dresses. This is understandable since extant examples confirm that tennis dresses were often made from the sheerest silk in the traditional but not obligatory white or cream (Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum WTM:1996/84).

Short Skirts and Silk Stockings By the mid-1920s, the patterns for women’s tennis dress had stabilized into the acceptable styles and skirt lengths à la Lenglen. The publicity surrounding tennis frocks ensured that they were now an important and essential fashion item: My dear ladies, a tennis frock which is the last word in smartness, and which is also the most comfortable model it is possible to have, is a thing to be wished for more than anything at the moment, when most of my ladies are turning their thoughts to getting their summer wardrobes into apple-pie order: for tennis frocks are wanted so much earlier in the season than bathing dresses, for instance! (Woman’s Life, 3 May 1924: 6)

Apart from the light colours, there was little to distinguish the styles of tennis dresses with those that were being worn for everyday fashions. Indeed, shops such as Derry & Toms, for example, advertised ‘500 Spun Silk Frocks For Tennis’, with one style suggested as equally suitable for either ‘River’ or ‘Tennis’ wear (Daily Mail, 27 May 1929: 1). Similarly, ‘“Petite Reine” Washing Silks’ were advertised as being appropriate ‘for golf, for tennis, for the picnic [or] for the river’ (Vogue, 30 May 1928: 10). In the wake of Lenglen’s influence, dresses were now, as Vogue noted, ‘specially designed to give ample movement in play’ (Vogue, 30 May 1928: 23). Lenglen was not alone in setting tennis fashion trends. The great American champion, Helen Wills, later Wills-Moody, for example, always wore her trademark ‘Wills Eye Shade’ under which she rarely smiled. The eye shade was also widely copied (Davidson and James 1971: 51). Wills’ stubbornness led to her becoming known as ‘Miss Poker-Face’. Her standing as a sports role model for young English girls led to concerns that too much time spent on the courts might give a girl a ‘tennis face’ with muscles set into ‘a dreadful frown of concentration’ (Punch, summer 1924: n.p.). Vogue assured anxious British mothers that this need not be so because there were: so many proofs that it’s possible to play it marvellously and at the same time look pretty and be perfectly fit . . . One very noticeable thing about our girl champions at

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Catherine Horwood Wimbledon is their grace, distinctly the reverse of what some people have prophesied – that hard exercise and strain would thicken the ankles, coarsen the complexion, and lead to general ungainliness. (Vogue, 12 June 1929: 56)

The inference here is that the modest gracefulness of the English girls was in marked contrast to the perceived ‘masculine’ style of the American players, which were seen as a threat to the required English restraint. While editorials focused on the fashionability of the dresses, English girls were constantly aware that this code of decorum had to be maintained. Similarly, even with the apparent relaxation of modesty standards, sportswear manufacturers were also well aware that they needed to emphasize the ‘correctness’ of their outfits. This pervasive sense of respectability also prompted a minor scandal in the tabloid press in 1929 over what was called at the time ‘bare-leg tennis’. The controversy had been precipitated by the changes in manufacturing of daywear stockings. At the turn of the century, nineteen out of every twenty pairs of stockings made were black (Farrell 1992: 60). The short skirts of the 1920s, however, had brought in a rapid expansion of the stocking industry with far finer knits becoming available for everyday wear in a range of paler colours. The vogue, for those who could afford them, was for silk stockings in flesh and neutral tones with names such as ‘Toast’, ‘Dago’ (Farrell 1992: 69) or, as Punch quipped, ‘Burmese Kangaroo’ (Punch, 30 May 1934: 605). They were held up by a combination of suspenders and garters. Suzanne Lenglen wore white silk stockings, the tops of which, it was reported, she rolled over her garters in what was called the ‘American’ fashion (Woman’s Life, 31 May 1924: 5). While some manufacturers assured their clients that their stockings would stand up to the rigours of court play, the fine knit of most of these stockings made them unsuitable for sports such as tennis (Daily Mail, 27 May 1929: 18). Among the confines of social tennis, the wearing of short white socks quickly became acceptable. However, the strict, though unwritten, code of decorum for competition tennis ‘kit’ precluded such informality. It became necessary for female players to wear stockings under their short socks to maintain accepted standards of modesty. When in 1927 Miss ‘Billie’ Tapscott of South Africa turned up for play on Wimbledon’s outside courts, not just without stockings, but without socks as well, it appears to have caused only mild amusement in the press (Daily Sketch, 29 June 1927: 623). The fact that Tapscott was a foreigner and was quickly knocked out of the championship may well have had something to do with this accepting attitude to such a break with convention. When she was due to return in 1929, no doubt as a better player, there were rumours of the imposition of regulations prohibiting the leaving off of stockings. This was because the authorities were concerned that what they termed the ‘eccentric’ behaviour of Tapscott might

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Dressing like a Champion encourage others to follow suit (Daily Mail, 15 June 1929: 9). For several weeks before and during the Wimbledon championships, the national press stirred up a vigorous debate on whether or not such an injunction was acceptable. Players were said to be ‘indignant’ that the LTA and the All-England Club were considering placing a veto on bare legs (Daily Mail, 29 May 1929: 10). In particular, American tennis stars such as the two Helens, Wills-Moody and Jacobs, were apparently amazed by the suggestion of such a veto since in the USA, and in France where many of them competed, the fashion for bare-legged tennis did not cause a blink of an eyelid. It was even rumoured that they would ignore such a ban if it were imposed. In the wake of such strong feelings, the championship committee of the All-England Club issued a statement stressing that they relied on the good taste and good sense of the players, which they hoped would quash the debate (Daily Mail, 6 June 1929: 9). It was a tactic that appeared to work. At the start of the championship a couple of weeks later, newspapers reported that ‘when Miss “Billie” Tapscott walked on to Court 15, everyone looked at her legs . . . [she] was wearing white stockings and the bare-leg controversy may be said to be ended so far as this Wimbledon is concerned’ (Newcastle Chronicle, 26 June 1929, Press Cuttings Book, Kenneth Ritchie Wimbledon Library). The following year, the News Chronicle once again tried to revive the stockingless issue on its front page with the anticlimactic headline: ‘Bare Legs. Almost Unnoticed’. US tennis star Helen Jacobs, who had by now played in the Wightman Cup with bare legs, said of Wimbledon: ‘I will continue to do so so long as there is no official ban. From the spectators’ point of view, there is scarcely any difference between bare legs and sun-burn stockings’ (News Chronicle, 26 June 1930: 1). With white stockings still the norm in Britain, this was not an argument that could be used at Wimbledon. However, by 1930, fashion was threatening to overtake events on the tennis court. The Star reported that it soon would not matter to the spectators ‘whether the fair sex have stockings or not. Mme Mathieu, the attractive French woman . . . is already wearing a tennis dress with a much longer skirt than usual [and] Miss Nuthall . . . was in mufti [civilian dress, slang] yesterday . . . wearing a skirt down to her ankles (Daily Star, 28 June 1930: 10).

‘Bare Legs’ and ‘Trousered Frocks’ Ultimately, it was fashion, rather than the relaxation of attitudes that was to spell the parting of the ways between sportswear and women’s daywear. With skirt lengths plunging, there did indeed appear to be a danger that tennis frocks might revert to the lengths favoured by Dorothea Chambers twenty years before and that the ‘bare-leg controversy’ would become irrelevant. It was not long, however, before a new fashion trend put an end to that possibility.

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Catherine Horwood For the following year, 1931, dress, as much as sporting performance, was the draw at Wimbledon. To the newspapers’ delight, not just one, but two, female players flouted Wimbledon ‘rules’. Joan Lycett, an erstwhile ‘babe’ of the early 1920s, had arrived at Wimbledon without stockings and had decided to play without them. The crowds, it was reported, were ‘so accustomed to seeing stockingless players that they were not in the least perturbed by seeing Mrs Lycett playing with bare legs’ (Daily Mail, 24 June 1931: 11). She started an unstoppable trend and later that week it was reported that her opponent, Lili de Alvarez, ‘the gay senorita’ from Spain, was ‘about the only girl who appeared in stockings’ (Daily Star, 27 June 1931: 21). De Alvarez did, however, create her own diversion by facing Mrs Lycett in a ‘white trousered frock’. The newspapers and cartoonists had a field day (News Chronicle, 24 June 1931: 9) and even The Times, not usually wont to comment on matters of dress, pondered ‘which were the more wonderful things – divided skirts or bare legs?’ (The Times, 24 June 1931: 8). As an alternative to skimpy dresses, the divided skirt was generally welcomed. ‘It is much more respectable than an ordinary skirt,’ commented one female spectator (Daily Sketch, Press Cuttings Book 1927–31, Kenneth Ritchie Wimbledon Library). A male tennis correspondent also felt they were ‘nothing to get excited about. In fact, the trousers are so like a skirt that bets were made as to what exactly they were!’ (News Chronicle, 24 June 1931: 9). However, the Daily Sketch saw de Alvarez’s ‘trousered tennis frock’ as yet more evidence that women had ‘a masculine fixation’: The claim of women to equality with men is understandable, but that so many of them should wish to imitate the appearance of the less beauteous sex is not so easy to understand. Yet the whole tendency of feminine fashion in recent years has been in this direction. It began with bobbing, and reached its logical hirsute conclusion in the Eton crop. And, having lost her hair, many a girl is now making strenuous attempts to lose her curves. And concurrently with these changes the conquest of trousers has been steadily proceeding, women riders being the first to lay sacrilegious hands upon what they apparently regarded as a flaunting symbol of masculine superiority. To-day the female hiker in shorts has none of the difficulty experienced by Rosalind in turning two mincing steps into a manly stride. And although mere man may regret the lose of feminine furbelows more than he resents the theft of his trousers, he realises that it is useless to rail against the spirit of the age. Whether we like it or not, girls will be boys. (Daily Sketch, 24 June 1931)

The suggestion that women might wear full-length trousers for tennis was not new. The fashion for skimpy, revealing tennis dresses in the early 1920s had prompted the Daily Mirror to speculate about what alternatives there were for ‘lawn tennis girls’:

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Dressing like a Champion Some people consider that the dress worn by the modern lawn tennis girl is hardly suitable to such an active game, particularly since women now play it with almost as much vigour and speed as the most expert men. In other sports in which women to-day take an active share they have in many instances copied masculine dress or followed it closely, and one never hears that the rowing girl or the running girl is garbed in a manner which is unsightly or unsuitable to the occasion. Does this mean that the tennis girl should follow their example? (Daily Mirror, 2 July 1923: 12–13)

There followed a selection of photographs showing, among others, ‘rowing girls wearing shorts’ and a hurdler in ‘abbreviated knickers’ ending with two photographs of a ‘lawn tennis girl in trousers’. They were indeed female versions of the ubiquitous men’s white flannels of the period. The cartoonists concluded that tennis girls were at that time in a no-win situation. Voluminous skirts were considered unhygienic, short skirts immodest, anything in-between unbecoming and trousers all three (Daily Mirror, 21 July 1923: 5). Readers appeared to agree. A ‘mere male’ wrote: Personally I think that the modern lady tennis players have got their ideal costume. What could be prettier, and yet more simple than the frocks worn by young players of Miss Colyer’s type? They combine grace with perfect freedom of action, and look far more cool and comfortable than they would in men’s costume. (Daily Mirror, 21 July 1923: 5)

Some brave young things attempted to wear trousers, introducing a short-lived vogue for females in white flannels in 1927. However, an overwhelming majority of English tennis-playing women agreed with the ‘mere male’. It was not until the general dropping of hemlines in the early 1930s that there was any question that the short tennis dress should be replaced on the tennis court by any form of bifurcated garment.

British ‘Modesty’ versus American ‘Masculinity’ At the time of Senorita de Alvarez’s appearance in 1931, shorts for women were beginning to make an appearance in fashion magazines, undoubtedly due to the influence of American films where such stars as Loretta Young and Lyda Roberti could regularly be seen wearing them. In England, however, they were struggling to leave the beach environment. The divided skirt, on the other hand, appeared to be a successful compromise, modestly maintaining the illusion of a feminine skirt while employing the practicality of a pair of men’s trousers. Indeed, Wimbledon’s own programme that year carried an advertisement for a ‘silk tennis dress with divided skirt’ from Lillywhites (Wimbledon Championship Programme 1931: 7).

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Catherine Horwood A tribute to the acceptance of the ‘divided skirt’ by the establishment is the fact that to this day they are required to be worn for sports such as hockey and netball in many private girls’ schools. However, it soon became obvious that the fashion for longer day dresses could not be reflected in divided skirts, as the extra length of the skirt would have meant that they would have lost their practicality. The English player, Mrs FearnleyWhittingstall, is credited with first wearing an above-the-knee form of divided skirt for competitive tennis. Thus, in no longer reflecting current hemline trends, tennis wear became separated from any semblance of everyday fashion and became true ‘sportswear’. Some players went even further, such as a Miss Tomblin, who wore a more masculine version of the tailored short. This was greeted with horror by some of the reactionary officials of the LTA. ‘A disgusting sight,’ exclaimed one, while the father of a female player declared, ‘I want my girl to grow up a woman, and therefore I will insist that she plays in a skirt and not ape men’ (Daily Mail, Press Cuttings Book 1934, Kenneth Ritchie Wimbledon Library). However, changing-room gossip from another female player suggested that while she herself preferred skirts, several of her fellow competitors wore shorts because they believed ‘no-one will look at you if you wear skirts’ (Daily Mail, Press Cuttings Book 1934, Kenneth Ritchie Wimbledon Library). When the Prince of Wales gave shorts for women his blessing at a British Industries Fair early in 1934, there was no question of the All-England Club committee being able to consider a ban. The Sunday Pictorial, in an attempt to forestall any such veto, listed the top international women players who now wore some form of shorts at major championships. The suggestion was that Wimbledon should be wary of repercussions if they took too reactionary a stance to fashion changes: In 1929 the battle of stockings-or-bare-legs was thrashed out, and Wimbledon, without banning bare legs, discreetly engineered the women – including Mrs Wills-Moody and Miss Jacobs – into relinquishing their intention of playing without stockings. But the following year a pair of stockings on the Centre Court was an anachronism! Last year only one pair was seen. Wimbledon has discovered that woman will have her way. (Sunday Pictorial, 4 March 1934: 4)

A month later, newspapers were full of praise for the charms of Middlesex Junior County champion, Miss Betty Batt, in her shorts (Daily Mail, 23 May 1934: 20). However, when it came to national pride and competitiveness in the playing of the Wightman Cup in England in June, some of the newspapers reversed their support for shorts and saw the issue yet again in terms of a battle of British modesty versus American masculinity. ‘It was a great triumph of skirts over shorts,’ proclaimed the Daily Sketch:

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Dressing like a Champion These two [British] girls looked as if they had stepped from the vicarage lawn on the centre court in their modest skirts and plain white eyeshades. They were in remarkable contrast to the two Americans, whose cricket shirt and very brief shorts gave them a real principal-boy appearance. (Daily Sketch, Press Cuttings Book 1934, Kenneth Ritchie Wimbledon Library)

During the 1930s, it is true that the majority of British players were not prepared to wear shorts for major tournaments. British champion Dorothy Round wrote in the mid-1930s that while she knew that many champions were trying shorts and she herself found them comfortable, she doubted ‘if they will have the approval of the majority, for the time being at any rate’ (Round 1934: 10). Similarly, Suzanne Lenglen, now making guest appearances in Selfridges’ sports hall, let it be known that she ‘approved the wearing of shorts in private but not in public’. However, her influence had diminished through an incident at Wimbledon when she kept Queen Mary waiting. This dented her popularity and she effectively dropped out of the British tennis scene after this outburst (Austin 1930: 34–5). As late as 1938, the British women’s team facing their American opponents in the Wightman Cup remained loyal to their near knee-length skirts. Eventually, with international endorsement, shorts for tennis did become acceptable both for the competitive and social tennis player (Bill 1993: 49). The influence of Fearnley-Whittingstall together with her elegant playing partner, Kathleen Stammers (Laver 1945: 178–9), and Helen Jacobs, who favoured a ‘tailored’ style of shorts, encouraged the total acceptance of divided skirts and shorts on the amateur circuit (Jacobs 1933: 181; Wade 1984: 64). By 1937, advertisements in Vogue for ladies’ tennis wear from the three major sportswear companies all focused on shorts (Vogue, May 1937: 56, 57, 61). Lillywhites confirmed the compromise of both fashion and decorum by advertising divided skirts as being ‘the most up-to-date and correct answer’ (Wimbledon Championship Programme 1935: 6). Elderly ladies who were shocked by stockingless female tennis players were depicted as ‘Mrs Grundys’. And the variety of outfits seen on the courts, called the ‘Wimbledon Medley’ by Punch, was welcomed as both practical and feminine (Punch 3 June 1931: 609; 19 August 1934: 213) (Figure 3.3).

Conclusion During the interwar years, English women’s dress and the body within were consistently judged in terms of sexual modesty. There was an inherently British language of ‘correctness’ that was used in attempts to maintain standards of appearance and decorum in England throughout this period. In the 1920s, there was a conflict between the limitations of modesty and the desire for freedom of movement. The ideal of gracefulness, for example, was perhaps valued more by

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Catherine Horwood

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 3.3 By 1937 sportswear bore no resemblance to women’s daywear: above-the-knee divided skirts and shorts for tennis became acceptable even in traditionally conservative middle-class suburbs such as Ealing, London. (By kind permission of Mr T. Hendrick)

the male spectator than by the player herself. Nevertheless, championship tennis was a sport that made role models of these highly successful sportswomen. The primary concern of the serious female tennis player was ease of movement, while for many social players, it was fashionability. Yet, whereas the everyday fashions of the 1930s saw a return to femininity in terms of longer skirts and a more curvaceous silhouette, in sportswear this change in direction did not herald a return to restrictive modesty. There was a gradual acceptance by the establishment of the practicality of shorts and above-the-knee divided skirts, which took as long to reach the championship courts as they did the back lawns of middle-class England. It has been shown that tennis wear moved from a variation of daywear to having a distinct and instantly recognizable look of its own. It is significant that the main forerunners within this fashion framework were initially not British, but French and American. In England, the changes took longer to take hold than elsewhere. The foreign players wielded enormous influence on the selection of clothes by young women. Lenglen and Wills-Moody, in particular, were continually – 58 –

Dressing like a Champion photographed and fêted by fashion designers and achieved a super-stardom more akin to today’s pop stars than today’s tennis players. Fans mobbed Lenglen when she visited film sets and department stores and she inspired a part in the Ballets Russes’ Le Train bleu. Crowds clamoured to see Wills whenever she arrived from the USA and she even had a fictional cat named after her in E.M. Delafield’s contemporaneous Diary of a Provincial Lady (1934). British girls, on the whole, remained reluctant to set trends themselves but were happy to adopt styles, once the barriers of decorum had been broken down by others. The authorities’ reluctance to impose rules and regulations regarding dress, relying instead on unwritten dress codes, shows that the establishment was confident that English women would be controlled by their inherent middle-class reserve. And, in general, they were. On the whole, tennis was a young woman’s sport and eventually, many young middle-class British women became sufficiently self-confident to reject the notions of required modesty that had been imposed upon them by an older authoritarian generation. By utilizing a language of health in this ‘thoroughly clean sport’, they were able to introduce comfortable and practical tennis wear, first to private and eventually to public matches. By the outbreak of the Second World War, as advertisements for tennis wear told young women, ‘dress [was] no longer a handicap’ (Wimbledon Championship Programme 1937: 7).

Acknowledgements The author would like to thank the staff of the Kenneth Ritchie Wimbledon Library at Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum for the help given to her during the preparation of this chapter.

References Austin, ‘Bunny’ (1930), Lawn Tennis Bits and Pieces, London: Methuen. Beamish, A.E. and Beamish, W.G. (1924), Lawn Tennis for Ladies, London: Mills & Boon. Bill, K. (1993), ‘Attitudes towards Women’s Trousers: Britain in the 1930s’, in Journal of Design History, 6(1): 45–54. – 59 –

Catherine Horwood Birley, D. (1995), Playing the Game: Sport and British Society 1910–1945, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Breward, C. (1995), The Culture of Fashion, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Davidson, O. and Jones, C.M. (1971), Great Women Tennis Players, London: Pelham. Delafield, E.M. (1934), Diary of a Provincial Lady, London: Macmillan. Farrell, J. (1992), Socks and Stockings, London: Batsford. Green, G. (1987), Kitty Godfree: Lady of a Golden Age, London: Kingswood. Hargreaves, J. (1985), ‘“Playing like Gentlemen While Behaving Like Ladies”: Contradictory Features of the Formative Years of Women’s Sports’, British Journal of Sports History, 2(1): 40–52. Hilton, C. (1995), ‘Modernity and the material culture of lawn tennis in England 1874–1900’, unpublished MA thesis, V&A/Royal College of Art, London. Jacobs, H.H. (1933), Modern Tennis, London: George Allen & Unwin. Lambert Chambers, Mrs D. (1910), Lawn Tennis for Ladies, London: Methuen. Laver, J. (1945), Taste and Fashion, London: Harrap. Lenglen, S. (1919), Lawn Tennis for Girls, London: George Newnes. Little, A. (1984), May Sutton, London: Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum. —— (1985), Dorothea Chambers, London: Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum. —— (1988), Suzanne Lenglen: Tennis Idol of the Twenties, London: Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum. —— (1999), Wimbledon Compendium, London: All England Lawn Tennis Club. McCrone, K. (1988), Sport and the Physical Emancipation of English Women 1870–1914, London: Routledge. McKibbin, R. (1998), Classes and Cultures: England 1918–1951, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Newton, S.M. (1974), Health, Art and Reason, London: John Murray. North, D.L. (1989), ‘Middle Class Suburban Lifestyles and Culture in England, 1919–1939’, DPhil thesis, Oxford University. Riordan, J. (1985), ‘The Social Emancipation of Women through Sport’, British Journal of Sports History, 2(1): 53–61. Round, D. (1934), Modern Lawn Tennis, London: George Newnes. Wade, V. (1984), Ladies of the Court: A Century of Women at Wimbledon, London: Wimbledon. Wilson, E. (1985), Adorned in Dreams, London: Virago.

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Dress, Migration and Englishness

– 4– Strawberries and Cream: Dress, Migration and the Quintessence of Englishness Carol Tulloch

Be not afraid, though you do see me weapon’d; Here is my journey’s end . . . And very sea-mark at my utmost sail. William Shakespeare, Othello

This work is about journeys into Englishness. The pre-eminent journey of the chapter was that undertaken by West Indian migrants on the Italian migrant ship Irpinia to England, which docked at Southampton in May 1956. Picture Post, the British illustrated weekly, reported the event with a focus on the women passengers from their disembarkation of the Irpinia to their arrival by train at Victoria station, one of London’s termini. This leg of the journey has poignant historical resonance. A terminus may indicate the end of the line, but it actually signals the beginning of a new journey. As these migrants passed through the platform barriers of Victoria station and walked on through its exit, crossing the threshold of the station into the light of the city, their journey earnestly began in England and Englishness. They attempted to make England their other home and their transition from traveller to ‘newcomer’. Hence, this chapter draws on the photographs that supported the Picture Post article reported by Hilde Marchant, and the out-takes that became part of the Picture Post archive, to assess the relevance of the clothes worn by the women documented. Geographically and culturally these newcomers had come a great distance and dress carried important meanings as they encountered transport officials and the unsolicited attentions of the press. Though one function of dress, in this context, was to help the wearer make a good impression on the indigenous people, dress will also be discussed as a reflective plane from which these women managed to conceal adroitly their anxieties of migration, while revealing their pleasure in travelling to England (Tulloch 1999: 118–22). Such a configuration of dress and migrants who journeyed into what was to become another dimension of their cultural experience is only part of the story. England and its cultural motif of

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Carol Tulloch Englishness provided another. As a cultural giant, Englishness cast a shadow over the migrants, first in the British colonies of their origin, looming ever larger once in England. But what was Englishness? Prior to entering into a case study of the Picture Post report of the arrivants at Victoria station, this chapter will look at the journeys made into Englishness by individuals from different realms of its domain and their definition of it.

Englishness is . . . The Jamaican-born academic, Professor Stuart Hall, a guiding voice throughout this chapter, has remarked that: ‘There were always different ways of being “English”’ (Hall 1999–2000: 6). He asks: ‘What would “England” mean without its cathedrals, churches, castles and country houses, its gardens, thatched cottages and hedgerowed landscapes, its Trafalgars, its Dunkirks and Mafekings, its Nelsons and its Churchills, its Elgars and its Benjamin Brittens?’ (Hall 1999–2000: 5). In this context, Englishness references a historical and cultural heritage that resonates in a picturesque myth of harmony. This myth in turn patterns the understanding of nation among its ‘imagined community’ of strangers who make up multicultural Britain – albeit to differing degrees (Hall 1999–2000: 4). Englishness then can be a vapour that magically suffuses the air that people breathe in England and the associated architecture and institutions that the English encounter. The vapour weaves through cities and countrysides alike. Hall’s overriding concern is how those ‘strangers’, the migrants in England (and the rest of the United Kingdom) who find themselves ‘heritage-less’, make themselves of value within this overwhelming definition of Englishness? In the more time specific experience of 1955, the English author Emma Tennant (1999) recounts in her book, Girlitude: A Memoir of the 50s and 60s, how she survived the pursuit of Englishness by those in Society during the emergence of ‘a new England’. The version of England imagined by this class, dubbed by Tennant ‘the Brideshead snobberies with a vengeance’ (Tennant 1999: 11), steadfastly resisted change and regressed further into its ideas of English heritage. Tennant can describe this perplexing situation only through the obstinate insistence of her parents to give a ball in honour of their 17-year-old daughter’s debut into Society and the conspicuous accoutrements of the occasion: the lavish delicacies of success and status, respectability and tradition in the ‘serving of a ball breakfast of kedgeree, bacon and eggs and strawberries and cream . . . For me it is all meaningless’ (Tennant 1999: 10–11). At the centre of this incursion of a debutante ball there was Tennant herself, offered as the helpless, sacrificial lamb to the cause of English heritage and plutocratic lineage, a privileged fate she defines through her dress for the spectacle and sealed in a photographic portrait captured by a social equal, Tony Armstrong-Jones: – 62 –

Dress, Migration and Englishness in silk tartan with pale blue bodice, black velvet straps and a bunch of artificial Parma violets pinned between bosom and chin. My hair is fiercely set . . . My neck and my earlobes, temporarily adorned with fake peals, await the inherited parure of the noble family in which I am likely to marry. When aged, so my stoical expression appears to suggest, I shall gracefully yield the gems to the bride of the heir and retire to a dower house on a distant estate. (Tennant 1999: 3)

Tennant demonstrates that the concept of Englishness not only is in the air, but also can be a trail around the body that takes individuals and groups into a specific custom of Englishness through dress and beauty. In 1949 the journalist Marjorie Beckett tried to define the ‘English girl’ within the context of how a well-dressed woman can contribute to the good looks of a town, how could they compete in London, which Beckett saw as a male city: Her tailored tweeds, which indeed the English woman wears better than any other woman in the world, [but] for some curious reason, so many English girls, even if they can afford to go to the best designers, they like to think of themselves as individualists in dress . . . So often too, the average English girl likes pale wishy, washy prints, and she seems to imagine that almost any shade of blue gives her a serene virginal quality irresistible to men. (Beckett 1949: 23–4)

Cultural and political icons, tangible goods and spatial evidence, tradition versus individuality were the means by which Tennant, Bennett and Hall could express what Englishness was and is along with their personal experience of it.

Onward Bound The current culture of devolution has released a tide of debate on whether Englishness exists, and if so, what exactly it is now that England is clearly a multicultural society. In the wonderfully insightful BBC Radio 4 programme, ‘Tuning into Children’ (September–October 1999), children from different parts of the United Kingdom discussed the issue of culture and identity – whether there were any differences between the Welsh and the English, or Black Britons and non-Black Britons and what all this meant to them. The overall consensus was that there were people of different cultural backgrounds, but that this was not a problem, it was something that was simply another part of their lives. Some time later (13 February 2000), also on Radio 4, Professor Stuart Hall appeared on ‘Desert Island Discs’. He explained how he arrived in England from Jamaica in 1951. The programme supplements Hall’s candid personal account of life in Jamaica as a youth and his journey to England and academia in adulthood, ‘in my felt hat, in my overcoat, with my steamer trunk’ (Chen 1996: 489). He travelled to England with his mother. Hall explains, that having been awarded a scholarship, ‘She – 63 –

Carol Tulloch brought me, as she thought, “home” . . . and delivered me to where she thought a son of hers had always belonged – Oxford’ (Chen 1996: 489). At Oxford, Hall found what he describes as a ‘a distilled Englishness’ that was not him, and by seeing this he feels, became West Indian in England. It took migration for Hall to realize who he was, because of his difference: Having been prepared by the colonial education, I knew England from the inside . . . Arriving on a steamer in Bristol . . . getting on the train to come to Paddington, I’m driving through this West Country landscape; I’ve never seen it, but I know it. I read Shakespeare, Hardy, the Romantic Poets. Though I didn’t occupy the space, it was like finding again, in one’s dream, an already familiar idealized landscape. In spite of my anti-colonial politics, it had always been my aspiration to study in England. (Chen 1996: 490–1).

Having observed and experienced England, and engaged with its cultural traits and the objectification of the idea of Englishness in education, landscape and architecture, Hall insists: But I’m not and never will be ‘English’. I know both places [Jamaica and England] intimately, but I am not wholly of either place. And that’s exactly the diasporic experience, far away enough to experience the sense of exile and loss, close enough to understand the enigma of an always-postponed ‘arrival’. (Chen 1996: 490).

The act of travelling then ‘allows one to see things differently from what they are, differently from how one has seen them, and differently from what one is’ (Minhha 1994: 23). Hall’s personal account articulates the initial problems I had with the construction of this chapter. The aim was to look at the dressed-body of West Indians who migrated to England between 1948 and the early 1960s (1955–62 was the most intensive period of migration, and Jamaicans the largest migrant group). Their arrival in England during this period forced them to confront the issue of inhabiting a place, because of their colonial association with Britain, but not belonging to it. One’s identity in the country will forever be the migrant, or as Hall describes himself, a ‘diaspora person’ and the reality of what he and other migrants cannot be is constantly felt (‘Desert Island Discs’ 2000). A context such as this will always impact on the study of dress worn by migrants from the West Indies to England. Essentially, I am dealing with the ‘split-self’ (Minh-ha 1994: 16), that of the colonized subject in England. I want to argue that the ‘split self’ is unified by clothes and the styling of the body. In combining the different facets of their ‘colonial’ identity, the former subaltern, now the colonized stranger in England, makes their dressed-body more poignant to the wider consideration of what Englishness and English dress is. It is this constructive aspect – 64 –

Dress, Migration and Englishness of difference that has intrigued and encouraged me to write this chapter. To return to the pre-eminent journey introduced earlier, that of the report in Picture Post in June 1956 and its focus on the female passengers, this chapter now considers the above issues in relation to West Indian women who migrated to England in the 1950s.

The End of the Beginning: Victoria Station The photograph of a young, slender woman, standing alone at a platform at Victoria station (Figure 4.1), was one of the many out-takes of photographs by Haywood Magee for the illustrated Picture Post article, ‘Thirty Thousand Colour Problems’, written by Hilde Marchant, published on 9 June 1956. The image can be described as a classic artist composition where the subject is placed two-thirds to the side of the picture, rather than in the centre. The line of the roof of the train leads the eye of the viewer towards the main subject, a young woman encircled by a sea of luggage and the fractured shapes of her fellow travellers. The tension between the long horizontal line of the train and the subject is reinforced by the strong vertical line of the young woman. She has arrived. In her direct eye contact with the camera, the woman looks into the new world – the future. The picture emits a sensual

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 4.1 African–Caribbean migrants at Victoria station, May 1956. Photographer Haywood Magee. (By kind permission of Hulton Getty)

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Carol Tulloch quality surrounding this young woman in the blend of sass and femininity exhibited by her confident air and the delicate touch of a light-coloured half-crown hat and neat handbag accentuating the prim cut of her suit. The woman was one of the 744 West Indians who arrived at Southampton on the Italian migrant ship, Irpinia. Marchant’s report on the new arrivants concentrated on the female passengers from their disembarkation through to the customs hall and travelling with them on their outward journey to London on the Boat Train, all the way to the end of the railway line at Victoria station. In her description of the women as they descend from the Irpinia, Marchant latches onto their clothing: ‘It was a chilly morning and most of the women went ashore in “English” coats, woollen coats they would not wear at home, but having accepted the independence of a little knowledge and a British passport, they also had to accept the independence of the British weather’(Marchant 1956: 38). For Marchant, clothes were the material link between the migrant’s place of origin and their quest for a new home in England. The ‘English’ coat escorted these women on the various stages of their journey. The coat marked the difference from their place of origin – ‘the islands [of] sun, rum and floral-tropical woods’ (Marchant 1956: 38) – to the place of economic hope – England – which Marchant herself defined as ‘chilly’. Contrary to Marchant’s assumptions about Jamaica, ‘English’ coats were available in the Caribbean to counteract chilly evenings in the islands. The Jamaican newspaper, the Daily Gleaner, in January 1956 advertised: ‘Weather-Wise Coats For These NIPPY Nights ENGLISH ALL WOOL COATS In Red, Fawn, Green Pink, Blue, Aqua, Gold, Sizes 12 to 20 Waist Length 98/6 ea. Finger Tip 110/- ea. Dress Length 138/6 ea.. . . Bardowell’s 16 King Street, 22 King Street’.1 For Jamaican newspapers to advertise and for women to purchase such a garment as an ‘English’ coat in Jamaica, one, surreptitiously or not, was buying into a particular kind of nationhood, connecting oneself with an ‘imagined community’ that stretched to the shores of England. In this example, nationhood is objectified in a coat; Hall has written that: what the nation ‘means’ is an on-going project, it is under constant reconstruction. We come to know its meaning partly through its objects and artifacts which have been made to stand for and symbolise its essential values. Its meaning is constructed within, not above or outside representation. It is through identifying with these representations that we come to be its ‘subjects’ – by ‘subjecting’ ourselves to its dominant meanings. (Hall 1999–2000: 5)

What is the dominant meaning of the ‘English’ coat? It is dependable in its protection against weather conditions, manufactured to a high quality and of good and reserved design. These ‘coloured’ women, then, could not simply wear ‘English’ coats as merely garments of protection from the elements; another layer

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Dress, Migration and Englishness of meaning came into play – a layer that was so clearly visible to Marchant. The ‘English’ coat literally wrapped the bodies of these black women to fuse what has already been described as the ‘split-self’. The definition of Englishness and English dress here is ingrained in metaphor for the role England played in the aspirational desires of its colonial subjects, both aesthetically and economically. At Victoria station, the women had reached another leg of their long journey from the Caribbean. Marchant paints a fearful picture of the possible fate of some of the women, particularly the young and single, ‘with only a vague idea of what job they want to do, and their qualifications are even vaguer, except perhaps for their good looks’ (Marchant 1956: 38). This acknowledgement of the beauty of Black women contradicts the former Conservative Member of Parliament and novelist Lord (Jeffrey) Archer’s comment in 1999: Afro-Caribbeans 30 years ago, they had the worst jobs and were not well dressed, they were eating the wrong food and you were very aware of it . . . Your head did not turn in the road if a black woman passed because they were badly dressed, probably overweight and probably had a lousy job. If you walk down London streets now there are most staggeringly beautiful girls of every nationality. That is part of getting rid of prejudice and making things equal. (Archer quoted in White 1999)

Marchant is adamant that without decent protection, these young women will be led into the underworld of prostitution by black men who fear to show their faces because they have acquired goods illegally and own large cars, though only in Britain some one or two years. According to Marchant, there are two sides to the migrant community visible on the platform and concourse of Victoria station: the decent and bewildered useful citizens and the undesirable citizens awash with tainted money and goods (Marchant 1956: 38). This article was written in the climate of fear expressed by the indigenous people towards the growing numbers of immigrants in England. To be Black, female and beautiful compounded the situation. The emphatic fusion of the three qualities exacerbated the threatening ‘otherness’ of African-Caribbean women that would invariably instigate sexual desire in Black, and more ominously, in white men. To return to the woman in Figure 4.1, the sensitive exposure of this attractive young woman through the lens of Magee’s camera illuminates an underlying quality of the image – the overpowering emission of femininity and beauty. Here, it could be argued, that the English man, Magee, was ‘confronted with an excess of difference’. As Francine Pacteau (1994) has written, in such circumstances, ‘the white male subject will excel at defensive ingenuity, making her blackness becoming to his light, brightening up his day with her night’ (Pacteau 1994: 126). This fear of beautiful Black women could be one explanation as to why this image, like many others in the series of very attractive and well dressed Black women, was not used to

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Carol Tulloch illustrate the article. To do so was to be complicit in ‘a loss of power to see’ (Pacteau 1994: 125). Instead, African-Caribbean womanhood in ‘Thirty Thousand Colour Problems’ was represented by the non-threatening sexuality of ‘ordinary’ looking, mature women, with children, or young women and girls with a ‘child-like’ demeanour (Picture Post, 9 June 1956: 28–9). Within this photographic archive, one can recognize easily fashionable clothing of the period. Shirt-waisters in varying styles were popular among the women, who used accessories, such as a lightweight square of fabric pinned to the shoulder with a diamond-shaped broach, lending a touch of flair to a chaste version. The ubiquitous presence of the indigenous Yippa Yappa or straw hats and baskets, decorated with raffia appliqués of ‘Jamaica’ or floral designs, carried by many of the women in the photographs and article, served as a tangible reminder of ‘home’. Above all, the complete collection of photographs convey, despite the large crowds and the profusion of luggage, women relaxed and composed in their attire, even though it bears the traces of a long journey. The creased lines of their skirts and dresses (Figure 4.1) are imprints of the journey made from boat to train. The irregular pattern formation on the lower back of the women’s clothing does not mar the otherwise meticulously constructed travel trousseau worn in order to make an impressive entrance (Tulloch 1999: 119). On the contrary, the furrowed designs trace patterns of association between the natural affinities of bodies and the cultural framings and furnishings of the built environment. The optical image [of the crease] appears to have an independent existence outside our bodies, but . . . it is important to know how to ‘come back’, to internalise that which we have taken from the body and turned into a sign. (Mitchell 1999: 177, 180)

In this case, the sign of the migrant body in transit. As discussed earlier, Lord Archer’s memories of this particular moment in history stretched back only to the 1960s, a memory that conjures up a distorted vision of only dowdy, down-trodden black women. But in the collection of photographs held by Picture Post of newcomers from the Caribbean in 1956, it cannot be denied that this group of women consisted of attractive, well-dressed individualists, particularly when one considers the definition of a well-groomed woman during the 1950s as espoused by Vogue editor, Edna Woolman Chase: As in cooking and bartending, so in good dressing; the mixture is the secret. Never be guilty of wearing fancy shoes with a sports costume, an elaborate hat with a simple tailored suit. Do not wear long earrings for travelling or carry a businesslike leather bag with a flimsy summer frock. Ask yourself always, ‘Am I harmoniously put together, am I appropriately clad for the deed at hand, and am I free of non-essentials?’ If you can truthfully answer yes, you are a well-dressed woman. (Chase and Chase 1954: 192–3)

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Dress, Migration and Englishness In summary of the event and the additional context of race and vulnerability, sexuality and difference, Marchant asks what these women have to look forward to at the end of this journey – cramped conditions in old Victorian homes at an extortionate rate and feeling that they are ‘treated as outcasts’ culminating in a colour bar, ‘of which there is a whiff already’ (Marchant 1956: 38)? Marchant’s prognosis was shaped by reports of such experiences covered in articles by Picture Post that questioned whether a colour conflict was being bred in ‘Britain’ (Hewitt 1952; Hopkins 1955). The styled figures of West Indian women on the platform of Victoria station was, on this occasion, where the myth and mystery of England hung in the air. Their dressed bodies heaved with expectation, wrapped in the metaphorical ‘comfort’ of the ‘English’ coat. This documentation and presentation of women at Victoria station by Picture Post, that conduit of everyday social memory, was effectively the exhibition of the vestiges of an-other culture which was about to truly embark on a journey into England and Englishness.

