As part of our celebration of fifty years of History of Dress at The Courtauld, this one- day conference explores the relationship and significance of women in designing, wearing, promoting, curating and writing about dress and fashion. Speakers will consider this both from the perspective of those working professionally in the field, and those who consume, wear and document fashion. The conference will provide the opportunity to question how changes in dress, and its representation and exploration through the media, academia, and exhibiting, have impacted upon relationships between women and fashion, since 1965.
Women, including Stella Mary Newton, who set up the first Courtauld course in the History of Dress, have been central to developing the discipline and exploring dress’ multifaceted meanings. They have also been important in the design and dissemination of fashion as a product and as an idea. This conference celebrates and critiques the role women have taken in making fashion, and, by extension, the role fashion plays in making women – by defining and constructing notions of gender, sexuality, beauty and ethnicity. We will take a global, interdisciplinary perspective to seek an overview of women’s significance to fashion and dress and vice versa.
KEYNOTE LECTURES
Designing Women
‘One dimension of fashion is the history of individuals who created this world in which reality and fantasy mingle and become confused, a world in which we go adorned into our dreams.’
Taking this quote from Elizabeth Wilson as a prompt, this paper reflects upon the complex, multi-layered and historically contingent nature of women’s relationship with fashion. Whilst a few women have designed fashion at the highest level, others have developed and managed successful businesses in fashion- not just designing and making fashion, but also working in the myriad of allied professions and industries. Many have made fashion within the home for themselves and family in effect ‘designing’ their identities with a greater or lesser degree of intent and complexity as they carried on everyday lives. Describing her upbringing in Yorkshire, feminist historian Sheila Rowbotham agonised ‘how was I to turn into Juliette Greco and Brigitte Bardot and Simone de Beauvoir all rolled into one? Leeds C&A cheaper separates just did not stretch far enough.’ Bounded by Juliette Greco and Leeds C&A, and drawing on long-standing research interests, this paper will examine how women made fashion and fashion made women.
Cheryl Buckley joined the University of Brighton as Professor of Fashion and Design History in 2013. Current research supported by an AHRC Fellowship has returned to the theme of the ordinary to explore the ways in which fashion is embedded in everyday lives. This project undertaken with Hazel Clark at Parsons School of Design in New York will result in a jointly authored book, Fashion and Everyday Life: Britain and America, 1890-2010. An interest in gender and feminism has been intrinsic to Cheryl’s practice as a design historian, and she remains committed to indisciplinarity and the questioning of dominant narratives about history. A former Chair of the Design History Society, she is now Chair of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Design History.
Feminine Attributes
This paper will look at exhibition-making and dress. Taking its cues from Renaissance depictions of saints and mythological figures it will look at how attributes might be translated into props to further complicate an exhibition’s narrative.
Judith Clark is Professor of Fashion and Museology at London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London , where she is course leader of MA Fashion Curation and Co-Director (with Amy de la Haye) of the Centre for Fashion Curation. She is a visiting lecturer at the Architectural Association, London. She is currently working towards an MA in Cultural and Intellectual History 1300-1650 at the Warburg Institute. Clark works internationally as an exhibition-maker.
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