Fashion Theory

The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture

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Dress in History: Reflections on a Contested

Terrain

John Styles

To cite this article: John Styles (1998) Dress in History: Reflections on a Contested Terrain,
Fashion Theory, 2:4, 383-392

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Published online: 21 Apr 2015.

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 Dress in History: Reflections on a Contested Terrain 383

Fashion Theory, Volume 2, Issue 4, pp.383–390

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Dress in History:
Reflections on a
John Styles Contested Terrain
John Styles is Head of Post- The title of the conference that gave rise to this collection of articles
graduate studies at the Victoria
was “Dress in History.” In the course of the conference a great deal was
and Albert Museum in London,
responsible for the M.A. program in said about dress, but rather less about history. These concluding
the History of Design run jointly by comments are concerned with the difficulties, conceptual and method-
the Museum and the Royal College
ological, of reinserting dress into history. In addressing those difficulties
of Art. He has published exten-
sively on design and manufacturing I shall reflect on the tensions between object-based and other modes of
in eighteenth-century England, with scholarship that have dogged the history of dress and fashion. These
a particular emphasis on textiles
are tensions that are unusually potent and intractable, most obviously
and dress. He is currently writing a
book entitled Clothes, Fashion and because they so often reflect professional divisions between those who
the Plebeian Consumer in England, study surviving garments and accessories, especially in museums, and
1660 to 1820.
those who study dress through images and words, often in higher
 384 John Styles

education. In reflecting on these divisions, my aim is to move beyond

issues of methodology—how we do the history of dress—and to raise
the more fundamental question of why we study the history of dress.
Appropriately I shall begin with the history of the subject itself, which
is dealt with so eloquently by Lou Taylor elsewhere in this volume. As
she points out, for most of the last hundred and fifty years, as art
museums multiplied and a host of new academic disciplines established
themselves in the universities, the study of historic clothing and the
history of clothing remained marginalized in these institutions. In some
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senses it still remains so, although the situation has changed radically
since the Second World War, and particularly since the 1970s. Why have
matters changed? In addressing that question I want to focus on
intellectual rather than institutional issues, while not denying the force
of Lou Taylor’s observations about the importance of gender prejudice
in explaining the widespread institutional animosity towards dress and
its history.
In the first half of the twentieth century that institutional animosity
was profound. As Lou Taylor’s essay makes clear, insofar as museums
in the period collected post-Medieval western dress at all, it was rarely
with great enthusiasm. Often clothes were prized more for the textiles
from which they were made than for their design and aesthetic qualities
as dress. What interest there was remained largely confined to high
fashion. But at least some important museums did develop collections
in this period, however grudgingly. In the universities, by contrast, the
history of dress featured hardly at all. Professional university historians
concerned themselves overwhelmingly with the history of high politics.
Economic and social history was struggling to establish a foothold within
the academy. It remained firmly anchored in the history of production,
especially the transformation of production wrought by factory industrial-
ization. Economic historians wrote extensively about how clothing
materials were produced, but with few exceptions their histories
concluded at the textile factory gate. Clothing and its production were
too fragmented, too small-scale, in a sense too primitive to incorporate
into their grand narratives of industrialization. Similarly, for those
economic historians (often women) who worked on social conditions
and social policy, clothing was simply not important enough when set
alongside grand themes like hunger or unemployment. Some academic
research did grapple with fashion in these years, but it was hardly ever
undertaken by historians. Such studies mainly considered fashion in its
relationship to economic, sociological, or psychological theory. Most
of this work was ahistorical, for instance those studies that contributed
to the early development of market research, but there were exceptions,
most notably J. Flugel’s Psychology of Clothes with its historical analysis
of “the great masculine renunciation”.1 Nevertheless, even at their most
historical, hardly any of these academic studies can be said to have
developed a sustained focus on the history of dress in its own right.
 Dress in History: Reflections on a Contested Terrain 385

Not a great deal changed in the decades immediately after the Second
World War. Interest in the history of dress at the Courtauld Institute in
London arose initially because art historians were anxious to use
historical knowledge of clothes to date paintings. As in the museums of
the 1950s and 1960s, the incorporation of fashionable dress into the
category of art history came only slowly and grudgingly. Indeed it is
really only since the 1970s that the history of dress has blossomed in
the academy. The reasons for this blossoming are many and various,
but three important sources of intellectual nourishment stand out. First,
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the rise of feminist historical scholarship, second the emergence of