The Journey to England in a Circle of Skirt You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet, And the swish of a skirt in the dew, Steadily cantering through The misty solitudes, As though they perfectly knew The old lost road through the woods – But there is no road through the woods! Rudyard Kipling, The Way through the Woods

Within the same series of Picture Post photographs, a visual narrative unfolds of another young woman whose distinctive skirt links her with a Black woman later embroiled in the generically called ‘Notting Hill Riots’ of 1958.2 She is first photographed by Magee while being attended to by a nurse of the British Red Cross for an eye infection. Eventually, she heads towards the platform barrier to cross over into the real space of London and enter the real experience of being in England (Figure 4.2). As in Madan Sarup’s eloquent definition of the migrant, this ‘is a person who has crossed the border. S/he seeks a place to make “a new beginning”, to start again, to make a better life. The newly arrived have to learn the new language of culture. They have to cope not only with the pain of separation but often with the resentments of a hostile population’ (Sarup 1994: 94). The woman wears a roll-neck jumper to compliment a circle skirt, boldly decorated with unidentifiable objects. There is nothing unusual about this particular garment, as this genre of skirt had been in existence since the late 1940s, when it – 69 –

Carol Tulloch

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 4.2 Victoria station, May 1956. Photographer Haywood Magee. (By kind permission of Hulton Getty)

was originally associated with the USA’s jitter-bug era. In fact, the woman’s pairing of sweater and skirt was in keeping with the fashionable way the circle skirt should be worn: ‘Circle skirts were usually worn with pullover sweaters, cardigan sweaters and sweater sets made of Orlon, Virgin wool, Angora and cashmere’ (Ettinger 1999: 24). I profess that the inclusion of an elaborate half-crown hat was an attempt to formalize, for this momentous occasion, an otherwise casual style of dress. Although this style of skirt was not unique to the Caribbean, its presence on the bodies of African-Caribbean women in 1956 must have pressed home to the English men and women present at Victoria, that these women were from distant tropical islands. The same style of skirt appears two years later during the Notting Hill Riots of attacks by whites on blacks in the summer of 1958 (Figure 4.3). A mature Black woman is photographed holding an axe which situates her on the front line of defence: ‘You know, they were going to fight to the death; there were women cutting up sheets and bandages, they had the whole roofs sorted out, and they decided that they weren’t going to have no more of it’ (Institute of Race Relations 1986: 7). It is an image of uncompromising urgency. She has taken up arms to help in the protection of her self and others with no time or thought to removing her hat. The woman’s short-sleeved blouse and skirt indicates the season of warm weather in which the attacks took place. This fruit and fauna version of the circle – 70 –

Dress, Migration and Englishness

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 4.3 ‘Notting Hill Riots’, summer 1958

skirt was not out of place among the range of fashionable, pretty, cotton, wide skirts available to teenagers and women in Britain during the late 1950s. It is the mesmerizing juxtaposition of violence and femininity, between the brutal aggression of the axe and its gruesome possibilities and the feminine garment of a decorated skirt designed to beautify and enhance the female form, that intensifies the incongruity of the image. The skirt, with its panoramic mural of tropical vegetation, foregrounds the intensity of the violence that was being and would, if necessary, be meted out during the attacks. One could say that the woman’s patterned skirt reinforces her origin, like the young woman at Victoria station two years earlier, as being from an ‘exotic’ Caribbean island. Such a constellation of interconnections grafted onto the determined manner in which the woman holds the axe taut across and against her skirt, primed for action, points to an analysis of the image as a woman protecting her place of origin, and all the associations that linked her to that place of origin that had brought the racist attacks to the fore. This was a civil war, with no official uniform for the opposing sides, though the press reports of the riots would have readers believe that the riots were solely led by Teddy Boys in full subcultural dress (Manchester Guardian 1958; Jefferson – 71 –

Carol Tulloch 1975: 82–3). The fighting colours of the competing sides was the pigment of their skin, black and white (although the Black migrants did have support from some whites). The photograph acts as memoria technica of everyday clothes, as worn by this woman, to remind one that these were ordinary people situated in and dealing with extraordinary circumstances – the sustained racism in the country they had chosen to migrate to which they were encouraged to view as their ‘Mother Country’, their new home. It was that initial act of migration from the predominantly British-owned islands in the West Indies to a predominantly white island, that triggered these migrants from the Caribbean to question who they were, and how they had learnt to be Black in England. To return to Hall: Constituting oneself as ‘black’ is another recognition of self through difference: certain clear polarities and extremities against which one tries to define oneself. We constantly underestimate the importance, to certain crucial political things that have happened in the world, of this ability of people to constitute themselves, psychically, in the black identity. (Hall 1993: 136)

The issue of understanding one’s difference through migration is poignantly expressed by a Jamaican woman in response to an English audience who asked if ‘she would like to lose some of her customs’: I look and I wonder what is my custom. Because if I was coming from Africa as an African, in my passport would be written a name like Shulu Afuyung or something like that. Instead I found myself at birth with a name like McGilpin, that makes me know that the man who owned my forefathers as slaves was a Scot, a McGilpin. I said, so I lost my name there. And then I realize I am not speaking in an African language, but I am speaking English language and I realize that my food, instead of being fufu, is crushed potato . . . I would have landed at the airport in a sari or a pretty tie-head, instead I’m wearing my same clothes, so all that’s left of me is the pigment, and I said this is what I dearly cling to, I wouldn’t change it for anything. (quoted in Pryce 1979: 4)

The quote is taken from Endless Pressure, Ken Pryce’s (1979) study of Black people in Bristol. There are no other details about McGilpin. We do not know when she arrived in England, or how long she had been in the country which provided her with the time for this intense reflection that rested in disillusionment. McGilpin had resigned herself to the belief that her cultural identity had no roots, no strong sense of origin, like the African and Indian migrants she referred to. McGilpin believed that she had lost everything, that she has no authentic customs. Whatever customs she did have had been diluted or devalued by the tenets of British colonialism that she and her forebears had been subjected to in Jamaica. – 72 –

Dress, Migration and Englishness All that was left, all that mattered was the colour of her body, she who was born in Jamaica with a Scottish name and a black body, and the preservation of that pigment, was uppermost to her. McGilpin was exemplary of how, ‘The category of the “black body” can come into being only when the body is perceived as being out of place, either from its natural environment or its national boundaries’ (Mohanram 1999: xii). McGilpin had reached what Stuart Hall calls that ‘certain moment’ when an individual or group of the African Diaspora defines themselves as black. ‘Black is an identity which had to be learned and could only be learned in a certain moment’ (Hall 1993: 136). Hall is saying that the notion of a Black identity, and that definition of what a Black identity is, takes on different forms, at different locations, at different times. For Hall, Blackness is heterogeneous. For McGilpin her identity was symbolized in her skin colour only, not the ‘customs’ that she was asked about, or what is pertinent here, the way she dressed and presented herself to the world. Therefore, to return to Sarup: Identity is changed by the journey; our subjectivity is recomposed. In the transformation every step forward can also be a step back: the migrant is here and there. Exile can be deadening but it can also be creative. Exile can be an affliction but it can also be a transfiguration – it can be a resource. I think what I am trying to say is that identity is not to do with being, but with becoming. (Sarup 1994: 98)

I would add, that becoming should not be considered only in the context of ‘begin to be’, but can also reference appearance, looking right, looking good.

Conclusion So where in all this do strawberries and cream fit in? Well, the culinary description strawberries and cream can conjure in the imagination qualities that are perceived as quintessentially English – afternoon tea on a perfect lawn amid the backdrop of an antiquated country home, delicate rose-coloured men and women punting at Oxford, the crisp white regalia of Wimbledon or Lords. Strawberries and cream, then, is a metaphor for all things English, its extended meaning easily understood by individuals regardless of ethnicity or social status. This meaning is about heritage, which also interests Stuart Hall, but within a different context. The innocent delicacy of strawberries and cream is complicit in a heritage based on traditional values of class and social exclusivity and cultural homogeneity that is linked with Empire, ‘with that era’s need to repress all difference – from internal regionalism to sexuality and ethnicity’ (Arts Council of England 2000: 7), thus resistant to change. While what Hall advocates and what I am trying to communicate here is that we need to break away from such limiting, and eventually

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Carol Tulloch destructive notions of England and Englishness. As Tennant (1999: 11) says, ‘it is all meaningless’. So, the essence of the appellation strawberries and cream ‘specialises rapturously with some of the delicious things in life’ (Tarrant n.d.: 2). I would stretch this to include the possibilities of difference to generate excitement and change in England in the pursuit of a harmonious coexistence of Englishness and other cultural practices. Therefore within the mythical understanding of Englishness, and what it has come to mean for those considered to be non-English, the shifting climate in the debate of this subject by academics, artists and curators is that it is possible, in fact crucial, to construct a new England by merging difference, and thereby build a new heritage based on an inclusive reflection of society and its composite histories. As Hall said while contemplating being a castaway on a desert island: difference is good, difference is exciting, difference is another way of being modern.

Notes 1. A survey of Trinidadian newspapers of the same period found that they did not carry similar advertisements promoting English coats, but did make reference to ‘English K Shoes’ as the best European shoes available (Trinidad Guardian 1956: 9). 2. Peter Fryer in Staying Power states the geographical area as North Kensington, which began in Nottingham, then North Kensington London, then across London to Kensal Green, Islington and Hackney for example (Fryer 1984: 378–79).

References Arts Council of England (2000), Whose Heritage? The Impact of Cultural Diversity on Britain’s Living Heritage, London: Arts Council of England. Beckett, M. (1949), ‘The First Professor in Fashion’, Picture Post, 42(8): 23–35. Chase, E.W. and Chase, I. (1954), Always in Vogue, London: Victor Gollancz. Chen, K. (1996), ‘The Formation of a Diasporic Intellectual: An Interview with Stuart Hall’, in D. Morley and K. Chen (eds) Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, New York: Routledge.

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Dress, Migration and Englishness Curtis, B. and Pajaczkowska, C. (1994), ‘“Getting There”: Travel, Time and Narrative’, in G. Robertson, M. Mash, L. Tickner, J. Bird, B. Curtis and T. Putnam (eds), Travellers’ Tales: Narrative of Home and Displacement, London and New York: Routledge. Ettinger, R. (1999), Fifties Forever: Popular Fashions for Men, Women, Boys and Girls, Atglen, PA: Schiffer. Fryer, P. (1984), Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain, London: Pluto. Hall, S. (1993), ‘Minimal Selves’, in A. Gray and J. McGuigan (eds), Studying Culture: An Introductory Reader, London: Edward Arnold. —— (1999–2000), ‘Whose Heritage? Un-Settling “The Heritage”, Re-imagining the Post-nation’, in Third Text, 49 (winter). Hewitt, C. (1952), ‘Breeding a Colour Bar’, Picture Post, 56(10): 28–31. Hopkins, T. (1955), ‘Are We Building up to a British Colour Conflict?’, Picture Post, 66(4): 29–32, 41. Institute of Race Relations (1986), The Fight Against Racism: A Pictorial of Asians and Afro-Caribbeans in Britain, London: Institute of Race Relations. Jefferson, T. (1975), ‘Cultural Responses to the Teds’, in S. Hall and T. Jefferson (eds), Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-war Britain, London: Routledge. Manchester Guardian (1958), ‘Problem for the Welfare State’, 8 September: 9. Marchant, H. (1956), ‘Thirty Thousand Coloured Problems’, Picture Post, 71(10): 28–9. Minh-ha, T.T. (1994), ‘Other than Myself/My Other Self’, in G. Robertson, M. Mash, L. Tickner, I. Bird, B. Curtis and T. Putnam (eds), Travellers’ Tales: Narrative of Home and Displacement, London: Routledge. Mitchell, V. (1999), ‘Folding and Unfolding the Textile Membrane: Between Bodies and Architecture’, in J. Stair (ed.), The Body Politic: The Role of the Body and Contemporary Craft, London: Crafts Council. Mohanram, R. (1999), Black Body: Women, Colonialism and Space, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Pacteau, F. (1994), The Symptom of Beauty, London: Reaktion. Pryce, K. (1979), Endless Pressure: A Study of West Indian Life-styles in Bristol, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Sarup, M. (1994), ‘Home and Identity’, in G. Robertson, M. Mash, L. Tickner, I. Bird, B. Curtis and T. Putnam (eds), Travellers’ Tales: Narrative of Home and Displacement, London: Routledge. Tarrant, H.P. (n.d.), Strawberries and Cream, Dover: E. Wild. Tennant, E. (1999), Girlitude: A Memoir of the 50s and 60s, London: Jonathan Cape.

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Carol Tulloch Trinidad Guardian (1956), ‘A Man’s Best Shoes – K Oxfords Craftmade in England’, 5 January: 9. Tulloch, C. (1999), ‘There’s No Place Like Home: Home Dressmaking and Creativity in the Jamaican Community of the 1940s to the 1960s’, in B. Burman (ed.), The Culture of Sewing: Gender, Consumption and Home Dressmaking, Oxford: Berg. White, M. (1999), ‘Archer Accused of Racist Claptrap’, The Guardian, 10 August: 2.

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Part II On Designing Englishness

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–5 – ‘What a Deal of Work there is in a Dress!’ Englishness and Home Dressmaking in the Age of the Sewing Machine Barbara Burman

A collection of chapters in a book called The Englishness of English Dress sets a fascinating challenge. In response to it, I have explored home dressmaking in the period between 1850 and the present day in relation to this slippery notion of Englishness. An account of the historical practice of home dressmaking belongs here because it can be understood as an activity within a range of household practices of production and consumption which contribute to the formation of national identity through concern with the making, maintenance and remaking of fluid social class and gender identities. As Fred Davis has noted in his book on fashion, ‘our identities are forever in ferment, giving rise to numerous strains, paradoxes, ambivalences, and contradictions within ourselves’ (Davis 1992: 17). Home dressmaking, just as much as ready-to-wear, has been a means of accommodating various identities in practice and in visual form and also challenging or subverting them. Ideas of Englishness and home dressmaking can be seen as entwined. If social class has been one of the principal organizing ideas of Englishness, or one of the principal ways in which English people have understood and defined themselves, home dressmaking has been, among other things, an agent in the maintenance and preservation of those perceptions. This is not to suggest that there is any uniformity or consistency in the experience of class. As David Cannadine has written: ‘the history of class in Britain should be written, and can only be written, as the history of multiple identities’ (Cannadine 2000: 171). It is more an argument that dress can be understood as part of this shifting social identity, one in which the local community, the street, the chapel, the church or the workplace may produce determinants which compete with those of the fashion magazine or the shop window, in which the vernacular might rub shoulders with the cosmopolitan. The period in question, from the 1850s onwards, I call the age of the sewing machine. It is the period in which sewing machines became reliable enough to be produced in sufficient quantity to enter general use, both industrial and domestic.1 This period could be characterized briefly as framing a rise and fall in the – 79 –

Barbara Burman importance of home dressmaking. However, we do not know enough yet to ascribe the rise in its importance entirely to the availability of the domestic sewing machine. Nor do we know enough to say that the subsequent fall in the importance of home dressmaking was due to the use of the industrial sewing machine, in conjunction with other technological advances, in the development of the market for ready-to-wear clothing. Production of ready-to-wear clothing began long before mechanization of sewing or cutting (Kidwell and Christman 1974; Lemire 1997). The confinement of this chapter to the age of the sewing machine is not another way of asserting that home dressmaking was, or is, wholly dependent on the machine. But the making of clothes in the home before the age of the sewing machine is still obscure and I have chosen to steer clear of those less charted waters. A great deal of work and pleasure, hardship and creativity is encompassed by the long history of domestic needlework, mechanized or manual. My title is taken from some heartfelt words written by a young working Englishwoman in a letter to a friend in 1905 (Thompson 1987: 72). Her friend must have appreciated the predicament when she in turn wrote of ‘dim eyes and aching limbs’ as she worked to complete new clothing for a precious holiday in 1908. ‘I am trying to make a blouse, pinafore dress and a top for this holiday. Miss Panting – always a friend in practical needs, is stitching up the seams of the latter for me. Isn’t she kind?’ (Thompson 1987: 122). My interest is in opening up inquiry into the very words we use – home, dress and making – as each signifying complex and important aspects of everyday life. Each of these aspects is defined and nuanced by time, place and social class. During this period, the making of a home and its perceived values were closely associated with the skills and nature of women. At the same time the home was also seen as being under threat from the apparent erosion of traditional feminine practices through the increasing importance of waged work for women outside the home. By the same token, dress for women was undergoing many changes, not least through the perceived democratization and accessibility of fashion and its agencies such as shops and magazines. Making and its close association with making do, as opposed to buying and getting something readymade, such as food or clothing, was subject to these same shifts in work and consumption patterns. In particular, the home of home dressmaking may be especially consonant with the particularities of English identity. As an Edwardian rhyme went: ‘The Germans live in Germany; The Romans live in Rome; The Turkeys live in Turkey; But the English live at home’ (Renier 1931: frontispiece). My own research as well as common-sense observations and oral testimony about the place of home dressmaking in women’s lives have left the indelible impression on me that dressmaking has a deep personal resonance for many women.2 It is a way in which they have stored memories of family and life events and it encompasses a good deal of creativity and self-expression. Memory of the – 80 –

Englishness and Home Dressmaking smallest details of clothing and fabrics seem to last whole lifetimes. Women recall what their mothers made for them to wear as children, as well as recalling what they themselves have made over their lives, for others or their own use. Home dressmaking is a process and a practice, an experience which is both private and public. It is a form of work undertaken in the home but manifest, mediated and judged in public settings. Like Englishness itself, it represents a wide range of different practices. In this context, it is important to define what is meant by the term home dressmaking. It refers here to the unwaged making of clothes at home, by machine or by hand or a combination of the two, for the consumption of the maker and her family. As an American home economist put it at the beginning of the twentieth century: The sewing machine has taken away much of the drudgery of home sewing, but its use does not lessen the need of skill in hand work. No machine can finish ends of belts, collars, sew on trimming, fastenings, and like work and the finish has much to do with the general appearance of a garment. (Watson 1916: 162)

I also think that it is legitimate and useful to include within definitions of home dressmaking the refurbishment, recycling, mending and alteration of garments; in other words, it includes the making, remaking and the maintenance of clothing. (Alteration or remodelling in this period was a continuation of a practice commonly seen in surviving eighteenth- and earlier nineteenth-century clothing.) Very commonly in this period the practice of creating new garments has employed second-hand cloth recycled from existing garments already owned by the household or acquired (Thompson 1981: 75) and sometimes donated for the purpose (Rowntree 1913: 318), as well as new cloth. In more leisured and less economically marginal households, ‘new’ sometimes denotes cloth acquired new but hoarded for years until a propitious moment or appropriate paper pattern presents itself. As a practice, making clothes at home has been mixed with other types of clothing acquisition, such as ready-mades, hand-me-downs and second-hand items. This is confirmed when we look at households or at individual practices over time, as we can in some museum collections (Brooks 1999). For example, we can see this through individual wardrobes such as the Korner Archive at the London College of Fashion or the Bagot collection in the City Museum and Art Gallery at Stokeon-Trent.3 Here we can see clothing situated within overall consumption habits and judge how it was acquired and made in a variety of ways. Within our theme it offers another way of seeing how the English respond to dress and how they have used it in social contexts. In innumerable novels, paintings and illustrations of the nineteenth century, and exemplified by Thomas Hood’s Song of the Shirt of 1843 (Flint 1992: 103–4),

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Barbara Burman we see the spectre of poverty and fear of loss of gentility which gnawed at the lives of many middle-class women of this period who were forced to turn to dressmaking for a living. While these representations of the plight of such women and their vulnerability to eventual prostitution were arguably exaggerated or skewed for middle-class audiences, nevertheless plenty of middle-class as well as workingclass women did trade and live by the needle in a precarious, exploited and unregulated way (Walkley 1981; Inder 2000). Such women would have been highly likely to have made their own clothes, or eke out the wear of their existing clothes by constant repairs and refurbishment, as well as acquiring clothes second-hand, alongside and in between the making of clothes for others for cash. They were both trading as dressmakers and practising as home dressmakers. So tidy distinctions are not very useful in this subject. At the same time, the condition in which such women lived, and those who did needlework at home for the rougher end of the trade, became embedded within the English social reform conscience. Problems of this kind were dramatically highlighted, for example, by the Sweated Labour exhibition of 1906, an event staged in London which brought its audiences into close contact with the inescapable fact that here, at the heart of their Empire and its wealth, were injustice and poverty on an appalling scale (Schmiechen 1984). Thus in English history of the past 150 years the act of sewing in the home has generated an uneasy cluster of meanings. These include its long association with poverty and exploitation, its connotations of thrift and the housewifely work of making-do and maintenance of domestic order and the further borrowing of sewing as a signal of feminine refinement and leisure. In this sense it echoes equally uneasy layers of associations of the home itself as a place of unregulated and sweated homework, as well as a haven from waged work and a site of women’s unpaid labour. A history of home dressmaking therefore invokes a substantial legacy of social experiences and discourses. On the equally loaded subject of Englishness, I have taken as a starting point George Orwell’s 1944 essay ‘The English People’ (Orwell and Angus 1968). Orwell was writing in the midst of war when external threats and then fears of Americanization prompted explorations of national identity right across the political spectrum. Near the mid-point of the twentieth century itself, Orwell deployed personal memories reaching back to the end of the nineteenth century. He was one of a long line of English writers willing to reflect on what Englishness might mean, in itself a habit perhaps characteristic of the English (see Aileen Ribeiro’s Chapter 1 in this volume). He listed what he regarded as ‘the salient characteristics of the English common people’. These were ‘artistic insensibility, gentleness, respect for legality, suspicion of foreigners, sentimentality about animals, hypocrisy, exaggerated class distinctions, and an obsession with sport’ (Orwell and Angus 1968: 16). Orwell was interested in social class, making him part of that tendency David Cannadine described as distinguishing the British from their equally unequal – 82 –

Englishness and Home Dressmaking counterparts elsewhere: ‘the British think and talk about their inequality and immobility more, and that is because, for good historical reasons, they have a larger repertoire of surviving vernacular models than most nations in which to describe and discuss them’ (Cannadine 2000: 170). It is within the defining experience of social class that home dressmaking, a widespread means of keeping up appearances, comes to play a role in Englishness. In Orwell’s view, social class distinctions, though diminishing, still characterized a less attractive side of English life midway through the twentieth century and within that class system, clothes themselves signified class identity, though to a lesser extent than formerly: Thirty years ago the social status of nearly everyone in England could be determined from his appearance, even at two hundred yards’ distance. The working classes all wore ready-made clothes, and the ready-made clothes were not only ill-fitting but usually followed the upper-class fashions of ten or fifteen years earlier. The cloth cap was practically a badge of status. It was universal amongst the working class, while the upper classes only wore it for golf and shooting. This state of affairs is rapidly changing. Ready-made clothes now follow the fashions closely, they are made in many different fittings to suit every kind of figure, and even when they are of very cheap cloth they are superficially not very different from expensive clothes. The result is that it grows harder every year, especially in the case of women, to determine social status at a glance. (Orwell and Angus 1968: 38–9)

Orwell was wrong to suppose all working-class people wore ready-made clothing. He overlooked the range of different clothing sources from which working-class women provisioned their households and the fact that working-class male outer wear was often second-hand, which may account for Orwell’s memory of seeing ill-fitting and out-of-date garments. Similarly, his confidence about ready-made clothing’s capacity to continue to blur what were formerly obvious social distinctions was misplaced, as arguably clothing since the 1950s has satisfied an increased desire to express new or multiple identities in a highly visual way (Hebdige 1979; York 1980; Davis 1992). Nevertheless, his general point holds good that cheaper clothes looked better than they had earlier in the century (Wray 1957). Orwell also notes: In peace time, it is unusual for foreign visitors to this country to notice the existence of the English people. Even the accent referred to by Americans as ‘the English accent’ is not in fact common to more than a quarter of the population. In cartoons in continental papers England is personified by an aristocrat with a monocle, a sinister capitalist in a top-hat, or a spinster in a Burberry. Hostile or friendly, nearly all the generalisations that are made about England base themselves on the property-owning class and ignore the other forty-five million. (Orwell and Angus 1968: 15)

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Barbara Burman Clothing and appearances feature as defining elements again: the monocle, the top hat and the Burberry. Orwell goes on to counteract this foreigners’ view of the English: ‘Blackpool is more typical than Ascot, the top-hat is a moth-eaten rarity’. He emphasizes that during the period in question, social class is central to articulations of sartorial identity. It is one of the prisms through which general trends in home dressmaking may be understood. (Gender would be another.) Equally important is the fact that social class manifests itself differently over time. People’s experience of social class includes the sense that it can and does change, just as Orwell, writing in the middle of the twentieth century, remembers how things were different at the start of it. A sense of class mobility and transformation may indeed inform some individual clothing strategies. To understand Englishness, Orwell directs us to observe the ‘ordinary, useful, unspectacular people’ (Orwell and Angus 1968: 15). And home dressmaking invites us to shift our attention to these people – Orwell’s ‘ordinary, useful, unspectacular people’. The documentation of home dressmaking’s history and practices involves engagement with ‘ordinary’ people and offers a way to expand dress history’s grasp of the ordinary and the everyday. In some senses this marks it out from a good deal of dress history literature to date and demands particular research resources and methodologies. If we take the broad figures set out by Ross McKibbin in his book Classes and Cultures: England 1918–1951, we see that England has been a predominantly working-class country, a fact which held true for the whole of our longer period: the working-class represented 78 per cent of the population, declining to 72 per cent during his period of study (McKibbin 1998: 106). McKibbin suggests that the middle-class made up 21 per cent rising to 28 per cent (McKibbin 1998: 46) and the upper class hovered somewhere between 0.1 per cent and 0.05 per cent (McKibbin 1998: 2). He concludes that ‘England was one of the most working-class countries in the world’ (McKibbin 1998: 106). A large body of social history has been published in the UK since the early 1970s in which an emphasis is given to the conditions and experience of the working class. This trend in history writing, together with feminist history, has gathered material which provides a rich source for dress history. It is evident, for example, how important clothing and home dressmaking were within working-class households and how they were used to uphold family and community standards of appearance and respectability (Thompson 1981; Hostettler 1986; Westover 1986; Chinn 1988; Alexander 1994; Davin 1996). We also find the representation of sewing bound up in the rhetoric of both class-based social improvement and the prevailing ideologies of femininity. These are evident, for example, in the social surveys of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Bell 1911; Pember Reeves 1913; Rowntree 1913; Black 1915). In this literature we see the essential contradiction evident in middle-class notions of the diminished capabilities of womanhood and the realities of three-quarters of English households, that is working-class – 84 –

Englishness and Home Dressmaking households, which depended on wives and mothers to shore up the household economy against the undermining effects of uncertain or seasonal male income and vulnerable housing. The needlewomen who met Mayhew in 1849 to describe first-hand their destitution and prostitution demonstrated their poverty vividly through their clothes: ‘I have no frock because I had to leave it in pawn for 6d.’ or ‘the gown I have got on does not belong to myself’ (Thompson and Yeo 1973: 213). It was from this desperate plight that many working-class women fought to keep their families. They sought to keep them respectable, employable and creditworthy. The home production of clothing, with a great deal of recycling, was an essential part of this constant battle. Oral history and autobiography give us many examples of this from the late nineteenth century through to the 1920s and 1930s. A young factory worker confides in her diary in 1883: ‘I finished Father’s shirt, I bet there will be something the matter with it when he tries it on, well I have done my best, I can do no more’ (Jackson 1993). A mother snaps up an adult grey flannel dressing gown at a jumble sale; ‘she washed it, cut it, unpicked it, turned it inside out and pressed it and she made me the most wonderful frock I ever had for Sunday’ (T. Thompson 1981: 75). Older wage-earning daughters helped out: ‘My older sisters [in service] helped my mother to make ends meet by sending their old clothes home, which my mother continued to cut down for us. Thus we were kept warm if not fashionable’ (Newbery 1980: 30). We can see home dressmaking playing its role behind closed working-class doors. As McKibbin says: ‘There is much evidence that people were suspicious of their neighbours and large numbers thought them untrustworthy. The shunning of neighbours was the result of a general desire to protect the privacy of the home and . . . to escape neighbourly prying and gossip’ (McKibbon 1998: 181). Robert Tressell captured some of the embarrassment which could be caused by the knowledge that garments were home-sewn garments. The young child of a painter and decorator is scrutinized by his white collar neighbours in the very early years of the twentieth century: ‘he was always very well dressed; so well indeed as to occasion some surprise, until they found out that all the boy’s clothes were home-made. Then their surprise was changed into a somewhat grudging admiration of the skill displayed, mingled with contempt for the poverty which made its exercise necessary’ (Tressell 1993 [1914]: 77). The argument that middle-class identities were sustained in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by new cultural and social codes within urban modernity and consumerism underlines the importance of the visual in general and selfpresentation in particular (Gunn 1999). McKibbin characterizes the English middle class by its ‘intense fear of loss of social esteem and relative status’. In this context, codes of dress took on special significance and home dressmaking provided ways of keeping up appearances, expressive of what McKibbin calls the ‘paradox which lay beneath the middle-class interpretation of its own experience – a growing, but – 85 –

Barbara Burman poorer middle-class and a shrinking but richer working-class’ (McKibbin 1998: 105). In other more financially secure households, home dressmaking has been a means throughout this period by which a woman engaged with the pleasures and pressures of the fashion marketplace, in which she has made choices, aligning herself with this or that look or shape. Selecting from the plenitude of possibility in styles, fabrics and finishes has required her to recognize and navigate those intricate and shifting rules and risks involved in the preparation of her public appearance. Home dressmaking in this more secure social context may be a creative act but it is an act normally accompanied by the hope it wouldn’t result in eccentricity or lapses of taste or judgement. It requires a certain nerve to take the scissors to the perfect, whole and often costly cloth. Home dressmaking has not produced an identifiable look or style or any homogeneous type which we could then categorize as English at any time in this period. We might be able to tell when a garment is home sewn, although this has never presumably been the intention. Indeed the intention has been to disguise the home made as shop bought or at least a good semblance of shop bought or tailor made. So, although, after scrutiny, we might be able to identify the home sewn, from the point of view of its technique or material or skill, and although we can track responses and reactions to the home-sewn garment through a variety of sources such as oral history and autobiography, we cannot say it is a type of clothing which in any obvious material sense embodies national identity. If it does, it is because it echoes a widely shared aesthetic, not because of its method of production. Arguably at various times, however, there may have been a kind of common ‘evening class style’, brought about by the enduring authority of certain ‘how-to’ books or the syllabuses of examination boards such as City and Guilds of London.4 In a 1970s novel, the clothing of a temporary secretary showed the results of these normative tendencies: her life was circumscribed by fell seams and hand hemming. For Miss Sparshott was a skilled dressmaker, an assiduous attender at the G.L.C. [Greater London Council] evening classes. Her clothes were beautifully made but so dateless that they were never actually in fashion; straight skirts in grey or black which were exercises in how to sew a pleat or insert a zip fastener; blouses with mannish collars and cuffs in insipid pastel shades on which she distributed without discretion her collection of costume jewellery. (James 1981 [1972]: 9)

In this respect, Orwell noted that an English characteristic was ‘the almost general deadness to aesthetic issues’. However, while the practice of home dressmaking speaks of the domestic, the everyday and of ‘history from below’, it can also be mapped through the more public histories of technology and trade. At least in the age of the sewing machine,

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Englishness and Home Dressmaking the sewing machine itself and the mass-produced paper pattern can be read as central components in the development of modern production and consumption. The mass production of the sewing machine presented particular problems to nineteenth-century entrepreneurs. Hounshell (1985) demonstrates that in fact the US company Singer, a market leader, was very slow to accommodate production changes and led the market not by the development of new methods of mass production of their machines, as is often supposed, but by advertising and agencies. Singer applied these methods to the UK domestic market. Thus by the 1860s the domestic home base for sewing, which was private, small scale and personalized, was also the focus for large-scale highly competitive activity. The home was penetrated by the same forces which fought over what Karl Marx called the ‘colossal industry of making “wearing apparel”’ (Marx 1990 [1867]: 604), itself part of the huge nineteenth-century shift to reach for what Marx described as ‘the extending markets and for the still more rapidly extending competition of the capitalists’ (Marx 1990 [1867]: 601). While Marx writing in the 1860s blamed the sewing machine, as an instrument in the hands of capitalists, for the destruction of skills and small-scale livelihoods, and the inhumane expansion of the factory system, Singer and numerous other American manufacturers got on with making the machines and developing their sales forces and advertising and their increasing presence on the British high street. It would be difficult to overestimate the exposure of the sewing machine through the myriad of retail outlets in Britain (Godley 1997, 1999). The home dressmaker found herself courted by an array of British, American and German manufacturers (Figure 5.1). Her activity and her expectations of what was possible were increasingly transformed and potentially standardized by the products on offer. The main thrust of the market expansion came from the USA. For example, Harmsworth’s women’s magazines, British owned, with their emphasis on home skills and thrift, learned their mass sales techniques from the USA (Dilnot 1925; Bourne 1990). A major effect of this new aspect of the commercialization of the domestic was the rise of magazines, paper patterns, sundries and scientific cutting methods. But among all of this paraphernalia of goods and services aimed at the home dressmaker, it would be hard to distinguish anything which was particularly English. Although British companies made sewing machines and produced other goods and services, the USA dominated the field. The engineering breakthroughs were American. Singer was more or less synonymous with the sewing machine. The company which set up shop in London in the mid-1870s and led the way in developing the dressmaker’s paper pattern business was Butterick, based in the USA. The huge importation of the sewing machine culture and the new fashionled paper patterns represented an early example of Americanization, not a flowering of English entrepreneurship or inventiveness. What has been said of the later part of this period could well apply to the earlier part: ‘No Englishman or woman – 87 –

Barbara Burman

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 5.1 A Singer sewing machine shop in Brighton in April 1914; in front a parasol parade is staged to advertise The Suffragette newspaper. (Courtesy of the Museum of London)

could escape America’ (McKibbin 1998: 526). The American sewing manuals which continued to develop within this culture are good examples of women’s goods produced intentionally for consumption on both sides of the Atlantic simultaneously. They were frequently published by the sewing machine or paper pattern manufacturers. To encourage sewing, they have often appealed to the notion that the handicraft, tactility and thrift of sewing made it universally attractive to women, regardless of culture or nation. ‘This book is dedicated to women and girls – and especially to teachers of sewing everywhere – who enjoy the feel of fabric, the beauty of textures, the precision of stitches, the smoothness of seams, and who delight always in appropriate fabrics carefully cut and made up for a happy purpose’ (Picken 1961 [1949]: frontispiece). There is the ring of a globalizing rhetoric about such texts. If various forms of recycling had previously dominated much home-produced clothing then this market expansion of machines and patterns was gradually to encourage the home dressmaker to add the consumption of new goods to her thrifty recycling of old goods. The Korner collection itself shows how recycling has continued in the form of the amendment of garments from evening wear to daywear and there seem to be several examples of darts and seams being let out to accommodate increased girth, prolonging the life of the garment for a variety of reasons. But the rhetoric of commerce from the 1870s to now has signalled a world in which more home dressmakers could speedily produce new fashionable clothing with ease. They could get more for their money and with – 88 –

Englishness and Home Dressmaking enough skill and time at their disposal they could say goodbye to the dismal chore of ‘making do’. Nevertheless, despite the giant commercial interests competing for the domestic consumer, the female consumer at specific historical moments is able to be both ‘instrument and agent’, as Pam Cook has written of the 1940s and 1950s. Cook reminds us of the multiple possibilities inherent in fashion. Her argument centres on the filmgoer’s relationship to film costume, but it also works for fashion in the wider sense. ‘Rather than simply being a stooge of consumerism, the female spectator becomes a kind of performance artist, putting on and taking off different roles’ (Cook 1996: 47). It is here in home dressmaking’s relationship with commercial fashion that there is a further point to be made about Englishness in relation to personal identity and creativity. Home dressmaking echoes those characteristics of creativity and individual self-expression which the English believe themselves to possess, in the sense that it is an activity which facilitates and nourishes them. It has been the means by which an individual can circumnavigate dominant fashion or amend its extremes to suit themselves or a means by which they can generate new avant garde or quirky styles or decorations of their own. The creation of style idiosyncrasies can flourish in a society where tolerance is believed to be valued. Orwell thought part of Englishness was an ingrained hatred of regimentation and ‘the feeling that your spare time is your own’ (Orwell and Angus 1968: 27). So perhaps we could say that home dressmaking can be seen as an expression of the creative urge and the English belief in self-expression and tolerance, evidence of a love–hate relationship with eccentricity. The relish with which home dressmakers describe this, through accounts of their ingenuity, independence and resourcefulness, is especially evident in tales of the Second World War ‘Make-do and Mend’ ethos. A young girl working in a government drawing office was given an old linen map, which she boiled to remove the starch and printer’s ink. ‘Then I washed it, dyed it with a four penny dye. Ironed it. Cut it out from a much-used blouse pattern. Made it up with a five penny reel of cotton and used the buttons from an old dress. Result – one new wearable garment. Total cost ninepence – no coupons. I was very proud of this blouse.’ (Longmate 1971: 251)

This relationship with fashion might best be seen through what has often been called the ‘democratization’ of fashion but this notion presents us with a complex historical problem. It has in part been aligned with modernity itself. In the context of this notion of democratization, part of the self-imposed task of the English home dressmaker became dominated by a kind of updating procedure by which a woman could modernize her wardrobe through strategic changes and additions in order to keep it resonant with fashion. In this sense home dressmaking was a kind

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Barbara Burman of hotline to fashion for those who, by choice or by necessity, got up some or all of their clothes at home. We can see the shift from home dressmaking as a necessity, a making-do practice, to a home production of fashion goods. This shift of emphasis in the practice is parallel to the widespread shift in women’s use of their time and resources. Over the course of the twentieth century, they moved from being managers of household resources to generating cash in their own right from waged work external to the home (Lewis 1984; Tilly and Scott 1987). So, although during this period we see an extension of the production of readyto-wear clothing and the increasing takeover of the software and hardware of this small-scale domestic practice of home dressmaking by large-scale manufacturers and retailers, home dressmaking remains at the same time a private and personal practice. It survives as an expression of personal handiwork, identity and enterprise, for example in the way home dressmaking gives access to fashion, or cedes a kind of fashion enfranchisement to an individual. Home dressmakers can choose what particulars of a fashion they want to adopt, they can nuance it and regulate the extent to which a widely marketed fashion drives change in their individual appearance. In effect although a fashion may dominate the ready-to-wear marketplace, the home dressmaker controls the degree and pace of its adoption into their wardrobe. One of the most engaging examples of this is seen at the time of the New Look. Oral history of this immediate post-war period in dress history reveals the remarkably powerful responses which the New Look generated. Carolyn Steedman captured this longing for the New Look in her book Landscape for a Good Woman. The New Look was an aesthetic dominated by its Paris origins. It had status precisely because it was French and was also criticised because of this. Readers of English fashion magazines were advised about its precise nature and style just as cooks in the 1950s were introduced to the foreign delights of olive oil and how to use it in their own kitchens. The New Look often seems to have been adopted in stages, typically starting with the coat as the outer garment was an obvious first necessity for the adoption of longer hemlines. The coat was usually a shop-bought item. Once this was acquired the rest of the wardrobe could be built up over time. The home dressmaker could produce New Look style skirts and frocks as time and resources allowed. This is a slightly different story of one home dressmaker’s response to the New Look. She adopts it, through a shop bought coat, after initial doubts, and later employs her dressmaking skills to re-style it. As she speaks, her confident, handson engagement with the pleasures and craft of clothing is reminiscent of the way many skilled home dressmakers communicate their work. We had our skirts just below our knee then, things . . . would go up an inch or down an inch but never anything drastic . . . When we saw it (the New Look) in the newspapers, we laughed about it, I always remember, we unzipped our skirts and we let our skirts

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Englishness and Home Dressmaking sort of go down almost to our ankles and we were all laughing and saying ‘O never for us’ . . . we would never wear anything like that . . . we’d been all through the war days without fashions changing . . . For our first wedding anniversary (1948) we went to London for a weekend . . . and I decided to buy myself a new coat . . . I paid 15 guineas for it and I was crazy really because my wage was only £4 a week . . . it was really beautiful, a navy velour . . . it had a nipped in waist and a very full skirt pretty well down to my ankles and I had . . . a round double collar . . . and I really felt absolutely marvellous in that and I wore navy traditional court shoes with that and we went to London to the West End to a show and I felt good (Laughter) . . . I wore that coat for two or three years and the skirt was very full and I took it to bits, I used the original sleeves and I made myself a little straight jacket of that and I wore that for years because the material was so beautiful, it was like a soft velour . . . so I really got my value out of that although it was 15 guineas. (Interview with Elsie Della-Gana 1995)

Home dressmaking can be seen to be empowering in the way in which skilled women have been enabled to define their appearance very closely. In this sense it is unlike the sewing in the home which has a long history of representing what Rosika Parker, writing of embroidery, called ‘both self-containment and submission . . . indissolubly linked to . . . powerlessness’ (Parker 1984: 11). This kind of representation has been mustered as part of the ideological bonding of femininity and domesticity. She goes on to argue that the needle was potentially also a kind of weapon and a tool for subversion. Here we are close to Pam Cook’s argument in Fashioning the Nation where she recognizes the widespread, deep-seated longing for national cultures to be experienced as authentic and ‘uncontaminated by foreign influences’ (Cook 1996: 1). Cook’s main direction is to argue that much writing and discussion of national identity as a concept fails because it does not take on board the ‘fissures at the heart of identity itself’ (Cook 1996: 2). To understand cultural identity we need to recognize that culture itself is ‘always a mixture of national and international, specific and general, interior and exterior . . . Thus identity is, from the beginning, lacerated, torn between self and other’ (Cook 1996: 2). Many visual images offer home dressmaking as a kind of self and other, internal and external. Fashioning yourself, the practice facilitates a kind of self-representation, a self-portrait, a self-imagining as well as a self-imaging, a sort of autobiographical practice (Figure 5.2). Home dressmaking is an intimate process. The garment made at home is not so swiftly had as the ready-made. In its measuring, cutting, assembling and fitting, the form and realities of the maker’s own body must be met with again and again. Home dressmakers using a dressmaker’s dummy see their own body shape from all angles, as seen by another person or in a three-way mirror. Visual representations of the home dressmaker sometimes suggest an intimacy with the self, the opposite of Parker’s (1984) notion of self-containment in that it requires a recognition and profound knowledge of the embodied self. – 91 –

Barbara Burman

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 5.2 Padding a dress form or dummy to duplicate the dressmaker’s own body measurements. An illustration from a paper pattern manufacturer’s dressmaking manual Dressmaking Made Easy, Laura Baldt, New York, London, Toronto: McCall, 1928. (Author’s Collection)

They suggest sensuality and they hint at eroticism, which is somewhat at odds with the images of submission and powerlessness which are often associated with needlework. Certain sorts of ecstasy, too, enter into descriptions of cloth: ‘there were bales and bales and bales of cloth. I liked the thump when it was thrown down onto the counter and the assistants always used to rip the cloth away from the bale’ (interview with Deidre Stewart 1995), ‘gorgeous and glamorous . . . the glamour of it and all the beautiful colours were absolutely exciting’ (interview with Muriel Davies 1995). Equally home dressmaking has been a means of facilitating, consolidating or expressing relationships between women and between women and their families. But how might we understand home dressmaking’s call to self-representation, intimacy, individuality and bodily knowledge in relation to Englishness? Perhaps its significance lies in the way it undercuts or reverses the alleged puritanism of the English. The very fact home dressmaking is an intimate, tactile activity sets it in opposition to the English reputation for reserve and personal privacy. But perhaps inhibitions of that kind have only ever applied to men of the middle classes. Orwell was certain that there was a class base to this characteristic. – 92 –

Englishness and Home Dressmaking The English people proper, the working masses . . . are not puritanical . . . puritanism in the looser sense in which the word is generally used (that is, prudishness, ascetism, the ‘kill-joy’ spirit) is something that has been unsuccessfully forced upon the workingclass by the class of small traders and manufacturers immediately above them. (Orwell and Angus 1968: 25)

So in conclusion, home dressmaking can be read alongside the vicissitudes of social class and the long-term trend towards the commodification of the domestic sphere in Britain as a distinctively ‘English’ phenomenon. It throws some light on the dynamics of clothing production and consumption in England and on popular and vernacular responses to these. It is a crucial element in the complex historical process we often call ‘the democratization of fashion’, a process which is, as yet, far from fully articulated or understood. The practice and products of home dressmaking represent the ways in which class and individual experience are engaged in this process. At the same time it also remains more elusive and more inventive than that. It speaks of a feminine culture and identity still largely hidden from history and overlooked in many accounts of national identity.

