The Importance of Fashion History (with Kate Strasdin)

"If we were all wearing the same thing or if we're all wearing nothing at all you might say it doesn't matter, but we don't and it does."

In this episode, I am again joined by dress historian Kate Strasdin, this time turning our attention to the wider world of Fashion History.  It's importance, the misconceptions and stereotypes of the subject and ways people interested in the field can get their foot in the door, hiw and why Fashion History should never be considered 'just for women' and how Kate got her start in working in the world of fashion history.

Kate Strasdin is a dress historian who has been fascinated by old clothes since she was a child.  She is a lecturer in Cultural Studies at Falmouth University and is a freelance consultant for dress and textile exhibitions. She has appeared as an expert on The Great British Sewing Bee.  In 2016 she was given an anonymous album full of annotated dress swatches that had been kept in a trunk for over fifty years, its original keeper unknown... She spent the next six years unlocking its secrets.

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"The hidden fabric of a Victorian woman's life - from family and friends to industry and Empire - told through her unique textile scrapbook.

In 1838, a young woman was given a diary on her wedding day. Collecting snippets of fabric from a range of garments she carefully annotated each one, creating a unique record of her life and times. Her name was Mrs Anne Sykes.  Nearly two hundred years later, the diary fell into the hands of Kate Strasdin, a fashion historian and museum curator. Strasdin spent the next six years unraveling the secrets contained within the album's pages.  Piece by piece, she charts Anne's journey from the mills of Lancashire to the port of Singapore before tracing her return to England in later years. 

Fragments of cloth become windows into Victorian life: pirates in Borneo, the complicated etiquette of mourning, poisonous dyes, the British Empire in full swing, rioting over working conditions and the terrible human cost of Britain's cotton industry.  This is life writing that celebrates ordinary people: the hidden figures, the participants in everyday life. 

Through the evidence of waistcoats, ball gowns and mourning outfits, Strasdin lays bare the whole of human experience in the most intimate of mediums: the clothes we choose to wear."

The Dress Diary of Mrs Anne Sykes: Secrets from a Victorian Woman’s Wardrobe is available to buy now (Penguin Vintage/ Chatto & Windus)