The Modern Venus: Dress, Underwear and Accessories in the late 18th Century Britain and the Atlantic World, Bloomsbury Academic, November, 2023
This book establishes the role of underwear and accessories as cultural currency in late eighteenth-century Britain and the Atlantic world. Fashioning the Modern Venus highlights the significance of underwear and accessories within the context of 1770s and 1780s British fashion, when fashionable dress expanded to new heights and volumes. Dissecting the female silhouette into regions of the body, the book focuses on five types of dress: headwear, cork rumps and bums, muffs, handkerchiefs and stays. Shifting away from a broad-sweeping stylistic evolution, this book establishes the contemporary position of these garments as highly charged artefacts that functioned and flourished within the dialogues and exchanges of eighteenth-century society.
Methodologically, this book explores the relationships between material artefacts and their visual and discursive representations, marrying material, archival and visual approaches to dress history. It demonstrates how these key facets of fashionable dress acted as significant social and cultural currency. Its holistic treatment of material artefacts, representations in painted portraiture and graphic satire, and textual constructions demonstrates how the study of dress not only contributes to understandings of the late eighteenth century, but also bridges and supports historical and art historical discourses.
‘Supporting Roles’, Crown to Couture, Historic Royal Palaces, April, 2023
This contribution to the exhibition catalogue for Crown to Couture discusses what was worn underneath and the significance of foundation garments both in the eighteenth century and on the contemporary red carpet.
‘Subverting Time: the Banyan, Temporality, and Graphic Satire, Eighteenth-Century Studies, March, 2023
This article examines men's dressing gowns, known as banyans, and their relation to time by examining the banyan's representation in two contrasting media. Within painted portraiture, the banyan is portrayed as timeless and immortal sartorial companion to the gentleman and scholar. However, as the body of this article addresses, within graphic satire, the banyan is represented as an accomplice to men's misuse of time. By probing the banyan's satirical representation in relation to daily life, the article exposes how the banyan was seen to subvert the temporal daily norms and rhythms of Britain's dominant sex.
‘A Well-Turned Leg’, Fashioning Masculinities, V&A Publishing, 2022
This contribution to the Fashioning Masculinities exhibition catalogue examines the role of the leg in men's fashion. From footwear to stockings, it positions the leg and foot as a beacon of masculinity from the early modern period to the present.
“Feather Muffs of all Colours”: Fashion, Patriotism, and the Natural World in Eighteenth-century Britain, Appearance(s), February, 2022
The end of the Seven Years War and the acquisition of the fur trade in Canada had an unexpected consequence in British fashion. Despite the increased access and availability to furs by British furriers, the newspapers noted with disgust that, under the influence of French milliners who had already adapted to their loss of fur supplies, British women of fashion had no taste for furs, only for feathers. The feather muff became the target of the press’ vitriol, an unpatriotic symbol of French sycophantism that was designed to undermine Britain’s victory for which the brave General Wolfe fell.
Despite the weighted and charged connotations surrounding the feather muff, its position in eighteenth-century dress and fashion has never before been explored in depth. This article aims to amend that oversight and contextualise the feather muff’s problematic status alongside its material lifecycle and understand the muff as an accessory that could bridge not only the Channel, but also the disparate worlds of fashion and natural history. Beginning with its notoriously charged appearance in the early 1760s, this article examines the lifecycle of the feather muff in mid-eighteenth century Britain. It first explores the feather muff’s perception in the press as a sartorial French intruder in British fashion. It then establishes how the feather muff was a product of the feather trade, exploring it make and manufacture. Finally, considering the symbolic and emblematic nature of the feather as its composition, it places the feather muff within wider narratives of British feather culture, female sociability, and the natural world.
‘Fancy Feathers: The Feather Trade in Britain and the Atlantic World’ in Material Literacy in Eighteenth-Century Britain: A Nation of Makers ed. by Serena Dyer and Chloe Wigston Smith, Bloomsbury Academic, 2020
While feathered plumage saturates the visual landscape of eighteenth-century portraiture, appearing on hats, in hair, in hands and on the dress of Britain's elite, the means by which those feathers came to inhabit such pronounced places of ornamentation has yet to be fully explored. Over the second half of the eighteenth century, the British, and subsequently Atlantic, feather industry evolved from one seemingly incorporated into the general sartorial trades to one with its own specific branch. Known by various names, including plumassier (after the French), feather-man, feather merchant, feather dealer, and feather manufacturer, this profession fashioned a distinct place, separate from the haberdasher's and milliner's domain.
This chapter delves into the lifecycle of the feather and, in particular, in whose hands it was traded, dyed, worked and sewn before appearing in its now immortal position on the painted canvas or printed page. Tracing its importation, manufacture, sale and ownership, this chapter examines how the industry developed and was shaped by the rising fashionability of the feather over the latter half of the long eighteenth century. Though a natural material, sourced from around the globe, feathers underwent a skilled transformation from bird to 'plume a la mode'. Like many sartorial trends, the material knowledge of these makers and manufacturers were not limited to the professional, but extended also to the amateur hand at home. Featherwork was a popular craft in an eighteenth-century household, one that highlights a further dimension of this feather-focused material literacy. A staple of fashion and craft, the feather, and its ecological to fashionable evolution, has long been overlooked in eighteenth-century historiography, despite its ubiquity and often flagrant prominence on the British silhouette. This chapter seeks to distinguish the makers of feathers, shedding a greater a light onto the process and material knowledge of their construction in order to better understand their pervasive plumed presence in dress and representation.
‘Pulled Tight and Gleaming: The Stocking’s Position within Eighteenth-Century Masculinity,’ Textile History, Vol. 46 (1), 3-27, May 2015,
Awarded the Pasold Research Fund Award for Best Essay 2015 (£400)
This article examines the cultural significance of the stocking as an essential accessory of an eighteenth-century man’s attire. Rooted in a material understanding of the stocking through extant garments and archival accounts, this discourse broadens to consider the stocking as a form of cultural currency that spanned visual and popular culture in the eighteenth century. An analysis of the stocking’s visual representation in painted portraiture and graphic satire reveals how it acted as a barometer for British masculinity and subsequently as a visual indicator for the health of the nation, which directly correlated with the stocking’s position and pattern of wear on the leg.