Notes. 1. The idea of a machine to duplicate the action of the human hand sewing cloth has occupied inventors in Europe since the late eighteenth century. Commonly, Howe’s 1846 patented lock-stitch machine and Singer’s 1851 patented improvement first called the Perpendicular Action Sewing Machine are taken to be the parents of the modern sewing machine. 2. In 1995 I undertook an oral history project which explored the place of home dressmaking in the lives of working women. The tapes form a collection (Home Dressmaking Reassessed) which is deposited in the Wessex Film and Sound Archive, Hampshire Record Office, Winchester, Hampshire UK. 3. Two examples of diversity within what ‘English’ might mean: Mrs Korner was of German origin and Australian-born Lady Bagot’s clothes were made by a Polish-born London dressmaker, Bojenna Kulczycki. 4. For example, Amy K. Smith’s best-selling books on sewing and dressmaking, Needlework for Student Teachers, went into eleven editions between 1892 and 1935 and her Cutting Out for Student Teachers had four editions between 1906 and 1925. After the Second World War, E. Lucy Towers’ Standard Processes in Dressmaking, published in 1948, went into its second edition in 1954 and had reached its eleventh impression by 1976. – 93 –

Barbara Burman

References Alexander, S. (1994), ‘Becoming a Woman in London in the 1920s and ’30s’, in Alexander, Becoming a Woman and Other Essays in 19th and 20th Century Feminist History, London: Virago, first published in G.S. Jones and D. Feldman, (eds) (1989), Metropolis: London, Histories and Representations since 1800, London: Routledge. Bell, Lady (1911), At the Works: A Study of a Manufacturing Town, London: Nelson Shilling Library. Black, C. (ed.) (1915), Married Women’s Work, Being the Report of an Enquiry Undertaken by the Women’s Industrial Council, London: Bell. Bourne, R. (1990), Lords of Fleet Street: The Harmsworth Dynasty, London: Unwin Hyman. Brooks, M. (1999), ‘Patterns of Choice: Women’s and Children’s Clothing in the Wallis Archive, York Castle Museum’, in B. Burman (ed.), The Culture of Sewing: Gender, Consumption and Home Dressmaking, Oxford: Berg. Burman, B. (1994), ‘Home Sewing and “Fashions for All”, 1908–1937’, in Costume, 28. —— (ed.) (1999), The Culture of Sewing: Gender, Consumption and Home Dressmaking, Oxford: Berg. Cannadine, D. (2000), Class in Britain, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Chinn, C. (1988), They Worked All their Lives: Women of the Urban Poor in England, 1880–1939, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Cook, P. (1996), Fashioning the Nation: Costume and Identity in British Cinema, London: British Film Institute. Davin, A. (1996), Growing Up Poor: Home, School and Street in London 1870– 1914, London: Rivers Oram Press. Davis, F. (1992), Fashion, Culture, and Identity, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dilnot, G. (1925), The Romance of the Amalgamated Press, London: Amalgamated Press. Flint, J. (ed.) (1992), Thomas Hood, Selected Poems, Manchester: Carcanet. Godley, A. (1997), ‘The Development of the Clothing Industry: Technology and Fashion’, Textile History, 28(1) (special issue on the History of the Ready-Made Clothing Industry). —— (1999), ‘Homeworking and the Sewing Machine in the British Clothing Industry 1850–1905’, in B. Burman (ed.), The Culture of Sewing: Gender, Consumption and Home Dressmaking, Oxford: Berg. Gunn, S. (1999), ‘The Public Sphere, Modernity and Consumption: New Perspectives on the History of the English Middle Class’, in A. Kidd and D. Nicholls (eds), Gender, Civic Culture and Consumerism: Middle-class Identity in Britain 1800–1940, Manchester: Manchester University Press. – 94 –

Englishness and Home Dressmaking Hebdige, D. (1979), Subculture: The Meaning of Style, London: Routledge. Hostettler, E. (1986), ‘Making Do: Domestic Life among East Anglian Labourers, 1890–1910’, in L. Davidoff and B. Westover (eds), Our Work, Our Lives, Our Words: Women’s History and Women’s Work, London: Macmillan Education. Hounshell, D.A. (1985), From the American System to Mass Production, 1800– 1932, London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Inder, P. (2000), ‘British Provincial Milliners and Dressmakers in the Nineteenth Century’, unpublished PhD thesis, de Montfort University. Interview, Elsie Della-Gana, Deidre Stewart and Muriel Davies (1995), Home Dressmaking Reassessed, Oral History Project, Wessex Film and Sound Archive, Hampshire Record Office, Winchester, Hampshire UK. Jackson, A. (1993), The Dairy of Ada Jackson 1883, Leicester: Leicester City Council. James, P.D. (1981 [1972]), An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, London: Sphere. Kidwell, C.B. and Christman, M.C. (1974), Suiting Everyone: The Democratization of Clothing in America, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Lemire, B. (1997), Dress, Culture and Commerce: The English clothing trade before the factory, 1660–1800, London: Macmillan. Lewis, J. (1984), Women in England 1870–1950: Sexual Divisions and Social Change, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Longmate, N. (1971), How We Lived Then: A History of Everyday Life during the Second World War, London: Hutchinson. (No source given for the quotation. Probably a Board of Trade wartime publication.) McKibbin, R. (1998), Classes and Cultures: England 1918–1951, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marx, K. (1990 [1867]), Capital, vol. 1, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Newbery, M. (1980), Reminiscences of a Bradford Mill Girl, Bradford: City of Bradford, Metropolitan Council, Libraries Division, Local Studies Department. Orwell, S. and Angus, I. (1968), The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol. 3, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Parker, R. (1984), The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine, London: The Women’s Press. Pember Reeves, M. (1913), Round about a Pound a Week, London: Bell (republished 1979, London: Virago, with an introduction by Sally Alexander). Picken, M.B. (1961 [1949]), Singer Sewing Book, London: Mayflower Books. (First published in 1949, this American book had seven foreign editions in addition to the British one: French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Afrikaans, German and Portugese.) Renier, G.J. (1931), The English: Are They Human? London: Williams and Norgate. Rowntree, S.E. (1913) Poverty: A Study of Town Life, London: Nelson. – 95 –

Barbara Burman Schmiechen, J.A. (1984), Sweated Industries and Sweated Labor: The London Clothing Trades 1860 –1914, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Steedman, C. (1986), Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives, London: Virago. Thompson, E.P. and Yeo, E. (1973), The Unknown Mayhew, Harmondsworth: Pelican. Thompson, T. (1981), Edwardian Childhoods, London: Routledge. —— (ed.) (1987), Dear Girl: The Diaries and Letters of Two Working Women (1897–1917), London: The Women’s Press. Tilly, L. and Scott J. (1987), Women, Work and Family, London: Routledge. Tressell, R. (1993 [1914]), The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, London: Flamingo. Walkley, C. (1981), The Ghost in the Looking Glass: The Victorian Seamstress, London: Peter Owen. Watson, K. (1916), Textiles and Clothing, vol. X of The Library of Home Economics: A Complete Home-study Course, Chicago: American School of Home Economics. Westover, B. (1986), ‘“To Fill the Kids’ Tummies”: The Lives and Work of Colchester Tailoresses, 1880–1918’, in L. Davidoff and B. Westover (eds), Our Work, Our Lives, Our Words: Women’s History and Women’s Work, London: Macmillan Education. Wray, M. (1957), The Women’s Outerwear Industry, London: Duckworth. York, P. (1980), Style Wars, London: Sidgwick & Jackson.

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–6– Rural Working-Class Dress, 1850–1900: A Peculiarly English Tradition? Rachel Worth

That peculiarity of the English urban poor . . . – their preference for the cast-off clothes of a richer class to a special attire of their own – has, in fact, reached the Dorset farmfolk. Like the men, the women are, pictorially, less interesting than they used to be. Instead of the wing bonnet like the tilt of a wagon, cotton gown, bright-hued neckerchief, and strong flat boots and shoes, they (the younger ones at least) wear shabby millinery bonnets and hats with beads and feathers, ‘material’ dresses, and boot-heels almost as foolishly shaped as those of ladies of highest education. (Hardy 1883: 259).

Introduction The contention that the clothes of rural working people in the second half of the nineteenth century were uniquely English raises a number of interesting and important questions. Was rural dress specifically ‘English’ to the extent that it was distinct from dress in the rest of the British Isles? Can it be seen as part of a broader folk culture associated with the creation and development of a national identity, thus linking it to other folk costumes in the rest of Europe? Was it part of a ‘tradition’? Finally, was it unique, as implied by Thomas Hardy’s observation quoted above? Hardy’s argument is that the English taste for cast-off clothes – itself an urban ‘peculiarity’ – was invading the countryside by the 1880s. George Sturt (1863–1927) (a friend of the novelist Arnold Bennett and an astute observer in his own right) described the transition of the Surrey village of Bourne from the time of the enclosure of the common in the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century in his book Change in the Village, published in 1912. Referring to the late nineteenth century he remarked: With regard to clothes – it is doubtful if anything new is bought, in many families, from year’s end to year’s end. At ‘rummage sales’, for a few pence, the women are now able to pick up surprising bargains, which they adapt as best they can for their own or their children’s wear. (Sturt 1956 [1912]: 64)

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Rachel Worth References to rural labourers wearing the cast-offs of other people and other classes can be found in a number of other sources. Furthermore, there are numerous contemporary references to how the distinctiveness of rural dress was being eroded by the last two decades of the nineteenth century, although in some cases this was assumed to be the result of an improvement in the economic condition of the agricultural worker. For example, a comment noted by the Royal Commission on the Agricultural Labourer (1893–4) is particularly telling: The old smock-frock is very nearly extinct, and there is no real difference in the style of dress adopted by the labourers and their wives and that of the class above them. On the clothes lines, instead of rags, good linen is to be seen. (Cited in Horn 1984: 122)

Clearly, there were a number of changes taking place in rural dress styles by the latter years of the nineteenth century, but any contemporary explanation for these must have depended largely on individual perception. Whether, as Hardy believed, these developments were the result of urban influences, is open to debate, but what is important is to put these changes in context. Certainly, in general terms, fashions in the countryside were undergoing changes due to complex socio-economic and cultural factors: rapid urbanization alongside agricultural depopulation and depression and shifting patterns of rural employment. Literary sources such as those provided by the reports and correspondence published in the Daily News in 1891 reveal that the ‘problem’ of the agricultural labourer concerned a variety of people in different walks of life, including social commentators, clergymen and nonconformist ministers, landlords and farmers, as well as the labourers themselves (Bellamy and Williamson 1999). As I hope to demonstrate in this chapter, both nineteenth-century commentators and, later, dress historians have tried to fit what we now consider to be the essential elements of rural working-class dress in the nineteenth century – namely the smock-frock (Figure 6.1) for men and the sun-bonnet (Figure 6.2) for women – into a folk tradition invested with ideals about the supposed stability of country-life. Concepts of a peaceful, idyllic English countryside have maintained a spectacular resonance and currency right down to the present time, usually in spite of a far-from-ideal reality. Such ideals were often expressed visually via the work of artists such as Helen Allingham (1848–1926) and Myles Birket Foster (1825–99). Indeed art historian Christopher Wood’s (1988) study, tellingly entitled Paradise Lost, devotes a whole book to this subject. As he points out in his introduction: Most Victorian artists were painters of pretty pictures first, and social historians second. They do not present us with a completely truthful, realistic or comprehensive picture, either of the countryside, or of life as it was really lived by country people . . . Beautiful, evocative and informative their pictures certainly are, but the overwhelming impression they create is one of a rural paradise. (Wood 1988: 7)

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Rural Working-Class Dress

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 6.1 Surviving smock-frock, showing detail of smocking and ‘heart’ embroidery, late nineteenth century. (Courtesy of the Rural History Centre, University of Reading)

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 6.2 Surviving sun-bonnet of white cotton, late nineteenth century. (Courtesy of the Rural History Centre, University of Reading)

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Rachel Worth Similarly, photographers such as Henry Peach Robinson (1830–1901) deliberately staged his scenes of rural life to give, more often than not, a vision of a pastoral heaven on earth. The writings both of novelists and of social commentators are often ambivalent in their appraisals of how rural life was and how they would have liked it to be, tempering their own personal feelings of nostalgia with a certain degree of hard realism. A common thread in much of what is otherwise very diverse writing is the perception during this period that the supposedly unique identity of rural dress styles was rapidly being eroded. Examples of this view may be found in the work of Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), Flora Thompson (1876–1947), as well as some lesser-known writers such as George Sturt (known sometimes as George ‘Bourne’, after the village he made famous), mentioned above. It is the purpose of this chapter to consider the significant role of dress in the context of the development from the late nineteenth century of that which historian G.E. Mingay (1989) has called the ‘rural idyll’. We should, however, be wary of lumping all cultural expressions of ruralism together as ‘representing a simple, nostalgic, and conservative longing for a “rural idyll”’ (Matless 1998: 16). The peculiarity and the ‘Englishness’ of English rural working-class dress, it will be argued, was that it came to be strongly identified as part of English folk culture and tradition just as it was disappearing from mainstream, everyday wear in response to broader socio-economic and cultural changes.

The ‘Decline’ of Agriculture This transition needs to be seen in the light of a dramatic shift in the importance and status of agriculture in the second half of the nineteenth century. Mingay (1990) observes, for example, that the 1851 census reveals that agriculture employed more than one-fifth of the occupied population and produced about the same proportion of the national income, whereas fifty years later, it employed less than one-tenth of the labour force and its share of the national income had fallen to less than onefifteenth (Mingay 1990: 19). The reasons for the decline in the importance of agriculture are complex, but it is useful to summarize them here. The long-term results of free trade brought about by the Repeal of the Corn Laws of 1846 were nowhere more apparent than in the rapid increase in imports of wheat during the period 1850–1900. For example, in the decade 1870–80, they increased from 28,827,000 hundredweight to more than 44 million when about 90 per cent came from the USA and Canada (Howkins 1991: 138). This was accompanied by a series of terrible summers and bad harvests: in 1879, for example, the rains were interminable and the corn was carried in from the fields sopping wet (Mingay 1990: 40). The general wetness of the years 1879–82 caused widespread outbreaks of pleuro-pneumonia among the cattle and liver-rot in the sheep. The impact of all this on landowners and farmers was devastating: in the – 100 –

Rural Working-Class Dress marginal wheat-growing lands (in southern England in particular), tenant farmers suffered catastrophic drops in profits and landlords’ rents fell dramatically. Needless to say, it was the farm labourers who felt the real brunt of all of this. In the name of money-saving, many farmers dispensed with casual labour altogether, which for large numbers of workers spelt unemployment and hence extreme poverty. There was little incentive to stay on the land if there were viable alternatives. Long-term, low wages and the prospect or reality of rural unemployment encouraged the migration of many villagers towards urban areas in the search for employment and, as many migrants presumably thought, greater opportunities. The move by women into domestic service was particularly significant: not only did it reflect the economic necessity for working-class women to earn their living (which, as suggested above, was becoming much more problematic in agriculture), but also it highlighted the differential wage-rates between fieldwork and domestic service. As the Special Commissioner for the Daily News Survey reported, quoting a farmer: ‘We get no women to work now . . . some of the old ones’ll do a day now and again, but we get no young women in the field now. They all go into the town to service. While ladies’ll give thirty or five-and-thirty pounds for a cook, and sixteen and eighteen pounds for a housemaid, of course we can’t keep ’em here.’ ‘And no doubt when the lasses go, the lads soon begin to follow?’ ‘Of course they do.’ (Bellamy and Williamson 1999: vol. 1, 17)

Furthermore, the move by women into domestic service was also indicative of the shifts in attitude towards what constituted acceptable and unacceptable female employment. Of the ‘unacceptable’, fieldwork came towards the top of the list. As Howkins (1991) observes, ‘bent double, clad in “rags”, heavy boots, short skirt and with a sack around her shoulders, she (the fieldworker) was the antithesis of the ideal of the “angel at the hearth” and a constant reproach to those who sought an ordered paternal ideal’ (Howkins 1991: 108). In the 1867 Parliamentary Commission of Enquiry into the Employment of Children, Young Persons and Women in Agriculture, the Hon. E.B. Portman wrote that as a result of fieldwork, ‘such sense of decency’ that girls have ‘is entirely broken down’ and that the work has made them ‘entirely unfit . . . for their duties in the future as wives and mothers’ (Howkins 1991: 102). Even more extreme was the Revd. James Fraser’s view of the results of fieldwork: Not only does it unsex a woman, in dress, gait, manners, character, making her rough, coarse, clumsy, masculine; but it generates a further very pregnant mischief by unfitting or indisposing her for a woman’s proper duties at home. (quoted in Howkins 1991: 102)

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Rachel Worth Although these are extreme examples of the attitudes towards female engagement in fieldwork, they illustrate the social and cultural pressures on women to be in employment which was, in all senses, acceptable. Furthermore, the more general economic decline in the availability of work in the countryside meant that the need for both men and women to find alternative (often urban) employment by the last decades of the nineteenth century was becoming one of urgent necessity. In the period 1851–1911, England’s rural areas suffered a net loss of 4.06 million people and England’s cities, towns and mining areas received a net increase of 2.56 million from migration (Waller 1983: 192). Many of the remaining 1.5 million people emigrated.

The Urbanization of English Rural Working-Class Dress In his thought-provoking study of rural England in the period 1850–1925, social historian Alun Howkins concludes that the idea of the ‘rural land’ retained an almost mystical importance in English and national culture, even while it lost much of its real power in an economic sense (Howkins 1991: 288–9). ‘Ironically’, observes Howkins, ‘as “agriculture” declined, so a mythologised version of its remnants became desirable to the urban elite’ (Howkins 1991: 290): There were those, coming out of the towns, who wanted to hold the process of rural depopulation still, and to do that created a nostalgic and idyllicised view of a world that was vanishing before them, giving it a permanence in elite and even popular culture which it never had in reality. (Howkins 1991: 249)

It is with a discussion of this idealized view of the countryside – and in particular the ways in which dress is here represented – with which this chapter is especially concerned. Much of what little published work there is on the subject of rural dress in this period is informed by an implicit assumption that garments such as the agricultural labourer’s smock-frock and the field-woman’s sun-bonnet were part of a much broader folk tradition which extended far beyond English national boundaries (into the rest of the British Isles and further afield). For example, seen in the context of its original publication in the 1930s, the assertions made about the smock and the sun-bonnet in Kathleen Mann’s book, Peasant Costume in Europe, are interesting: Until recently, beautiful smocks were worn by country people in England, and they seem to be almost the only distinctive peasant dress in this country . . . Apart from the smock, the only other notable item of peasant dress found in England is the sunbonnet, still seen in some districts during the summer months in the rural parts of England. (Mann 1961 [1931]: 60)

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Rural Working-Class Dress Alma Oakes and Margot Hill’s Rural Costume – Its Origin and Development in Western Europe and the British Isles (1970) places English rural dress in the folk tradition and in a broad geographical context – that of the British Isles and Western Europe. However, such a view ignores the particular historical circumstances affecting the condition of agriculture in England in the period briefly described above, which were so crucial to the changes in styles of which many contemporaries were accutely aware. Put simply, the main trends constituted relative agricultural prosperity in the period c.1850–70, followed by depression; the disappearance of rural trades, the decline of women engaged in fieldwork and the eventual drift away from the land. A summary of what was happening in general terms is given by Howard Newby: the countryside was increasingly infiltrated by the culture of the towns and cities . . . And a distinctively rural culture became absorbed into the growing mass culture of the English working-class in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. (Newby 1987: 96)

With regard to fashion, this trend towards urbanization and the shift of village girls away from agricultural occupations into domestic service where they would have come into contact with middle-class fashions (perhaps this is what Hardy is obliquely referring to when he talks of the ‘cast-off clothes of a richer class’) resulted in visible changes in ‘rural’ fashion. In other words, clothing worn by working people in the countryside began to lose its distinctive rural identity – or, more accurately, what contemporaries perceived to be a distinctive rural identity. As historian Pamela Horn (1991: 28) has observed, in the early 1890s, there was comment in newspaper reports, for example, that the large-scale migration of village girls to posts as maids in the urban areas was encouraging the men to move also (see above, Bellamy and Williamson 1999: vol. 1, 17). Ultimately, while older generations tended to hold onto the fashions of their youth, it should come as no surprise that younger men and women wanted to be fashionable. Oral evidence provided by an article in Country Life Illustrated in 1898 by a Sussex labourer underlines the importance of fashion to the younger generation: Old Stephen Harman brought up all his twelve sons in smock frocks . . . It was a sad grievance to the old man when one after another of the stalwart lads got beyond his control in this matter and went in for ‘fashi’n’. ‘Comf’ble ’nuff too, zur, it wor’, young Stephen remarked to me, ‘an’ a capital good thing fer keepin’ the mook off anybody. Dunno zackly as ’ow we left it off; wanted a change, I reckon’. But I think I know. The village lassies don’t like the smocks, and the yokel who persisted in wearing one would be left without a sweetheart. (Country Life Illustrated 1898: 313)

What we are witnessing here is a shift in the economic and social circumstances of rural working men and women. This, in turn, brought new experiences and – 103 –

Rachel Worth preferences regarding what was and was not fashionable, especially among the younger generations most affected by the impact of urbanization and new patterns of employment.

The Idealization of Rural Dress1 In spite of – and, in fact, as I want to argue, because of – the fact that they were going out of fashion, the two most familiar ‘representations’ of rural labouring dress in paintings, photographs and literature in the latter half of the nineteenth century are, for women, the sun-bonnet, (described sometimes as ‘wing’ bonnet), and, for men, the smock-frock. It is no accident that of all the categories of rural clothing which survive, these are the most plentiful and tend to survive in the best condition. It is likely that a number of these garments were collected with a specific agenda in mind, and, in some cases, with an awareness of their current and potential symbolic importance. For example, the donor to the Rural History Centre, University of Reading, of a sun-bonnet (referred to as ‘an old woman’s harvesting cap’) describes in a letter (dated 25 May 1960, cat. no. 60/179) how she obtained the garment in 1914 from a Mrs Wicksteed, ‘who told me she had bought several of these caps as they were going out of fashion’. Indeed, the majority of the Victoria & Albert Museum’s collection of smocks were accessioned during the first three decades of the twentieth century, in particular during the years following the end of the First World War. Both sun-bonnets and smock-frocks combined the two characteristics which have become so closely identified with rural working-dress. Both were functional and both also served an aesthetic purpose. In the case of sun-bonnets, these protected the wearer’s face and neck from the sun, but, significantly, they were also singled out by contemporaries as having a ‘picturesque’ quality. This is illustrated by Alec d’Urberville’s comment to Tess in Hardy’s novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles: ‘You field-girls should never wear those bonnets if you wish to keep out of danger’ (Hardy 1988b [1891]: 409). In the case of the smock-frock, it was intended to be worn over the labourer’s clothes as a windproof and protective outer garment. (Some smocks were ‘waterproofed’ by the application of linseed oil, as can be seen by examples which survive at Worthing Museum and Art Gallery.) At the same time, smock-frocks were often highly decorative in their intricate embroidery and smocking, illustrated by some of the most exquisite examples which survive and which were worn as ‘Sunday best’. I want to argue that sun-bonnets and smock-frocks were acquired by museums at least partly because they came to represent a world which contemporaries perceived to be vanishing – first, in terms of the nature of the agricultural work for which they were worn and, second, (in the case of smocks), in terms of the handicraft skills they represented. – 104 –

Rural Working-Class Dress Sun-bonnets were traditionally worn by women fieldworkers for protection against the sun. However, as has already been pointed out, by the 1880s the number of women engaged in such work had decreased dramatically, particularly in favour of domestic service (Snell 1985: 378). If, therefore, we assume that the extent to which such clothing is worn is related in some direct way to its function, then we would expect to see the demise of the sun-bonnet over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century. According to Flora Thompson, in the Oxfordshire hamlet of Lark Rise in the 1880s, ‘about half a dozen of the hamlet women did field work, most of them being respectable middle-aged women . . . They worked in sunbonnets, hobnailed boots and men’s coats, with coarse aprons of sacking enveloping the lower part of their bodies’ (Thompson 1987 [1945]: 58). Flora Thompson also noted how, away from the fields, only the older women wore sunbonnets by the 1880s. Old ‘Queenie’, for example, ‘represented another phase of [the hamlet’s] life which had also ended and been forgotten by most people . . . She seemed very old to the children, for she was a little, wrinkled, yellow-faced old woman in a sunbonnet’ (Thompson 1987 [1945]: 81). Sir George Clausen’s (1852–1944) painting, An Old Woman (1887) is probably one of the few paintings of the 1880s where a sun-bonnet is depicted in a likely context – that is, being worn by an older woman. By contrast, the paintings of artists such as Helen Allingham (1848–1926) and Myles Birket Foster (1825–99) invariably depict children or young girls wearing sun-bonnets and standing outside rose-covered cottages or tending cottage gardens (see, for example, Helen Allingham’s Redlynch, Wiltshire and At the Cottage Gate). Sun-bonnets are thus shown being worn by the latter artists in a context of leisure (or relative leisure) rather than in the context of work, and by children or young girls at a time when their use had become mostly associated with the habits of older women. It is possible that by depicting sun-bonnets in this way, Allingham was attempting to link sun-bonnets with mainland European folk traditions: by the second half of the nineteenth century, folk costumes were widely worn in Scandinavia, Switzerland and France, for example, for festivals, high days and holidays only. Sun-bonnets, however, were traditionally work-clothes. Thus, it may be argued that these kinds of images illustrate the ways in which the representation of specific garments, set in an inappropriate context, cannot be read in a literal sense, and to that extent, the ‘reality’ they seem to portray is an illusory one. To summarize, while we might expect to see fewer images of sunbonnets in paintings and photographs by the last three decades of the nineteenth century (because the type of work for which they were traditionally worn was in decline), the number of visual representations of these garments does not, in any way, appear to reflect this trend. Sun-bonnets also appear in a large number of photographs of the period, the work of Henry Peach Robinson (1830–1901) providing a wealth of different – 105 –

Rachel Worth examples. According to Robinson, ‘it is the sun-bonnet which is characteristic of the country’ (quoted in Harker 1988: 66). But there are problems of interpretation to be disentangled here, not dissimilar to those already encountered in the paintings of Helen Allingham. As John Tagg has argued, ‘every photograph is the result of specific, and, in every sense, significant distortions which render its relation to any prior reality deeply problematic’ (Tagg 1988: 2). In particular, photographic images of the rural in the late nineteenth century engaged with the idea of the picturesque in order to, as John Taylor argues, ‘reassure people that England was as beautiful as ever’. Modern methods of photography and printing allowed audiences ‘to see an ideal England that was permanent, if only in memory’ (Taylor 1994: 19). Although Taylor does not specifically discuss the work of Henry Peach Robinson, the latter’s work illustrates the way in which the rural is recreated and the role played by clothing in this process. The way in which Robinson acquired the clothing seen in his photographs (he usually managed to persuade country people to sell him their clothes!) and his use of models for the sake of ‘authenticity’ renders his work particularly interesting in the context of this discussion. Judging by the number of different kinds of sunbonnets which feature in so many of the photographs taken by Robinson in the period from the late 1850s to just before his death in 1901, he must have possessed a large stock of these garments. (See, for example, ‘Bringing Home the May’ (1862) and ‘The Starling’s Nest’ (1900).) In his efforts to create authenticity in his photographs, he stressed that the clothes worn by his models should not be new: For instance, we usually find that when a young lady is dressed as a peasant model she generally looks like one of the chorus in an opera. The clothes are new and very clean, the country clodhopping boots are perhaps represented by patent leather shoes and by some strange dispensation of artistic providence she is only allowed to appear as a milkmaid or gleaner. (quoted in Harker 1988: 66)

It would therefore appear that Robinson was well aware of the rustic stereotype manifested in traditional representations of milkmaids and gleaners. However, in trying to obviate the conventions of one particular genre and attempting to produce an approximation of ‘authenticity’ in which he combined real clothes with artificial constructions, Robinson was, ironically, contributing to the development of yet another kind of rural idyll. Henry Peach Robinson was clearly not alone in his view that the sun-bonnet had become the quintessential garment associated with the countryside, even when it was no longer worn as such. Fictional literature and rural memoirs of the period reinforce this view, revealing the way in which a special cultural significance attached itself to particular kinds of clothing. As Flora Thompson observed, looking back to the 1880s:

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Rural Working-Class Dress A stranger coming to Lark Rise would have looked in vain for the sweet country girl of tradition, with her sun-bonnet, hay-rake and air of rustic coquetry. If he had, by chance, seen a girl well on in her teens, she would be dressed in town clothes, complete with gloves and veil, for she would be home from service for her fortnight’s holiday. (Thompson 1987 [1945]: 155)

As we have seen in the extract from his well-known and ostensibly ‘factual’ essay, ‘The Dorsetshire Labourer’ (1883), quoted at the beginning of this chapter, Thomas Hardy refers to the way in which the traditional forms of dress worn in the countryside by working people were being abandoned: ‘Like the men, the women are, pictorially, less interesting than they used to be. Instead of the wing bonnet like the tilt of a waggon . . . they (the younger ones at least) wear shabby millinery bonnets and hats with beads and feathers’ (Hardy 1883: 259). Hardy’s inference that the sun-bonnet was being worn mostly by older women accords with Flora Thompson’s observations noted above. However, perhaps the most interesting point about Hardy’s comment that the women had become ‘pictorially, less interesting’ is the overtly subjective stance he adopts in his opinion of the aesthetics of rural styles of dress. Hardy’s own preferences are expressed on a number of other occasions when, for example, he describes Tess as a dairymaid at Talbothays in ‘the print gown of no date or fashion, and the cotton bonnet drooping on her brow’ (Hardy 1988b [1891]: 251). This image of Tess appears to have symbolized for Hardy – and probably for many of his contemporaries too – an ideal of rural simplicity. Furthermore, this illusory concept of timeless country clothing is undoubtedly more symptomatic of Hardy’s own ideals and responses to the changes taking place around him than indicative of a straightforward interpretation of styles of dress traditionally adopted in the countryside. The sun-bonnet was in no way ‘timeless’, first appearing in rural areas in the 1830s and 1840s and, as Anne Buck has shown, its shape was based upon fashionable bonnet-styles of that period (Buck 1983: 103). It had not been, as Hardy seems to be implying, an item of clothing dating from time immemorial. As with the sun-bonnet, so, by the 1880s, the smock-frock was being worn much less frequently. Contemporaries noted that the smock-frock was rarely worn ‘afield’, and when it was, it was worn, in the main, by old men. In ‘The Dorsetshire Labourer’, Hardy observes that ‘the genuine white smock-frock of Russia duck and the whity-brown [sic] one of drabbet, are rarely seen now afield, except on the shoulders of old men’ (Hardy 1883: 258).2 In Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Hardy describes Alec d’Urberville in the unlikely disguise of a labourer on the village allotments: The unexpectedness of his presence, the grotesqueness of his appearance in a gathered smock-frock, such as was now worn only by the most old-fashioned of the labourers, had a ghastly comicality that chilled her [Tess] as to its bearing. D’Urberville emitted a low, long laugh. (Hardy 1988b [1891]: 431)

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Rachel Worth The success of this passage in conveying a deep sense of dramatic irony depends on the reader’s appreciation of the fact that Alec looks ridiculous not only because young labourers would no longer be wearing smock-frocks but also, in his attempt to acquire ‘gentlemanly’ status, he would not have had a labourer’s gait or bearing. The observation that smocks were going out of fashion is endorsed by Flora Thompson, who makes the important point that one of the reasons for this was that smocks were being replaced by the products of the developing ready-to-wear clothing industry: The smock frock was still worn by the older men, who declared that one well-made smock would outlast twenty of the new machine-made suits the younger men were buying. The smock, with its elaborately stitched yoke and snow-white home laundering, was certainly more artistic than the coarse, badly-fitting ‘reach-me-downs’, as they were sometimes called. (Thompson 1987 [1945]: 259)

Indeed, it was the handiwork represented by the smock-frock and the concept of the traditional hand-crafted product which contemporaries thought (correctly) was being threatened by the onslaught of mass production. ‘Five decades’, Hardy sentimentally observed in his novel Far from the Madding Crowd, ‘hardly modified the cut of a gaiter, the embroidery of a smock-frock, by the breadth of a hair’ (Hardy 1988a [1874]: 196). In a similar nostalgic vein, Sturt observed how the labourer’s acquisition of second-hand and new ‘shoddy’ clothes had destroyed the important place traditionally reserved for needlework skills: With needlework it is the same story: commercial thrift has degraded that craft. She must be an enthusiast indeed who would expend any art of the needle upon the shabby, second-hand garments, or the shoddy new ones, which have to content the labourer’s wife. And if the family clothes are not good to make or mend, neither are they good to wash, or worth displaying on the clothes-line in the hope of exciting envy in the neighbours. (Sturt 1956 [1912]: 158)

It is possibly on account of its elaborate smocking and embroidery that Nicholas Thornton, in an article in Textile History, describes the smock-frock as ‘the most highly developed British folk garment’ (Thornton 1997: 176). However, to talk of the smock as a British folk garment is misleading. As Christine Stevens (Curator of the Museum of Welsh Life at St. Fagan’s, Cardiff) has observed, smocks were never as extensively worn in Wales as they were in the Midlands and southern counties of England (Rees and Stevens 1986: 32). Worn from the late eighteenth century, one hundred years later, smocks became associated with trades and occupations which remained unmechanized. Certainly, those engaged in occupations which could never be mechanized – such as shepherds – went on wearing the smock for longest. Elizabeth Gaskell in her novel – 108 –

Rural Working-Class Dress North and South (1855) described the north of England: here, she says, ‘there were no smock-frocks even among the country-folk; they retarded motion, and were apt to catch on machinery, and so the habit of wearing them had died out’ (Gaskell 1994 [1855]: 65) In England, the smock, like the sun-bonnet, came to symbolize a way of life that was vanishing – a society without mechanization and one in which rural values had not yet been encroached upon by the culture of the towns. George Sturt, for example, noted, with nostalgia, how, in the past, ‘the women decorated their men’s blouses with pretty smocking’ (Sturt 1956 [1912]: 127). Significantly, however, contrary to what many contemporaries believed, not all smocks were made under such supposedly idyllic domestic circumstances. The commercial manufacture of smocks was being undertaken by the Suffolk firm, Gurteens of Haverhill, for much of the nineteenth century.3 Archival records show that the company was supplying local retailers with such smocks as early as 1819. At this time, all stages of the manufacture of the smocks would have been conducted on an outwork basis: the fabric (drabbet) was woven and the smocks were made up and embroidered by local outworkers. However, weaving was conducted in the Gurteens factory after its construction in 1856 and the purchase of sewing machines in the 1860s meant that the fabric pieces could be made up by machine. Nevertheless, the embroidery was always done by hand and it was this characteristic of the smock which caught the imagination of middle-class audiences. It has also, understandably perhaps, caused smocks to be related in this respect with folk costume in mainland Europe. Furthermore, the long, straight side- and arm-seams could have been (and occasionally were) machine stitched. Interestingly, however, of all the hundreds of surviving smocks which I have examined, only a very small proportion have machine-sewn seams. The persistence of a perceived association between smocks and the individual, hand-crafted product may account for the appropriation of smocks for wear by middle-class female followers (and their children) of the Arts and Crafts Movement. The frequent appearance of smocks in Kate Greenaway’s illustrations of children in rural settings (seen, for example, in her popular Under the Window, published in 1878) and the popularity of smocking on children’s ‘Kate Greenaway dresses’ sold by the costume department at Liberty’s from the 1880s (Adburgham 1975: 53-5, 64) provide further examples of the way in which smocks were adopted outside the context in which they were originally worn. The various craft revivals of smocks and that of button-making (‘buttony’) in the county of Dorset in the early years of the twentieth century are also illustrative of a wider movement which aimed to reinstate the importance of rural values and lifestyles.4 Alun Howkins (1991) examined the ‘back to the land’ movement of the late nineteenth century, which, he argued, took two routes: the first was practical in that it was a literal move for some people back to the countryside for reasons of – 109 –

Rachel Worth health or aesthetics; the second was intellectual inasmuch as it took an interest in the revival of all things rural, giving value to aspects of rural life or craft, for example, the revival of English folk song (Howkins 1991: 227–8). The deliberate collection of smocks; the representation of garments associated with traditions of rural dress outside of their original context; the revival of smock-making; and last but not least, the conscious decisions on the part of individuals to continue to wear the styles of their youth even when they had long gone out of fashion are all testimony to the ways in which particular garments became incorporated in the construction of an idealized English rural past invested with a strong folk culture.

Conclusion The history of English rural working-class dress is, then, not simply a history of the physical characteristics of clothing: it is the history of people’s reaction to change, their perceptions of the past compared with the present, of nostalgia tempered with a degree of realism. As Hardy so astutely observed, ‘it is too much to expect . . . [the Dorset farm-worker] to remain stagnant and old-fashioned for the sake of romantic spectators’ (Hardy 1883: 262–3). English rural working-class dress could be characterized as such only because it stood outside of the folk traditions marking rural clothing in the rest of Europe. With the long-term erosion of English rural life, fashion responded in a unique way to broader socio-economic and cultural changes. Specific garments such as the smock and the sun-bonnet, were, in at least one sense, ‘reinvented’ towards the end of the nineteenth century. Subsequently, they have occupied an important place among the annals of an imagined and idealized English folk culture. It is highly significant that these are the clothes which survive in museums, rather than, for example, the much-despised, ‘shoddy’, ready-made suits worn by those who finally cast aside their smockfrocks for the sake of fashion. Clothing has played and continues to play a highly significant role in the characterization of a peculiarly English rural past.