cultural studies, and third the shift in interest across the social sciences
from production to consumption.
The new women’s history that emerged from the late 1960s as part
of a wider revitalization of feminist thought and campaigning did not
initially display much interest in the history of dress. In Britain especially,
issues to do with work, power and inequality predominated for feminist
historians whose roots were mainly in social history. But interest in the
experience of women in the past soon spawned interest in women’s
identities and the ways those identities were constructed and represented
in art and the mass media. Dress is, of course, one of the key mechanisms
of gender differentiation. It is also a key site of female expertise. Its study
therefore acquired a new significance and respectability. This is not to
say that feminist historians have always been successful at incorporating
the study of dress into their work. A willingness to do so has often been
compromised by an unfamiliarity with the subject and its technical
difficulties.2 Much of the best work on dress by feminist historians has
been done at by scholars working in film history, design history and art
history.3
The relationship of cultural studies to the history of dress is dealt with
very thoroughly by Christopher Breward elsewhere in this volume.
However, it is worth emphasizing here that, as with women’s history, it
was the growth of an interest in issues of identity, autonomy and
resistance that increasingly drew the pioneers of cultural studies in the
1970s towards the study of dress. Early work in the field (by historians,
sociologists and literary scholars alike) had bemoaned the vulnerability
of working class culture to manipulation by the capitalist mass media.
Such a perspective emphasized the heroic, political aspects of the culture
of adult industrial male workers. It was suspicious of mass-produced
fashions, whether in dress or leisure pursuits, and accorded them
relatively little significance. But this was to ignore vast areas of the
cultural experience of working-class men and women. Increasingly
interest shifted to the ways mass-produced goods could be appropriated
and used by working-class consumers to contest established authority.
This development was most marked in the study of working-class youth
subcultures that became prominent in this field in the 1980s. Given how
important the self-conscious manipulation of dress is to the ways these
 386 John Styles

subcultures so often construct their identities, it is not surprising that

dress and its history began to receive more serious attention by scholars
in this field.
The shift in interest since the 1970s across the social sciences from
production to consumption has been the third important intellectual
influence on the new academic interest in the history of dress.4 In
historical scholarship this has involved two linked developments, both
of which have been beneficial to the history of dress: on the one hand,
a loss of faith in that kind of economic history that privileged production
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in general, and the Industrial Revolution and the rise of mass production
in particular; on the other, a growth of interest in the goods people
acquired and the meanings they invested in those goods. As is so often
the case in historical scholarship, these intellectual developments have
been influenced by important changes in the modern world—in part-
icular, the intensification and expansion of consumption since the Second
World War and the rise of flexible production systems in manufacturing,
most notably in the immensely successful Japanese export industries of
electrical consumer goods and automobiles.
The history of the clothing trades always had an ambiguous relation-
ship to histories of mass production. Despite the progressive expansion
of ready-made clothes production from the seventeenth–century
onwards, short production runs and rapid, fashion-driven changes in
specification have remained characteristic of the manufacture of a large
proportion of clothes. Clothing, therefore, never fitted easily into those
narratives of economic history whose culmination was Fordist mass
production. Since the 1970s, however, Fordist narratives have been
challenged by a new emphasis on the continuing and indeed growing
importance of flexible and artisanal forms of production.5 From such a
perspective the distinctive, fashion-driven features of the way clothes
are made appear less a historical backwater than one of the main currents
in the history of manufacturing.
The growth of interest in consumption has also moved dress towards
the center of historians’ concerns. Initially historical interest in consump-
tion grew out of the search for a consumer and marketing revolution
that reflected and might perhaps explain the classic Industrial Revol-
ution.6 Dress and fashion always featured very prominently in studies
of this kind, not least because of the crucial importance of cotton clothing
fabrics in early factory industrialization.7 More recently, as faith in a
single, all-transforming Industrial Revolution has waned, the importance
accorded to the history of consumption has if anything grown. With it
has come an explosion of work on the history of that most personal
and expressive form of consumption—dress. This new work now embraces
a huge range of issues and periods, ranging across the experience of rich
and poor, the opinions of consumers and critics, and the influence of
advertising and the mass media, while offering explanations that draw
on theoretical traditions from psychoanalysis to political economy.8
 Dress in History: Reflections on a Contested Terrain 387

The rise of women’s history, the emergence of cultural studies and

the shift in intellectual interest from production to consumption have
been distinct, albeit overlapping developments. Nevertheless, there is a
pattern to what they share. They each embrace key aspects of what has
been termed the postmodern turn in the human sciences—a downplaying
of long historical trajectories and deep causes, a focus on surface
phenomena and on diversity, a concern with the personal, with the
subjective and with identity. These postmodern priorities have worked
to move the history of dress from the wings to center stage. They render
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important the very characteristics of dress that previously made it

