1,720,967 research outputs found
Reporting Royal Dress: Queen Alexandra and Royal Image Making
Get PDFThis chapter considers the origins of the Court Circular as a means of disseminating royal style, specifically the clothing worn by Queen Alexandra. It examines the embedded knowledge of dress and fabrics in the public consciousness and the print descriptions of formal clothing shared with the general public. The image making of Queen Alexandra and her canny use of dress as a means of cementing her public popularity played out through these descriptions
Alexandra of Denmark: Fashioning the Modern Consort
No full textIn this edited volume of Queens Consort, this is a biographical summary of Queen Alexandra analysed through the lens of dress and how she fashioned both her public and private self. It considers her life through dress, both through surviving objects in different museum collections and through other historical records, paintings and memoirs.
Abstract
For so relatively recent a queen consort, Alexandra (1844–1925) is a figure whose reputation has arguably found itself built on mythologised narratives. Popular perceptions position her as the beleaguered wife of an unpredictable husband, Edward VII—whose scandals eclipsed her own experiences. It is often her enduringly youthful appearance that is most remarked upon, yet previous biographies have not explored how she came to capitalise on this. This chapter considers Alexandra’s dress practices to explore more traditional approaches to life writing. Her garments have survived in museums around the world, covering different decades of her life. Using these alongside a variety of written sources and images, it is possible to build on existing biographical works. Looking at her world through the lens of clothing reveals much about her upbringing, her life at the heart of the British establishment, and how she used dress to control public perceptions of her royal role
Pattern As Memento - the Case of the 19thc Dress Diary
Get PDFMemorialising lives through the ‘album-ising’ of paper scraps, photographic montages and collages is a well documented female Victorian hobby, but in 2016 I was given a very special example by an elderly friend – an album of dress scraps compiled by one woman from the 1830s to the 1870s. Albums relating to dress are scarce and under-researched. Barbara Johnson’s album of 18th century fabrics is perhaps the best known in the genre, memorialising the wardrobe of one woman but few others survive and those that do have been rarely documented.
Early research has revealed not only the owner of the album but some of the circumstances of her life. It records the life through dress of Anne Sykes, her family and friends recorded through the inclusion of dress fabrics from dozens of those in her social circle. Each swatch is cut into the same shape and each page has been organised into a distinct sartorial pattern. Other patterns emerge through analysis of its pages – the patterns of consumption of this community of women in the North of England recorded within its pages, patterns of fashionable fabrics dispelling myths about provincial access to prevailing styles and the pattern of writing the details of each hexagonal piece of fabric so carefully pasted into the book.
This paper will consider the memorialisation of these lives through dress fragments, what this pattern of album creation represented and the multi-disciplinary potential of fragmentary material culture
The Dress Diary of Mrs Anne Sykes: Secrets of a Victorian Woman's Wardrobe
No full textIn 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 unravelling 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
Inside the Royal Wardrobe - A Dress History of Queen Alexandra
No full textThis single author monograph was undertaken following my doctoral research into the surviving garments of Queen Alexandra. Although earlier biographies had been written about this Edwardian Queen, her garments had never before been studied by scholars, despite the fact that her appearance was central to her public persona and the performance of her Imperial royal body. More than 130 garments survive in different museums worldwide, none of them had been studied before and some institutions did not know they had garments that related to her. The key research questions centred on demythologising previously long held notions of Alexandra's queenship, considering how objects can contribute to life writing and analysing elite dress practices in the 19th century. The research took a material culture methodological approach, starting with the object and then working in a cross-disciplinary fashion to better understand the life in question through the objects left behind. Garments were the primary source but underpinned with business records, wardrobe accounts, contemporary photographs and letters. The research produced some key outcomes in terms of new knowledge relating to Alexandra's life and aspects of her physical self that had never been interrogated before and brought together, in a virtual sense, the disparate objects form her working royal wardrobe that had become separated over more than a century and across four continents. It also underscored the practice of reading objects as sources and raising the profile of material culture studies in the academy. As well as the monograph which was published in both hardback and paperback and as an e-book, the research was disseminated through the exhibition, Royal Women, at the Fashion Museum, Bath. It was also shared with the institutions holding her garments, thus generating a connecting thread to link them, in spite of their disparate geographical locations
‘Think of me as I was now I am breaking up’ Queen Alexandra and the Art of Royal Camouflage 1863-1925
No full textAlexandra, Princess of Denmark, married Edward Prince of Wales on March 10 1863. From a role of European royal obscurity she was launched into a public life that was to dominate her world for almost fifty years. As Princess of Wales she became one of the most photographed women of her generation and her appearance was reported almost daily in the press and disseminated through popular photographic images. Alexandra has been the subject of a number of biographies since her death in 1925 but whilst all attest to the importance of her appearance in her public and private life, none of them have attempted to move further towards an analysis of her clothed body.\ud
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Upwards of 130 objects relating to Alexandra are now held in ten different museums worldwide. They range from glittering evening dresses to elements of daywear, shoes, coats, stockings and fans. These remains of her corporeality can be ‘read’ and allow an interpretation that adds to the supposedly ‘known’ biographical subject.\ud
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This paper will explore how Alexandra used dress to mask or disguise aspects of her physicality from the public domain. From a supposed childhood scar on her neck to a serious bout of post-natal rheumatic fever, the scars and frailties of Alexandra’s royal body were carefully camouflaged through astute sartorial decisions. Taking an object based methodology, surviving garments can reveal how these decisions were constructed in her working royal wardrobe. \ud
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As her aging body was crowned Queen Consort at the age of 58 in 1902 she adopted ever more glittering apparel in a bid to demonstrate her newfound majesty, but also I would suggest to distract observers from her fading beauty and thus protect herself from bodily reality
It's All in the Detail - Couture's Best Kept Secret
No full textA short article exploring the history and work of London embroidery firm Hand & Lock, considering their establishment in the 18th century and examining the work they do today
‘A Working Royal Wardrobe – The Public Persona of Queen Alexandra’
No full textAs the world press disseminates images of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge touring Australia, the concept of a carefully presented working royal wardrobe feels like a familiar one, ensuring that both sartorial and cultural expectations are realised and logistical considerations managed.\ud
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It was not always thus, but during the second half of the 19th century and into the first decade of the 20th century, one celebrated figure successfully negotiated the realities of nomadic royalty. Alexandra, Princess of Wales and from 1901, Queen Consort to Edward VII arguably rescued the British monarchy from the brink of crisis following Queen Victoria’s retreat from public life. A young and vivacious Danish Princess, she married Edward Prince of Wales in 1863 and was launched into British society to become the public face of royalty. Her popularity was enormous and this was in no small part due to her shrewd sartorial decisions.\ud
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This paper will consider how Alexandra made her wardrobe work in her favour when travelling both in Britain and abroad, promoting the royal family in a recognisably modern fashion. The management of her appearance was a carefully crafted affair and relied upon the skill of those who have been largely hidden from the historical record – the dressers and wardrobe maids, the directors of travel, messengers, dressmakers, tailors and hairdressers – who all ensured that the public persona of the Princess of Wales exceeded the expectations of the many thousands of British subjects who inevitably flocked to see her.\ud
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Based on recently completed PhD research, I will consider how Alexandra managed the complexities of dressing and changing garments whilst travelling. Using evidence from surviving garments, diaries, letters and photographs, it reveals Alexandra’s recognition that with an increasingly sophisticated media machine her managed appearance was a powerful contributor to positive public perceptions
Foundations of Fashion - The History of Underwear
No full textA paper given to NADFAS members in various parts of the UK (I am an accredited lecturer for the National Association of Decorative and Fine Arts Societies
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