Notes 1. Part of the section which follows is taken from R. Worth (1999), ‘Rural Laboring Dress 1850–1900: Some Problems of Representation’, Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture, 3(3): 323–42. 2. Drabbet (or ‘drabbett’, as it was spelt in Suffolk) was a fabric with a twill weave made of a mixture of linen and cotton. – 110 –

Rural Working-Class Dress 3. I am grateful to Gillian Holman, former archivist for the Gurteens Collection, for the useful information on the manufacture of smocks which follows. 4. A good example is provided by the revival of smock-making in the Dorset town of Bere Regis by the Bere Regis Arts and Crafts Association which was formed in 1905–6. It was led by Sarah Bere, the wife of the Revd. Montague Acland Bere, vicar of the town from 1905 to 1919. A number of these smocks survive in museums such as the Dorset County Museum and the Rural History Centre, University of Reading. They may be distinguished from the genuine smock-frock by the fact that they were generally made in fabric dyed in soft pastel colours and are decorated with buttons based on the traditional Dorset ‘crosswheel’ design.

References Adburgham, A. (1975), Liberty’s: A Biography of a Shop, London: George Allen & Unwin. Bellamy, L. and Williamson, T. (1999), Life in the Victorian Village: The Daily News Survey of 1891, vols I and II, London: Caliban. Buck, A. (1983), ‘Clothes in Fact and Fiction’, Costume, 17: 89–104. Country Life Illustrated (1898), ‘A Sussex Peasant’, 10 September: 313–14 Gaskell, E. (1994 [1855]), North and South, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Hardy, T. (1883), ‘The Dorsetshire Labourer’, Longman’s Magazine, 2: 252–69. —— (1988a [1874]), Far from the Madding Crowd, Harmondsworth: Penguin. —— (1988b [1891]), Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Harker, M. (1988), Henry Peach Robinson: Master of Photographic Art 1830– 1901, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Horn, P. (1984), The Changing Countryside, London: Athlone. —— (1991), Victorian Countrywomen, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Howkins, A. (1991), Reshaping Rural England: A Social History 1850–1925, London: HarperCollins. Mann, K. (1961 [1931]), Peasant Costume in Europe, London: Adam & Charles Black. Matless, D. (1998), Landscape and Englishness, London: Reaktion. Mingay, G.E. (ed.) (1989), The Rural Idyll, London: Routledge. —— (1990), Rural Life in Victorian England, Stroud: Alan Sutton. Newby, H. (1987), Country Life: A Social History of Rural England, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

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Rachel Worth Oakes, A. and Hill, M.H. (1970) Rural Costume: Its Origin and Development in Western Europe and the British Isles, London: Batsford. Rees, M. and Stevens, C. (1986), ‘Smocks in the Welsh Folk Museum Collection’, Medel, 3: 32–8. Snell, K.D.M. (1985), Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England 1660–1900, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sturt (Bourne), G. (1956 [1912]), Change in the Village, London: Country Book Club. Tagg, J. (1988), The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographs and Histories, London: Macmillan. Taylor, J. (1994), A Dream of England: Landscape, Photography and the Tourist’s Imagination, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Thompson, F. (1987 [1945]), Lark Rise to Candleford, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Thornton, N. (1997), ‘Enigmatic Variations: the Features of British Smocks’, Textile History, 28(2): 176–84. Waller, P.J. (1983), Town, City and Nation: England 1850–1914, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wood, C. (1988), Paradise Lost: Paintings of English Country Life and Landscape 1850–1914, London: Barrie & Jenkins.

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–7– The Wardrobe of Mrs Leonard Messel, 1895–1920 Lou Taylor

Introduction Brighton Museum holds over 460 garments and accessories on loan and donated from Lord Snowdon and belonging to five generations of his family. These include sixty items of his own clothing from the 1960s, clothing worn by his mother, Anne, Countess of Rosse, dating from the late 1920s through to the 1950s, clothing of his grandmother, Maud, Mrs Leonard Messel, the daughter of the Punch cartoonist Linley Sambourne, dating from the 1890s to the 1920s, clothing of Marion Sambourne, his great-grandmother, mostly from the 1890s, and even some mourning jackets worn by Mary Anne Herapath, his great-great-grandmother from the 1880s. The two largest and most interesting of these dress collections are those of clothes worn by Anne, Countess of Rosse and Mrs Leonard Messel. The research for this chapter has been undertaken with the generous help of Rebecca Quinton, Assistant Curator of Costume, at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery. It will focus on exploring the style, sources and cultural meanings of the clothes of Mrs Leonard Messel. However, just to tantalize, mention needs to be made of the superb quality of the twenty garments worn by her daughter, Anne, Countess of Rosse, sister to Oliver Messel. She was famously dressed in the 1930s by the young Charles James and by Norman Hartnell. She purchased clothes in Paris through the 1920s and in the 1950s she selected designs by the successful new London couturier, John Cavanagh. The aim of this text is, however, to unravel three interwoven issues stemming from an examination of Maud Messel’s clothes. The first intention is to address the dearth of published dress history on English Court dressmakers and their trade in the 1895–1920 period, while the second is to assess Mrs Messel’s clothes within the general context of this trade. Finally, this chapter questions whether Maud Messel’s choice of fashionable dress can throw any light on the character of ‘the Englishness of English dress’. These issues will be framed within Igor Kopytoff’s belief that ‘things’ carry their own ‘biography’ and that unravelling their individual life stories can help us ‘understand a culture’ (Kopytoff 1986: 66). – 113 –

Lou Taylor In my former role as Curator of Costume at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, my own personal interest in Maud Messel’s clothes dates back to the late 1970s, when the first batch of this loan collection arrived at the museum. Ten of these garments were featured in the museum’s fashion gallery, which opened in 1981 and closed in 1999. The uniqueness of the collection was already clearly evident and a special view of the collection was held to spread the news to the British Costume Society. Since then, while it has had no public profile, this collection has vastly increased in size, under the curatorship first of Emma Young and now of Rebecca Quinton, who has been examining both the clothes and the history of the Sambourne/Messel/Rosse families. Most of this collection has never been displayed and remains virtually unknown, though the museum has long-term, positive plans for a special exhibition. What is now evident is that this collection provides us with a remarkable insight into the sartorial tastes of the women of one specific family of fashionable dressers and, in so doing, helps us probe the notion of ‘the Englishness of English dress’.

The Dearth of Dress History on English Court Dressmakers In returning to look again at the Messel collection after twenty years, it has been disappointing to realize that so very little has been published in this interval detailing the work of London fashion houses and their designers between 1895– 1920. Despite the fact that English couture clothes of this date are most carefully collected in British museums, the lack of serious published research, set against the vast array of books on Paris couture, remains a scandal. The void seems unexplainable. A great deal of published work by British dress historians exists on Paris couture at the turn of the twentieth century, including that of Diana de Marly (1980) and more recently, Jane Mulvagh (1988). In direct contrast, very little has been published on our own fashion designers, unless, like Worth, Creed, Redfern and Lucile, they succeeded in gaining international success in Paris. Even then, studies remain minimal. The Victoria & Albert Museum’s Four Hundred Years of Fashion (first published in 1984) mentions top London fashion houses, such as Lucile, but not in any depth. No major exhibition of their holdings of this period has taken place, though the work of post-Second World War British designers was thoroughly displayed and discussed in Amy de La Haye’s exhibition The Cutting Edge: 50 Years of British Fashion 1947–97 at the V&A in 1994 (de la Haye 1997). Existing autobiographies by, and exhibitions on, Hartnell (1955, 1984) and Amies informed this show. Of the earlier period, we have Lucile’s (Lady Duff Gordon’s) breathless account of her career Discretions and Indiscretions (Duff Gordon 1932). While not detailing the work of London fashion houses in depth, 20th Century Fashion (Mendes and de la Haye 1999) does successfully thread specific themes on early-twentieth– 114 –

The Wardrobe of Mrs Leonard Messel century English dress history into its text. The authors note, for example, the use of arty dress at this time, stating that ‘a minority of women avoided fashion’s mainstreams in favour of individualistic styles’. (Mendes and de la Haye 1999: 24). This book also addresses the work of England’s foremost couturier, Lucile, who has been the object of long-standing research by Valerie Mendes. Lucile, they comment, ‘issued no challenges, simply meeting the needs of her clients by producing elegant clothes for all occasions. Her particular forte was draping.’ Mendes and de la Haye (1999) also note that in London by the 1930s ‘a new generation of couturiers gradually replaced the court dressmakers’. Noting the names of the leading fashion houses before the outbreak of the Second World War, Mendes and de la Haye comment that ‘these designers operated along similar lines to their Parisian colleagues, though on a smaller scale’ and that Britain ‘excelled in tailoring and formal sports clothes’ (Mendes and de la Haye 1999: 36, 77, 78). These views reflect the generally accepted assessment of London fashion of 1890–1939, namely that it excelled in formal court dress and tailoring created to suit the social needs of its upper class clients and that it drew both its underlying style and its modus operandi from Paris. However, the detailed specific history of nearly all the famous London Court dressmakers of the 1895–1920 period remains a blank page. The Messel collection is an ideal vehicle through which to encourage such research.

The Family and its Collection The joy for this researcher of re-examining the Messel collection after an interval of over twenty years has been the discovery of its extensive expansion and to find that the new garments maintain the collection’s exceptional levels of style, rarity and quality. It now contains hundreds of beautiful garments worn by Maud Messel, saved for posterity by her daughter Anne, Countess of Rosse. It was she who also saved the family home in Staffordshire Terrace, Kensington, from destruction. Now owned by the Victorian Society, this retains its 1870s–90s interiors and is open to the public. Over fifty of Maud Messel’s garments, dating from about 1895 to 1925 are contained in the collection. Research is greatly aided by the survival of Mrs Messel’s diaries and by the excellent account of life at Staffordshire Terrace by Shirley Nicholson (1988). Contextual themes which immediately emerge revolve around Mrs Messel’s life, family and social place, the source and quality of her clothes, her personal sense of style and fashionable London society of her day. Maud, who was born in 1875 and who died in 1960, was slight and slim of build. This is verified both through family photographs and from the size of surviving garments. Rebecca Quinton confirms that her waist measured 24 inches. – 115 –

Lou Taylor As a girl, she spent many hours posing for her father as he drew his weekly Punch cartoons. Growing up in Staffordshire House, where, as the visiting book verifies, George du Maurier and the Rider Haggards came to dinner, Maud would have become acquainted with her father’s specific friends among the artistic and literary celebrities of the day. Luke Fildes, as Nicholson (1988) indicates, was her father’s closest friend, while Marion’s friends included Mrs Alma Tadema and Mrs George du Maurier. Maud attended exhibition openings at the Royal Academy with her mother and was educated privately by a governess, Miss Gill. Maud was also an excellent watercolourist. This was not, however, an upbringing in the Bohemian London of Chelsea nor of the far more aesthetic and wealthier circle of Lord Leighton’s home, just around the corner, at exotic Leighton House. The surviving largely 1890s interior of Staffordshire Terrace provides us today with a clear indication of the family’s less avant-garde taste, a mix of conventional Victorian with touches of moderate aestheticism. Nicholson (1988) notes that the family’s social place in London altered as Linley Sambourne became better off. Marion ran her house with four servants, making some of her daughter’s clothes, though almost certainly out of love rather than necessity. ‘Marion and Linley had always been busy on the fringes of smart society, but during the 1890s they became more involved than ever in the London Season’ (Nicholson 1988: 122). They joined, for example, a reception at the Foreign Office attended by the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Portland and a garden party at Hatfield House, the home of the Marchioness of Salisbury. Sometimes Marion and her daughter Maud were so busy with their social round that they attended three teas in one afternoon. The family travelled to Paris from time to time, visiting the International Exposition in 1889. In the early 1890s they cruised to the Baltic Sea, stopping off in Norway en route and visiting Russia. Maud’s coming-out season, aged 18, took place over 1892–3. The family was still neither rich enough, nor well enough connected socially, to enable Maud to be presented at court. However, her parents’ increasing social success ensured that she was invited on her own to balls at various grand houses in England and Scotland. Maud was clearly aware that it was her daughterly duty to marry well. She wrote to her mother from Ayton Castle in 1892: I am getting so excited about the dance that I believe I shall be very nearly off my head on the night. I mean to enjoy it like anything, not knowing what will happen amongst all these millionaires. Hardly any of them have less than £7000 a year, so darling, your own little [daughter] may have a chance of fishing out one of them. (quoted in Nicholson 1988: 153)

It took, however, six years to settle on her choice and in 1898 Maud married Leonard Messel. This was a strikingly successful match in financial terms as he

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The Wardrobe of Mrs Leonard Messel came from a wealthy family of Jewish bankers, originally from Darmstadt in Germany. Leonard’s father, according to Nicholson (1988), married an English girl, Anne Cussars and in 1890 bought the Nymans estate in Sussex. Leonard Messel had been educated at Eton and Oxford. His father, Ludwig, was a Jewish convert to the Church of England. Maud wrote of sitting through fourteen-course meals at the Messel family home in Westbourne Terrace, a far cry from her more modest meals at Staffordshire Terrace. In 1905, her husband purchased Balcombe House, near his father’s Nymans estate in Sussex. Eventually Leonard and Maud Messel took over Nymans and here Maud’s children, Anne (later Countess of Rosse) and Oliver Messel (the decorator/interior designer, set designer and friend of Cecil Beaton) spent their childhood. As Maud Messel entered into her newly affluent married life in London from 1898, fashion leaders included the Marlborough set of the Prince and Princes of Wales, the Duke and Duchess of York, Daisy, Princess of Pless, Lady Curzon, the Duchess of Warwick, the Duchess of Portland, Nancy Astor, Lady Desborough and Margot Asquith. Attending the London social season occupied them from May till August every year. Their best and official clothes were ordered not only from the top London court dressmakers but also from Paris couture houses during their regular annual visits. Less well-off women of the upper and upper-middle classes, such as Maud Messel, ordered their best clothes from London court dressmakers, from the top levels of London department stores and from their own private dressmakers. In a different strata of London society existed another type of dressing and another less conventional type of beauty to which Mendes and de la Haye (1999: 24) also draw our attention. This was the aesthetic or artistic dresser, typified in the 1910s by Lady Ottoline Morrel at Garsington Hall, by Dorelia John, the mistress/wife of the painter Augustus John, and, in Bloomsbury circles, by the painter Vanessa Bell. Dorelia’s long, loose, brightly coloured clothes were copied by the young women students at the Slade School of Art, and at other such institutions. A few bold wearers ordered hand-painted and wood-block printed garments from the dress department of the Omega Workshop from 1913–1919, which was run by Vanessa Bell and Winifred Gill. These anti-fashion clothes were, of course, far too ‘odd’ to be worn by women born into and functioning within the top levels of the conventional British social establishment.

Character of Maud’s Dress Style The great good fortune arising from the survival of so many of Maud’s ‘best’ clothes is that this allows for the possibility of ‘placing’ her fashion consumption in its period setting. The collection is also large enough to allow for identification of Maud’s specific style preferences and her choice of dressmakers and retailers. – 117 –

Lou Taylor What becomes clear and significant from close examination of her garments is that they reveal the same mix of highly conventional respectability and qualified aesthetic design as the interiors of Staffordshire Terrace, her father’s home. Thus, for example, for her 1898 wedding at St Mary Abbots Church, Kensington, Maud Sambourne wore a dress designed by the London court dressmaker, Sarah Fullerton Monteith Young, of 65 South Audley Street, Grosvenor Square, in ‘white satin with orange blossoms and fine old lace.’ The collection contains only the veil, train, underskirt and shoes. (It is hoped that the wedding dress survives in the family archives in Ireland.) The dress that Marion Sambourne wore to her daughter’s wedding is in the collection with a note attached: ‘This dress was worn by darling mother at my wedding, April 28/1898 – Mrs Sarah Fullerton Monteith Young, who made my wedding dress.’ This bodice and skirt is made up in mid-blue silk printed with a stylish but moderate art nouveau ‘wiggle’ design in yellow and white. The bride’s elegant and striking ‘going-away’ costume also came from the same establishment. In fine-weight, pinkish-mauve wool face cloth, with a trained skirt and a short flared bolero jacket, it is trimmed with braid to match the silk bodice beneath. It has curious opal rosette trimmings on each lapel and fastens with two large gold scarabs on a clasp and chain. The matching deep pink straw hat, from Woolands of Knightsbridge, is trimmed with great swatches of perfectly made pink lilac blossoms which drip over the large brim. Apart from the curious scarab fastenings, both these garments represent conventionally elegant London fashions of 1898 as represented in elite journals of the period, such as the Ladies Field. Conventional too is the mourning dress to be found among surviving items, including two black, half-mourning bodices (without their skirts) dating from 1884 after the death of Mrs Spencer Herapath (Mary Anne). One, in heavily craped black woollen cloth trimmed with black glass beads, was ordered from Mme Elphick of New Bond Street. The second, from Mrs J.J. Carnley, is of stamped black velvet.1 A recent addition to the collection is an entire box full of mourning dress which includes a fine white muslin blouse by Reville and Rossiter embroidered with black decoration. This may possibly relate to Maud’s periods of mourning either for her father, who died in 1910, or for her mother, who died at the age of 63 in 1914. Rebecca Quinton suggests that, alternatively, they may have been worn by Marion Sambourne in mourning for her husband. All these garments, worn across three generations, follow conventional society mourning etiquette regulations, albeit with quite some style. The Messel collection also includes classic examples of the English excellence in tailoring for women for which London court dressmakers had been famed since the 1880s. Examples include a long functional jacket by Samson, of 181 Sloane Street, of about 1907–8. This is made up in grey serviceable wool tweed trimmed with heavy white, brown and black silk braid and large shiny steel buttons.2 – 118 –

The Wardrobe of Mrs Leonard Messel There is a streak of orientalism in Maud’s taste – very much on her own terms. This style developed within her personal wardrobe through the 1905–14 period, extending into the 1920s. An early, subtle example is a grey silk crepon bolerostyled jacket and skirt, with its own white chiffon blouse by Mme Hayward of New Bond Street. Dating from about 1905, both jacket and skirt are covered with great swirls of white, mid-blue and dark blue Chinese-styled embroidered silk braid.3 Another more extreme, rare and strikingly unusual example is a blouse, skirt and belt in brick-red cotton muslin in a typical fashion style of about 1905– 7, with a tucked hem and bodice-tucked decoration, all entirely hand stitched. The rareness come from a hand-painted design of what may be Turkish rose and leaf design outlined in gold on the centre front of the bodice. There is no trace of provenance to this exceptional garment although Nicholson (1988) notes that Maud and Leonard Messel travelled around Europe in 1907.4 We are all familiar with the exotic flamboyance of Paul Poiret’s orientalism, which had become his house signature by 1908. Mrs Messel seems to have fallen in love with this style and her wardrobe included many delicate, high-waisted, tasselled and highly coloured chiffon and muslin evening (and possibly fancy) dresses dating from 1907 to 1914. A fondness for oriental embroidery, possibly Turkish embroidery, is to be found again in a simple, white satin evening dress with a neo-classical waistline. This features appliquéd motifs of the rose and leaf which seem to have been cut from a Turkish embroidery and applied around the hem of the dress (see Figures 7.1 and 7.2).5 An evening coat from the early twentieth century in black and mauve with large shawl collar and cuffs embroidered over what may be a silk ikat print has a bold, tasselled, gold-braid oriental-styled fastening on the hip.6 It is similar in style to designs by Poiret and to examples on sale in Dickens and Jones’s catalogue of ‘Advanced Fashion’ of 1912.7 This listed several tasselled coats with shawl collars, including Monaco, described as a ‘smartly cut and well-tailored coat, in heavy quality silk shantung, with collar and cuffs embroidered with self-coloured silk’ selling at 85s 6d. Maud’s 1895–1907 colour preferences of mauve, pink, pale purple, pale blue and soft apple green evidently shifted from about 1910, in tune with English versions of Paris/Poiret orientalism, to incorporate gold and cyclamen pink. This overthrows the clichéd notion that conventional Englishwomen of this period preferred sweetpea tones. There is a shockingly bright, pink, transparent overtunic in the collection in fine silk chiffon of about 1912. With thin gold braid slotted through the high waist and around the neckline to gather the simple form into shape, clearly an under dress was worn beneath, which does not seem to have survived.8 The Gazette du Bon Ton (one among many journals of the period to do so) featured a robe de tango by Redfern in February 1914 of a not dissimilar style. – 119 –

Lou Taylor

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 7.1 Mrs Messel Collection: white satin evening dress of about 1912, with ‘Turkish’ embroidery, provenance unknown. (Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, no. C004234, with their kind permission)

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 7.2 Mrs Messel Collection: detail of appliquéd ‘Turkish’ embroidery on white satin evening dress of about 1912, provenance unknown. (Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, no. C004234, with their kind permission)

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The Wardrobe of Mrs Leonard Messel Tea gowns seem to have been another favourite garment of Mrs Messel, as they were for many other wealthy women of this period. Unusually, a group of five examples exist in the collection. The first is in pale green silk (one of Maud Messel’s favoured colours) with a layered collar similar in design to that of an early-nineteenth-century coachman’s cape. This is trimmed with brown floral braid and velvet. The second is another clear green silk gown with huge white falling lace collar. The third is a mauve creped silk gown trimmed with purple velvet, which Rebecca Quinton believes may possibly have been used for maternity wear. A fourth, which was displayed in Brighton’s Fashion Gallery till 1999, is in bright pink silk and also has a large white lace collar. The final and most extreme example is a positively spectacular chiffon gown in layered grey and mauve, with a vast train. This is secured to the upper and lower arms only by thin braid bands. All of these garments are trimmed with highly unusual buckles and braids.9 Examples such as these would have been worn in the home, privately, and for receptions and receiving close friends. They were widely featured in women’s journals of the period and were evidently made up in every weight of fabric from the lightest cobweb chiffon to heavy velvet. Mrs Pritchard, in the Ladies Realm of December 1908, discussed the ideal the tea gown in the following terms: ‘If it is to be successful, there must be more poetry in the tea gown [than the dinner gown] and though it must be full of mysterious folds and lines, the majority of women wish to have the figure well defined.’

Maud’s Choice of London Fashion Houses From the time of Maud’s wedding in 1898 until about 1910 Sarah Fullerton Monteith Young seems to have been the favourite London fashion house of Marion and her daughter Maud. For the wedding, as we have seen, the bridal dress, going away and mother-of-the-bride outfits all came from this salon in fashionable Grosvenor Square. Exclusive enough not to seem to need to advertise in the London fashion press of the day, in total, eleven examples survive in this collection from this one house – clearly all ‘best’ dresses. As well as the wedding outfits, these are a white sprigged muslin afternoon dress, with Virago sleeves of 1902–5 (possibly featured in a family photo); a spectacular evening dress in white lace and net with a gold tissue skirt also of 1902–5 with its bodice entirely covered with trembling fish-scale sequins; a dinner gown in Directoire style in cyclamen pink chiffon with Restoration sleeves dating to about 1906; an ivory satin evening dress of 1905–8, covered in lace, with an unusual jewelled buckle at its centre back; a cream-coloured satin evening dress of about 1907 decorated with fine turquoise beading and a neo-classical style evening dress in grey-blue chiffon with a bold Greek key pattern around the hem, dating to about 1907. The final example is a superbly elegant walking costume of apple-green face-cloth of about 1908, with – 121 –

Lou Taylor trained skirt and bolero jacket, with its sleeves fashionably slashed to show a white spotted silk blouse beneath. This also has an unusual, jewelled, oval buckle trimming.10 Maud Messel also frequented Reville and Rossiter, one of London’s leading court dressmakers which enjoyed its heyday before the First World War. She seems, as discussed already, to have purchased a group of clothes, possibly for mourning, in the 1910–14 period. This group contains a tailored walking costume in black wool, a fine white muslin blouse with black floral embroidery and two dresses.11 Mrs Messel’s collection includes a beautiful and softly structured tailored garment with its label ‘Lucile, 23, Hanover Square’. This is a pale aubergine wool face-cloth costume with moleskin collar, slim, simple and elegant in style, dating from about 1910. A second example, very possibly made by Lucile, is a threequarter-length coat in deep browny-purple face cloth with a self-coloured brocaded design. This was worn over a matching overblouse in brown georgette with insertions to match the coat. Mme Hayward of New Bond Street provided the grey silk crepon outfit, with its elaborate braiding, already described. Maud purchased two dresses, in about 1911–13 and both in the fashionable, slim, oriental style from Mrs Neville of Connaught Street. One is a dinner dress, which was displayed in Brighton’s Fashion Gallery and is made up in ivory-coloured brocaded silk crepon. The other is in white satin and is also trimmed with gold braiding and thread. Mrs Messel’s selections from other salons included orders from Russell and Allen, Old Bond Street, for a black lace dinner dress of about 1900–5; Samsons of 181 Sloane Street for the wool suit of about 1907–8 with large, shiny steel buttons; Madame Ross, court dressmaker of 19 Grafton Street and Bond Street, for the 1907 wool suit with ammonite buttons and for a white satin bodice with a false waistcoat front. This, also dating from about 1907, is made from white brocade with an unusually exotic, stylized floral pattern in black, white and purple (see Figure 7.3). This company later advertised itself in English Vogue in March 1920 as the source of ‘La Mode de demain’. The only dress in this collection with a Paris couture salon label is an afternoon dress of about 1910. Made up in embroidered and braided white net, it is cut in the high waisted Directoire style with long narrow sleeves. It is labelled Frederique, Rue de La Paix, Paris.12

The Messels as Clients of London Department Stores The elegant, top London department stores were another fashion source for Marion Sambourne and Maud Messel, particularly for Maud’s ‘coming out’ in 1891 and for elements of her trousseau in 1898. As we have seen already, after her financially advantageous marriage, Maud gravitated upwards to the London salons detailed above. Thus, Marion ordered her daughter’s first evening dress – 122 –

The Wardrobe of Mrs Leonard Messel for her coming-out season from Woolands of Knightsbridge, in 1892. In white muslin, costing six guineas, it was ordered and worn five days later at an April party. Seven years later, the spectacular lilac going-away straw hat was also ordered from here. Preparing for Maud’s wedding her mother noted in her diary in 1898: ‘out all morning with Maud, Swears and Wells [famous for its furs] and Dickens and Jones, nearly dead, Maud so slow choosing.’ Her diary also indicates that the pair also shopped in Harvey Nichols, Barkings, Whiteleys and Schoolbreds. Harrods had not yet been rebuilt when Marion Sambourne went shopping there in the late 1880s: ‘To Harrods – dirty place though cheap’, she noted (Nicholson 1988: 33, 170, 85).

The London Fashion World It is of interest, now we know where they shopped, to try to place Marion Sambourne and Maud Messel’s fashion consumption within the overall setting of the world of London fashion between 1890 and 1920. At the most elite levels of luxury consumption were London establishments with sister couture branches or headquarters in Paris. Lucile (Lady Duff Gordon) had already firmly established her international reputation, which grew steadily through to the start of the First World War. This establishment was rivalled by other Paris-based salons such as Paquin at 39 Dover Street. On 29 February 1908 the Ladies Field commented that the Hon. Mrs Lawrence was presented at court wearing a ‘beautiful Paquin dress in pale blue Oriental satin . . . Empire style [with the] bodice enriched with embroidery and rosettes of gold.’ Worth and Redfern were of course both long established in London. These last two fashion houses are at least mentioned in dress history accounts of the London fashion world of this period. Most, however, remain largely forgotten although their names are easy to find reading through advertisements and editorial listings of stockist of women’s clothes in up-market journals such as Illustrated London News, the Ladies Field, Ladies Realm, the Sphere, Home and Hearth or British Vogue. Maud elected to order her ‘best’ garments, as we have seen, from about ten of London’s top fashion houses. There were many others she could have patronized. Kate Reilly’s was at 10 Dover Street; Elspeth Phelps was famous for elegantly tailored clothes; Mrs Mosa was to be found at New Burlington Street. Others in the exclusive central London fashion streets included Gustave Meyer, Millizena Clark, milliner, Mrs Wilson, milliner (patronized by Mrs Messel for a huge cartwheel straw hat of about 1912),13 and H. Goodbrock, tailor, all four in Hanover Square. Mrs Parsons, milliner, Burlington Arcade, Madame Valerie, court milliner of New Burlington Street, Mesdames Sykes and Co, Regent Street, for lingerie, Madame Marte of Conduit Street, for trousseau tea gowns, Myrna Salter of Albermarle Street, Edyth Brown of 17 Conduit Street, Vladimir, court – 123 –

Lou Taylor dressmaker, at 43–44 New Bond Street, Threshers at 5 Conduit Street for riding habits and John Simmons at 35 The Haymarket. Vogue of March 1920 contains advertisements for many of these companies as well as Dan Ainsworth of 40 South Molton Street, and Millicent Chadwick, milliner. Another fashion centre was the Knightsbridge–South Kensington area. The garments in the ‘beguiling showrooms’ of Mme Rivers at 19 Sloane Street were, according to the Ladies Field of 7 December 1907, ‘especially suited to debutantes’. The journal, on 29 February 1908 also admired the fashions at Thorpe’s of Cromwell Place, South Kensington. As yet unidentified as an elite fashion source in London at this time, other salons for court and fashionable dress in this area included Mme Riez at Gloucester Gate, Swears and Yantian of Sloane Street, Mme Marie Rice of Alfred Place and Bourner for tea gowns at Sloane Street. By 1920 Maison Fifinella was to be found in Brompton Road and Buckingham Palace Road and Mme Donovan in Brompton Road. The March 1920 edition of British Vogue carried advertisements for Samsons, 181 Sloane Street (where Maud Messel purchased her warm tweed coat with shiny steel buttons) and the Sphinx of 7 Church Street, Kensington, for the ‘beautiful lines of antiquity – tea gowns, evening dresses and picture dresses’. Hearth and Home of 26 May 1910 included details of two (of many) ‘dress agencies’ which dealt with second-hand fashionable clothes. Miss Malcolm, at 239 Fulham Road, South Kensington, sold ‘genuine bargains in Smart Gowns, only slightly worn’. Miss Selwyn of 5 Sloane Square declared that ‘Every lady can buy for next-to-nothing, Valuable New “Misfits” [and] Fashionable Costumes, (scarcely worn) . . . sent by Ladies in the Highest London Society’. There is no suggestion that Mrs Messel ever had the need to patronize such establishments. (Why is it that no major book discussing these London salons has yet been produced?)

The Role of the ‘Little Dressmaker’ Many of Mrs Messel’s clothes carry no labels. On close examination of the quality of the making up there are clear differences between the desperately neat, professionally finished garments which carry court dressmaker labels and much of the rest. We know from family diaries that Maud’s mother, Marion, made use of private dressmakers but always seems to have found the results disappointing. In the late 1880s she notes: ‘Napper here, don’t think dress will be a success – shall never fancy myself in any but Madame dresses.’ On other occasions she wrote ‘T-gown came, don’t like it.’ ‘New dress arrived – bad.’ ‘Madame’ was Madame Bocquet, who seems to have run her own salon, and kept Mrs Messel ‘waiting for ages’ and was ‘dreadfully expensive’, with dresses costing £22–28 (Nicholson 1988: 82–5). – 124 –

The Wardrobe of Mrs Leonard Messel Mrs Farebrother, a well-off resident of Salisbury in the 1890s, whose clothes are also in the collection at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, paid her local dressmaker in Salisbury with a leg of lamb rather than cash. The dressmaker made summer day dresses in silk and cotton.14 Lady Ottoline Morrell (whose extraordinary and eccentric clothes are being researched at the Gallery of Costume in Bath) had her clothes made by her lady’s maid, Benty, who spent a lifetime in her service and who was a practical and thrifty woman. According to Miranda Seymour (1992), Benty was ‘able to adapt the ideas which her employer took from paintings seen on her travels’. Benty wrote to her mistress in the 1910 period: ‘It is so difficult to keep out of the fashions as the narrow frocks do suit you so much . . . but we must make our things quaint and unusual by the colouring or embroidery’. These garments rarely cost more than three guineas but the ‘materials were magnificent’, although ‘seams were skimped, lining was not often used . . . hems and turnings were often only tacked . . . made like theatrical props’ (Seymour 1992: 98–9). This use of private dressmakers and ladies’ maids as a source of clothing was thus a recognized method of dress provision for women of Mrs Messel’s class though they were never used as a source for tailored, best or evening dress. To give one example, the Ladies Field of 14 December 1907 proposed ‘an Artistic Gown . . . made in Liberty satin’, commenting that making it was ‘well within the capacities of the “ordinary” little dressmaker’. Interestingly, Marion Sambourne chose to make some of her daughter’s clothes herself, even for the all important coming-out season of 1892–3. Thus, for a socially important visit to the Hampshire home of the Watneys (the brewing family, who were family friends), Maud wore a pink silk dress her mother had made. She wrote home that ‘Lady Margaret likes all my little frocks so much.’ Shirley Nicholson notes that Marion ‘sewed a lot by hand’ but found someone else ‘to do the machining’ (Nicholson 1988: 134, 85). It seems a viable guess to suppose that some of the more simple and poorly made garments in the Messel collection were made by Marion or Maud themselves. The bright pink chiffon overtunic of about 1912 with its gold braid, for example, is entirely hand stitched except on the side seams. The most curious example is the white satin Directoire evening dress of about 1912 with its appliquéd Turkish style embroidery. Separate flower designs are laboriously applied all around the hem by hand. The work seems never to have been properly finished off as some of the tacking stitches still remain very visibly present (see Figure 7.2).15

Maud’s Taste: the Englishness of English Fashion? Maud’s selection of dressmakers and styles indicates that she had far more money to spend on her wardrobe than either her own mother, or for example, Lady Ottoline Morrell and that her taste was far more conventional than that of the aesthetic dressers. Maud Messel paid her court and private dressmakers to produce clothes – 125 –

Lou Taylor for her which were conventionally elegant and feminine, rather than for any form of overt eccentricity. The basic styling of the clothes in this collection indicates a sharp awareness of changing styles as they moved from S Bend through Directoire and into orientalism from about 1910. At first glance Maud Messel’s taste in fashionable dress seems to fit into the clichéd image of English upper-class dressing, with its emphasis on tailoring, smart city day wear and elegant evening dress. Her adoption of exotic chiffon oriental touches from about 1910 also reflected a wish to keep up with the new tones of fashion. Her use of ‘un-English’ bright deep pink or gold-trimmed oriental garments shocks, only because so few similar garments have survived or been written about. Their use was fashionable rather than unusual in their day. There is, however, a specific unconventionality within Maud Messel’s taste, unexpected and curious, which becomes evident only on examination of the collection as a whole. There is here an aesthetic touch which manifest itself in many of her garments, from tweed costumes to delicate tea gowns. This is evident through an emphasis on curious buttons, buckles, clasps, touches of oriental-style and peasant embroidery and the survival of a few really quite extraordinary garments. These include the brick-red dress with its gilded hand-painted floral decoration and a pale 1910–12, eau-de-nil silk muslin and gold Greek Minerva style evening (or fancy) dress, which is very extreme in its styling. The blouse of about 1910–14 from the salon of Reville and Rossiter reveals the use of peasantinspired embroidery in black on white muslin with a very Central European flavour, while the waiscoat-style Ross bodice uses extraordinarily patterned silk for the period (Figure 7.3).16 There are some other extraordinary garments in the collection. The ‘star’ is a full-length, circular, deep-blue, silk velvet cloak, with collar embroidered in gilt metal thread. Possibly dating from the early 1920s, this dramatic garment, which is in perfect condition but of unknown provenance, has heavy medieval/orientalstyled gold embroidery on its standing collar (Figure 7.4).17 Its style seems to relate to a limited fashion trend, as it is not dissimilar to a garment worn by Lady Curzon photographed in Les Modes in 1914 nor to the style of ideal wedding dress proposed by the Council of Art and Industry in their Annual Journal of 1923. In Mrs Messel’s wardrobe all of this is very carefully and subtly conventionalized. The Mme Ross jacket has its large ammonite buttons, the pink going-away costume by Sarah Fullerton Monteith Young has its gold scarab clasps. There is also an unprovenanced purple velvet satin evening dress of about 1907 which has the centre front of its bodice decorated with an embroidered insertion, which may have been taken from a late-eighteenth-century waistcoat. The early 1920s evening coat has its curious embroidered oriental style cuffs and collar.18 Many of the garments, indeed most, have jewelled buckles and ‘interesting’ buttons. None of – 126 –

The Wardrobe of Mrs Leonard Messel

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 7.3 Mrs Messel Collection: Madame Ross, Court Dressmaker, 19 Grafton Street and Bond Street, white satin bodice with a false waistcoat front in brocade of about 1907. (Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, no. C004200.1, with their kind permission)

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 7.4 Mrs Messel Collection: detail of blue velvet cloak with gold embroidered and tasselled medieval collar of about 1920, provenance unknown. (Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, no. C004000, with their kind permission)

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Lou Taylor these are of the highest quality and use gilt metal and paste stones. All these touches are evidently highly personal and are used to individualize this fascinating wardrobe within the conventions of Leonard Messel’s social world. None of these elements would have offended him, or his business and social circles. Neither would they have stereotyped Maud Messel as an aesthetic dresser. Rather, they subtly paid tribute to her own personality and to the sense of taste she inherited from her parents, Linley and Marion Sambourne. It could be useful to compare in detail Maud Messel’s clothes to those hundred or so garments in the Heather Firbank (1881–1954) collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum. As Valerie Mendes explains, she was the daughter of the affluent Member of Parliament Sir Thomas Firbank. The Firbank country house was also in Sussex, at Newlands near Petworth. This collection dates from about 1905 and ends at 1921 when these ‘expensive clothes, bought from leading London houses such as Lucile, Redfern and Mascotte, were packed into trunks and put into storage.’ After careful assessment of her garments, related bills and photographs, Valerie Mendes concluded that Heather Firbank’s taste was that of ‘a modish, wealthy woman’ (Mendes 1984: 79). A closer garment-to-garment comparison could usefully be made here, but already it would seem that Maud Messel was a less modish dresser but was perhaps more ‘original’ and individual in her taste. Maud Messel’s taste in dress was evidently coloured in a specific way by her upbringing in her father’s home at Staffordshire Terrace and later, once she married, by her improved financial ability to buy from carefully selected London court dressmakers. She favoured Sarah Fullerton Monteith Young, who seems to have catered perfectly to Maud’s predilection for subtle aesthetic touches to her clothes. This moderated style reflected exactly Maud’s own personality and conventional, etiquette-correct upbringing. When she was 21 in 1896, she visited Kelmscott House to have tea with William Morris’s daughter, May, while Morris was away on his travels. Shocked by what she saw as the bohemianism of the surroundings, she wrote to her mother that the house was ‘so artistic, so grubby . . . the tea was laid in a barbaric fashion with a loaf on the table and a dirty jam pot that had been broken open through the paper . . . Miss Morris [dressed] in such a sloppy way, with no stays’ (Nicholson 1984: 154). If Maud was far from May Morris or Dorelia John in her dress style, she was also far from Lady Ottoline’s Morrell’s home-made, oriental/aesthetic individualism. Maud followed all the nuances of fashion change while they did not. She had a clear preference for simple fashionable elegance, rejecting the formal grandiosities of the 1895–1920 period favoured by many designers and their clientele. This was, of course, also a reflection of her ‘social place’, which was well outside grand court society and royal circles. The fish-scale evening dress by Sarah Fullerton Monteith Young of 1902–5 is the most elaborate of the surviving Maud Messel garments. Most are far plainer, even if their colour shocks. – 128 –

The Wardrobe of Mrs Leonard Messel This collection provides a key for assessing ‘the Englishness of English dress’ in this period, which indicates that style was focused on far more than just tailoring and sweet-pea-coloured respectability. There is also in these surviving garments some astonishingly exotic dressing. We are overly used to French images of the oriental Poiret, Beer and Paquin French styles of the 1907–14 period. We have, by contrast, rarely seen groupings of English garments of this style in exhibitions or publications. The idea of English women attending London soirées awash with chiffon and gold ornamentation, as featured in some of Maud Messel’s evening dresses, comes as something of a shock. Perhaps this misconception has arisen simply because this specific period of English society dressing, and its related museum examples, remains so under studied by British dress historians. There may also be real significance in Maud Messel’s careful use of a sanitized aesthetic style. The roots of ‘the Englishness in English dress’ may well also lie in touches of the odd, the eccentric and the aesthetic. We know about the range of styles of this period favoured by Jessie Newbery and the Glasgow Girls in Scotland, by Dorelia John, Ottoline Morrell, the Omega Workshop and the more commercialized version from Liberty (Newton 1974; Collins 1983a, b; Swain 1987; Burkhau 1990; Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum 1996). Maud Messel’s subtle use of mildly aesthetic touches to her clothes was acceptable in the wealthy circles in which she socialized or she would not have worn them. Here even an expensive embroidered velvet Liberty dress would mark the wearer out as ‘arty’ and ‘different’. What we see here indicates a lapping over of style from aesthetic dress into conventional English fashionable dress and that this may have been a specifically English trait. It is not to be found in French couture of the period in the same way. The various styles of English and Scottish aesthetic dress of the 1880–1920 period deliberately existed outside of the framework of etiquette-correct society dressing. All were timeless, ‘eccentric’, counter-cultural and anti-fashion styles. What makes Maud Messel’s wardrobe so interesting is that her subtle appropriation of touches of aestheticism, aided by top-level court dressmakers in London, allowed her to present herself as elegantly and charmingly ‘different’ rather then as ‘eccentric’. These touches form a hitherto neglected design strand in English fashion of the 1890–1920 period. Now, ‘eccentricity’ is recognized internationally as one of the trademarks of avant-garde London designers such as Alexander McQueen, Shelley Fox and Hussein Chalayan. This study has revealed that mildly eccentric aesthetic touches had already been ‘taken on’ by London society dressmakers by the early 1900s. The foundation stones for the acceptance of more extreme design within the London fashion world may thus have been laid down a hundred years ago. – 129 –

Lou Taylor This object-focused ‘biography’ of Mrs Messel’s wardrobe is intended to open up this debate. Igor Kopytoff proposes that in order to understand any objects in this close way, we need first to address a series of questions. What sociologically, are the biographical possibilities inherent in its ‘status’ and in the period and culture and how are these possibilities realised? Where does the thing come from and who made it? What has been its career so far, and what do people consider to be an ideal career for such things? What are the recognised ‘ages or periods in the thing’s ‘life’, and what are the cultural markers for them? How does the thing’s use change with its age, and what happens to it when it reaches the end of its usefulness? (Kopytoff 1986: 66–7)

The preservation of this collection by Anne, Countess of Rosse, and now by Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, has ensured that these clothes are still a long way from reaching the end of what Kopytoff terms their ‘usefulness’. This ‘biography’ of the Messel collection has also examined ‘the cultural markers’ offered to us by these clothes. This has opened for discussion the notion that Mrs Messel’s specific sense of style, and the provision of these garments for her by conventional London court dressmakers, may reflect a significant aesthetic design strand to be found in the character of English dress by the early 1900s and at its most fashionable level of design and manufacture.