intellectually suspect—its ephemerality, its superficiality, its variety.
Since the 1970s these developments have provided the history of dress
with a new intellectual respectability. The subject is now much closer
to the core of mainstream historical scholarship. But with this new-found
respectability have come new obligations. In moving closer to the center
of intellectual affairs in the humanities, greater intellectual demands have
been made of the subject and its practitioners. In a very real sense the
study of dress in the past has been forced to lose its innocence. No longer
is it possible to sustain a history of dress that considers its principal tasks
to be those of establishing the time line of high fashion, or the chronology
of changes in the construction of clothing. Questions of meaning and
interpretation now dominate the intellectual agenda. This has been
particularly hard for those who work on dress in museums. Inevitably
their first concern is with surviving objects. Their intellectual work grows
out of the close empirical study of those objects—their form, their color,
their ornament, their construction. Yet at the very moment when their
subject, so long subordinated, begins to be taken seriously in the
academic mainstream, the careful empirical work at which museum
scholars have excelled is called into question by those trumpeting the
superiority of theory, sometimes in a language so impenetrable that it
seems designed to exclude all but a narrow band of cognoscenti.
Yet for all the excesses of some advocates of high theory, excesses
that amount in some cases to a fetishization of theory rendering it
virtually inaccessible, it should be remembered that without theories
there can be no questions and no explanations. It is essential that we
address conceptual issues if we are to be clear–minded about what the
history of dress is. This is not simply a problem of methodology, of how
we go about the history of dress through the study of, for example, dress
construction, probate inventories, or fashion plates. Methodologies in
this sense received a good deal of attention at the “Dress in History”
conference, but much less consideration was devoted to the kinds of
questions those methodologies might address. Yet it should be clear that
the broader intellectual developments that have propelled the history
of dress to its new respectability have brought with them new ways of
conceptualizing that history. These can touch even those aspects of dress
history usually considered strongholds of the empirical, object-based
 388 John Styles

tradition. Take dress construction, for instance. Usually it is associated

with the need to recreate historical dress for the stage, but it can bear
on a range of theoretically-driven questions such as the capacity of
tailoring to reconstruct the body according to prevailing fashionable
silhouettes, or the adaptability of certain styles to serial production.
What is required here is a new self-consciousness about the range of
issues that the history of dress now embraces. Dress history is now a
point of intersection for scholars coming from a variety of disciplinary
backgrounds. Indeed, this is precisely what underpins its new promin-
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ence, nay respectability. But this is a more demanding world than that
in which establishing the fashion time line across the centuries was the
primary and apparently self-evident objective. It requires from those who
study the subject a commitment to a mode of enquiry combining
elements of both conceptual and empirical work. It has been too easy
in the past for those who study surviving dress (often in museums) to
criticize others for their empirical ignorance, just as it has been too easy
for scholars whose work is theoretically driven (often in universities) to
dismiss empirical researchers as conceptually naïve. What is required is
not a crude pooling of approaches. Specialization has considerable
benefits in scholarly as in other matters. Rather we need a willingness
to monitor and reflect on other approaches. In doing so it will be neces-
sary to remember that understanding the mindset of academic disciplines
other than one’s own can be a challenging exercise in ethnography that
often requires at least a temporary suspension of disbelief. Nevertheless
the benefits are potentially enormous. In the last thirty years, history
has become much more than simply establishing a single, accurate story
line. To say this is not to suggest that the empirical precision that has
characterized traditional dress history at its best should be abandoned,
but simply to recognize and embrace the conceptual diversity of current
historical scholarship. Acknowledgment of this diversity is the key to
putting the study of dress back into history.

Notes

1. See for examples of work that was essentially ahistorical, P. H.

Nystrom, Economics of Fashion (New York, 1928), or E. S.
Bogardus, “Social Psychology of Fads,” Journal of Applied Psych-
ology, 8 (1924), 239–43. J. Flugel, The Psychology of Clothes
(London, 1930).
2. For example, L. Davidoff and C. Hall in their Family Fortunes. Men
and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London,
1987), 410–415 make a serious, although not altogether successful,
attempt to incorporate dress into their analysis.
3. See, for examples which originate in very different areas of historical
scholarship, S. Alexander, “Becoming a Woman in London in the
 Dress in History: Reflections on a Contested Terrain 389

