Material Strategies: Dress and Gender in Historial Perspective

Material Strategies brings together scholars from different disciplines to explore what dress and textiles can tell us about gender history. Experts from the fields of dress, design and textile history, business history, cultural anthropology, social history, art history and cultural history consider particular periods, places, individual garments, and moments of transformation. The book is broad in scope, covering women, men, social groupings and nations from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. At the same time, it incorporates illustrations that provide detailed visual evidence for gendered strategies of dress. Material Strategies both demonstrates the potential of this field of enquiry and helps to define its parameters. A jargon–free style makes it accessible to readers from a wide range of backgrounds.

Introduction: Material Strategies Engendered: Barbara Burman (University of Southampton) and Carole Turbin (SUNY/Empire State College). Part I: Dress, Textiles and Social Transitions in Pre–industrial Europe:. 1. Fashion, Time and the Consumption of a Renaissance Man in Germany: The Costume Book of Matthaus Schwarz of Augsburg, 1496–1564: Gabriele Mentges (University of Dortmund). 2. Reflections on Gender and Status Distinction: An Analysis of the Liturgical Textiles Recorded in Mid–Sixteenth–Century London: Maria Hayward (University of Southampton). Part II: Identity and Eroticism, Consumption and Production, from the Early Seventeenth to the Mid–Twentieth Century:. 1. Following Suit: Men, Masculinity and Gendered Practices in the Clothing Trade in Leeds, England, 1890–1940: Katrina Honeyman (University of Leeds). 2. Pocketing the Difference: Gender and Pockets in Nineteenth–Century Britain: Barbara Burman (University of Southampton). 3. Fashioning the American Man: The Arrow Collar Man, 1907–1931: Carole Turbin. 4. Erotic Modesty: (ad)dressing Female Sexuality and Propriety in Open and Closed Drawers, USA, 1800–1930: Jill Fields (California State University, Fresno). Part III: Fashion Strategies for Reconfiguring Nations and Social Groups in the Early Twentieth Century:. 1. ‘De–Humanised Females and Amzonians’: British Wartime Fashion and its Representation in Home Chat, 1914–1918: Cheryl Buckley (University of Northumbria). 2. Fashion, the Politics of Style and National Identity in Pre–Fascist and Fascist Italy: Eugenia Paulicelli (City University of New York). 3. Style and Subversion: Postwar Poses and the Neo–Edwardian Suit in Mid–Twentieth–Century Britain: Christopher Breward (London College of Fashion). 4. ‘Anti–Mini Militants Meet Modern Misses’: Urban Style, Gender and the Politics of ‘National Culture’ in 1960s Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: Andrew M. Ivaska (University of Michigan). 5. Dressing for Leadership in China: Wives and Husbands in an Age of Revolutions (1911–1976): Verity Wilson (Victoria and Albert Museum, London).

Barbara Burman teaches at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, where she is Director of the Centre for the History of Textiles and Dress. Her research interests and publications focus on the cultural and social history of dress and textiles in the modern period. She edited The Culture of Sewing: Gender, Consumption and Home Dressmaking (Berg. 1999). Carole Turbin is Professor Emeritus of History and Sociology at SUNY/Empire State College. She is author of Working Women of Collar City: Gender, Class and Community in Troy, New York, 1864–86 (University of Illinois, 1992) and numerous articles, including ′Collars and Consumers: Changing Images of American Manliss and Business′, in Beauty and Business, ed. Phillip Scranton (Routledge, 2001.) She is also an artist who has exhibited in the NY area.

"This stands out as a vaulable summation of the many approaches which, in shorthand, can be described as ′the new dress history′." Valerie Cummings <!––end––> "This book is a significant, interdisciplinary consideration of the gendered characteristics of clothing that provides new conceptual frameworks and methodologies for the interpretation of attire across tiem and culture. Material Strategies should further move clothing and fashion scholarship out of its ghetto and into the mainstream. Textile History