Acknowledgements This chapter forms part of an ongoing research project into the Messel Dress Collection conducted jointly by the author with Rebecca Quinton, Assistant Curator of Dress at Brighton Museum. I am most grateful for her help in all aspects of this work.

Notes 1. Brighton Museum and Art Gallery: Mme Elphick bodice, no. C004245; Mrs J.J. Carnley bodice, no. C004246. 2. Brighton Museum and Art Gallery: Samson jacket, no. C004192. 3. Brighton Museum and Art Gallery; Mme Hayward day dress, no. C004230. 1–5. – 130 –

The Wardrobe of Mrs Leonard Messel 4. Brighton Museum and Art Gallery: red muslin day dress, no. C004226. 5. Brighton Museum and Art Gallery: white satin evening dress with ‘Turkish’, embroidery, no. C004234. 6. As this book goes to print this is not yet numbered. 7. In the collection of the National Library of Art and Design, Victoria & Albert Museum. 8. Brighton Museum and Art Gallery: pink chiffon overtunic, no. C004020. 9. Brighton Museum and Art Gallery: tea gowns: green with ‘coachman’s’ collar, no. C004224; green with lace collar, no. C004199; mauve crepe, no. C004183; deep pink with lace collar, no. C004227; grey and mauve chiffon with braid, no. C004203. 10. Sarah Fullerton Monteith Young examples: sprigged afternoon dress, no. C004241; evening dress with fish-scale sequins, no. C004242; dinner gown in pink chiffon, no. C004239; ivory satin lace evening dress with buckle, no. C004238; evening dress in cream satin with turquoise beading, no. C004228; evening dress with Greek key pattern, no. C004207; apple-green walking costume, no. C004229. 11. Brighton Museum and Art Gallery: Reville and Rossiter: black wool coat, no. C004021; black-embroidered white blouse, no. C004274; dress, no. C0044017.1–2; dress, no. C004005.1–2. 12. Brighton Museum and Art Gallery: Lucile: aubergine wool costume, no. C004232.1–2; brown purple coat and blouse, no. C004233.1–3. (Rebecca Quinton believes that the coat may well have belonged to Anne, Countess of Rosse.) Mme Hayward: grey silk costume, no. C004230.1–3. Mrs Neville: white oriental dinner dress, no. C004235.1–2; cream-coloured evening dress with gilt trim, no. C004004. Russell and Allen: black dinner dress, no. C004201.1–2. Samsons: wool suit with steel buttons, no. C004202.1–2. Mme Ross: black wool costume, no. C004195.1–2; floral panelled bodice, no. C004200.1. Frederique: white afternoon dress, no. C004219. 13. Brighton Museum and Art Gallery: Mrs Wilson, black straw hat with white ostrich feather trimming, no. C004030. 14. Interview by the author in 1979 with Mrs Farebrother’s son, Michael Farebrother, when the collection was purchased by Brighton Museum and Art Gallery. 15. Brighton Museum and Art Gallery: pink chiffon overtunic, no. C004020; white satin evening dress with ‘Turkish’ embroidery, no. C004234. 16. Brighton Museum and Art Gallery: red muslin day dress, no. C004226; eau-de-nil ‘Minerva’ dress, no. C004205.1–7; Reville and Rossiter blackembroidered white blouse, no. C004274; Mme Ross floral panelled bodice, no. C004200.1. 17. Brighton Museum and Art Gallery: blue velvet cloak, no. C004000. – 131 –

Lou Taylor 18. Brighton Museum and Art Gallery: Mme Ross jacket, no. C004200; Sarah Fullerton Monteith Young pink face cloth going-away costume (returned to family); purple velvet evening dress, no. C004218; oriental coat, unnumbered.

References Amies, H. (1955), Just So Far, London: Collins. —— (1984), Still Here: An Autobiography, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Burkhau, J. (1990), ‘Glasgow Girls’: Women in Art and Design, 1880–1920, Edinburgh: Canongate. Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum (1996), Simply Stunning: The Pre-Raphaelite Art of Dressing. Cheltenham: author. Collins, J. (1983), The Omega Workshops 1913–1919: Decorative Arts of Bloomsbury, London: Crafts Council. —— (1997), The Omega Workshops, London: Secker & Warburg. De la Haye, A. (1997), The Cutting Edge: 50 Years of British Fashion, 1947– 1997, London: Victoria & Albert Museum. De Marly, D. (1980), The History of Haute Couture, 1850–1950, London: Batsford. Duff Gordon, L. (1932), Discretions and Indiscretions, London: Jarrolds. Easton, M. (1974), ‘Dorelia’s Wardrobe: There Goes an Augustus John’, Costume, 8: 30–4. Hartnell, N. (1955), Silver and Gold, London: Evans. Kopytoff, I. (1986), ‘The Cultural Biography of Things’, in A. Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mendes, V. (1984), ‘Women’s Dress since 1900’, in N. Rothstein (ed.), Four Hundred Years of Fashion, London: Victoria & Albert Museum. Mendes, V. and de la Haye, A. (1999), 20th Century Fashion, London: Thames & Hudson. Mulvagh, J. (1988), Vogue: History of Twentieth Century Fashion, London: Viking. Newton, S. (1974), Health, Art and Reason: Dress Reformers of the Nineteenth Century, London: J. Murray. Nicholson, S. (1988), A Victorian Household: The Diaries of Marion Sambourne, London: Barrie & Jenkins. Royal Pavilion, Art Gallery and Museums of Brighton (1985), Norman Hartnell, Brighton: author. Seymour, M. (1992), Ottoline Morrel: Life on the Grand Scale, London: Sceptre. Swain, M. (1987), ‘The Dress of Jessie Newbery’, Costume, 12: 64–73. – 132 –

–8– The Spirit of English Style: Hardy Amies, Royal Dressmaker and International Businessman Edwina Ehrman

When Hardy Amies was asked in 1989 what was the most important thing in his life, he replied without any hesitation that it was the proper functioning of his business.1 Throughout his sixty-year career, which has witnessed significant changes in attitudes to dressing, he has maintained the financial viability of his business by being alert to change and embracing new markets, while carefully retaining his firm’s reputation for classic English clothing. The identification of Englishness with his name has been an integral part of Amies’ business strategy (Figure 8.1).

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 8.1 Sir Hardy Amies, 1989. (Museum of London)

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Edwina Ehrman

English Style According to Amies, English style is rooted in the lifestyle of the upper classes, who are bound to the country by their possessions, interests and sports. It is characterized by a respect for tradition, a taste for controlled informality and the principle of inheritance. It is the land of the society journal Country Life, where house and garden are all important. The English woman maintains a wardrobe of clothes to suit the social calendar, which she wears with an air of nonchalant confidence, derived from her innate sense of belonging. Her suits are tailored to her husband’s Savile Row standards but her ballgown is secondary to the family jewels; neither suit nor ballgown should look too new or ostentatious (Amies 1994: 93–101). This is, undoubtedly, a narrow view of Englishness but it represents the observations of a sharp-eyed outsider. Amies comes from a modest middle-class background and three formative years in France and Germany gave him a cosmopolitan detachment, as well as a taste for business. Amies’ interpretation of English style acknowledges the role played by class but as he frequently points out, Englishness can be acquired by grooming as well as by breeding. When he was appointed designer at Lachasse in 1934 he realized that as well as learning about tailoring he also had to understand the lifestyle and values of his customers in order to create the clothes they needed. So just as he had once learned French and German, he now set himself to learn the language of the upper classes. His tastes were educated by friends such as the antique dealer and interior decorator Alexis ffrench, who taught him about food and antique furniture, how a gentleman should dress and where to order his clothes. Another, more important, influence was John Fowler, who with Sybil Colefax specialized in restoring country houses in the modern taste and who later became an authority on eighteenth-century English decoration. He taught Amies to respect the proportions of a room, the importance of understatement in interior decoration and to appreciate the simple but elegant forms of old fashioned and species flowers – all of which, proportion, understatement and simple elegance, became key to Amies’ approach to design. So, gradually, he threw off ‘the gaucheries of a suburban boy’ to emerge as an English gentleman (Mackenzie 1989: 68). Debonair and immaculately dressed, Amies personified the English style his business promoted. His press officer Peter Hope-Lumley recognized that his Englishness, both in terms of his appearance and attitudes, helped to strengthen the house’s reputation for classic understated English tailoring;2 Amies has certainly played on this perception of himself to further his business throughout his career. In New York, he decorated the company flat where he entertained the press in English style, with oak furniture, chintz and even a coal fire; in Japan he was an eloquent spokesman on the nature of English style.3

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Hardy Amies, Royal Dressmaker

Designing for the English, and American, Woman Although Hardy Amies’ mother worked for a court dressmaker and he therefore grew up knowing people involved in the couture business, he had no intention of making it his career until a chance opportunity came his way. Through family connections he was offered a job as designer at Lachasse, a shop that specialized in made-to-measure women’s suits. Amies took over from Digby Morton, who he credits with transforming the classic tweed suit ‘from its hairy, Harris tweed rigidity into an intricately cut and carefully designed garment’ (quoted in Polan 1981). Amies followed Morton’s lead and concentrated on designing fashionable feminine tailored suits appropriate for both town and country – what he called a ‘livery for living’ (Amies 1954: 172). However, the designer he revered was Captain Edward Molyneux: ‘Molyneux was my god’ (Amies 1984: 144–5). Amies admired the classic, expensive-looking simplicity of Molyneux’s clothes, whose severe elegance was lightened by his subtle use of detail and colour. Molyneux was born in London of Irish parents and trained at Lucile. After serving in the British army in the First World War, he set up his own couture house in Paris in 1919. His style appealed to the English upper classes and his clients included the Duchess of Kent and several leading actresses. Pierre Balmain, who joined him as a junior designer in 1934, described him as an ‘elegant, aloof Englishman who held the fashion world in the palm of his hand during the 1930s’ (Watson 1999: 194, citing Balmain 1964). Amies’ typical customer at Lachasse was responsive to fashion but wanted clothes that would work with her existing wardrobe, that balanced novelty with suitability, and that were hard wearing, perfectly fitted and comfortable. Many belonged to the international racing set. In an interview in 1989, Amies stated that the ‘best discipline for a designer is a customer with taste’. He cited the influence of the late Lady Delamere, who he respected as a woman with perfect manners, who paid her bills on time, and knew ‘precisely what she looked best in’ (Smith 1989). Cyril Connolly described her as ‘one of those creamy ash blondes of the period with a passion for clothes and jewels, both worn to perfection, and for enjoying herself and bringing out enjoyment in others’. Notorious as a femme fatale and a key figure in Kenya’s Happy Valley set during and after the Second World War, she hunted, flew with Amy Johnson, fished for marlin, owned racehorses and managed a considerable estate near Lake Naivasha in Kenya (Daily Telegraph, 5 September 1987). A selection of her clothes given to the Museum of London after her death includes tailored suits, elegant daywear, more adventurous outfits chosen for a cruise and glamorous cocktail dresses and evening gowns. A knobbly dark green tweed suit ordered with a skirt and knickerbockers was worn in Scotland every year on salmon fishing trips and a Tattersall check suit was chosen for English race meetings.4 – 135 –

Edwina Ehrman Hardy Amies gradually found his own style at Lachasse and in April 1937 British Vogue featured a suit he had designed called ‘Panic’. Made in a vibrant Linton tweed of dark plum sprinkled with specks of cerise and overlaid with an emerald green check, the jacket reflects Amies’ growing understanding of tailoring and proportion. It had a lower waist than Morton’s suits, to allow for more movement, and a longer length, which drew attention to the hips and balanced the fashionable square shoulders. The skirt was made in the same tweed but without the overcheck. Another measure of Amies’ increasing success was the interest of American buyers, who bought a number of Lachasse models to have copied in the USA, introducing his name to an important new market. By 1939 the turnover at Lachasse had doubled and the business was running profitably and efficiently. However, success had made Amies ambitious for personal recognition. With the advent of the war he joined the Intelligence Corps but was released temporarily in December 1940 to help design an export collection organized by the Board of Trade to be sold in South America. Determined to work under his own name, he quarrelled with the owner of Lachasse and started to design independently for the New York house of Henri Bendel and for Viyella. He was encouraged by Madge Garland, who had recently left Vogue to become Director of Fashion at Bourne & Hollingsworth, and who predicted that the future lay in mass production. The garments were made free of charge in workrooms at Bourne & Hollingsworth in exchange for the right to copy the designs for the store. Bendel was disappointed with his first models and the arrangement with Bourne & Hollingsworth lapsed, but Amies continued to design as time and his military commitments allowed, selling his work through Worth of London and contributing to the government utility scheme. He was also invited to join the Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers, which consolidated his links with the trade and would later offer important public relations and export opportunities. Amies felt that his fashion work during the war focused his approach, teaching him to express his creativity in a more disciplined and refined way. After being demobilized he set out about finding the finance and premises to set up his own house and in November 1945 he moved into bomb-damaged premises at 14 Savile Row, in the heart of London’s West End tailoring district. Staff from Lachasse, Worth and Russell & Allen soon joined him, bringing the experience and the expertise he needed. (Amies has continued to attract very skilled staff, who stay with him for many years, ensuring a remarkable continuity of craftsmanship and customer service.) Even before he had shown his first collection, buyers from the USA and Canada purchased models, demonstrating the strength of the links that Amies had forged before and during the war and bolstering his growing reputation. In 1946 he made two promotional trips to the USA, covering stores in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago, Boston and New York. His wearable – 136 –

Hardy Amies, Royal Dressmaker suits and tailored dresses and jackets, made in quality British fabrics, proved popular with American women, who also, in Boston at least, loved his English accent. In 1950 he opened a boutique at Savile Row, taking the lead from the French fashion houses, which had just begun to experiment with ready-to-wear. But for his boutique he deliberately chose stock that was ‘unmistakably English’, to emphasize the direction of his house. Instead of Parisian frivolités and scent, Amies sold sensible cashmere sweaters and scarves, linen blouses and silk and wool dresses alongside ready-made suits and coats which were offered with one fitting for the price rather than the traditional three that were customary for couture (Amies 1984: 64). Like most womenswear designers, Amies was inspired by cloth. He described how he liked working with natural colours that ‘have something to do with the countryside’ and which help ‘to establish and sustain an English style’.5 He favoured natural rather than lime green, cornflower or delft blue, navy rather than black. This defining taste for natural, organic colours is made explicit in a prewar advertisement for women’s Country Life Wear sold in London by Messrs John Burnett & Company, of Princes Street, Hanover Square. Racing . . . Polo . . . Motoring . . . Cricket . . . Tennis . . . Golf . . . all have their following. To have clothes suitable for occasions of the kind is the British woman’s birthright . . . Dictates of fashion cannot alter nature’s colourings which reflect the covert side, the lanes of England, Morning on the Downs. The type cloaks the wearer with an atmosphere of realism and renders the passage of years agreeable. (British Vogue, 28 April 1937: opposite p. 1)

Here again we encounter the concept of the English woman’s wardrobe stocked with practical, attractive, ‘timeless’ clothes appropriate for an active outdoor social life. Although Amies used British fabrics from firms such as Linton Tweeds, Bernat Klein and Sekers, he increasingly purchased not only silks from overseas but also wool and even tweeds to take advantage of the much wider colour range offered by the French manufacturers. The same was true of prints, which have always been a popular English choice for summer. With one eye on the weather and the other on the smarter styles needed in the city, Amies offered his customers simple but elegant printed dresses and jackets, and dresses with contrasting or toning coats lined in print. In the post-war period the suit lost its high fashion status but remained a staple of the female wardrobe, while gradually becoming less structured. Amies credited Balenciaga with sounding the death knell for the London suit. Compared to his immaculately structured and moulded suits, with their distinctive collars that framed rather than lay on the neck, English suits looked staid and ‘governessy’ (Amies 1984: 146). In 1961 Harper’s Bazaar advised that in London ‘the tradition of the

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Edwina Ehrman suit and of the glamorous ball dress is still felt but the former rigidity and grandeur are replaced by a supple femininity’ (Harper’s Bazaar 1961: 149). The 1960s were a difficult time for Amies and his fellow London couturiers. The wellmannered, discreet, quietly fashionable clothes he favoured were out of tune with the youthful, body-conscious, informal and fast-changing styles, packed with attitude, which dominated the decade. However, the British fashion press continued to support the London couturiers, defending their record by emphasizing their ‘top British clientele’ and their ability to ‘blend the jet travel attitude with the traditional English and so create clothes that fit the lives their clients lead: clothes for Royal formal occasions; for the speedy international pace of London; for the English country style’ (British Vogue 1964: 88). Amies was better able to survive than many, as his couture business was supplemented by ready-to-wear sales and he had by this time developed a thriving menswear business. By 1964 the annual turnover of his menswear line was about £15 million compared to £0.75 million for his womenswear (British Vogue 1964: 88). The couture business was patronized by a nucleus of customers drawn from the British upper classes. These ‘professional dressers’ had learned from their mothers how to select a wardrobe and how to work with a vendeuse and fitter.6 They understood and accepted the time-consuming nature of buying couture. Their own children and grandchildren come to Amies mainly for wedding dresses, which are the only one-off garments made by the house. In 1987 they made thirteen, designed by Ken Fleetwood, Amies’ head designer, who specialized in romantic evening gowns and bridal wear until his death in 1996. Although Amies acknowledges that special occasion wear and evening wear are an important market and a valuable showcase for the firm’s creativity, his interests lie elsewhere. ‘As a house . . . we are fascinated by modern day clothes – clothes to live in, travel in, work in’ (Amies 1984: 78). New customers come through personal recommendation and include a few rich Americans, tax exiles living in Switzerland and Monaco, some Greek shipping families, the wives of successful City financiers and in the 1980s customers from the Middle East. Most are over 40 with time for fittings, disposable income and a social life that demands smart, formal clothes.7

Dressmaker to the Queen Amies’ most visible client is Queen Elizabeth II, whose patronage has given his house respectability and international standing. He has been criticized by the press for dressing the Queen in unflattering prints and outmoded styles, for instance during her tour of Australia in 2000 (Armstrong 2000). But dressing a queen is a daunting problem, which Amies has solved by working within the bounds of practicality and suitability, those hallmarks of traditional English style. The Queen’s clothes not only must reflect her rank and dignity and enhance her presence but – 138 –

Hardy Amies, Royal Dressmaker are also designed with her audience in mind. The simple, well-defined silhouette and clear colours of her clothes make her stand out without dazzling or intimidating her public and her clothes look fresh and smart whatever the weather and however intensive her schedule. They are also selected to fit into her existing wardrobe and are expected to work for her for a number of years. Amies believes that the Queen has perfect couture manners, that she is aware of fashion but above it. She has created her own style and her familiar appearance reflects the stability and longevity of her reign (Figure 8.2). Amies was first commanded to make clothes for the then Princess Elizabeth for the state visit to Canada in 1950 and five years later he successfully applied for a royal warrant for his services to her. In 1977 he became a CVO (Commander of the Royal Victorian Order) and in 1989 was awarded a KCVO, a non-political knighthood conferred on those who work closely with the crown. He and his press officer Peter Hope-Lumley, while meticulously observing royal protocol, made the most of the press opportunities the connection offered. His work for the Queen and her public acknowledgement of his role also impressed the firms he worked with abroad, particularly in countries with a tradition of monarchy such as Canada and Japan. The Coppley Apparel Group, which has sold Hardy Amies menswear

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 8.2 A Hardy Amies design and embroidery sample for HM the Queen’s state visit to France in 1957. This ensemble was worn by the Queen to a matinée at the opera house at Versailles. (Museum of London)

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Edwina Ehrman in Canada under licence since 1968, promotes his designs on its website.8 After pointing out that the fabrics and styling of his line echo the finest British tailoring, the short paragraph finishes with the following brief statement. ‘Mr Amies has been dressmaker to the Queen for the last 40 years. He received a knighthood in 1996 [sic] and continues to provide bespoke tailoring at 14 Savile Row.’ Taking a similar but more flamboyant approach, the home page for Hsinger Garments in Taiwan introduces Amies’ collection against a background of internationally recognized symbols of British tradition. The Houses of Parliament, Big Ben and a troop of Guards in scarlet tunics and bearskins marching beneath the Union Jack are crowned, against all the rules, with Amies’ royal warrant-holder’s coat of arms.9

Menswear Hardy Amies first became involved in menswear in the late 1950s when he was asked by the owner of Michelsons if he would consider designing and putting his name on men’s ties. He had noticed that Jacques Fath had moved into this new market in Paris and wanted to test the water in England. Amies, always ready to try something new, agreed. The silk ties were woven in Como in Italy and sold well, despite costing about 2 guineas each. Amies then moved on to design high quality cotton shirts for Radiac, a firm which was later taken over by Tootal. His real breakthrough into the men’s clothing market came in 1959, when he was approached by Hepworths, a large menswear manufacturer based in Leeds, to design a range of suits for them. In the 1950s the menswear industry in Britain gradually became aware that young men were turning away from the traditional, conformist clothes of their fathers to choose more comfortable and fashionable styles, which emphasized their youth and showed off their bodies. Frank Mort pinpointed the years 1953–4 as a critical moment of change for the menswear industry. In response to the interest of young adult men in more relaxed clothing, which allowed for touches of individuality and self-expression, middle-market firms such as Montague Burton reassessed their whole approach to selling and advertising. Fashion consciousness was equated with affluence and leisure and an easy, assured, natural, masculinity that was attractive to women (Mort 1996: 132–3, 139–44). Casual sweaters and shirts, influenced by American styles, offered an alternative to the sports jacket. The Italian suit, with its short boxy jacket, high lapels and close-cut trousers introduced sex and classlessness into men’s wear and Carnaby Street tempted teenagers with a fast-changing supply of tackily made but colourful, body-conscious clothes. Some retailers like John Michael Ingram of the John Michael chain took a middle path between ‘boredom on the one hand and fancy dress on the other’ (Cohn 1971: 46) and it was this middle path that Hepworths wanted for their chain of over 300 shops. – 140 –

Hardy Amies, Royal Dressmaker Hardy Amies was a bold choice for Hepworths but his Savile Row address with its associations with men’s tailoring and his connection with the Queen would impress the more conservative customer, while his role as a woman’s dress designer clearly spelt fashion. For his first collection in 1961 he designed about thirty suits which were intended ‘to make the customer feel younger and richer than they were, and more attractive’ (Amies 1984: 68). Amies’ input gave Hepworths’ menswear a higher status and a veneer of fashion but his design was never cutting edge. Each year he presented a line which successfully reflected current trends, while his marketing emphasized the traditional tailoring and masculinity of his suits. His second collection was shown at the Savoy Hotel by models who paraded up and down with umbrellas in the military shoulder-to-arms position to the accompaniment of the British Grenadiers. This tongue-in-cheek presentation was a great success and attracted several overseas buyers, seduced by the potent combination of City and military might. Alison Adburgham astutely summed up Amies’ appeal in an article in the Guardian in 1962: Supreme though Savile Row may remain for sheer perfection of skilled workmanship and traditional tailoring, the influence of America and Italy in the styling of men’s clothes in general, has, in the post war years been marked. But it is difficult for Englishmen to stomach. Hardy Amies British line now comes as a palatable compromise between the old world and the new. (Adburgham 1966: 276)

Amies in fact greatly admired the Italian contribution to men’s fashion, remarking that they put the sex back into trousers while producing clothes of innate good taste (Amies 1984: 158). The first issue of Men in Vogue (published in November 1965) celebrated the peacock revolution with an article profiling London’s ‘sharp dressers’ and a special report on ‘new clothes this winter’. These were tempered by features on ‘The most Bailey girls in the world’ and ‘Men and their cars’. The opening article explained these were the interests of the ‘new Englishman (and the Irishman, Welshman and Scot) who likes cars and girls and clothes, has always looked well in old clothes and uniforms and now buys many more new clothes; he now likes clothes so much that he may once again qualify as THE BEST DRESSED MAN IN THE WORLD’ (Men in Vogue 1965: 51). And so, once again, the English male customer is reassured that fashion will not diminish his masculinity and that tradition and history are on his side too. The issue gave a full page to an Amies-designed Hepworths’ suit modelled by the actor Edward Fox. His grey flannel double-breasted box-cut suit, which featured shaped, extra slim trousers, was worn with a pink batiste shirt and a Pierre Cardin striped silk tie. Suits like these were sold in Hepworths’ high street branches all over England, exerting a not inconsiderable influence on popular taste (Figure 8.3). Amies’ contribution to

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Edwina Ehrman

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 8.3 A Hardy Amies menswear design for April 1968. The jacket is cut with a Ghillie collar. (Hardy Amies Ltd)

menswear was recognized by the Sunday Times, which presented him with one of its annual Fashion Awards in 1965. Hardy Amies is often compared to Pierre Cardin. Both were womenswear designers who branched out into menswear and both successfully diversified into ready-to-wear clothing and accessories. Both also helped to change male attitudes to dressing and fashion. Amies admits watching Cardin and picking up on his styling.10 Cardin started designing menswear in 1958 and in the early 1960s presented his style anglais, which was still influential in the mid-1960s. His tailored suits were inspired by Savile Row but pared down to produce an athletic and dynamic silhouette, which followed the lines of the body. Amies’ respect for Cardin’s tailoring and his appreciation of Italian style are important. His English style is neither insular nor static. It can absorb influences from the outside world while retaining the basic grammar of the Savile Row suit. Hardy Amies’ designs for Hepworths and particularly his flamboyant shows at the Savoy Hotel were well covered by the press and attracted the attention of Genesco, a large menswear corporation in the USA which owned factories, several stores in New York and a chain of menswear shops. They entered into an agreement – 142 –

Hardy Amies, Royal Dressmaker with Amies to set up Hardy Amies USA Ltd to sell high quality suits, made up in their factories to designs by Amies, through their retail chain of Roger Kent shops. This triggered a string of licensee agreements with manufacturers in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, Japan and more recently Taiwan and Korea, whose profitability has ensured the survival of the couture business on which Amies’ reputation for quality and craftsmanship is based. The question of how much input and quality control Amies had in these ventures is often asked. Certainly the quality of a Hepworths suit, in terms of material, manufacture and fashion detail, was very different from the product sold under Amies’ name at the same time in Canada and Japan. But both Amies and his menswear designer Ian Garlant find it a challenge and an opportunity to see their ideas represented across the market. They are proud of their ability to work with manufacturers and to advise on how their designs can be adapted to suit the capacity of the manufacturer, the fabrics they have available and the market point at which they will be sold.11 Amies has no problems designing and marketing anything which is cheap in price provided that the aim is to produce the best available article on the market at that price (Amies 1984: 141). For him it is a mark of success rather than failure to be adaptable and pragmatic. Perhaps because of his background in haute couture, he is more than usually aware of the customer. In the end his design needs to translate into a practical and appropriate garment for the purchaser. He is selling a suit not a fashion statement. Indeed he has learned that it is best for the designer to draw back. ‘It is dangerous for a menswear designer to have too much power. Suits should never look as though they have been designed: only that they have happened’ (Amies 1984: 126–7). This relaxed, understated look is one of Amies’ indicators of English style.

Conclusion The common factor of the suits produced under Amies’ name is their Savile Row provenance, however distant the link may be in reality. Indeed the Savile Row connection endorses all the many products sold in his name from eyewear to the humble handkerchief. As Roger Whiteman, Amies’ licensing manager, has observed: ‘Menswear seems to work very well over thousands of miles and the focus of the world on Savile Row and English men’s fashion doesn’t seem to fade.’12 Amies has dedicated much of his working life to travelling the world to promote his export and his licensee business. He feels that the value of personal contact is inestimable and never grudges the time he spends working as an ambassador on behalf of his house and its style. It is Hardy Amies’ great achievement to have created a highly profitable international licensee operation on the back of his reputation for making refined, wearable clothes for a small, carefully identified – 143 –

Edwina Ehrman clientele. The two businesses are in fact interdependent, sharing premises, staff, craft skills and experience, but the licensee business is the money-spinner, which ensures the survival of the couture business. Amies’ international outlook and shrewd approach to business are significant but above all it is his own personal image that has attracted the licensees. As he has claimed, ‘I appear to be the spirit of English style to them all’ (Smith 1989).

Acknowledgements Much of the information in this chapter has been drawn from a recording project conducted by the Museum of London with the fashion house of Hardy Amies in 1989.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Interview with Hardy Amies, Museum of London, DK.89/19, tape 1, side 2. Interview with Peter Hope-Lumley, Museum of London, DK.89/30. Interview with Ken Fleetwood, Museum of London, DK.89/23, side 2. Museum of London, 89.264. Interview with Hardy Amies, Museum of London, DK89/19, tape 1, side 2. Interview with Ken Fleetwood, Museum of London, DK89/23. Interview with Hardy Amies, Museum of London, DK89/19, tape 1, side 1 and interview with Peter Hope-Lumley, Museum of London, DK89/30. www.coppley.com www.hsinger.com Interview with Hardy Amies, Museum of London, DK89/19, tape 1, side 2. Interview with Ian Garlant, Museum of London, DK89/26. Interview with Roger Whiteman, Museum of London, DK89/21.

References Adburgham, A. (1966), View of Fashion, London: George Allen & Unwin. Reprint of ‘Legs and the Man’, Guardian, 14 September 1962. Amies, H. (1954), Just So Far, London: Collins. – 144 –

Hardy Amies, Royal Dressmaker —— (1984), Still Here: An Autobiography, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. —— (1994), The Englishman’s Suit, London: Quartet. Armstrong, L. (2000), ‘Fifties Look out of Favour’, The Times, 1 April. Balmain, P. (1964), My Years and Seasons, London: Cassell. British Vogue (1937), Coronation number, British Vogue, 28 April. —— (1964), ‘London Couturiers: the Lives their Clothes Lead’, British Vogue, 15 September. Cohn, N. (1971), Today There are no Gentlemen, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Daily Telegraph (1987), Unsigned obituary: ‘Femme Fatale takes Kenya murder secret to her grave’, Daily Telegraph, 5 September. Harper’s Bazaar (1961), International Fashion Folio Spring number, Harper’s Bazaar. Mackenzie, S. (1989), ‘Hardy Perennial’, Country Homes and Interiors, January. Men in Vogue (1965), ‘The Englishman . . . (and the Irishman, Welshman and Scot’, Men in Vogue, 1(1). Mort, F. (1996), Cultures of Consumption: Masculinities and Social Space in Late Twentieth-Century Britain, London: Routledge. Polan, B. (1981), ‘Hardy Perennials’, Guardian, 21 January. Smith, L. (1989), ‘Hardy Laurels’, The Times, 13 June. Watson, L. (1999), Vogue Twentieth Century Fashion, London: Carlton.

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–9– Gilded Brocade Gowns and Impeccable Tailored Tweeds: Victor Stiebel (1907–76) a Quintessentially English Designer Amy de la Haye

The name of Victor Stiebel is synonymous with romantic evening gowns and impeccable tailoring – the quintessential hallmarks of the English designer. Stiebel did not document his own career and there are no monographs of his work. As a result, his role – along with that of a number of other talented English designers – has been eclipsed within dress history. This chapter presents an initial insight into Stiebel’s fashion career sited within the context of London’s elite fashion industry. Stiebel was born in Durban, South Africa. He moved to England in 1924 to study architecture at Jesus College, Cambridge, where he designed the décor and costumes for the college’s theatrical Footlights Revue. The Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) houses two of his watercolour designs from 1927: a black and white evening dress in the fashionable Garconne style and a more dramatic gown in black and silver featuring an appliquéd snake coiled from hem to bodice.1 Stiebel had found his forté. In 1929 he went to train at Reville, a court dressmaker (founded in 1906) based in Hanover Square in the midst of London’s exclusive fashion trade. In contrast to Parisian couturiers that served international markets, the primary role of the English court dressmaker was to provide the specific sartorial demands of an elite social life that revolved around the monarchy. At its peak in the years prior to the First World War, Reville enjoyed a reputation as one of London’s foremost houses, best known for elaborate evening creations. However, by the 1920s business was ailing. The role of the court dressmaker was falling into demise and designerfounder Terry Reville’s fashion aesthetic was not in tune with more modernist trends. (During the 1930s the house merged with the London branch of Worth.) However, Stiebel spent three years at Reville, successfully learning the skills of haute couture. Before creative fashion courses were established within the art schools this was the standard career path for an aspiring designer. At this time, highly publicized Parisian couturiers led international trends, determining the design of women’s fashion apparel at all market levels. While

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Amy de la Haye English designers were widely acknowledged for their superb tailoring, only rarely were they credited for possessing independent fashion flair. Indeed, reflecting on his early career, Norman Hartnell (who opened in 1923) rued his client’s preoccupation with Parisian designs and conviction that London houses simply copied and adapted French models. In his autobiography, he bitterly recalled, ‘I suffered from the unforgivable disadvantage of being English in England’ (Hartnell 1955: 14). Hartnell’s decision to present a collection in Paris – along with that of innumerable designers in more recent years – undoubtedly elevated his standing both internationally and at home. At this time, London designers had to face stiff competition not only from across the channel, but also on their own doorstep as some Paris houses – such as Paquin and Schiaparelli – opened London branches. It is within this context that Stiebel launched his own label. In 1932 the press announced the launch of Victor Stiebel Ltd, Court Dressmaker, of 21 Bruton Street, Mayfair. In light of the diminishing role of the court dressmaker, it is perhaps surprising that he chose to define himself as such. Stiebel was in fact one of a new generation of English designers to work along similar lines, but on a smaller scale, to the Paris couture houses. Fellow couturiers Norman Hartnell and Peter Russell were also based in Bruton Street, and Digby Morton, Molyneux and Mattli had premises in surrounding West End streets and squares. Stiebel’s debut collection (shown in February 1932) was acclaimed, as was his swift acquisition of fine premises and skilled staff. Queen magazine (13 February 1932) applauded his ‘very striking creations’ that ‘would arrest attention in any smart gathering, within England or on the Continent’. British fabrics were used extensively, including dark red check serge for a tailored suit for the country and a grey flannel for a neat tailor-made, teamed with black and white jumper. The Nottingham Journal (6 February 1932) described his pleasantly simple evening gowns that followed ‘a tailored line, particularly suited to the Englishwoman’s figure’. Stiebel was also praised for his clever use of pleats and draperies that gave fullness without elaboration. Vogue (2 March 1932) photographed an evening dress in the newly developed angelskin lace and The Times (4 February 1932) praised a racing suit in shepherd’s plaid, with immense cravat of striped shantung. The designer’s stylish and imaginative use of striped fabrics was to become his signature. Hoyningen Huene photographed a modish bias-cut, red, white and green striped dress, accessorized with long gloves and oversize leghorn hat for Vogue in May 1932. The caption reads ‘Gold Cup Day at Ascot demands the fairest and filmiest of frocks, of which this flowing model in chiffon is an excellent example’. Vogue also praised his slender cut, floral-printed dresses for Ascot and his debutante gowns, including an Empire line dress in oyster satin with silver-edged train from 1935. While serving an international clientele, Stiebel – along with fellow London designers – excelled when catering for the domestic market. Like the court – 148 –

Victor Stiebel, English Designer dressmakers they were thoroughly versed – often more so than their clients – in the appropriate sartorial etiquette required for English social life. (A Vogue advertisement from January 1935 for Victor Stiebel Ltd reveals that by this date the designer no longer defined himself as a court dressmaker.) Eschewing novel surreal devices and overt Hollywood glamour, Stiebel aligned himself with the 1930s vogue for historical revival styles. Revealing the dominant neo-classical influence, a finely tucked and pleated columnar evening gown in hyacinth-blue chiffon was photographed for Vogue (14 September 1932) while eighteenth-century hunting dress provided the inspiration for a dashing, applegreen and beige velvet costume (Vogue 21 December 1932). Stiebel adored the refined and luxurious but was also eminently practical. Responding to the 1932 craze among debutantes for riverside parties, he made evening dresses in Turkish towelling, to prevent ruining costly silks on a moonlit row between dances. From the outset Stiebel’s designs attracted a stylish, wealthy clientele. For her marriage to Mr Anthony Acton, Miss Joan Pearson – the beautiful granddaughter of the late Lord Cowdray – selected him as designer for her wedding dress. Stiebel created a princess-line gown of ice-white romaine edged with tiny piqué daisies, long fitted sleeves, high neckline and a fan-shaped train cut with a widening band of piqué daisies. (White daisies were to punctuate his collections recurrently.) A small white sequinned cap was held in place by a tulle veil. This high profile commission was a great compliment to the fledgling couturier and provided him with extensive favourable publicity (as revealed within his press books housed by the Archive of Art and Design, Victoria & Albert Museum). Stiebel’s prestigious clients were subsequently to include Princess Margaret (he designed her primroseyellow going-away outfit), Princess Marina and Princess Alexandra and he dressed the Duchesses of Devonshire, Argyll and Buccleuch. Although best known for his softly feminine designs, Stiebel (along with Schiaparelli) dressed the rebel lesbian artist Gluck (Hannah Gluckstein, 1895– 1978). Throughout her adult life, Gluck predominantly wore menswear-style tailoring. She was introduced to Stiebel by the fashionable florist Constance Fry, with whom she had a relationship from 1932 to 1933 (Stiebel was to become a director of her company). Gluck’s biographer Diana Souhami (1988: 98) records that he made Gluck an austere, long black velvet dress with a white tie. This hybrid garment revealed the artist’s penchant for a formal, masculine aesthetic while (unusually) conforming to a female gender-specific garment. During the 1930s Stiebel also designed for the screen and stage and counted top Hollywood stars Katharine Hepburn, Vivien Leigh and Madeleine Carroll among his clients. With the Hollywood star system at its peak, the on and offscreen wardrobes of the stars were avidly reported not only in newspapers, but also within the burgeoning number of women’s fashion magazines and cinema fanzines. It is therefore highly likely that Stiebel’s name was already known when – 149 –

Amy de la Haye he took his first collection to New York in 1936. By this date Stiebel had established himself as a successful London couturier with an international reputation. With the onset of the Second World War, the designer was to prove both resourceful and versatile. For autumn/winter 1939 Stiebel showed garments in warm and durable blanket cloth, including back-belted plaid jackets. ‘For early evening attacks’ he presented a full-length grey wool skirt and ‘for early morning surprises’ skiing-style suits in crushed strawberry duvetyn, with useful pockets. A grey dress with divided skirt and bodice cut on battledress lines was eminently practical and his use of bold Guards’ scarlet fabrics cut a striking note. Even at this time, trousers were not fully acceptable for women: Stiebel was to refer to the ‘slackness of slacks’, conceding that they could look smart in the country, but never in town. When his customers could no longer visit his London house, Stiebel took his collection to them. Travelling with a saleswoman, a fitter and two models, the designer made a duplicate collection and toured Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds. In 1940 Stiebel signed up as Lieutenant Colonel at Army Camouflage, secure in the knowledge that his business was to be kept alive within the Jacqmar organization. Jacqmar designed and marketed fashion fabrics from their Grosvenor Street house and wholesaled textiles to a chain of Jacqmar shops as well as selling directly to fashion designers. In 1939 Bianca Mosca, who had worked with Schiaparelli in Paris, moved to London to direct the studio at Jacqmar (and went on to open her own London couture house in 1946). While engaged within the services, Stiebel was permitted to work on special design assignments that fed directly into the war effort. When German forces invaded Paris in June 1940, communications with the outside world were severed and Paris’s hegemony of fashion came to a temporary halt. Many houses closed and foreign designers returned home including Parisbased English designers Creed and Molyneux. In spite of wartime constraints, the time had arrived for English designers to prove their worth. In 1942 the Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers (Inc. Soc.) was founded, becoming the first professional organization to support and represent the interests of London designers (in contrast, the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne was founded in 1868). Victor Stiebel was a founder member. In March 1942 at the invitation of Sir Thomas Barlow, President of the Board of Trade, Inc. Soc. members agreed to create templates for a basic year-round wardrobe, comprising an overcoat, suit (with shirt or blouse) and a day dress, suitable for mass manufacture. All clothes were made using Utility cloth and conformed to strict economy-driven regulations. By exploiting and promoting the skills of London’s top designers, the Board successfully demonstrated that austerity rulings permitted both creativity and style. The prototype models, featured in Vogue during October 1942, were subsequently donated to the V&A. While the contributions of individual designers – 150 –

Victor Stiebel, English Designer was intended to remain anonymous, certain stylistic traits are evident and some items arrived marked with designer’s initials. A red rayon dress and two-piece gored navy woollen skirt with blue-grey lumber-style jacket have been linked with Stiebel.2 In Britain, consumer rationing did not end until March 1949 and Utility clothes remained in large-scale production until 1952. But, during this time, women who could afford to buy new clothes had, for the first time, access to garments directly conceived by London designers, albeit made in fabrics of various qualities. During the war, English journalists raised the spectre of London emerging as the epi-centre of international fashion (as indeed did American journalists about New York). But, as influential fashion writer Alison Settle so wryly observed in Picture Post in January 1945: Success cannot come to English fashions, so long as men of the country treat fashion as being essentially frivolous and even laughable . . . Only when fashion trends, colours and the whole philosophy of clothes is talked about – as films, pictures or music are discussed – can the textile trades of Britain regain their merited superiority in the eyes of the world.