1920s and 1930s,” in D. Feldman and G. Stedman Jones (eds),

Metropolis London. Histories and Representations since 1800
(London, 1989) and P. Cook, Fashioning the Nation. Costume and
Identity in British Cinema (London, 1996).
4. For a challenging review of these developments, see D. Miller (ed.),
Acknowledging Consumption (London, 1995).
5. See, for a very influential example, C. Sabel and J. Zeitlin, “Historical
Alternatives to Mass Production: Politics, Markets and Technology
in Nineteenth-Century Industrialisation,” Past and Present, 108
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(1985), 133–76. For the application of this approach to the modern

clothing industry see J. Zeitlin, “The Clothing Industry in Tran-
sition,” Textile History, 19 (1988), 211–38.
6. N. McKendrick, “Josiah Wedgwood: An Eighteenth-Century Entre-
preneur in Salesmanship and Marketing Techniques,” Economic
History Review, second series, 12 (1960), 408–433 and N. McKendrick,
J. Brewer and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society (London,
1982).
7. E. Jones, “The Fashion Manipulators: Consumer Tastes and British
Industries, 1660–1800,” in L.P. Cain and P.J. Uselding (eds), Business
Enterprise and Economic Change (Ohio, 1973) and N. McKendrick,
“The Commercialisation of Fashion,” chapter 2 in McKendrick,
Brewer and Plumb, Birth of a Consumer Society.
8. The single most important monographic study in this new vein is D.
Roche, The Culture of Clothing. Dress and Fashion in the “Ancien
Regime” (Cambridge, 1994).
Downloaded by [National Inst of Intellectual Property] at 07:28 23 October 2015
 Annual Index 391

Fashion Theory, Volume 2, Issue 4, pp.391–392

Reprints available directly from the Publishers.
Photocopying permitted by licence only.
© 1998 Berg. Printed in the United Kingdom.
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Annual Index
Articles

Arthur, Linda B. “Hawaiian Women and Dress: The Holoku- as an

Expression of Ethnicity.” 3: 269–286.
Breward, Christopher. “Cultures, Identities, Histories: Fashioning a
Cultural Approach to Dress”. 4: 301–313.
Evans, Caroline. “The Golden Dustman: A critical evaluation of the
work of Martin Margiela and a review of Martin Margiela: Exhib-
ition (9/4/1615).” 1: 73–93.
Fischer, Gayle Veronica. “A Matter of Wardrobe? Mary Edwards Walker,
a Nineteenth-Century American Cross-Dresser.” 3: 245–268.
 392 Annual Index

Gill, Alison. “Deconstruction Fashion: The Making of Unfinished,

Decomposing and Re-assembled Clothes.” 1: 25–49.
Ince, Kate. “Operations of Redress: Orlan, the Body and Its Limits.” 2:
111–127.
Kim, Sun Bok. “Is Fashion Art?” 1: 51–71.
Jobling, Paul. “Who’s That Girl? ‘Alex Eats,’ A Case Study in Abjection
and Identity in Contemporary Fashion Photography.” 3: 209–224
MacKendrick, Karmen. “Technoflesh, or ‘Didn’t That Hurt?’” 1: 3–24.
Martin, Richard. “A Note: Gianni Versace’s Anti-Bourgeois Little Black
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Dress (1994).” 1: 95–100.

Michelman, Susan. “Breaking Habits: Fashion and Identity of Women
Religious.” 2: 165–192.
Radford, Robert. “Dangerous Liaisons: Art, Fashion and Individual-
ism.” 2: 151–163.
Ribeiro, Aileen. “Re-Fashioning Art: Some Visual Approaches to the
Study of the History of Dress.” 4: 315–326.
Steele, Valerie. “A Museum of Fashion Is More Than a Clothes-Bag.”
4: 327–335.
Styles, John. “Dress in History: Reflections on a Contested Terrain.” 4:
383–389.
Taylor, Lou. “Doing the Laundry? A Reassessment of Object-based Dress
History.” 4: 337–358.
Tulloch, Carol. “‘Out of Many, One People’: The Relativity of Dress,
Race and Ethnicity to Jamaica, 1880–1907.” 4: 359–382.
Wallerstein, Katharine. “Thinness and Other Refusals in Contemporary
Fashion Advertisements.” 2:129–150.
Wilson, Elizabeth. “Bohemian Dress and the Heroism of Everyday Life.”
3: 225–244.

Book Reviews

Bordo, Susan. Twilight Zones: The Hidden Life of Cultural Images from
Plato to O.J. (reviewed by Jonathan Schroeder). 2: 193–196.
Duerr, Hans Peter. Der Erotische Leib – Der Mythos vom Zivilisations-
prozess (reviewed by Beatrice Behlen). 1: 101–107.
Hughes Myerly, Scott. British Military Spectacle – From the Napoleonic
Wars through the Crimea (reviewed by S. K. Hopkins). 2: 197–200.

Exhibition Reviews

Mears, Patricia. “From Writer to Curator: Fifty Years of Fashion. The

Fashion Institute of Technology, New York” (October 7, 1997–
January 10, 1998). 3: 295–298.
Martin, Richard. “Yeohlee: Energetics: Clothes and Enclosures. Aedes
Gallery, Berlin and the Netherlands Architecture Institute, Rotter-
dam.” 3: 287–293.