Making Historical Dress: Hands, bodies and methods

Making clothing is a fundamentally corporeal experience. Yet histories of dress, textiles, and manufacture often lack awareness or acknowledgement of the physicality of garment making. Such processes were rarely captured in text, and extant material objects usually only represent the finished product. The Making Historical Dress Network will bring into conversation and flatten traditional hierarchies between a diverse range of scholars and practitioners who have recognised this lacuna and taken to their needles to recapture practical sewing knowledge of the past. Through these 'embodied' approaches, garment construction can be reverse engineered, lost skills can be recovered, and instructions and diagrams can be tested. Recreative methods push back against the narratives of professionalised and masculine production, which dominate the archive. Attention to historic practices of manual making offers a mouthpiece to labourers, particularly women and BAME makers, who are often obscured in guild records and industrialist accounts. Vitally, recreation recovers the manual skills devalued by present-day fast fashion. It illuminates and retrieves the physical human labour required to make clothing, which historic narratives around and current practices of mass manufacture have diminished.

Experimental methodologies are well established in disciplines such as archaeology and technical art history but have only recently gained traction amongst historians, as recreation and practical approaches have often remained outside the academy. The recent 'making' and 'embodied' turns, led largely by dress historians, have asked scholars to consider how these objects interacted with and were formed by historical bodies. Existing scholarship, such as the work of Arnold and Tiramani in Theatrical Costume Studies and Hohti Erichsen and Pitman in History, has been fragmented along disciplinary and professional lines. However, this approach has gained accelerated traction amongst scholars following the launch of Tiramani's School of Historical Dress in 2012 and Davidson's 2019 article. Simultaneously, the growth of historical recreation on YouTube and Instagram since 2018 (recognised as a fashion phenomenon by Vogue in 2021) has created a global community of historical makers, who generate knowledge outside of the academy.

Despite the field's growth, there is little cohesion or field-wide acceptance of key terms and methods. Research in this field has been undertaken by scholars and practitioners fragmented across the UK, USA, Europe, and Australia, working on different periods, or employed outside traditional academic institutions. The Making Historical Dress Network will unite established and emerging scholars of dress across the disciplines of History, Literature, Art History, and Cultural Studies with practitioners in the worlds of costume production, curation, and conservation, as well as the social media community of historical costumers. In doing so, the network will provide a forum for the discussion and establishment of a shared fundamental rubric for the field. The network will address the lack of diversity within the field, a particular challenge for the academy, by illuminating the work of diverse and enslaved makers of the past and raising up the voices of BAME practitioners. This network will consolidate existing fragmented work, co-create knowledge with non-academic practitioners, and enable participants to establish field-defining best practice.