(And alas, almost sixty years on this still has resonance.) Stiebel was demobbed in November 1945 and joined Jacqmar as director of couture, where he presented his designs under the ‘Victor Stiebel at Jacqmar’ label. While Britain had emerged triumphant from war, the economy floundered and shortages continued. In a bid to earn much needed foreign revenue, the government requested London’s designers create luxurious fashions (free of austerity rulings) for export markets. Models such as Stiebel’s flowing Grecian style gowns in silk jersey were tantalizingly featured in the press, but were strictly unavailable to domestic consumers. Another – a ravishing black gown trimmed with ostrich feathers – was among a selection from the Export Collections pictured in Harper’s Bazaar. Stiebel’s designs for the home market from this period are superlative and were selected for the covers of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. In January 1946 he presented short dinner dresses of stiff slipper satin in dove grey with unpressed pleats that flared from bell-shaped skirts reaching 18 inches (46 cm) from the ground and décolleté picture frocks with pannier hips. As hand-worked embroidery was difficult to obtain, he applied Victorian petit point as decoration, notably on the corselette of a red dinner dress. By creating dresses with longer, fuller skirts and sloping shoulder lines, Stiebel had anticipated future trends. When new couturier Christian Dior presented his profoundly influential fullskirted and tightly corseted ‘New Look’ collection in February 1947, Parisian fashion supremacy was instantly restored. Overnight, lingering wartime styles were rendered demodé. English designers responded valiantly, as did resourceful

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Amy de la Haye home-dressmakers. A highlight from Stiebel’s autumn/winter 1947 collection was a yellow-green striped grosgrain dress with a large bustle bow – a surprisingly flamboyant feature for a day dress. This detail, combined with the horizontally striped overskirt (supported by stiff horsehair frill), created an impression of additional fullness with economy and aplomb.3 While the lavish evening courts of the pre-war years were not revived, from 1947 the English social season once again offered its annual round of entertainment. With this came new demands for fashionable clothing and a boost in demands for the services of London’s couturiers. Stiebel opened a department catering especially for debutantes at Jacqmar the same year. During the 1950s London’s couturiers generally fared well and were joined by talented newcomers John Cavanagh, Michael Sherard and Ronald Paterson. For the 1953 Coronation the world’s attention focused upon London and the couturiers rose to the occasion creating larger, special collections. Stiebel’s Coronation collection, shown in February, numbered ninety pieces, many in rich fabrics including commemorative designs by the theatre designer Oliver Messel for Sekers. In March 1953, Norman Parkinson for Vogue photographed Stiebel with two models. Dressed in evening gowns with strapless bodices, one in slipper satin looped in to a bustle over an immense tulle skirt, the other a smoke-beige organza gown with a draped polonaise of spotted surah. Also from this collection were gowns with tiny bodices festooned with garlands of roses and sashes that swept across immense crinoline gowns, consuming some 250 yards of luxurious fabrics. For special occasion daywear, silk suits had accordion pleated skirts over stiff petticoats and coats were offered in two silhouettes, the swagger and fitted. The designer also presented matching mother and daughter gowns. The English climate is notoriously unpredictable and country houses are particularly renowned for their chilly draughts. For winter 1955 Stiebel masked velvet-trimmed cashmere cardigans with chiffon to match his evening dresses. The jackets of Stiebel’s tailored suits from the 1950s were sculptured with softly rounded shoulders and moulded the body to a nipped in waist, sometimes with a basque and often with interesting button placement. Suits for the town had pencilslim skirts, straight or pleated, while those for the country were gently flared and cut slightly shorter. Daytime fabrics included tweed, face-cloth, velour, striped and check suitings. As befitted couture, Stiebel’s suits were perfectly balanced, expertly fitted and meticulously well made. Once the client had selected fabric and chosen a model from the collection, her measurements were taken and the tailoring began. The suit would be cut, tacked and fitted onto a dummy and the seams, collars and shoulders adjusted to ensure perfect alignment. While partially made, with just one sleeve tacked on and still unlined, Stiebel’s client would come for an initial fitting. As it neared completion two more fittings would take place. The result – 152 –

Victor Stiebel, English Designer was a suit that fitted perfectly without constriction, the buttons and sleeves fitted to allow ‘taking up’ while in wear. A perfectly made jacket should hang equally well whether unbuttoned or fastened and never lose its shape. Constructed to last a lifetime, stylish and classic tailored suits by Stiebel and the London couture were celebrated worldwide. A grey wool day dress from the early 1950s, worn by Mrs Korner, and now housed as part of the Korner Archive at the London College of Fashion, exemplifies the designers grasp of functionality and elegant understatement. It was perhaps these qualities in his work that led to commissions to design new uniforms for the Women’s Royal Naval Service (1951) and the mess dress for the Women’s Royal Air Force (1958). The eminently wearable qualities of Stiebel’s work presented various possibilities for dissemination to the less affluent fashion consumer. In the first year of his business, the popular women’s magazine Home Chat (9 July 1932) praised a ‘sophisticated and charming’ tucked velvet chiffon dress with fur-collared capelet noting, ‘These will become popular immediately, because it gives one a chance of using up an odd length of fur in a really fashionable manner.’ In spring 1956 the middlebrow Evening Standard London newspaper offered making instructions for a summer dress and jacket designed by Victor Stiebel, with patent belt, bindings, zipper, buttons and tarlatan underskirt for 34 shillings. Patterns for little black dresses that could be made in velvet, taffeta or translated more informally in alpaca or wool were available from Weldon’s. Stiebel also served the huge army of home knitters: in February 1959 Housewife magazine featured a pattern for a green blouson style sweater with a scarf neckline. Stiebel’s talent as a designer was undisputed. In the post-war period he also became a driving force within London’s designer-level fashion industry and in 1956 was appointed as chairman of Inc. Soc. Clearly optimistic for the future, in 1958 Stiebel reopened his own couture house at 17 Cavendish Square (formerly the London home of the Earls of Bessborough) with a staff of 125 skilled workers. The eighteenth-century premises housed five specialist workshops and a showroom featuring Adam ceilings. By 1960 the role of international haute couture was threatened by ready-towear fashions that were cheaper, more ephemeral and instantly available. In 1948 the London Model House Group had been founded to represent the interests of fourteen top quality ready-to-wear companies such as founder-member Frederick Starke, Brenner Sports and Frank Usher (whose history is largely undocumented). London fashion also enjoyed a massive boost from the new generation of many art-school trained designers whose modern vision transformed the appearance of an adventurous and affluent youth market. Ready-to-wear was also to become central to the survival of many of London’s couturiers. As early as 1950 Jacqmar had launched a ready-to-wear line designed by American Vincent Monte-Sano – 153 –

Amy de la Haye and the same year couturier Hardy Amies introduced a boutique for ready-towear within his house. When Vogue (early September 1960) posed the question ‘Are couture clothes worth the money?’ they responded by profiling the work of various London designers. Stiebel’s clothes were decreed to be, Well worth it for the sense of elegance and magnificence he gives to his grand occasion ball dresses; and for the delicious assurance that only a couturier can give – of knowing that one looks ravishingly pretty, that the fabric is magnificent, the detail intricate, and the design individual.

During the 1960s London houses continued to operate on a relatively small scale, showing around sixty pieces per season, while the Paris houses presented some two hundred. However, a major strength of London’s couturiers was that they principally catered for a private clientele, while in Paris and Italy it was ready-towear and licensed goods that formed the bulk of the business. European haute couture was to become the glamour-laden, but loss-making, advertising platform for designers to promote their label. Conversely, in London the small scale of the majority of (mainly privately owned) fashion houses has always meant that the clothes shown on the catwalk are – and remain – what the designer has to sell. This partly explains why London’s couturiers are celebrated for the wearability of their designs. In order to bridge his couture and the broader ready-to-wear market, in 1960 Stiebel introduced a mid-range called the Ground Floor Collection. Garments (that appear to be no less detailed than the couture models) were offered in sizes up to 16 and cost approximately half the price of his couture models. (In 1960 a madeto-order ball gown cost around £200.) Clients were provided with a one-alteration service by a couture-fitter and the completed items delivered within a week of purchase. (Cavanagh had introduced a similar line called ‘Boutique Couture’ in 1959 and Hartnell followed suit in 1965 with his Special Collection.) The London College of Fashion Library houses three sales books showing Stiebel’s haute couture designs during 1960–1, 1962–3 and his Ground Floor Collection 1961–3. Revealing the continuing vogue for time and occasion-specific dress, each album is subdivided into sections presenting suits and blouses, day dresses, Ascot and cocktail dresses, evening dresses and coats. Stiebel depicts his model as a mature woman, impeccably groomed and appropriately accessorized. The water-coloured sketches reveal a fastidious attention to detail. Each drawing shows colour and pattern, a full-length front view, accompanied by smaller sketches of the back and partially concealed garments such as blouses (see Figures 9.1 and 9.2). By presenting the full range of the collection – not just the ‘showstoppers’ featured in the press – the albums provide a fascinating insight into the output of this English designer. – 154 –

Victor Stiebel, English Designer

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Figure 9.1 A Victor Stiebel tailored suit in black and white tweed with black trim, Gentle Lady Collection, autumn/winter 1960–1. Water colour and pencil. (London College of Fashion)

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 9.2 A Victor Stiebel evening gown in green silk with side draperies and back bow, The Swing Collection, spring/summer 1962. Water colour and pencil. (London College of Fashion)

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Amy de la Haye Stiebel’s press books from this period reveal extensive newspaper coverage and features in journals, but fewer entries in the high fashion glossies. While Vogue, for example, continued to present the London couture, editors simultaneously showed the more funky output of the young designers (and this dual identity has characterized English fashion to the present day). However, to compare Mary Quant’s denim tunics with Stiebel’s gilded brocade gowns, and view the latter as having passed his heyday, is to miss the point. London’s couturiers had no intention of being in fashion’s vanguard. As Vogue (September 1964: 88) so rightly pointed out, London’s couturiers ‘are not a launching pad for wild new fashion adventures. Not a melting pot for sizzling new lines. Not leaders of world fashion. They don’t want to be any of these things, nor do they see themselves in that light at all.’ Instead, they judged their success by creating clothes that perfectly suited the social lives of their clients: catering for formal royal occasions, busy metropolitan life, sporting events and for relaxation in the country. Designers and classic clothing companies have consistently championed the classic fabrics and colourings for which English, Scottish and Irish textiles producers are world famous. While Stiebel inevitably made extensive use of Jacqmar’s textiles, he also purchased traditional tweeds from Donegal and dynamic, modern weaves from Ascher and Bernat Klein. The West Cumberland Silk Mills, launched by Nicholas ‘Miki’ Sekers in 1938, who famously commissioned many fine artists and non-textiles designers to design for him, provided materials for evening gowns. (It is a shame that nowadays fashion magazines only rarely credit textile manufacturers.) While most designer-level garments were – and still are – primarily made from natural materials, Stiebel was prepared to experiment with the new synthetic fibres. He participated in various Courtaulds promotional projects using nylon and Orlon (a 60/40 Orlon/silk cloth made by Hurel) and in February 1961, showed a black ball gown in nylon net with a velvet sash at the British Nylon Fair at the Royal Albert Hall. In January 1963, Victor Stiebel explicitly announced to the press that his designs were aimed at, ‘“the not so young” rather than the twisters’ (Western Daily Press, 23 January 1963). In contrast to youth trends that were inching their way up the leg to culminate in the miniskirt, Stiebel’s spring/summer show presented designs with longer hemlines in a palette of sweet-pea shades, which have long been used to flatter mature beauty. He chose the name ‘Muted Trumpet’ to describe his jackets and coats that were gently fitted to a high-buttoned bust. Hats for the collection were designed by leading London milliner Simone Mirman (who had trained with Schiaparelli in Paris and launched her own London business in 1939). From this, his final collection, Victor Stiebel selected and gave to the V&A a white moiré silk wedding dress. Striking for its streamlined simplicity, the back of the dress falls from the shoulders recalling eighteenth-century sack-back styles. The design is shown in a London College of Fashion album and the finished garment complete – 156 –

Victor Stiebel, English Designer with headwear – a soft scarf of organdie knotted peasant style under the chin – was modelled in the Evening Standard (24 January 1963).4 Stiebel retired due to ill health in 1963 – he had suffered from multiple sclerosis since his fifties. Anxious that his 120 staff members should find suitable alternative employ, he was delighted when Hardy Amies took the full complement. Ruing his loss to English fashion, Betty Wilson wrote in Country Life (4 June 1964) that England’s First Eleven had lost their playing captain. During his retirement Stiebel (1968) published an account of his youth in South Africa, but sadly did not document the achievements of his career in fashion. Of London’s remaining ‘Top Ten’ couturiers – with the exceptions of top royal dressmakers Hardy Amies and Norman Hartnell – current dress history lacks insight into the work of Lachasse, John Cavanagh, Mattli, Angele Delànghe, Creed, Michael, Ronald Paterson and Michael Sherard. The same is true of many of the next generation of designers. Names such as Clive, Foale & Tuffin, John Bates and Thea Porter are little known outside fashion circles. If English fashion is to enjoy its merited place in dress history, we must remedy these omissions.

Notes 1. Garconne style gown (V&A) museum reference no. E.1076–1983 and coiled snake gown (E.1077-1983). There are three designs 1934–5: orange beach pyjamas (E.1074-1983), a violet suit (E.1073-1983) and black day dress (E.1072-1983). With thanks to Shaun Cole. 2. V&A reference no: T.58-1942, T.46&A-1942. 3. This dress was featured in Vogue, March 1947 and was donated by Lady Cornwallis to the V&A (T.292-1984). It is also shown in de la Haye (1997). 4. V&A reference no. T.169-1963. Also see de la Haye (1997).

References de la Haye, A. (ed.) (1997), The Cutting Edge: 50 Years of British Fashion, London: Victoria & Albert Museum. Hartnell, N. (1955), Silver and Gold, London: Evans Brothers. Souhami, D. (1988), Gluck 1895–1978: Her Biography, London: Pandora. Stiebel, V. (1968), South African Childhood, London: André Deutsch. – 157 –

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Part III Representing Englishness

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–10 – Vivienne Westwood’s Anglomania Rebecca Arnold

For Vivienne Westwood, fashion has never been simply about the clothes. Her work consists of a continual dialogue with the past, a quest for fashion that can transcend the mundane world that she perceives around her and become an escape route to greater elegance and nobility, and that will always, always draw attention to the wearer. Her vision is utopian; she says of her approach, ‘I would describe it really as a nostalgia for the future’ (Garfield 1998: 6). She has the zeal of a nineteenth-century dress reformer, but rather than advocating simpler, healthier garments, she urges people to wear clothing that is more dramatic, more glamorous, that tells stories of the past. She reconfigures icons of royalty and tradition, to produce outfits that appear to have been made to be worn in splendid interiors or Arcadian landscapes. Her clothes are, above all, never ordinary, they may rely upon images of Englishness for much of their impact, but it is the England of aristocracy and empire, not suburbia and parochialism that inspires her. For Westwood clothing is the key to change, she states: ‘You have a much better life if you wear impressive clothes’ (quoted in Jones 1987: 57). This faith in fashion as personal propaganda for the wearer, demanding that they be judged by the splendour of their self-presentation, leads me to one of the main themes in this examination of Westwood’s designs: the relationship between the visual impact of her work and that of Swagger portraiture. The Swagger portrait combines elements of both English and Mainland European art to produce images of, in Nicholas Serota’s words, ‘bombast, glamour and dressing-up, and not a little unconscious humour’ (Serota 1992: 7). Vivienne Westwood, I shall argue, creates outfits as Grand Manner portraits for her customers and her use of Englishness is not as simple as it seems. I shall focus on her collections from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, a decade that saw her establish and elaborate upon her own design philosophy as distinct from her earlier work with Malcolm McLaren. The style that she developed was encapsulated in the suit, crini and fake ermine cape she made for her autumn/winter 1987–8 Harris Tweed Collection, which displayed her fascination with English and Scottish traditions and fabrics, as a source of both inspiration and parody. It was restated in the mini-kilt tartan ensembles from her autumn/winter 1993–4, Anglomania Collection, in reference to the French

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Rebecca Arnold craze for Englishness during the 1780s (Figure 10.1). This hints at another aspect of my argument: the essential ‘otherness’ of the aristocratic view of Englishness that Westwood so often draws upon. For most English people the uniforms of empire that she conjures with in her designs are completely remote from their own experience. In the catalogue to accompany the Tate Gallery’s 1992 exhibition, The Swagger Portrait, Grand Manner Portraiture in Britain from Van Dyke to Augustus John, 1630–1930, Andrew Wilton states: ‘Swagger’ implies a degree of self-consciousness on the part of the artist, if not the sitter (though often the two will coincide), which causes the portrait to transcend the private statement (in which the sitter communes with a single viewer), and address itself to the public at large. There is therefore an element of rhetoric in it, even of challenge – the ‘insolence’ that was always inherent in the meaning of the word. That challenge can often be erotic: swagger nearly always demands sex appeal. It is in its element in the theatre, and the interrelationship between theatrical and other kinds of ostentatious portraiture is an important facet of the subject. (Wilton 1992: 17)

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 10.1 Vivienne Westwood, Anglomania Collection, autumn/winter 1993–4. (Courtesy of Vivienne Westwood)

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Vivienne Westwood’s Anglomania It was Van Dyck who crystallized the style in England, creating portraits, like that of Lord John Stuart and his brother Lord Bernard Stuart, c.1639, which revel in the drama of rich drapery that enhances the figure and flamboyant gesture, depicting the sitters as stars rather than mere mortals. Swagger portraits combine the symbolism of formal portraiture with bravado, showing not only the sitter’s actual status, but also their aspirations and desire to be seen and admired. Van Dyck’s influence overrode natural English reluctance to dwell upon display and sensuality. His portraits demand grand country houses as a setting and relate to the fantasy and theatricality of Inigo Jones’s contemporary court masquerades, focusing upon the impact of gesture and expression in combination with eye-catching dress. Vivienne Westwood’s designs show very similar concerns, appropriating the mythologies and symbolism of the English aristocracy to create clothing that affects the way the wearer feels about their body, constructing often complex designs that produce a very different relationship between fabric and flesh from most latetwentieth-century fashions. In 1990 she commented: What I’m not trying to do with my clothes is to make a kind of shell that stays in place half an inch away from the body. My clothes are dynamic. They pull and they push and they slightly fall off. There’s more to clothes than just comfort. Even if they’re not quite comfortable and slip and have to be readjusted now and again I don’t mind, because that’s some sort of display and gesture that belongs with the clothes. (quoted in Howell 1990: 32)

Like the Swagger portrait, it is the overall impact that is important, in both cases the image has propaganda value, speaking as it does of the wearer’s/sitter’s importance which appears undeniable given the grandeur of their appearance. They demand public attention, just as Van Dyck’s portraits require a large and splendid venue to accommodate their glamour, so Vivienne Westwood’s clothes always seem grander than the occasion. Her clothes are (as I have said) more than fashion, for her they represent a range of historical, cultural and artistic ideals, that are transmitted to those who see her designs, as well as vouching for the wearer’s intelligence and discernment. Her Café Society Collection of spring/summer 1994 included a lavish silk gown (Figure 10.2). Its style may have owed more to the eighteenth than to the seventeenth century, but the brilliance of the golden yellow fabric, and the billowing drapery that emboldened the figure and dazzled the onlooker, bore more than a passing resemblance to the young men in Van Dyck’s portrait’s carefully swathed silhouettes and recalled other seventeenth-century artists like Dobson’s and Lely’s dramatic use of colour and fabric. Westwood, like them, creates heroic images, bodies are displayed in the grand manner, ennobled and made into stars by the sheer power of their visual impact. She has hijacked aristocratic emblems,

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Rebecca Arnold

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Figure 10.2 Vivienne Westwood, Café Society Collection, spring/summer 1994. (Courtesy of Vivienne Westwood)

disregarding social hierarchies and the etiquette of dress to produce living Swagger portraits, wrapping the wearer in fantasy and nostalgia. It is notable though that much of the work under discussion was designed during the recession of the early 1990s, reinforcing Kevin Tester’s assertion that nostalgia, ‘revolves around a desire for something absent’ (Tester 1993: 65). Westwood’s continual return to the past to search for cultural ideals of elegant taste, luxury and artistic refinement that she feels are lacking in late-twentiethcentury England was evoked in the ‘Gainsborough’ blouse from her autumn/winter 1992–3 Always on Camera Collection. The sheer fabric was bunched in heavy layers around the neckline, with deep flounces falling across the shoulders and down the front of the blouse into a deep point. The edges of the frills were left unhemmed, stray, wispy threads mimicked the hazy outlines produced by Gainsborough’s light brushstrokes in his double portrait of Mr and Mrs Hallett (The Morning Walk) of 1785. The blouse pays homage to the fashions of the 1780s, and also to the vision of Englishness that Gainsborough idealized in his paintings. It is a world of tranquillity, where elegant aristocrats promenade in the dappled light of summer landscapes, where nature has been tamed to create pastoral vistas – 164 –

Vivienne Westwood’s Anglomania of rolling fields and swaying trees. This portrait, while informal in style, retains the impact of a society painting, the artist’s restraint tempering the swagger of the overall effect. Once again, Westwood is inspired by the idealized glamour of portraiture, seeking to imbue her blouse with the history of art, of dress and of social class. Westwood’s sentiment for the English countryside is matched by her love of traditional fabrics. The obvious swagger of a tartan ensemble from autumn/winter 1994–5’s On Liberty Collection paraded many of her design concerns. Its bright red cloth drew attention to the intricate tailoring of both the jacket, complete with nineteenth-century puffs at the shoulder, and the asymmetry of the dress’s hem. It also served to emphasize the neatly padded bustle strapped across the model’s bottom. The outfit clearly demonstrates her attachment to the idea of ‘dressingup’, masquerading in your clothes, defying the social or cultural status that may have been allotted to you and re-forming your body in clothes that aspire to create a new culture. Just like the subcultural clothing that made Westwood famous in the 1970s, her clothing since 1985 comprises emblems of an ‘imagined’ culture, which as she says, uses the past to look to the future. Her designs are for a culture that no longer exists, in fact, one that never really existed except in the portraiture that inspires her. Her designs demand a present that is as dramatic and purposeful as that inhabited by, for example, MacDonnell of Glengarry, painted by Raeburn in the late eighteenth century, in what was itself a wistful mythology of Scottish identity. For Westwood, women can cut just such a dashing and heroic figure as men, in clothes that are just as much about constructing an idealized, theatricalized femininity as they are about representing national identity. She says of the models she uses: ‘I like them to look like goddesses or monsters, I’m not sure which. I like to idealize women but perhaps it is the monster that I’m idealizing’ (quoted in Gerrard 1995: 16). The mini-crini of spring/summer 1986 played with ideas of heightened femininity by framing the body in a swaying bell-shaped skirt – a flirtatiously abbreviated version of the mid-nineteenth-century crinoline. One example of the mini-crini was photographed for The Face in September 1987, its claret velvet and corseted bodice adding to the lushness of the image. The model appeared childlike in her ringlets and cross-laced shoes, yet provocative and knowing, her lips smeared with red lipstick, a crimson, imprinted kiss on her uplifted bosom. Her clothes seemed to pull apart on her body, the sensuality of the model’s exposed flesh revealed the latent eroticism of Victorian dress. As Westwood said in 1987, ‘I’m never happier than when I’m parodying the English’ (quoted in Mulvagh 1998: 195) and it is English taboos surrounding sex, nudity and morality that she enjoys challenging most. By blending garments and eras that are seemingly so incongruous, in this case miniskirt, corset and crinoline, she creates clothes that are visually jarring, bringing together familiar elements – 165 –

Rebecca Arnold seen in countless other images, yet fracturing their usual meanings by placing them in a new context. She seems to want not only to re-create the visual impact of historical dress but also to recapture the sensation she felt when she first tried on high heels when she was 14, and felt like a ‘real’ woman for the first time. Jane Mulvagh wrote of Westwood’s exploration of the power of overtly feminine dress: ‘Vivienne took this sensual preoccupation of women designers and inverted it. Her abiding design signature became the physical restriction of a woman’s body. This, she calculated, would arouse the wearer’s sense of sexuality and theatricality’ (Mulvagh 1998: 104). Rather than taking her knowledge of what clothing feels like when it is worn and using it to create more functional fashions as some women designers have done, Westwood wants to experiment, to make women more, not less aware of their bodies. Her desire to experience, inhabit and feel different types of clothing is an important driving force in her design. She wants to try on different historical periods, other cultures, traditions, to enter a new narrative, a fresh persona with each outfit. She says: ‘Life is an adventure, so I make clothes to have adventures in . . They give you power over rich people, because you can look more chic than they ever can’ (quoted in Mulvagh 1998:139). Westwood’s fascination with the aristocracy was crystallized in her Harris Tweed Collection of autumn/winter 1987–8. The traditional fabric that the collection was named after spoke of generations of country living, its rich colours evoked mosstoned landscapes, and cocooned the wearer in authentic English elitism (despite its Scottish origins). Westwood’s use of the fabric extended to little princess line coats that mimicked those worn by the Queen as a child. As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the collection also included fake ermine capes and even Harris tweed crowns made from offcuts. Westwood’s adoption of this fabric demonstrated her affection for traditional dress and the ideals of elitism that she felt it embodied. However, it is not contemporary aristocrats that she favours, since in her words, the ‘English aristocracy is only the middle-class with knobs on’ (Frankel 1997). It is rather an idealized vision of aristocrats of the past, whom she believes paid more attention to patronizing the arts, to developing visual culture and literature. Her ambiguous feelings towards the establishment are apparent in the irreverence with which she evokes both royalty and the upper classes, using emblems of their status for clothing to be worn by clubbers and fashion victims, anyone who wishes to appropriate tradition to gain attention. As Caroline Evans and Minna Thornton said of such designs: To identify with the Queen is presumptuous; to dress up like her is to forget your place. The fact that the Queen’s clothes have traditionally been reviled in the fashion world as lacking in style and sex appeal also marks them out as yet more fertile ground for

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Vivienne Westwood’s Anglomania Westwood’s strategic play on the interrelated themes of Englishness and class. (Evans and Thornton 1989: 154)

While stealing the status symbolism and gravitas of the establishment’s dress codes and adapting them to her own ends, Westwood is consistently refusing the class exclusivity that is also inherent in their design. She is also exposing the snobbery of not only the English upper classes, but also the fashion industry, which spent much of the late 1980s revelling in traditional status symbolism from the classic white shirt to more obvious emblems like Hérmès scarves and Chanel logos. These were valued, at least in part, for their legitimate and unassailable connotations of class and wealth. They also had French chic to recommend them. During this period of Thatcherism, such conservative clothing became a vital sign of financial success; Westwood, with tongue firmly in cheek, went a dress code further though, and dressed as the Queen. Westwood’s nostalgia for a mythical cultured elite provides a critique of the upper classes and also of the idea that the images of royalty and aristocracy that are routinely paraded as symbols of English national identity could ever adequately summarize the cultural diversity that exists in this country. Westwood exposes the lie of a coherent single definition of Englishness, and highlights the fact that most English people are outside this rarefied world, by examining and parodying its dress and etiquette. She wilfully transgresses fixed ideas of the gender, class, ethnicity and sexuality that the Establishment stands for and shows up both formal and informal uniforms as theatre, as clothes for masquerading assumed power and dominance. In her Harris Tweed Collection she used barathea wool cloth, this so-called hunting ‘pink’ evoked images of both countryside and the military in neat two-piece suits with black velvet Peter Pan collars and brass buttons fastening up the back of the jacket. She turned the masculine bravado of this traditional material into a demure, feminine outfit that aped the sober styles worn by the present Queen. In autumn/winter 1992–3 a similar theme was developed. This time it was shooting and fishing rather than hunting that was evoked in a tailored two-piece women’s suit. The exaggeration of the catwalk model’s accessories, with shotgun accompanied by leopard skin hat and platform boots exposed the absurdity and formality of the social etiquette that surrounds such aristocratic dress and lifestyle, and the arbitrary notions of appropriateness that underpin so many social uniforms. Pam Cook (1996), in her book Fashioning the Nation: Costume and Identity in British Cinema, discusses the difficulties of representations of supposedly stable visions of Englishness. She writes: Indeed, internal ethnic divisions always threaten to unpick the fraying seams of national unity. ‘Home’, in the sense of a tranquil, safe place, becomes an ever-receding object,

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Rebecca Arnold swiftly turning into its opposite, the locus of uncertainty and anomie. Freud’s notion of the uncanny, the twinning of the heimlich and unheimlich, is revelatory here, for the safety of the home (heim) is inseparable from its strangeness (Freud 1990). The place to which we belong is also foreign to us. (Cook 1996: 3)

By reconfiguring dress and imagery that is so familiar to us from history and art, Westwood confronts the onlooker with the conflicting feelings of both security in English heritage and yet an uneasy sense of alienation from the very symbols that supposedly summarize English national identity. The aristocratic and royal identities that we are invited to dress up in represent ‘home’, yet also ‘another country’, they are ‘other’, ‘exotic’, removed from the majority of people’s dayto-day existence. She encourages people to masquerade in dress that would otherwise be out of their reach, sometimes because of the cost, but also, significantly, because of their social status. By placing such clothing in a new context it can become visually jarring, incongruous. Her clothes stand for Englishness, yet illuminate the fissures in English culture, the exclusions because of class, wealth, gender, ethnicity that are part of English identity too. Westwood uses her clothes to teach about elitism, art, culture. But where is this artistic culture? When did this fantasy of dilettantes living for art and enlightenment really exist? Largely, it must be said, within the idealized confines of portraiture, but that in a way is the point, Westwood is not accurately replicating English history, but rather reinventing it to create an idealized form of utopian dress. Some may still yearn for a coherent, collective sense of self, but national identity is a complex and fluid construct that can never be easily defined. This is perhaps one of the reasons why until the late 1980s Westwood’s work was covered more extensively by overseas rather than the domestic press. Since its representations of Englishness are perhaps easier to perceive from the outside than from within, where its exploration and transgression of cultural identity is too close to home. Westwood also revisits her own past in her designs. In the aptly named Time Machine Collection of autumn/winter 1988–9 she made sharply tailored doublebreasted suits with bondage trousers that harked back to her punk days in the mid-1970s, when her World’s End shop was known as Seditionaries (Figures 10.3 and 10.4). Punk enabled Westwood to explore the transformative possibilities of dress. It gave her a means of expression, but also a route out of suburbia. When Jane Mulvagh interviewed Suzy Menkes in 1996, she described the subculture as ‘the great letting go of England. Vivienne’s England, the England she was reacting against, was that of Macmillan: the meanness, the end of empire, the end of austerity’ (quoted in Mulvagh 1998: 131). Its anti-establishment stance struck at the heart of middle-class English morality, and gave Westwood the opportunity really to exploit the power of visual revolt. As Simon Garfield wrote of the period in his 1998 profile of the designer, ‘to see her dancing at the side of the stage

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Vivienne Westwood’s Anglomania

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Figure 10.3 Vivienne Westwood, Time Machine Collection, autumn/ winter 1988–9. (Courtesy of Vivienne Westwood)

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 10.4 Vivienne Westwood, Time Machine Collection, detail. (Courtesty of Vivienne Westwood)

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Rebecca Arnold while Johnny Rotten wore her ripwear – it was obvious she had waited all her life to be set free like this’ (Garfield 1998: 6). Westwood thought that punk could demolish the claustrophobic social hierarchies that dominate England but instead it became yet another emblem of Englishness, its power defused by mainstream appropriation. Her work since 1985 has seen her seek more legitimate status as a fashion designer by adapting aristocratic icons to her own purposes, rather than directly challenging it. In 1987 she said of this shift in emphasis, ‘Dressed like this . . . you look like you’ve got power and culture . . . It’s a move away from middle-class bourgeois dressing, but it’s also a move away from the underground . . . There’s no status in it’ (quoted in Jones 1987: 57). She had learnt from experience that subcultural dress may generate attention but, in England, it will rarely gain you legitimate social standing. Since the mid-1980s, Westwood’s search for this status has led her to explore the traditions of English tailoring, seeking to construct clothes loaded with cultural value. In her ‘Time Machine’ Collection of autumn/winter 1988–9 the spectator was invited to appreciate the fine Harris tweed wool and the echoes of London’s heritage as a centre for male and female suiting since the late seventeenth century. The tweed suits sought to link their wearers to a rich history of craft skills, setting them within the broader framework of dress history, rather than trying to present themselves only as products of the late twentieth century. Her clothes are part of a continuum, referring back to Savile Row and London couturiers like Digby Morton and Hardy Amies. Westwood’s designs therefore relate to Kaja Silverman’s comment about the effect of wearing vintage clothes: ‘It [vintage clothing] is thus a highly visible way of acknowledging that its wearer’s identity has been shaped by representational activity, and that no cultural project can ever “start from zero”’ (Silverman 1986: 151). This collection was the second in a series of five collections stretching from Pagan I, in spring/summer 1988, through Time Machine, Civilizade, Voyage to Cythera and finally, Pagan V of spring/summer 1990, which were placed under the broad title ‘Britain Must Go Pagan’. In these Westwood set out her visual manifesto for a new, improved national culture. It should be noted, though, that it was not just English history that she plundered in her search for images, construction techniques and fabrics that would evoke her own version of Cythera. She looked to a variety of models including ancient Greece and Rome (hence the chiffon togas that she added to the Harris tweed suits for men and women in Time Machine), the Italian Renaissance and eighteenth-century France, anywhere that she perceived the forms of elitist, enlightened, artistic culture that she wished to escape to through her clothes. Westwood has long acknowledged her fascination with French art and fashion as a source for her meticulously researched collections. In ‘Cut, Slash & Pull’ of spring/summer 1991, she printed the authentic form of a late-eighteenth-century – 170 –

Vivienne Westwood’s Anglomania corset with the image of a Boucher painting, fusing modern technologies of photographic prints, fake plastic whalebone and lycra stretch fabric with rococo sensuality. In an interview in 1996 for the Victoria & Albert Museum’s exhibition The Cutting Edge: 50 Years of British Fashion, Westwood responded to the question ‘Do you draw on British identity?’ by saying, ‘Fashion as we know it is the result of the exchange of ideas between France and England’ (quoted in de la Haye 1996: 198). It is this exchange of ideas that is kept alive in her clothes; they are both English and continental. This resonates once again with the Swagger portrait. Wilton states: ‘We can interpret the whole genre in terms of foreign influence and native imitation, variation and deviation’ (Wilton 1992: 12). French influences are absorbed and integrated into her strategy for a future culture built on the past. She projects her love of history and frustration with the late twentieth century onto clothes that are fantasies of aristocratic distinction, historical models that, like her 1991 ‘Dangerous Liaisons’ jacket, whose etiolated cut, rich silk ground and painted floral borders cross boundaries of gender and national identity. They refer to joint traditions in eighteenth-century French and English menswear, transferred to the body of 1990s woman. Westwood’s work hints at the complexities of national culture, which constantly shifts, soaking up foreign influences and remaking icons of the past. Pam Cook’s (1996) discussion of national identity is again helpful in this context: My primary metaphor is one of travel, through and between different identities in a constant movement of exile and return which must transform the notion of homeland. As travellers, we cross boundaries and, through identification with other cultures, acquire a sense of ourselves as something more than national subjects. This may smack of cultural tourism – but what is culture, after all, if not a collection of souvenirs. (Cook 1996: 4)

The souvenirs that Westwood collects together in her designs immerse the wearer in narratives of history, art and culture, altering their figures, gesture and sense of self. This is equitable with Cook’s discussion of the experience of watching a film: we are taken up with new characters, absorbed in often familiar yet somehow new stories and lives. We are then returned to our everyday existence once we leave the cinema, altered by having ‘lived’ in another character’s world for the film’s duration. Perhaps by dressing up in Westwood’s clothes the wearer may enter the narrative of national identity; caught up in another persona that at first evokes a simple vision of aristocratic Englishness, morality and display, that adds to and alters the relationship between body and fabric. Yet Westwood’s anglomania in fact reveals the fissures and frictions of any notion of national identity, exposing frictions of class and culture. Westwood is obsessed by, but constantly fighting against Englishness.

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Rebecca Arnold

Acknowledgement The author would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Board for support she received as part of the Fashion and Modernity Research Group at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design for helping to fund the research of this chapter.

References Cook, P. (1996), Fashioning the Nation: Costume and Identity in British Cinema, London: British Film Institute. De La Haye, A. (ed.), (1996), The Cutting Edge: 50 Years of British Fashion, London: Victoria & Albert Museum. Evans, C. and Thornton, M. (1989), Women and Fashion: A New Look, London: Quartet. Frankel, S. (1997), ‘Tweed Coat, No Knickers’, Guardian (Weekend) 22 February. Freud, S. (1990), ‘“The Uncanny” (1919)’, in Pelican Freud Library, vol. 14, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Garfield, S. (1998), ‘The Guardian Profile: Vivienne Westwood, The Faith that Launched a Thousand Zips’, Guardian (Saturday Review), 15 August. Gerrard, N. (1995), ‘Vivienne Westwood Knows Women’, The Independent (Life Section), 22 January. Howell, G. (1990), Sultans of Style: 30 Years of Fashion and Passion 1960–1990, London: Ebury. Jones, D. (1987), ‘Royal Flush: Vivienne Westwood’, i-D, August. Mulvagh, J. (1998), Vivienne Westwood: An Unfashionable Life, London: HarperCollins. Serota, N. (1992), ‘Foreword’, in A. Wilton, The Swagger Portrait, Grand Manner Portraiture in Britain from Van Dyke to Augustus John, 1630–1930, London: Tate Gallery. Silverman, K. (1986), ‘Fragments of a Fashionable Discourse’, in T. Modledski (ed.), Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Tester, K. (1993), The Life and Times of Post-modernity, London: Routledge. Wilton, A. (1992), The Swagger Portrait, Grand Manner Portraiture in Britain from Van Dyke to Augustus John, 1630–1930, London: Tate Gallery.

