Fashioning Everyday Lives in 20th century Britain and America

Fashioning Everyday Lives reveals how fashion was integral to everyday lives in Britain and America in the 20th century. Looking at New York and London in some detail, it proposes that fashion was mundane, routine, and ordinary as well as novel, innovative and unusual. Whilst cities such as New York and London have been created by the fashion system in particular by the combination of designer names, famous brands and specific districts these cities are also places of 'local taste constellations' based around fashion, music, dance and clubs, but also family and work activities and events (Gilbert and Breward, 2006). It is in these other city spaces- interstitial and peripheral to the city's traditional fashion centres- that fashion in everyday lives can be observed. These places were not only for the young; indeed part of this research is to question the generational , market -driven myth of fashion, as it considers, for example, getting married, dressing for the church or grocery shopping, going to the races or the soccer game, or heading for work. It is concerned with how fashionable clothes were retained and worn, re-made, and re-configured, as people drew items from their wardrobes and closets in a routine, everyday manner. Over the last century various writers, historians and theorists have studied fashion as a way to articulate all that is most modern, yet when we look at photographs and newsreel, read auto-biographies and diaries, and listen to individuals describing their attitudes to fashion and dressing, it becomes apparent that clothes remained with people throughout their lives, and that items of dress could be extremely symbolic of key moments in individual lives. Whilst the extraordinariness of 'high fashion' has captured people's imagination in magazines, film and newspapers, 'ordinary' fashion has been resolutely invisible. Yet visual sources that depict people going about their daily routines show how they have interpreted fashion's cycles even if these were not always the latest nor articulated as a coherent 'look'. Such fashion was heterogeneous and represented a bringing together of familiar garments accumulated in closets and wardrobes over time. To these might be added something modern: a new coat or the latest hat, but most often they would remain ensembles of clothes acquired during a number of years. Focusing on the flip-side of fashion; its ordinariness and everydayness, instead of its spectacle and glamour, this study asserts the importance of wearing fashion in the 20th century as diverse groups and individuals in two of the world's fashion cities, New York and London went about their daily lives. Aiming to expose the individual imprint on fashion and its role in the 'making' of the self, this transnational project includes a number of personal autobiographies of fashion through a detailed look at individual wardrobes, family albums and shopping expeditions. It shows how fashion shaped everyday lives in similar and different ways in London and New York, and it reveals how these two cities were historically linked via the fashion business, popular media, and individual and group migration

This research project offers a number of pathways to wider impact. These offer potential benefits to public bodies (museums, archivists), commercial private sector organisations (design professionals, creative and cultural industries, the media), education (school children, students, and teachers), and local communities and the general public (with diverse constituencies). In general terms the benefits stem from wider understanding of fashion and its social, cultural meanings, its histories, circulation and use, the fashion city and its constituents, and the use and meanings of photography and archives of visual and material culture. A number of strategies for developing impact will be deployed. These include:

1. The organisation of an exhibition, which will be staged in Britain and America. Fashioning London and New York in the 20th century organised by the applicant, Masters students and co-author will include visual material (photographs, advertisements, magazines) from key archives and sources. These will be accompanied by narrative accounts of individual life stories outlined through fashion and staged at the Kellen Gallery at Parsons School of Design, New York and at Gallery North, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne. The beneficiaries of these include museum curators and archivists, the fashion media and industry, students and school children, and the wider public. The exhibition will open in New York in autumn 2013 to coincide with New York Fashion Week.

2. Underpinning and complementing the exhibition will be Fashion Stories which will allow visitors to the exhibitions to narrate their own 'fashion stories' via photographs and oral interviews. This will draw into the history-making process, those individuals who would not normally see themselves as 'fashionable' thus reinforcing the project's central premise, that fashion impacted upon everyday lives as never before in 20th century Britain and America.

3. Two public lectures in the fashion cities at the centre of this research Fashion and Everyday lives in Britain and America will highlight the ways in which the processes of wearing everyday fashion is a creative practice that utilizes aesthetic, social and cultural choices by most people in their daily lives. These will be aimed at a range of potential beneficiaries including peers, students, the public, and the media. They will accompany the exhibition openings at the Kellen Gallery, New York and at Gallery North, Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

4. By utilising quite simple new technologies that are well within the public domain, Opening the Wardrobe will draw on elements of the research that can be made accessible to the wider public (that which is not restricted by copyright). The blog will be launched at the opening of the first exhibition in New York in autumn 2013 to coincide with New York and London fashion weeks. Masters students, the applicant and her co-author have already established a Facebook site for 'Fashion and Everyday Life' (currently a closed group) that allows their research to be shared and discussed. Oral accounts and images gathered from visitors via interviews at the two exhibitions will be posted on the blog (following agreed consent).

5. A longer term benefit of this project will be the Fashioning Everyday Lives Network which aims to strengthen international relationships between art galleries, museums and academics in the UK and the USA via broader networks and cultural exchanges especially through the exhibition and the blog.