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–11– English-style Photography? Penny Martin

In May 1997, the editor-in-chief of American Vogue magazine, Anna Wintour, gave a presentation to the Women In Journalism meeting in London. Wintour, who had been editor-in-chief of British Vogue from 1986 to 1987, had been asked to discuss the difference between magazines production in the USA and the United Kingdom. She suggested that ‘market considerations on each side of the Atlantic have led to different systems’, where English and American fashion editors approach the production of fashion images in different ways. Whereas in England, she said, fashion editors ‘did everything except press the button on the camera’, in the USA, ‘the opportunity for a creative or personal approach is relatively limited’ (Wintour 1997: 7). What is interesting about Wintour’s comparison of the British and American versions of Vogue is that she identified the production of fashion imagery, and particularly the role of the fashion editor, as key to unpacking the style and national identity of each magazine. Given her audience of journalists, it is understandable that she discussed the construction of fashion stories at American and British Vogue in terms of the working cultures at each publishing institution, the fashion journalists responsible for coordinating the shoots and the market viability of their contrasting strategies. The British fashion journalist often sees herself as an artist or a craftsman. Her work is very hands-on, she cares a lot about originality and less about readers or advertisers . . . the New York editor, on the other hand . . . works in a tightly coordinated and organized system which leaves less scope for her individuality. (Wintour 1997: 7)

The difference between English and American fashion photography, Wintour implied, lies in the level of autonomy delegated by magazine publishers to stylists to construct the content of the shoot. ‘This somewhat corporate manner of fashion editing isn’t due to any lack of creativity on the part of American editors’, she said, ‘rather, it’s dictated by the enormous size of the American market’ (Wintour 1997: 7). From this notion that the bigger the magazine market and associated advertising revenue, the less room there is for experimental photography, it follows that editors – 173 –

Penny Martin at English magazines, with much smaller circulation and readership figures, permit greater levels of autonomy and creativity to fashion photographers. Yet, at no point during Wintour’s presentation was it clarified exactly what was meant by creativity and experimentation in English magazines and how this ostensible freedom was manifested in the images they publish. By omitting any discussion of the images produced, Wintour failed to mention the crucial factor that separates the two national magazine systems: how the appearance of their product reflects the creative system that produces it. One of the most influential conceptions of nationhood is Benedict Anderson’s notion of the ‘imagined community’. In his 1983 book Imagined Communities, Anderson argued that nations are bound together by shared mental images rather than actual experiences of nationhood and that the difference between each national community therefore lies in the way it is imagined. Whether representations of Englishness are accurate or genuine is therefore immaterial. Of crucial importance is the way these images are used discursively to inform our conception of ourselves and sense of national belonging. According to Stuart Hall, ‘we only know what it is to be “English” because of the way “Englishness” has come to be represented, as a set of meanings, by English national culture’ (Hall 1992: 292). However, as Anna Wintour’s comparison of American and English approaches to fashion photography suggests, the nation as a system of cultural representation competes with other discourses. In her analogy, Englishness competes against fashion photography and capitalism, both of which use their own representational strategies to win identification among target audiences, ultimately, to guarantee sales. In this sense, consumers of fashion imagery are equally an imagined community. In this chapter, I shall examine two specific moments during the second half of the twentieth century when the competing discourses of Englishness and fashion photography impacted upon each other: the 1950s/early 1960s and the 1990s, both periods when England was regarded as important in the production of fashion imagery. In recognition of the fact that London continues to dominate the production of British fashion imagery, and of the paucity of practitioners originating from Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and even northern England, I focus on English practitioners and centres of practice. Using Hall’s question ‘what are the representations of . . . “England” which win the identifications and define the identities of “English” people?’ (Hall 1992: 293), I shall demonstrate how English fashion imagery has developed away from explicit references to recognizable symbols of England in its representation of Englishness. Nationalism in fashion photography, I shall argue, exists not in the images themselves, but in the discursive ways they are used by the fashion publishing industry. In the first section of the chapter, I examine how the work of English fashion photographers, including Norman Parkinson and John Cowan, was used to sustain – 174 –

English-style Photography? a sense of belonging and security by English centres of production including British Vogue and the Queen. In the latter section, I shall consider how a group of ‘oppositional’ practitioners, born out of new centres of production such as The Face and i-D magazines of the 1980s, subverted the traditional tropes of fashion photography and used a revised conception of reality to communicate themes of isolation and dislocation in their images of English life. Concentrating on the imagery of the English photographer Jason Evans (Travis) and the publication i-D, I explore the impact of globalism on their practice, and how Englishness has been superseded by other imagined communities in recent British fashion publishing. There is continuity in the English fashion photography reproduced since the 1950s created in part by the strict parameters of the commissioning brief. The key objective of publishing detailed images of models wearing fashionable garments has remained central to the economic health of women’s fashion magazines since they were first able to reproduce photographs using the halftone printing process introduced in the 1890s. As the magazine historian Brian Braithwaite and sociologist Ellen McCracken have observed, few magazines make a profit from their cover prices alone and therefore rely heavily on advertising revenue (Braithwaite and Barrell 1988: 30; McCracken 1992: 14). The sale of advertising space is based on tacit, reciprocal agreements that, in addition to publishing a company’s explicit adverts, editors will include covert advertisements – recognizable representations of the company’s merchandise – in their editorial photography (McCracken 1992: 38–9). Not only does this requirement restrict the fashion photographer’s choice of garments, accessories and cosmetics, but also in most cases this expectation shapes the narrative of advertising and editorial photography by pressurizing photographers to represent merchandise in an unequivocally positive light, free from ambiguity or social comment. However, as I shall argue, fashion photography’s engagement with issue-based aesthetics in the 1990s revisited opportunities for provocative and expressive work suggested in British photography of the late 1950s, both in recent editorial work and also in strictly controlled advertising campaigns such as those for Calvin Klein. In a highly circular system of production, ostensibly ‘anti-fashion’ photography was used by the fashion industry as a currency to promote the very fashion industry photographers sought to critique in these fashion images. As Anna Wintour’s (1997) account of the industry suggests, innovations in fashion photography must therefore be read in relation to the narrow space permitted for interpretation and individuality by commercial determinants outside the magazines themselves. This sense of continuity and repetition in fashion photography has parity with the representation of Englishness, which Stuart Hall (1992) asserts, is told and retold in national histories, literatures, the media and popular culture. These provide a set of stories, images, landscapes, scenarios, historical events, national symbols

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Penny Martin and rituals which stand for, or represent, the shared experiences . . . which give meaning to the nation. (Hall 1992: 293)

Photography has an especially powerful role in this discourse because it creates the mental images that are held in England’s collective imagination. As the photohistorian John Taylor (1994) argues, continuity in the representation of Englishness ‘centres on the idea of a stable England, despite all the evidence pointing towards the idea that the nation is fractured and potentially unstable. At the same time, even the imagined stability of the country cannot be taken for granted, and has to be remade constantly’ (Taylor 1994: 5).

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 11.1 Norman Parkinson, ‘Hobnails Inn, Little Washbourne’, 1951. Published in Raymond Mortimer (1951) ‘Quality and England’, British Vogue, February: 48–63. (Courtesy of the Norman Parkinson Estate)

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English-style Photography? Figure 11.1, an image by Norman Parkinson from the ‘Quality and England’ fashion story by Raymond Mortimer in the February 1951 issue of British Vogue, illustrates the tension created when the discourses of fashion photography and Englishness meet (Mortimer 1951: 54). Entitled ‘Hobnails Inn’, the image features Parkinson’s wife, the model Wenda Parkinson, sitting in a pub near where the couple lived in Little Washbourne, Worcestershire. The narrative is constructed using a standard trope of the picturesque tradition: modernity juxtaposed with history, here symbolized by signifiers of rural England. The evidence of a simple, English, country life surrounds the model, from the hunting scene above her, the shove ha’penny game on the oak trestle table, the local ‘rustic’ in flat cap and boots, with whom she sits, to the pewter mug from which he drinks. She too is styled to represent Englishness, dressed in the archetypal English leisurewear of the period – a twinset designed by Women’s Home Industries and a string of pearls. Yet her crisply set hair, her elegant pose, the smooth texture of her clothing and the whiteness of her skin are intended to set her apart from the man next to her, in terms of the class, period and the urban background from which she originates. Although the shove ha’penny game appears to be in play, there is no interaction between their bodies. The frontal composition of the image sets the figures in shallow space behind the table, accentuating the rigidity of her body. As the man raises his pint in a gesture of rural hospitality, she defiantly stares at the camera, as if to proclaim her urban sophistication. Possibly assigned by a copywriter or by Mortimer, the title of the shoot, ‘Quality and England’, enforced this appearance of class difference, which was underscored by the caption text: ‘The scene: a village pub. The theme: poise, dignity, the respect of person for person and class for class’ (Mortimer 1951: 54). A gentle, ‘respectable’ portrayal of two different visions of Englishness, the image conflates nostalgia for the past with a knowing appreciation of contemporary fashionability. Parkinson took this image at the end of a decade of working for British Vogue, for which he created a body of work concerned with rural England. In 1949, he first visited New York and he would continue to make annual visits there throughout the 1950s, when the city was at the centre of the production of fashion photography. The photohistorian Martin Harrison (1991) locates a profound shift in Parkinson’s treatment of Englishness during this period. Whereas during the 1940s, the photographer ‘identified a specifically English pastoral, the offshoot of 1930s neoromanticism, a yearning for the rural idyll that the war had increased’, Harrison contends that ‘the American experience . . . entailed the sacrifice of specifically English qualities which had informed his most individual work’ (Harrison 1991: 197). Yet, in the catalogue that accompanied his retrospective exhibition Lifework, Parkinson (1983) described how working in colour in 1947 introduced an exciting new visual vocabulary whose appearance he associated with American fashion photography. ‘I scanned the plush pages of American Vogue and Harper’s; – 177 –

Penny Martin beautifully lit and reproduced full pages . . . in “glorious color” – such a lift to be enjoyed by contrast to drab London in the full grip of rationing’ (Parkinson 1983: 54). Viewed from this perspective, rather than stripping his images of English sentimentality, Norman Parkinson’s work in New York for Alexander Liberman, produced between 1949 and 1952, demonstrated the photographer willingly distancing himself from his explicitly English, black and white imagery. In contrast, the vivid, often abstract, Modernist fashion photographs he produced for American Vogue celebrated the new color medium and the overtly commercial world in which he worked. However, national identity was often an important feature of an international fashion photographer’s professional reputation and Norman Parkinson exploited his Englishness to obtain commissions. Described as a ‘mustachioed British dandy’ by Michael Gross (1995) in his blockbuster exposé on modelling, Parkinson played to the stereotype of the eccentric, even colonial, English gentleman. ‘At six feet five inches, topped by a Kashmiri bridal cap on a balding head’, Gross stated that ‘Parkinson dressed for excess in caftans and gold jewellery or a decades-old vanilla be-spoke suit made for him by the British tailor Tommy Nutter’ (Gross 1995: 188). In 1991, Harrison wrote that in Britain, ‘before 1960 there were only two fashion photographers of more than moderate significance’ – Parkinson and Cecil Beaton (Harrison 1991: 198). This is an oversimplification. English practitioners such as Madame Yevonde, John French and Richard Dormer were also highly influential producers of fashion imagery during this period. Yet, as Harrison states, Bill Brandt was the only English photographer with an international profile (Harrison 1991: 198). This apparent lack of gifted English practitioners owed mainly to the scale of London’s fashion publishing system, which was tiny in comparison with those in Paris and New York. Throughout the 1950s, the French and American systems provided the models and photographers for the majority of English shoots. London had only a few model agencies for photographers to choose from, none of which rivalled major firms such as Ford in New York or Dorian Leigh in Paris. British Vogue continued to supplement its images by English photographers with those imported from American and French Vogue throughout the 1950s, resistant to the new talent emerging in Britain. In his book Young Meteors, Harrison (1998) modified his view on pre-1960s fashion photographers in his re-evaluation of the work of a group of young, British photographers working between 1957 and 1965, whom, in a reference to Jonathan Aitken’s (1967) book of the same title, Harrison calls the ‘Young Meteors’. Grouping together practitioners including Don McCullin, Phillip Jones Griffiths, John Bulmer, Roger Mayne, Terence Donovan and David Bailey, Harrison recontextualized a body of innovative work linked less by a common pictorial style or political agenda than the types of publications for which they were – 178 –

English-style Photography? produced. ‘The Meteors were interconnected’, he contends, ‘as colleagues seeking assignments within a specific sector of magazine culture’ (Harrison 1998: 7). Following the closure of Picture Post in 1957 and prior to the launch of the Sunday Times colour section in 1962, the Meteors sought commissions from newspapers including the Daily Express, Daily Mail and the Observer and fashion magazines such as the Queen, Town and British Vogue (Harrison 1998: 52). Newspapers and Jocelyn Stevens’s revamped Queen magazine were a more natural setting for the Meteors’ issue-based work than traditional fashion magazines such as Vogue (Harrison 1998: 52–6). The writer describes how Vogue required direction from these photographers when attempting to document youth trends and quotes the photographer Roger Mayne explaining how in 1959, he dissuaded the magazine from covering outmoded fashions. ‘They had originally suggested an essay on Teddy Boys, but it was explained to them that Teenagers were the latest thing’ (Harrison 1998: 37). In this sense, it was the Meteors’ access to and connection with youth culture, rather than the visual appearance of their imagery, that made them valuable to mainstream fashion publishing. The launch of the Observer Magazine and Weekend Telegraph Magazine in 1964 marked these newspapers’ attempt to capitalize on the potential profits offered by full-colour advertising printed in fashion magazines. This created a debate about the increasing similarity and physical proximity of advertising and editorial photography which forced a chasm between photographers engaged in reportage or advertising. The former group of practitioners, to which most of the Meteors belonged, Harrison refers to as ‘photojournalists’. The latter, specifically David Bailey and Terence Donovan, who went on to specialize in fashion photography, he terms ‘the style photographers’ (Harrison 1998: 7). Harrison claims that these distinctions were irrelevant to the photographers. However, by disassociating photojournalism from style and fashion, the Meteors’ crucial role in integrating youth culture and street fashions into mainstream fashion in the late 1950s and early 1960s has been denied, and the style photographers David Bailey and Terence Donovan have consequently been credited with pioneering the entire transition (Harrison 1998: 7). The perpetuation of this distinction in photohistory has contested the continued use of the Meteors’ often confrontational, issue-based subject matter, particularly in the work published in punk and subcultural magazines introduced at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s. In addition, this categorization has profoundly affected the historiography of this period of fashion photography, creating the belief that Britain produced no significant fashion photographers before Bailey and Donovan. Crucially, it has led to the narrow definition of fashion photography articulated by Nancy NewhallDuncan (1979) in the first book devoted solely to the field, The History of Fashion Photography: – 179 –

Penny Martin The fashion photograph’s primary concern with the style of dress rather than the sitter or the setting is what distinguishes it from other types of photography . . . the success of a fashion photograph depends not only on the desirability of the clothing but on our willingness to believe in and identify with the subject. Once workaday reality intrudes, the potency of the idealization is lessened. (Newhall-Duncan 1979: 9–10)

One of the photographers who successfully incorporated the ‘workaday’ sensibilities of reportage photography into normative fashion imagery was John Cowan. As Englishness became a fashionable system of idealization during the first half of the 1960s, Cowan was able to depict everyday English settings and use ordinary London girls as models because they were recognizable elements of English national culture. Regarding photography as a social passport, Cowan taught himself to use a camera to gain entry into the world of society photography. He personified what Newhall-Duncan (1979) termed the ‘photographer-hero’ of the 1960s, quickly cultivating a reputation among fashion editors as a daredevil, with a penchant for exotic clothing, women and fast cars. Cowan incorporated these interests into the content and style of his imagery, which centred on the portrayal of ‘daring’ young women in urban England. In his first substantial magazine feature for the Queen in 1962, titled ‘Monumental Ideas about Dressing’, Cowan used statues and monuments, the symbols that Stuart Hall argues give meaning to nationhood, to create a self-consciously English narrative (Hall 1992: 293). Not only did England provide the setting, in this image of his girlfriend Jill Kennington posing next to a statue of a dragon and a shield bearing the St George’s cross in a London street (Figure 11.2), but also Englishness was enlisted in what was fashionable. Combining Parkinson’s juxtaposition of history with modernity and the Meteors’ graphic compositions and vigorous use of space, Cowan injected the standard conventions of fashion photography with a level of dynamism that almost detracted from the garments rendered. Though Cowan’s charm and passion endeared him to the Queen’s editor Beatrix Miller, she said she ‘wouldn’t call him a fashion photographer, though he photographed clothes and girls. Fashion was secondary’ (quoted Garner 1999: 12). The belief that photographic experimentation was damaging the representation of fashion was voiced by an article published in Time magazine in 1964 that claimed fashion design was ‘being downgraded to mere props for far-out fashion photography’ (Newhall-Duncan 1979: 180). Cowan’s interest in capturing arresting shots of the body in motion at the expense of close-up details of clothing meant that he earned few magazine commissions. Like the Meteors, the majority of Cowan’s images were published in newspapers, whose editors appreciated the graphic, dramatic qualities of his work. However, his inability to develop beyond this approach caused the demise of his own career. As the sensibilities of English fashion

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English-style Photography?

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure 11.2 John Cowan, ‘Monumental Ideas about Dressing’, 1962. Published in The Queen, 4 December 1962: 78–85. (Courtesy of the John Cowan Estate)

design shifted from the crisp, linear shapes, towards a softer appearance with a focus on exotic fabrics after 1966, Cowan’s images of dynamic girls in motion no longer looked contemporary. In spite of attempts to crossover into the American market with a series of commissions for Diana Vreeland at American Vogue, his literal interpretation of nationhood and what might be regarded as a specifically English approach, tied him to a specific period when the discourses of Englishness and fashion photography overlapped but had now shifted apart. To return to Stuart Hall’s question, what were the strategies of representing nationhood that won the identifications of English people in the fashion imagery produced between the publication of ‘Hobnails Inn’ in 1951 and ‘Monumental Ideas about Dressing’ in 1962? As the representation of Englishness became increasingly literal, London’s place at the centre of fashion design and photography was galvanized by the self-reflexive imagery it produced. Englishness became enlisted in what was fashionable and, conversely, fashion photography was enlisted in what England meant. This was successful in sustaining a sense of belonging among the imagined community who consumed fashion imagery for this brief – 181 –

Penny Martin moment. However, as I have argued, the identity of all imagined communities is in a constant state of revision. In the late 1960s, the competing discourse of fashion dictated that England was no longer part of its system of cultural representation and its identification with the discourse of Englishness was temporarily lost. Fashion photography abandoned Englishness as a visual style, composed of graphic symbols of specific English places or particular English women. When the two discourses did impact upon each other again in the early 1980s, Englishness was not represented as an inclusive community but a political ideology – an socioeconomic disaster against which new models of fashionability could be constructed. In the final section of this chapter, I shall look at the different models of fashionability created when this break in the continuity of Englishness became a prominent subject of British fashion photography. Newhall-Duncan (1979) suggests that fashion’s shift away from London caused the death of English fashion photography: ‘Ironically Britain, which had given birth to and nurtured the whole illusion [of the photographer-hero], produced no further fashion photographers of note’ (Newhall-Duncan 1979: 183). Certainly, in the 1970s, fashion’s focus fixed on a new group of European practitioners including Guy Bourdin, Hans Feurer and Helmut Newton, whose highly sexualized and provocative images were published in the editorial and advertising pages of magazines including Vogue and Harpers & Queen. The key fashion publication of this period was Paris Vogue. However, this conception of fashionability shifting from one city to another oversimplifies the dynamic between practitioners and publications and belies the fact that several British photographers made equally innovative imagery for British publications. A few English practitioners continued to work for British Vogue during the 1970s, and in collaboration with the magazine’s art director Terry Jones, David Bailey in particular produced some of the most vibrant and vigorously constructed images of his career. Vogue thrived under Jones’s creative direction, but the designer began to feel constrained by the repetitive nature of mainstream fashion magazine production (Jones 2000). Not only did the photographic image need to fulfil the strict brief to depict fashionable clothes in a positive and identifiable manner, but also there were apparently arbitrary industry rules governing the presentation of the text and images. In his final two years at Vogue, Jones tried to publish two cover images that apparently contradicted the received view on the colours that would guarantee high cover sales. The first was an image of a mouth biting into green jelly by Willie Christie that Jones published on the cover of the February 1977 issue, despite protestations from Vogue’s European marketing director, Daniel Salem, that a green cover would not sell well. Jones (1997) wrote in his retrospective book Catching the Moment that although ‘it’s sales folklore that green doesn’t sell’, when the – 182 –

English-style Photography? publishers finally published the issue, it ‘confounded the sceptics: the issue was a great commercial success!’ (Jones 1997: 10). In some instances, Jones was forced to revise the appearance of his covers. Explaining why he chose to leave Vogue, Jones wrote that a key motivation was his disappointment with the Diamond Jubilee issue of October 1976. ‘I wanted to turn the cover into a window, so I asked for an engraving of the word Vogue to be made in glass . . . unfortunately one of the head men at Condé Nast Europe had other ideas . . . it is magazine folklore that if you have a red cover you get better sales’ (Jones 1997: 9–10). Salem insisted that the cover was published in red and according to Jones, ‘the subtlety of the idea was lost’ (Jones 1997: 9–10). It was this knowledge that working in mainstream fashion publishing caused him such creative frustration that inspired Jones to set up i-D, a revolutionary cross between a fanzine and a fashion magazine. Launched in August 1980, the same year as both The Face and Blitz, Jones admits i-D was a conscious attack on mainstream fashion publishing. ‘I had joked about infiltrating the fashion industry’s commercial image three years before . . . somehow over the years of publishing iD, “the school of i-D” has invaded the mainstream’ (Jones 1997: 46). Jones’s use of the term ‘school’ to describe the culture at i-D is significant, not only because it indicates the magazine’s crucial role in nurturing young English photographers, designers, stylists, hair and make-up artists and fashion writers, but also because it implies his own role as pedagogue in this collective. Jones encouraged the photographers he worked with to challenge the fashion industry’s reverence for the photographic print by inverting, cropping or covering it with illustrations or text. The fashion photographer Nick Knight described Jones’s irreverent treatment of the fashion photograph as more of an ideology than a technique: Terry’s attitude to photography was against everything I had learnt. He taught me not to be precious . . . photographers look at the craft rather than the content of the picture, but he insists that human energy is the most important thing a picture can have, not the colour range, or the quality of the lighting. (Jones 1997: 46–50)

Together with the photographer Steve Johnson, Jones pioneered i-D’s signature portrait technique that they called the ‘straight up’, for which people would be stopped in the street and photographed against a wall, wearing their own clothes. The absence of seductive production techniques in these snapshot images distanced them from the photographs of glamorous, smiling models produced for mainstream fashion magazines during the 1980s by the plein air school of photographers, including Patrick Demarchelier and Peter Lindbergh (Harrison 1991: 266). However, the straight up was modified slightly to include elements of the subject’s surrounding environment after the first few issues of i-D, after Jones’s longstanding friend and collaborator, the photographer Frank Horvat, criticized the approach’s

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Penny Martin confrontational ‘mug-shot’ appearance and its disempowerment of the subject (Jones 2000). The struggle to incorporate everyday street fashion into fashion lay at the heart of i-D’s agenda. This evoked the style photography of the Young Meteors and set it apart from its competitors, The Face and Blitz magazines, which were slightly more concerned with portraying celebrity, rather than ordinary lifestyles. The attempt by i-D to position an engagement with contemporary English culture, as lived by its readers, at the centre of their photographic production stimulated a new group of young practitioners to incorporate ‘reality’, as they perceived it, into their imagery. Their distinctive, often politicized, interpretation of real life led to their international recognition as a ‘new’ force in English fashion photography at the end of the 1980s. If ‘Hobnails Inn’ represented the early 1950s conception of Englishness as specifically rural and Cowan’s ‘Monumental Ideas about Dressing’ the 1960s urban, the photographer Jason Evans (Travis) and stylist Simon Foxton conflated these sensibilities and situated them in England’s suburbs to explore the 1990s black experience of nationhood. For this image from the 1991 shoot ‘Strictly’ (Figure 11.3), Foxton dressed the young, black male model Edward Enninful in a riding jacket and plus twos from the luxury tailors Swaine & Adeney and a monocle on a chain – an outfit associated with an upper-class, country gentleman. In an ironic reference to eighteenth-century, English landscape painting, the model is pictured in front of what appears to be his estate. However, the modern house with a harled wall and mock-Tudor detail at the gate behind him also alludes to the man’s suburban context and situation at the periphery of both urban and rural existence. As I have argued, the ability to recognize and repeat the signs of national culture is fundamental to the process of identification and participation in an imagined community. In this image, the signs of the dominant ethnic and class identity are subverted by projecting them onto the body of a black man to critique the assimilationist concept that cultural harmony can be achieved by cloaking difference in the signs of normative national culture. Instead of the gentle juxtaposition of dissonant elements achieved in Parkinson’s nostalgic view of England, Jason Evans’s representation of Englishness in the early 1990s is characterized by dislocation and ambiguity. Although mainstream British fashion titles such as Vogue, Harpers & Queen and even the more journalism-centred British Elle and Marie Claire had resisted the hard-edged, confrontational aesthetics of style photography throughout the 1980s, the industry perceived this approach as conducive to the representation of contemporary fashion in the early 1990s. At the height of the recession in 1992– 3, fashionable young designers including Marc Jacobs for Perry Ellis, Anna Sui and Martin Margiela used styling techniques to promote their layered and distressed garments that were most closely associated with photographers and stylists working – 184 –

English-style Photography?

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Figure 11.3 Jason Evans (Travis), 1991. Styles by Simon Foxton. Published in ‘Strictly’, i-D, High Summer Issue, July 1991: 34–43, original in colour. (Courtesy of Jason Evans (Travis))

for The Face and i-D. In January 1993, Nicola Jeal wrote in The Times that consequently, ‘a new breed of fashion photographers and stylists’ including the models Kate Moss, Cecilia Chancellor, stylists Melanie Ward and Anna Cockburn and photographers Nigel Shafran, Glen Luchford, David Sims and Corinne Day, had built up ‘a cult following in New York’ (Jeal 1993: 13). The working partnerships and commissions that ensued signified that English photographers had returned to the centre of mainstream fashion, although their representational strategies had changed beyond all recognition. Any traces of a nation depicted in these images imagined it as alienating, ambiguous and potentially threatening in comparison with John Cowan’s dynamic portrayal of 1960s London. It is significant that of all the photographers working for the style press, the appearance of Day and Sims’s imagery appealed to major American magazines like Vogue most. These practitioners’ admiration for the classic studio imagery of Richard Avedon inspired them to include the least possible information in their – 185 –

Penny Martin shoots, making it difficult to ascertain the precise national identity of the images or of their authors. Photographers like Jason Evans, who engaged with Englishness explicitly, in order to attack normative British fashion photography, were less desirable to the mainstream international market. Englishness was, therefore, no longer a viable frame of reference for English fashion photographers, as the pressures of globalism forced them to seek alternative imagined communities with which to identify. Terry Jones’s notion of the fashion magazine as a collective offered one possible solution to this crisis of identity. In 1998, i-D Books published Family Future Positive, a book composed from invited visual interpretations of the concept of ‘family’ from i-D’s regular contributors. The theme of the publication was based on the premise that i-D was a ‘worldwi-De creative community’ (i-D Books 1998: 5). This problematic use of the concept of family to bind a commercial community was reflected by the juxtaposition of biological ties (i-D Books 1998: 124–9), professional relationships (i-D Books 1998: 226–33) and philosophical statements about the ‘family of man’ (i-D Books 1998: 34). By implication, i-D’s subscribers were included in the i-D family by purchasing the magazine. Like Englishness, in this global fashion context, family was suggested as an alternative imagined community, used discursively to sustain security and belonging among its consumers. In conclusion, the essence of a national character of English fashion photography cannot be defined by a single visual style because the two main discourses upon which it depends are contingent on different forms of renewal. Whereas the culture of late capitalism makes it necessary for fashion constantly to attach itself to new discourses in order to inspire identification, Englishness relies upon its apparent continuity with its past for meaning. It is the way that fashion images are used in fashion publishing to inspire identification that determines the nature of the discourse of Englishness in fashion photography. In the 1950s and 1960s, fashion’s emphasis on English design and London as a fashionable space created a desire for images that referenced Englishness explicitly, both in their content and style of construction. The notion of a harmonious England was alien to practitioners working for the style magazines in the mid-1980s to 1990s, who used the strategy of repeating familiar narratives, central to the representation of Englishness, to critique the discourse from within. However, their belief that their mundane locations and everyday recycled fashions meant that they reflected the ‘reality’ missing in mainstream fashion imagery belied the fact that their work was equally discursive. In this sense, one fashionable fabrication replaced another at the will of external, global forces. As national identity becomes eroded by cultural homogenization, contemporary English fashion photographers seek out new communities, such as the ‘family’ constructed at i-D, to give meaning to their imagery. – 186 –

English-style Photography?

Acknowledgement The research for this chapter was prepared with kind support from the Harold Hyam Wingate Foundation.

References Aitken, J. (1967), The Young Meteors, London: Secker & Warburg. Anderson, B. (1983), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso. Braithwaite, B. and Barrell, J. (1988), The Business of Women’s Magazines, 2nd edn, London: Kogan Page. Garner, P. (1999), John Cowan: Through the Light Barrier, Munich: Schirmer/ Mosel. Gross, M. (1995), Model, London: Bantam. Hall, S. (1992), ‘The Question of Cultural Identity’, in S. Hall, D. Held and T. McGrew (eds), Modernity and its Futures, Cambridge: Polity. Harrison, M. (1991), Appearances: Fashion Photography since 1945, London: Cape. —— (1998), Young Meteors: British Photojournalism, 1957–1965, London: Cape. i-D Books (1998), Family Future Positive, London: i-D Books. Jeal, N. (1993), ‘Getting the New Picture’, The Times (Looks), 27 January: 13. Jones, T. (1997), Catching the moment, London: Booth-Clibborn. —— (2000), Life-story Interview, London: National Sound Archive. McCracken, E. (1992), Decoding Women’s Magazines: From ‘Mademoiselle’ to ‘Ms’, New York: St Martin’s Press. Mortimer, R. (1951), ‘Quality and England’, British Vogue, February: 48–63. Newhall-Duncan, N. (1979), The History of Fashion Photography, New York: Alpine. Parkinson, N. (1983), Lifework: Norman Parkinson, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Taylor, J. (1994), A Dream of England: Landscape, Photography and the Tourist’s Imagination, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Wintour, A. (1997), ‘Both sides now’, Guardian (Media), 19 May: 6–7.

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–12– Fashion Stranger than Fiction: Shelley Fox Caroline Evans

London Fashion This chapter describes the design practice and working methods of the designer Shelley Fox. It looks at the period from March 1996 to autumn 2000, documenting the first ten collections and the early business practice of a young London designer setting up in her own name straight after leaving college. What follows is written in the past tense because the research and analysis scrutinize a specific period, 1996–2000. It is not intended to suggest, however, that anything described in this chapter necessarily ceased after that date, or that it does not continue in the present. The cut-off date itself is not particularly significant but marks, simply, the moment at which I did my research. Fox’s practice did not change in any substantial way in 2000 and, at the time of writing, nearly one year and two collections later, she continues to design and produce her avant-garde fashions under the company name ‘Shelley Fox’, consolidating her business in essentially the same terms. Originally I intended to write about her as a case study that would demonstrate how the reality of a London-based designer’s practice differed from the mythology of London fashion in the late 1990s. This mythology was generated across many strata of the industry, from the marketing stratagems of the British Fashion Council in its promotion of London Fashion Week, to journalistic and media constructions of Brit-fashion as a fellow-traveller with Brit-art and Brit-pop. Stella McCartney’s first slip dresses for the Parisian house Chloé were promoted by the press as the signature of the ‘London girl’, an insouciant Portobello Road style that harked back to the promotion of Carnaby Street as the locus of ‘Swinging London’ in the 1960s. ‘Swinging London’ was given a new spin in the 1990s as ‘Cool Britannia’, a concept perpetuated largely, this time, by the British journalistic media rather than the American press. The development of spectacular runway shows in London in the second half of the 1990s fuelled the international reputation of London fashion as original, iconoclastic and daring. Two of its most outstanding showmen, Alexander McQueen and John Galliano, were recruited to the more conservative Parisian houses of Givenchy and Christian Dior. London’s reputation was for pyrotechnics, – 189 –

Caroline Evans nudity and outrage, leaving room for the implied criticism that, in the hands of less accomplished designers, runway excess did not translate into commercial sales. Not all buyers went to London, even where they bought from British designers. Shelley Fox for example sold substantially to Japanese buyers who missed out London and went directly to the Paris shows; in the same trip they would visit the showroom of her agents to inspect her samples there. But they would have done so partly because they were aware of the reputation of ‘London fashion’, largely through the theatrics of its shows. Thus the myths of ‘London fashion’ were potent ones, because they were international marketing tools. Although the media construction of the idea of ‘Brit-pack’ fashion in the 1990s may have been a lie, it was a lie that concealed a commercial truth. Against this façade, I wanted to look at the London-based practice of Shelley Fox, drawing a parallel between the aesthetic of ruination I perceived in her distressed fabrics and the run-down urban fabric of the East End of London where she lived and worked. The idea of London as a centre for a specific kind of fashion informs Andrew Tucker’s (1998) The London Fashion Book which showcases a wide range of London designers at the end of the 1990s, although it does not include Shelley Fox. More interestingly, it also pictorially maps seven fashion zones of the city. One, the East End, uncannily illustrates in photographs many of the sites documented in Iain Sinclair’s (1997) Lights Out for the Territory. Aptly subtitled Nine Excursions into the Secret History of London, Sinclair’s book captures the complexity of the city in fragmented and episodic forms. His descriptions of the decaying urban fabric and social problems of east London build, in a series of poetic evocations, an image of the city’s history as densely layered, particularly in its derelict sites, as the past poetically seeps into the present like weeds growing out of the cracks in the pavement. Patrick Keiller’s 1993 film London (Argos Films and the British Film Institute, 1993) evokes the same London. Both derive many of their ideas from Baudelaire’s concept of the flâneur and the French Situationists’ concepts of psychogeography and of dérive, or drift, in the city. These texts impressionistically capture an image of the city that I also found in Shelley Fox’s work. To explore the connection, I planned to use them to link the material fabrics of fashion to the urban fabric of the city, and then to ground that poetical comparison with an examination of the material circumstances of Fox’s production. Shelley Fox’s business was run entirely differently from the international operations of firms like the Gap, Donna Karan or Issey Miyake, or the large directional fashion houses such as Gucci and Prada, even though she adhered to the strict timetable of international fashion, showing twice a year in London Fashion Week, and taking samples to Paris during the French collections. Rather, it fitted into pre-existent methods of doing business that flourished invisibly in the hinterlands of East London, in the gaps and interstices between global – 190 –

Fashion Stranger than Fiction: Shelley Fox business practices. In architecture the interstices are where the problems start: moulds grow and fungi flourish. However in the business of fashion the interstices provided fertile growing space for a singular, small-scale and quirky style of London design and production. Going in search of it was like going down through layers, starting with the big myth of glitzy London and diminishing in scale until I reached the micro-history of Shelley Fox’s practice in a tiny East End studio. To my surprise, it was more extraordinary than the designs. I thought the commercial analysis would ground the poetics in reality but what I discovered was that the business practice was just as poetical as her designs, and her design influences were meshed with the way she ran her business. The gritty realism of commerce turned out to be as other-worldly as Sinclair’s (1997) imaginative fusions of London history and myth. Discovering about Shelley Fox’s business produced the curious sensation of being in a nineteenth-century fiction. As I listened to her deadpan descriptions of her fantastical working methods, I was reminded both of Charles Dickens’s evocations of the nineteenth-century city, for example in Our Mutual Friend (1985 [1864]) and of Henry Mayhew’s descriptions of London and the London poor (Quennell 1964; Thompson and Yeo 1971). Fox’s commercial practice intersected both the East and West Ends, the traditional sites of the production and consumption of London fashion. For while her work was conceptual or avant-garde in its aesthetic concerns, it was in other respects conventional. It was this tension between conventional business and unconventional design that first interested me. She was, in her business practice, an inheritor of an old London tradition of small, commercially stretched, East End companies producing tiny batch runs for sale in prestigious West End shops. Like many young, internationally acclaimed London designers at the end of the 1990s she struggled financially, worked all hours, and ploughed all her profits back into the business. In her first four years, Fox’s sales did not build steadily but fluctuated wildly, despite favourable press coverage and the prestigious Jerwood Prize for Fashion which she won in spring 1999. In particular, her sales dipped dramatically after her third and eighth collections, rising equally spectacularly in the following ones. Fox was only an extreme, because uncompromising, example of the way many small London designer businesses work, on a micro-scale and in a laissez-faire economy in which margins are so tight that work conditions and payment rates most resemble those of the free trade zones of South East Asia. Hampered by lack of cash flow and manufacturers’ inflexibility, crippled by the expense of showing twice a year on the catwalk, and at the mercy of a fickle fashion press always hungry for the next new thing, many independent young London designers in the late twentieth century either went bankrupt, or deserted London for paid jobs with Italian or French designers. In British Fashion Design: Rag Trade or Image Industry?, Angela McRobbie analyses the problems specific to London-based – 191 –

Caroline Evans conceptual designers (McRobbie 1998: esp. chs 5 and 6). McRobbie surveys a slightly earlier generation of eighteen designers from the mid-1980s to mid-1990s including Darlajane Gilroy, Pam Hogg, Barbara Sonnentag and Tracy Mulligan, but her survey reveals work and business practices very like those of later designers such as Hussein Chalayan and Shelley Fox. The voluntary liquidation of Hussein Chalayan’s business in January 2001 demonstrated more than most that cultural capital alone cannot sustain a company. At the time of his liquidation Chalayan was named Designer of the Year; he was held in huge critical esteem by his peers in the industry; he had been included in international museum and gallery exhibitions of both art and fashion; and had been an exhibitor in the ‘Mind’ section of London’s Millennium Dome. Yet his accounts in Companies House in London showed that, far from being bankrupted by his last show, the company had struggled for years to remain solvent. McRobbie’s research is a reminder that, though fashions may date, the London fashion business is remarkably consistent, at least in the realm of more ‘conceptual’ fashion design, and it is in the tradition of small, entrepreneurial London designers she describes that Shelley Fox set up her business in the late 1990s.

Shelley Fox: a London Designer in the Late 1990s Shelley Fox studied textiles at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London; she went on to do an MA in fashion there, graduating in March 1996 with a collection based on scorched, felted and embossed wool that was immediately bought by the prestigious London department store Liberty (Figure 12.1). On leaving college she set up in business with the aid of two publicly-funded grants: a Crafts Council Setting Up award, which she applied for as a textile rather than a fashion designer, and a Spitalfields Small Business Association grant, which her studio off Brick Lane entitled her to apply for. From then on, she continued to produce seasonal fashion collections under her own name, of which the next four were produced as selling collections without catwalk shows. Collection number 2, shown in autumn 1996, featured scorched bandage and Elastoplast fabric that Fox sourced through the medical suppliers Smith & Nephew. The Elastoplast fabric was used in its white, loom-state form, before the application of adhesive; the scorched bandage fabric was used in the metre widths it was woven in before being cut into 10 centimetre strips. Six months later she produced her collection number 3, in March 1997, in which she continued to use the felted wools but introduced textured ‘scars’ on the wool (Figure 12.2), based on research done on healing techniques in the library of the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine. There she found documentary photographs of nineteenth-century bandaging techniques. In further collections she developed these ‘scars’ by machine stitching and pulling the material before felting, so that the stitches shrank – 192 –

Fashion Stranger than Fiction: Shelley Fox

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Figure 12.1 Shelley Fox number 1 (autumn/winter 1996–7), scorched lambs’ wool felt high-necked dress. (Courtesy of Shelley Fox)

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Figure 12.2 Shelley Fox number 3 (autumn/winter 1997–8), printed felt gather neck top and arc skirt. (Courtesy of Shelley Fox)

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Caroline Evans

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Figure 12.3 Shelley Fox number 3 (autumn/winter 1997–8), heat transfer press printed Elastoplast shirt. (Courtesy of Shelley Fox)

differently from the wool, causing raised ‘weals’ on the fabric. Wool was felted and scorched, laser-cut and bubbled. The ripples and scars that appeared were mishaps, resembling the scarred bodies suggested by the medical themes she had researched at the Wellcome Institute. In collection number 3 she first experimented with producing these raised ripples on wool. She also printed on the Elastoplast fabric by pressing pigment into its creases and scorched crumpled up Elastoplast garments in a heat transfer press that left a decorative print of white crease marks (Figure 12.3). Although Liberty, known for its enlightened buying policy regarding fashion, bought the first three collections, and the equally influential London retailers Joseph & Whistles started to buy from the second and third, absolutely no one bought the fourth in September 1997. Fox described this as a turning point for her, not entirely a bad one. It gave her the chance to reassess her work and its presentation, and it took her to Kate Monckton at the public relations company Abnormal PR, which she paid for by doing an extra half-day’s teaching a week at the American College in London. Monckton subsequently played a key role in her business, thinking strategically about how to promote her, rather than just sending out mail shots. It was her idea to show collection number 5 in an empty Joseph shop near the official – 194 –

Fashion Stranger than Fiction: Shelley Fox British Fashion Council tent in London Fashion Week in March 1998. This collection used the motif of Braille, embossing felted garments with descriptive phrases like ‘this is a dress’ that would identify them to a blind person. The garments hung in the window with music coming out on to the street; at night a big ‘Shelley Fox number 5’ in Braille dots was projected from the inside so it lit the whole shop up, creating the effect of a fine art installation. As a result of this installation, and to her huge relief, she received five orders from Japan, France and Britain. Although she describes the fashion business as ‘brutal’, nevertheless certain key individuals helped and supported her, notably the retailer Joseph, for whom she subsequently designed a capsule collection, and the designer Roland Mouret, who guided and encouraged her to produce her first runway show for collection number 6 in September 1998. She broke her pattern of simply numbering her collections and named this one ‘Nervous’. Mouret introduced her to the complexities of showing, as well as to the MAC make-up team, the make-up artist Sharon Dowset and the hairdresser Alain Pichon. The collection was shown in the basement of the Shoreditch restaurant the Great Eastern Dining Room while it was still being built. White, loom-state Elastoplast was burnt with a blow torch (Figure 12.4). In this and subsequent collections the wrecked

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Figure 12.4 Shelley Fox number 6 (spring/summer 1999), scorched Elastoplast angel dress. (Courtesy of Shelley Fox)

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Caroline Evans textiles she produced had the patina of decay and age, echoing the architecture of the site. Six months after her first runway show, in February 1999, she beat 200 entrants to win the prestigious Jerwood Fashion Prize, which gave her £30,000 to produce her next two collections, a guaranteed order from Liberty worth £10,000 wholesale, and free studio space for a year. The prize money enabled her to employ an assistant for the first time. The Jerwood criteria included not only design but also business acumen; the short-listed eight candidates had to submit a business plan as well as a catwalk show of ten pieces to a jury that included Alexander McQueen. The collection with which she won the prize also formed the basis for her next collection, number 7, shown ten days after the Jerwood Prize. It incorporated scarred and buckled felts, one-off dresses and skirts of gauze wadding individually sprayed with car paint and overlaid with a ghostly veil of muslin (Figure 12.5) and twinsets encrusted with dripped candle wax (Figure 12.6). These showpieces received intense press coverage due to the prize, and collection number 7 attracted seven orders, including Joseph and Liberty in London.

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Figure 12.5 Shelley Fox number 7 (autumn/winter 1999–2000), car-spray twinset and muslin wadded skirt. (Courtesy of Shelley Fox)

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Fashion Stranger than Fiction: Shelley Fox

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Figure 12.6 Shelley Fox number 7 (autumn/winter 1999–2000), candle wax twinset with knitted full circle skirt. (Courtesy of Shelley Fox)

The physical and economic conditions of her work were disciplined and austere; winning the Jerwood Prize in 1999 was rather like a modern version of Cinderella, with the difference that her transition from rags to riches was to last not a lifetime but a year. She gave up the lease on her studio in the East End and in April 1999 she moved into the Jerwood studio, south of the river Thames between Waterloo and Southwark. It gave her evident pleasure: she described light, air, space and a sense of community. She enjoyed a high-ceilinged Victorian school room that was her studio; a welcome break from ‘the rag trade’ and specifically the geographical space of her Brick Lane studio where she had worked, eaten and sometimes lived for three demanding years; a sense of community with other prize winners from different disciplines all working there too; fruitful collaborations with the musicians’ agent Sonic Arts Network, who put her in touch with a composer; a café on site; and the sound of The Lion King rehearsing next door all summer. These obviously were the good things; yet the prize bought its own pressures. She felt that people, especially her contemporaries, expected her to be ‘the next Galliano’. Whereas collection number 7 had come so hard on the heels of the Jerwood Prize that it was barely affected by it, collection number 8 was substantially funded – 197 –

Caroline Evans by the prize money. In autumn 1999, for the first time, Fox showed on schedule in the British Fashion Council tent as part of the official London Fashion Week. As an outsider Fox had consistently received more, and better, press than many other designers showing on schedule. This time there was money to pay for models. Everything augured well. It should have been like going to the ball, Fox’s moment of greatest triumph. Yet the ballroom scene, for all its glister, was a scene of darkness. It was a darkness that was articulated in the sombre presentation and styling of the show. Fabrics were printed and embossed with decorative patterns of Morse code (Figure 12.7) which had attracted Fox’s attention precisely because it had just been abolished. The Morse patterns spelt out a sentence from Nietszche’s Human, All Too Human: ‘he who considers more deeply knows that, whatever his acts and judgements may be, he is always wrong’ (Nietzsche 1997: 198). ‘It was the way we were feeling about things’, she said, ‘that whatever you do, it’s wrong.’1 Nietzsche’s words opened the show. A circle of white light was projected onto the dark wall. In its centre, a pair of hands silhouetted against the light signed the words in deaf and dumb language. The show started with ambient electronic music that gradually formed itself into the tap tap tap of Morse code that spelt out the

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Figure 12.7 Shelley Fox number 8 (spring/summer 2000), morse code drop skirt with olive leather high-slit cardigan. Photograph by Chris Moore. (Courtesy of Shelley Fox)

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Fashion Stranger than Fiction: Shelley Fox same inexorable words. The models appeared dressed in skirts, dresses and tops patterned with the same despairing message in Morse code: you are always wrong, you cannot win. And, indeed, she was wrong, in that the sales dropped dramatically, and neither Joseph nor Whistles bought. With hindsight Fox felt that it was because there was too much in the collection and she failed to edit it ruthlessly enough in a period when so much else was happening. Learning from this lesson, her ninth collection changed tack. Shown in February 2000, it featured burnt sequins and felt frills and was styled with 1940s vintage handbags and shoes, introducing a historical reference into her work for the first time (Figure 12.8). Sales picked up miraculously and she tripled her orders, but only after she had radically rethought the collection two days before the show, jettisoning 90 per cent of it and starting from scratch at the eleventh hour. Yet, I would argue, the ‘failure’ of the Morse code collection (which was highly acclaimed in the press, but whose acclaim failed to translate into orders) illuminated both her business practice and her design aesthetic more than the success of the following one. Accustomed to working successfully in the margins, the sudden shift to the spotlight appeared to make her uncomfortable and anxious. On the evidence of her first ten collections, Fox worked most successfully in adverse conditions. The earliest scorched wool came from an accident in her MA show, when she allowed a clothes press to overheat and liked the scorched effect; her felting moved on when she over-boiled the wool for her third collection so the fabric rippled and puckered in unusual ways. When she did things wrong, she made a virtue out of them; when her fourth collection produced no orders, she used the opportunity constructively to reassess her business. But when things went too well, a sense of unease entered her work: the Jerwood Prize was frightening because everyone expected so much of her. Here it is relevant to consider her research interests and methods, as they not only offer an insight into her design motifs but also illuminate her business practice. The ‘poor’ aesthetic of her designs was mirrored in her business practice; her first catwalk show cost under £1,500 and the models were paid in clothes, whereas the usual cost of a designer show was between £50,000 and £150,000. Despite huge critical acclaim and prestigious sales, she consistently worked on tiny financial margins and had to teach to support herself while running her business. Before she won the Jerwood Prize she was sleeping on the floor of her studio because her boiler had broken at home and she could not afford to repair it. After her Jerwood tenure she vacated the space and temporarily worked from home, her windows festooned with paper patterns, her assistant at work on a table in the corner of her living room, while she waited to get into her new Hackney studio to do the felting. She was interested in the lives of people such as migrants who are thrown back on their own resources, when communications are reduced to basics; she cited – 199 –

Caroline Evans

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Figure 12.8 Shelley Fox number 9 (autumn/winter 2000–1), burnt sequinned skirt with peat felt ruffle top. Photograph by Chris Moore. (Courtesy of Shelley Fox)

prisoners in solitary confinement who tap messages through the walls. Hence her interest in cryptography, Morse code and Braille: ‘there are different levels of Morse code; there are certain Morse codes that can only be understood by the person you’re sending it to.’ Her research took her to unlikely archives for a fashion designer: the Wellcome Institute of Medicine, the archives of Smith & Nephew, medical manufacturers of sticking plaster and bandages, the Royal National Institute for the Blind, and the photographic and sound archives at the Imperial War Museum (her favourite museum). Her interest was in mark-making as an index of historical traces of the past. Figure 12.9 shows a piece of fabric that bears palimpsests of earlier collections. It is the back cloth from the silk screen used to print the newsprint fabric from collection number 3; once saturated with dye it would be thrown away and replaced by a new one. Fox, however, saved it and pinned it up on her studio wall along with several other back cloths that also bore the ghostly traces of her past designs. Her research for her collections showed her interest in how people record a life, particularly a life that is fragile, at risk, and transient. On her shelf in May 2000 was a book of Roman Vishniac’s photographs documenting life in the Warsaw ghetto in the last months before its destruction and the – 200 –

Fashion Stranger than Fiction: Shelley Fox

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Figure 12.9 Printing imprint left behind on back cloth from collection number 3 (autumn/winter 1997–8). (Courtesy of Shelley Fox)

annihilation of its occupants. Yet stories from her mother and grandmother reminded her that the 1930s and 1940s are not so long ago as photographs make them seem, and bring the instability of the past into the present. That sense permeated collections 9 and 10 (Figure 12.10) with their Second World War evocations: 1940s handbags and shoes, sad models, and soundtrack of children’s voices and birdsong mixed with Elvis Presley’s ‘Are you lonesome tonight?’ for number 9; powdery, old-lady make-up and the crackly sound of tuning radios in number 10. Experience taught Shelley Fox that business is precarious. The elements she liked in the work of the artist Joseph Beuys were not aesthetic (despite his use of felt) but were more to do with Beuys’s interest in the metaphor of survival; perhaps the metaphors of survival and communication in adversity fuelled her business practice even more than her design aesthetic.

Cultural Capital Angela McRobbie (1998) has argued that British conceptual fashion designers draw on the language of art rather than popular culture to assert their creativity: – 201 –

Caroline Evans

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Figure 12.10 Shelley Fox number 10 (spring/summer 2001), cotton viscose petal dress with military hat and red vintage shoes. Photograph by Chris Moore. (Courtesy of Shelley Fox)

This form of cultural capitalism is led by art school trained designer-entrepreneurs who, by and large, express little if any interest in the dynamics of wealth creation and business. They work according to a different set of principles which are about artistic integrity, creative success, recognition, approval by the art establishment and then also, almost as an afterthought, sales and markets. (McRobbie 1998: 177)

It is true that many such designers live on impossibly tight margins, and that many are insolvent. Yet that is not incompatible with the fact that the kudos of art is itself bankable, and in certain markets is a powerful marketing stratagem for a particular type of conceptual fashion design. Unwearable catwalk showpieces function as marketing rather than sales tools; they are a designer’s ‘signature’ and will get them the free press coverage they so need to sell the wearable pieces. From her sixth collection onwards Fox began to separate the showing and selling collections; however, although the selling collections were intended to be more commercial, sometimes the press pieces sold too. In particular the burnt sequinned skirts from collection number 9 sold extremely well in Italy, at a wholesale price – 202 –

Fashion Stranger than Fiction: Shelley Fox of £300 per skirt. She saw her design work as being fuelled by ideas, and even attributed the failure of certain collections to a failure to foreground those ideas. Looking back on what she had learnt about selling from her first nine collections, she said, as she embarked on her tenth (spring/summer 2001, shown in autumn 2000): ‘don’t ever start by thinking about selling, because that we can do very easily, we just water down. It’s easy to water down but if you have nothing to water down from, you’ve got nothing.’ Fox was not making a starry-eyed plea for the designer’s vision but rather, as she saw it, for the commercial necessity that, to sell, the collection had first to be intensely thought through, and then focused, so that it could be edited into the right form to sell. Early in her career Shelley Fox realized the commercial value and the aesthetic meaning of the one-off in a business based on mass production: London had the best high street fashion shops in the world, in the sense that their teams of often excellent designers could turn around a catwalk look and get it on the rails faster than anyone else. This made her question what kind of designer she could be. In terms of fashion production many would consider the craft-based nature of her practice anachronistic, even naive, but in fact it showed a sophisticated understanding of the significance of craft techniques in the age of mass production. Her garments played with the notion of an urban gothic and a poor aesthetic by looking back at yesterday through the eyes of today. Why else, in an age of mass production and global distribution, would one find one of Britain’s most notable young fashion designers painstakingly reviving craft methods? Fox’s artistic approach to craft signalled a complex form of consumer address that more orthodox forms of fashion production could not make. In contrast to high street fashions, her avant-garde scorched and wrecked textiles were highly crafted pieces that bore the mark of their maker, like a trace or an evocation. Even her very first order, sixty pieces for Liberty, was really an order of one-offs: one small, two medium and one large, in every style. And this cannot be attributed simply to necessity for, once successful, she consistently continued to produce in this way. Even after ten highly acclaimed collections and international sales, her signature felted wools that sold as far afield as Japan were still hand-made in a local London launderette, in two-metre lengths that shrank down to one. Because so many of her fabrics were hand-made there was an artisanal aspect to their production which typified the way Fox worked; she preferred the business to grow slowly and to remain on a small enough scale for her to preserve her hands-on approach to production in which she alone created certain fabrics. For the felts, Fox herself scarred the fabric with machine stitching and personally felted it in the launderette. She then scorched, printed or embossed it by hand. After that, it was cut into pattern pieces in her studio, the first process which she delegated to students on placement. Only then was it sent out of her studio to be made up into the finished garments by a factory in Luton, England. As she became more – 203 –

Caroline Evans successful she began to use some bought-in fabrics, but many were still made in the studio and Fox herself still decided when each piece was ready for cutting, even after collection number 5 when she first started taking students on placement, and collection number 7 when she first employed an assistant. Unusually for a designer, she oversaw all her own production, as well as designing. The orders for collection number 9, the biggest to date, amounted to 600 garments, which meant about 1,200–1,500 pattern pieces to cut out. It included orders for 75 burnt sequinned twinsets and 15 burnt sequinned skirts, each to be individually scorched with a blow torch, and she did all the burning herself. The huge, clotted bits of felt, some frilled, had to hang around the studio to dry after felting. In business terms, she continued to be an unlimited company, what accountants call a ‘sole trader’. Every pattern piece of the felted clothes that sold in prestigious specialist shops, alongside designers such as Comme des Garçons, Hussein Chalayan, Yohji Yamamoto and Martin Margiela, was produced individually. Fox’s aesthetic of ruination made a specific appeal to a discerning customer whose cultural capital allowed them to perceive the ‘added value’ of these clothes was an avant-garde aesthetic, distinct from the look of shiny newness, luxury and excess of mainstream fashion. In this respect her work can be located in a distinct, if minority, tradition of international fashion, running from Rei Kawakubo’s earliest designs for Comme des Garçons in the 1980s, which both questioned the formal logic of clothing in their cut and construction, and introduced the idea of patina and ageing, for example by producing fabrics with flaws designed into them or sweaters knitted with lacy holes like moth holes (Evans and Thornton 1989; Vinken 1997). In the 1990s Martin Margiela screen-printed images of dress linings onto the outside of new dresses; and cut up and reassembled old ones, giving them a new life and history (Evans 1998). He designed half-constructed gilets like tailors’ dummies and garments based on flat pattern pieces that undid the logic and techniques of tailoring and the couture atelier (Vinken 1997; Gill 1998). This trend was loosely dubbed ‘deconstruction’, or ‘la mode Destroy’ by journalists who used the term to describe a trend towards frayed hems, recycled fabrics and coming-apart seams (Gill 1998 usefully summarizes and contextualizes these sources). Martin and Koda’s (1993) essay ‘Analytical Apparel: Deconstruction and Discovery in Contemporary Costume’ located the origins of these trends in the 1980s and argued in the early 1990s for deconstruction as a ‘mode of thought current to our times’ (Martin and Koda 1993: 105). Towards the end of the 1990s the use of recycled or antique fabrics gained pace. In New York Susan Cianciolo produced one-offs from vintage fabrics. In London Jessica Ogden used second-hand fabrics that bore the trace of the past in their stains, darns and hand-sewn seams; the design company Fake London cut up and recycled cashmere jumpers in jokey pastiche themes; and Russell Sage revamped trademark fabrics like Burberry’s in his ‘So Sue Me’ – 204 –

Fashion Stranger than Fiction: Shelley Fox collection. In the Netherlands, Viktor & Rolf’s first collection in 1993 had featured a ballgown made from old shirts, and a dress constructed out of an old jacket and trousers. Their tenth collection, shown in Paris in 1998, featured vintage 1960s Chanel and Pucci fabrics. Unlike many of these designers, Fox did not recycle second-hand fabric or old clothes. Neither, despite her experiments with geometric cut and its interface with the body, for example in her circular patterns, was she a deconstructionist. If anything, her work was allied more to an aesthetic of melancholy and dereliction (Martin 1992; Evans 2000: 104–6). Harold Koda (1985) has attributed a specific ‘poor’ aesthetic in conceptual fashion to the Japanese concept of wabi sabi in relation to Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons, and the same analysis could be applied to Shelley Fox (Koda 1985). Fox’s designs made an appeal to a bohemian notion of poverty as inherently aesthetic in a way that could never be matched by the ostentatious display of wealth. In Japan, wabi sabi attributes a superior value, based on enlightened recognition, to the flawed artefact and to poor materials. However, Koda does not extend his discussion from the realm of aesthetics to those of production and consumption. By invoking Bourdieu’s (1986) concept of cultural capital, one can begin to see how the style of wabi sabi becomes valuable in Western fashion when it is used to create a consumer discourse of the avantgarde. Although these clothes are rarely made from luxury fabrics their cut may be innovative and their production extremely labour-intensive. Indeed, one garment may have been worked on as intensely as an artist’s canvas in earlier centuries and have something of the unique value of the one-off in an age of mechanical reproduction. Through over-accentuating hand-made methods that could now be achieved with machines, Fox’s designs connoted a poor aesthetic, and the purpose of her symbolic communication through craft addressed a sort of chic that the stylish and the rich recognize only too well. The concept of cultural capital enables us to put production and consumption together in the symbolic register as well as economically, moving beyond the labour-intensive nature of Fox’s production per se, and to understand its symbolic and economic value in terms of consumption. In the mid-nineteenth century, Karl Marx theorized commodity fetishism in relation to production, but it was in the writing of Thorstein Veblen in 1899, and Georg Lukács in the twentieth century, that commodity fetishism came to be articulated in terms of consumption in a way that gives us a model to understand how such objects can have a symbolic meaning in a consumer culture (Gamman and Makinen 1994: 28–32). Yet because Fox’s clothes are so labour intensive, it is hard not to understand their production, as well as their consumption, in terms of fetishism. Marx argued that the labour that goes into making the commodity, and its use-value, become submerged in another value that he identified as mystical: ‘it is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes, here, for them, the fantastic form – 205 –

Caroline Evans of a relation between things’ (Marx 1976: 165). For Marx, the labour that goes into making a commodity is made invisible, as is its use-value, as we flood the commodity with other values. It is ‘a congealed mass of human labour’ (Marx 1976: 142) and it is tempting to see Fox’s heavily worked felts as ‘congealed labour’, even to suggest that she fetishized production. However, hers might usefully be classified as ‘consumer fetishism’, a little different from Marx’ ‘commodity fetishism’. For Marx concentrated on questions of labour and value, rather than trying to understand the ways in which, since the consumer revolution of the eighteenth century, the bourgeoisie had tried to differentiate itself from other classes through notions of taste; whereas Fox’s emphasis on the hand-made and the one-off in this moment in history paid tribute to a sophisticated pattern of consumer distinction through taste. In his discussion of commodity fetishism, Marx failed to connect production and consumption; his emphasis on the economic value of commodities did not acknowledge their symbolic and cultural values. It was to be many decades before these concepts were to be formulated by Lukács and Bourdieu respectively. Yet, for all its shortcomings, Marx’s (1976 [1867]) discussion in Capital of value still has a bearing on the singular economy of Shelley Fox’s work. Like Fox, Marx starts with textiles and dress. He builds his argument around two commodities, a coat and 10 yards of linen. The coat is worth twice as much as the linen. Each is brought into being by a specific form of labour, tailoring and weaving respectively. In a society whose products are, increasingly, commodities, labour will become socially divided and, for example, tailoring becomes a special trade (Marx 1976 [1867]: 133). In viewing the coat and the linen as values, Marx follows his own argument that a complex society views commodities as abstractions, divorced from their differing use-values (ibid: 135). ‘The use-values coat and linen are combinations of . . . productive activity and . . . cloth and yarn; the values coat and linen, however, are merely congealed quantities of homogenous labour’ (ibid: 135–6). ‘The value of a commodity represents nothing but the quantity of labour embodied in it’ (ibid: 136). And, ‘as values, commodities are simply congealed quantities of human labour’ (ibid: 141). Human labour ‘has been accumulated in the coat’: the coat ‘counts as embodied value, as the body of value’ (ibid: 143). Over thirty pages (ibid: 131–63) Marx circles around the coat, the linen, tailoring and weaving, in such dizzying terms, at such length and in such detail, that in his narrative the commodity begins to assume a life of its own long before he gets on to the subject of commodity fetishism (ibid: 163 et seq.). Marx’s political economy has been questioned on a number of grounds and by many critics. Carver points out that his literal equation of labour and labourproducts rests on a confusion of energy with matter, or its properties, well before Einstein’s equation of matter and energy (Carver 1998: 79). This confusion produces in his writing a coat that is congealed labour and a purchase price that is – 206 –

Fashion Stranger than Fiction: Shelley Fox embodied labour. The value of 10 yards of linen is doubled by its conversion into a coat. Marx goes on to argue that both coat and linen could be expressed in many different ways: analysed for their use value, expressed as chemical equations, or described in their physical formation (Marx 1976 [1867]: 141). Then Marx translates them into their equivalents in tea, coffee, corn and gold (ibid: 157). For all its flaws, there is an alchemy in Marx’s writing not unlike the alchemy with which Shelley Fox transforms a mass-produced two-metre length of wool into a hand-made one-metre length of felt, itself patterned with flaws. Fox miraculously halves its size yet doubles its value. Her labour congeals and settles into the very fabric itself as she sits in the launderette, bundling the wool into the washing machines, then dries it on a park bench before scorching it with a blow torch, rippling or scarring it in a heat transfer press, and cutting it into pattern pieces in the studio before sending it to be made up, finally, in the factory, the very quintessence of capital for Marx. By the same alchemy, she converts half a day’s teaching into PR. As her unpaid assistants she has the students who exchange their labour for the value of putting ‘work experience at Shelley Fox’ on their CVs. Their work too converts into the cloth artefacts of her business, even if they are not allowed to wield the blow torch. The heavily hand-crafted nature of the clothes imbues them with human traces. The burning and scarring motifs carry the association of dereliction in the midst of luxury. Fox’s scorched, felted and scarred materials bear the trace of the hand, and sell as luxury goods in specialist shops, a poor aesthetic produced out of hard labour in the East End for West End consumption. Suddenly Marx’s creative confusion of energy with matter has a material reality in the haywire economy of Shelley Fox’s felted fabrics. Although Marx’s critique of capitalist society is flawed, it is also ‘double-voiced’ and speaks to us politically today (Carver 1998: 83). The reality does not compute but the idea is true. And at the end of his chapter, Marx finally introduces a gold-standard by which to measure all commodities, money (Marx 1976 [1867]: 162), much as the business of fashion wholesale and retail produce an end-price in a prestigious store like Liberty or Joseph. If Fox fetishizes labour she differs, however, from Marx’s analysis that separated capital and labour: she is both the boss and the exploited labourer. Angela McRobbie’s study of London-based fashion designers in the late twentieth century has analysed the way in which creativity was mobilized from the late 1980s as a form of self-exploitation germane to the new ‘enterprise culture’ (McRobbie 1998). Management studies in the same period began to identify the arts, previously considered anomalous, as paradigmatic and singularly modern is the way they exemplified risk. McRobbie considers the ways in which the creative work of such designers is both ‘postmodern’, in that it depends on image and media to promulgate it, and ‘premodern’ in some of its production techniques that have barely changed over two centuries (McRobbie 1998: 101). Yet whereas McRobbie – 207 –

Caroline Evans formulated these two as distinct opposites, in Shelley Fox’s practice they are proximate. For all Fox’s premodern production practices, they can be understood as her taking herself out of history into a pre-industrial past which is, however, commercially connected to a post-industrial present. Her design and selling stratagems that depend on the hand-made make specific sense in the context of the history of the commodity, tied as it is to the history of craft and mass production. Fox’s contemporaries in furniture and product design, such as Ron Arad, Jasper Morrison and Tom Dixon, all started in the 1980s and 1990s as crafts people. All had to get artistic recognition before they had the opportunity to engage with mass production. These three product designers were some of the few famous faces who crossed over into the mainstream, who could have done so only on the basis of the cultural capital of their earlier work.

‘In the Shadows of Money and Power’ Earlier I situated Fox’s avant-garde aesthetic in the context of similar international fashion designers such as Margiela, Comme des Garçons, and Viktor & Rolf. However, she is also notably different from those designers, because of the fact that she is London based. Although London has sophisticated sales and marketing techniques, and is itself a cultural capital, in its economic base the story is very different. In London the infrastructure of fashion production is virtually nonexistent, which makes it significantly different from other centres of fashion production, as McRobbie (1998) has pointed out in her distinction between its image industry as ‘postmodern’ (for which read ‘sophisticated’) and its production patterns as ‘premodern’ (for which read ‘primitive’). My discussion of value through the work of the hand can ultimately be brought back to London’s history as a city of capitalist enterprise. There is, after all, a comparison to be made between Shelley Fox’s textile transfigurations and the urban fabric of the city. I have argued that Fox’s commercial sense has mutated into her design aesthetic. Fox’s aesthetic of ruination, with its emphasis on imperfection and the beauty of the flaw, mirrored the urban fabric of the old garment district in which she worked, with its history of tailoring and sweated labour. The texture and fabric of the city seemed to mutate into the fragments of her clothes so they became, as it were, site-specific. Her sand-blasted leather, burnt sequins and scorched wool echoed the urban fabric, textures and patterns of the run-down areas she worked from and lived in: a studio near Brick Lane, in Spitalfields and her home in Dalston. This brings us back to Iain Sinclair, whose writings on both these zones, in the London boroughs of Tower Hamlets and Hackney respectively, have sketched a forgotten and marginal London, a romantic ruin of the Thatcher years. Sinclair’s project is to dig under the hidden layers of London history and myth, finding traces and evidence of forgotten and marginalized histories, – 208 –

Fashion Stranger than Fiction: Shelley Fox submerged under the weight of the present. His anarchistic method constructs his own darkly romantic vision of London. Like Fox, Sinclair fetishizes, or glamorizes, an element of decay inherent in London. He turns it into an object with more than its use-value. This was the similarity I originally saw between the two practitioners, not just aesthetic but also structural, it turns out. Reviewing Shelley Fox’s working methods, they appear as incredible as any Iain Sinclair London essay or novel. Indeed, it is surprising that he has not already unearthed her, she is so ripe for transformation into Hackney myth. Imagine what pictures can be conjured from Fox’s burnt and battered fabrics. Picture, like a series of magic lantern slides, Shelley Fox hand dripping candle wax onto a cardigan; scorching felt and sequins with a blow torch; or hauling clotted woollen frills out of the tumble dryer in the launderette in Russell Square, London. See her in the summer of 1999 seated on a bench in the sun outside Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christchurch in Shoreditch with her address book and phone, making business calls while the newly felted fabrics dried in the sun on the park bench beside her. London is an ever-shifting, kaleidoscopic organism that spawns its own stories. Sinclair, uncovering ‘forgotten’ London, mythologizes it; I have added yet another layer in sketching equivalencies between urban fabric and fashioned fabric; my myth, like Sinclair’s, is no less a construction than the wider myth of ‘London fashion’. In the outcome, the business analysis failed to ground the poetry in anything at all. The tension between what I thought was the poetics of design, and the ‘reality’ of commerce, was a chimera. Yet if there is a story here, perhaps it is the story of fetishism, rather than of fabric. Robert Stoller wrote that ‘a fetish is a story masquerading as an object’ (quoted in Gamman and Makinen 1994: 1) and the ‘story’ of Fox’s production is embedded in her hand-crafted clothes whose labour-intensive and craft-based production techniques fetishise production itself. The London that Shelley Fox evokes is described by another chronicler and myth-maker of the city, Peter Ackroyd, in his descriptions of the ‘cockney visionaries’ Blake, Dickens and Turner: All of them were preoccupied with light and darkness, in a city that is built in the shadows of money and power; all of them were entranced by the scenic and the spectacular, in a city that is continually filled with the energetic display of people and institutions. They understood the energy of London, they understood its variety, and they also understood its darkness . . . in this vast concourse of people they understood the pity and mystery of existence just as surely as they understood its noise and bustle. (Ackroyd 1993)

I disagree with Ackroyd’s formulation of London ‘darkness’ as generic and transhistorical; I would situate this ‘darkness’ in specific moments of capitalist production and consumption, to which I believe it has a profound relation. Much

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Caroline Evans of the liveliness, as well as the darkness, of Ackroyd’s passage, are to be found in Marx’s descriptions of capitalist endeavour. And the designs I have discussed do have a very specific connection both to ‘darkness’ and to commerce. The hinterlands of East London lie adjacent to, and in the shadow of, the City of London, historically its commercial heart. Poverty and riches are spatially proximate, as they are in Fox’s ‘poor’ aesthetic and fetishised production; in her hand-crafted clothes in which ‘human labour . . . becomes value in its coagulated state’ (Marx 1976 [1867]: 142). High fashion, since the nineteenth century, has sought to differentiate itself from mass production and consumption through its use of expensive craft techniques. These give it cultural capital so that fetishized production acquires a symbolic value through a consumer discourse of art. Thus the coat becomes, in Marx’s phrase, ‘the body of value’ (Marx 1976 [1867]: 143). Shelley Fox has a very clear commercial sense, and her London, for all its differences from her predecessors, is still, in Ackroyd’s words, ‘a city built in the shadows of money and power’.

Note 1. Shelley Fox, interview with Caroline Evans, May 2000. All subsequent quotes from Shelley Fox are from this interview.

References Ackroyd, P. (1993), London Luminaries and Cockney Visionaries, the London Weekend Television London Lecture 1993, published by LWT Action & BT in the Community. Delivered at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 7 December 1993 and broadcast by London Weekend Television 19 December 1993. Bourdieu, P. (1986), Distinction, trans. R. Nice, Cambridge: Polity. Carver, T. (1998), The Postmodern Marx, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Dickens, C. (1985 [1864]), Our Mutual Friend, ed. S. Gill, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Evans, C. (1998), ‘The Golden Dustman: Martin Margiela’, Fashion Theory, 2(1): 73–93. – 210 –

Fashion Stranger than Fiction: Shelley Fox —— (2000), ‘Yesterday’s Emblems and Tomorrow’s Commodities: The Return of the Repressed in Fashion Imagery Today’, in S. Bruzzi and P.C. Gibson (eds), Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explorations and Analysis, London: Routledge. —— and Thornton, M. (1989), Women and Fashion: A New Look, London: Quartet. Gamman, L. and Makinen, M. (1994), Female Fetishism: A New Look, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Gill, A. (1998), ‘Deconstruction Fashion: The Making of Unfinished, Decomposing and Re-assembled Clothes’, Fashion Theory, 2(1): 25–49. Koda, H. (1985), ‘Rei Kawakubo and the Aesthetic of Poverty’, Costume: Journal of Costume Society of America, 11: 5–10. McRobbie, A. (1998), British Fashion Design: Rag Trade or Image Industry?, London: Routledge. Martin, R. (1992), ‘Destitution and Deconstruction: The Riches of Poverty in the Fashion of the 1990s’, Textile & Text, 15(2): 3–12. —— and Koda, H. (1993), Infra-Apparel, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. Marx, K. (1976), Capital, vol. I, trans. B. Fowkes, Harmondsworth: Penguin in association with New Left Review. Nietzsche, F. (1997), A Nietzsche Reader, selected, translated and with an introduction by R.J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Quennell, P. (ed.) (1964), Mayhew’s London: Being Selections from ‘London Labour and the London Poor’ by Henry Mayhew, London: Spring. Sinclair, I. (1997), Lights Out for the Territory: Nine Excursions into the Secret History of London, London: Granta. Thompson, E.P. and Yeo, E. (eds) (1971), The Unknown Mayhew: Selections from the ‘Morning Chronicle’ 1849–1850, London: Merlin. Tucker, A. (1998), The London Fashion Book, London: Thames & Hudson. Vinken, B. (1997), ‘Eternity: A Frill on the Dress’, Fashion Theory, 1(1): 59–68.

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Appendix: The Korner Archive Bronwen Edwards and Clare Lomas

The following is an edited catalogue of the garments displayed at the exhibition of Mrs Cecile Korner’s wardrobe held at the London College of Fashion in May 2000. It includes items loaned by the family. The collection (including items not displayed at the exhibition) is held at the London College of Fashion Archives along with a complete catalogue. The exhibition was divided into five sections arranged under the following headings: Biography, tracking Mrs Korner’s life through her wardrobe, Teaching and Research, demonstrating how the Korner Archive can be used as a learning resource, Home and Family, looking at the informal elements of the wardrobe suitable for the private sphere, and About Town, comprising smart day wear for shopping trips and meeting friends. Finally, Formal Occasions provided the opportunity to display treasured and glamorous evening dresses, which form an important element of the collection.

Biography Mrs Korner in her Forties Cocktail dress, maker unknown, c.1950s. Black lace lined with paper taffeta. The knee-length dress has a square neck, short sleeves, fitted bodice and box pleated lace overskirt. It has protective dress shields and zip fastening.

Mrs Korner in her Fifties Formal dress, Miss Worth, c.1960s. Dress of black wool double jersey with bengaline details and belt. Princess line with straight knee-length skirt, and bow detail at mid-thigh level. The dress has a V-neckline with false wing collar. It has short sleeves with gussets and is fully lined except for the sleeves. The dress fastens at centre back. It has been altered by unpicking the back darts from the waist upwards.

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Bronwen Edwards and Clare Lomas

Mrs Korner in her Sixties Cocktail dress, Hardy Amies (boutique), c.1970s. Black silk chiffon with ribbon detail and synthetic lining. This three-quarter-length dress has a V-neckline with butterfly box pleated sleeves and skirt. The bodice and skirt are lined, with fastening at centre back. The original belt is missing. (Item loaned by Korner family)

Teaching and Research An Example of an In-house Designer Dress ‘New Look’ style, Victor Stiebel at Jacqmar, c.1949–51. Fine woven wool fitted grey dress with black synthetic lining. This dress has a very complicated construction. The bodice is closely fitted with a shawl collar, a draped pleated front panel and full-length fitted magyar sleeves and French cuff. There are underarm gussets and the garment has dress shields. Complex fastenings are concealed at the front and left hand side. The three-quarterlength skirt is panelled with bias-cut accordion pleated vents and is partially lined.

An Example of Home Dressmaking Evening dress which is in the process of being remade, c.1950s. Three-quarter-length, cream heavy satin with textured floral pattern and plastic pearl beads. Machine stitching with hand finishing, still contains dressmaking pins.

An Example of a Named Designer Item Dress and jacket, Christian Dior (without label), c.1960s. Cream silk jacket with three-quarter-length sleeves, a wide notched collar and two inserted pockets. It is fully lined with purple and white floral silk. Sheath knee-length dress with purple and white floral silk fitted bodice and cream skirt. The bodice has a decorative flower detail of the same fabric and has half-capped sleeves. The garment fastens at centre back. The original belt is missing. (Item loaned by Korner Family)

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Appendix: The Korner Archive

An Example of a Boutique or ‘Off-the-peg’ Item Formal day dress, Hardy Amies, c. late 1950s to early 1960s. Black cotton velvet with a fitted bodice, a wide notched collar, low neckline and three-quarter-length sleeves. It has a centre front opening with ten corded buttons and sewn button holes. The below-knee-length A-line skirt is made up of three pieces.

An Example of a Dressmaker Copy Formal day dress, dressmaker made, no label, c. late 1950s to early 1960s. Black cotton velvet which appears to be a copy of the Hardy Amies boutique dress (see above) as the similarity between them is quite striking. The only difference is that the Hardy Amies dress has buttons down the whole front of the dress, whereas this item has four buttons and opens only to mid-thigh. The dress has a notched collar with three-quarter-length sleeves and three-quarter-length Aline skirt. It is not lined and has dress shields.

An Example of Mass-produced Clothing Blouse, ‘St Michael’ (Marks & Spencer), c.1970s Pink and white cotton gingham blouse with a convertible collar and short sleeves. There are buttons attached to the edge of the shirt for attaching stocking suspenders.

Home and Family Housecoat, Maker Unknown, c.1950s Pale blue and white cotton gingham housecoat with white machine-lace collar and cuffs (Figure A.1). Wrap-around knee-length dress fastened with two buttons at the waist. The hem of the flared skirt has been let down. This item was shop bought, although the label has been cut out at the neck. Mrs Korner’s son remembers: ‘This almost certainly is the kind of thing my mother wore in the house, possibly bought . . . on one of their trips to America’.

Beach Dress, Home-made, Late 1940s Red, white and blue cotton towelling sun-dress with knee-length A-line skirt, in front-fastening ‘Pinafore’ style. This dress was home-made, and intended only for holiday-wear when accompanied by children. Her son recalls: ‘This is beach

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Bronwen Edwards and Clare Lomas

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure A.1 Blue and white cotton gingham housecoat with white machine-lace collar and cuffs, maker unknown, 1950s. (London College of Fashion)

wear, my guess it that it is either pre-war or immediately post-war. Probably homemade, at that point she would have been making most of her clothes, certainly things like that she would have made herself.’

Summer Day Dress with Scarf, Home-made, Early 1950s Dress of synthetic crepe with large floral print. Décolleté fitted bodice and full three-quarter-length skirt, side-fastening. The dress is unlined but would most likely have been worn with starched or net petticoats to exaggerate the fullness of the skirt. An earlier photograph of Mrs Korner shows a dress with a different bodice more suitable for evening wear. The original dress was probably home-made and subsequently altered. – 216 –

Appendix: The Korner Archive

About Town Coat Dress, Maker Unknown, Mid- to Late 1950s Dress of grey wool mix with synthetic lining. The fitted bodice has a wide notched collar, concealed front fastening, three-quarter-length sleeves and knee-length wrap-around skirt. The maker is unknown; however, Mrs Korner’s son recalls her purchasing this item and suggests it is a French designer piece bought in London from a woman who sold dresses worn by models on the Paris catwalks.

Coat, Norman Hartnell, Early 1960s Three-quarter-length coat of pale blue wool and silk twill, with silk lining. A wide neckline with convertible collar and three-quarter-length magyar sleeves with turnup cuffs. Coat fastened with four large blue plastic buttons with large button detail on the pockets.

Suit, Mattli, 1950s Jacket and skirt in pale blue slub silk, with silk lining (Figure A.2). The jacket has pocket features, matching belt and three-quarter-length sleeves. The below-knee-

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure A.2 Detail of Mattli pale blue slub silk suit, 1950s. (London College of Fashion)

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Bronwen Edwards and Clare Lomas length gored skirt has a side zip fastening. The suit is in the process of being altered: the skirt’s waistband and lining have been removed.

Formal Occasions Evening Dress, Dressmaker-made, 1967–8 Full-length silk evening dress in pale green silk with large floral print (Figure A.3). The fitted cuffed bodice has shoe-string straps with a zip fastening at centre back. There are two different belts in fabric matching with the garment, one with a buckle and one with a hook and eye fastening. The silk was bought in Thailand, which Mrs Korner visited on her return from the World Bank conference held in Tokyo. The seams of the dress are selvedges which have been snipped; this is not a technique generally used in the UK, and suggests the item was made up abroad, possibly in Bangkok.

TO VIEW THIS FIGURE PLEASE REFER TO THE PRINTED EDITION

Figure A.3 Green silk evening gown, dressmaker made, 1967. (London College of Fashion)

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Appendix: The Korner Archive

Evening Dress, Hardy Amies, Early 1980s Full-length coat dress in black sheer georgette with bright pink satin and gold lurex squares woven in. The fabric is backed with black organza and lined with black silk. There is a separate full-length under-dress. Mrs Korner’s son recalls that this dress, though a spectacular design, was not a characteristic choice for his mother and she wore it only once, to the opera, soon after her husband died.

Formal Dress, Dressmaker-made, and Accessories, c.1963 Dress of brown and black rayon taffeta with grey flower pattern and white cotton cuffs. The dress has a fitted bodice with V-neckline, roll collar and three-quarterlength sleeves. It fastens at the front. The full below-knee-length skirt is supported by a black net underskirt. The outfit has a matching drawstring bag and was worn with brown suede gloves with black trim and white feather hat by Clarida, also in the collection. The dress was first worn by Mrs Korner at her eldest son’s wedding in Vienna, 1963, although she never used the bag. The dress was also worn later in her life and she altered it accordingly by letting out darts and inserting panels. The hem was also taken up, in accordance with the shorter fashions that followed.

Evening Dress, Horrockses, c.1950s Strapless dress of blue floral chiffon, fully lined, with plain blue chiffon belt. The bodice is boned and has a full below-knee-length skirt. Such a dress would be likely to have been worn with long white gloves and a stole to formal dinners. Although the dress is short in length, contemporary etiquette books advise against the wearing of such revealing necklines to cocktail parties! (Item loaned by Korner family)

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