The Hub

FOCUS ON RESEARCH
LONDON COLLEGE OF FASHION
OCTOBER 2006/ISSUE FOUR

01 Foreword
02 Project Profile – Pain and Injury
03 Staff Profile – Reina Lewis
03 Staff Profile – Eiluned Edwards
04 Staff Profile – Charlotte Hodes
04 Staff Profile – Silvia Sovic
05 Area Profile – Cosmetic science
is a science-based, but
fashion-led discipline
06 Press Release
07 Research Student Profiles
08 Centenary Conference – New
Directions in Fashion Research
09 Reflection on Research Fellows
Lecture Series 2005/06
10 Research Fellows Lecture Series
2006/07
11 EMap Special Collection
13 The Costume Institute: an
evolving idea
14 Research Centre for Fashion,
the Body and Material Cultures
Seminar Series
15 Mapping Motifs: An Explorative
Journey through Fashion, Cities
and Identities
16 UK talent cut from a quality cloth
17 Reconstructing Sixties Fashion
at the V&A
19 Scythia: Sixth International
Symposium and Exhibition of
Textile Art
20 IMB Clothing Technology Fair,
Cologne Germany
21 Design 2 Business Symposium,
Shanghai
23 AHRC Research Centre for Textile
Conservation and Textile Studies
Third Annual Conference
25 American Studies as Media
Studies? – Annual Conference
of the German Association of
American Studies
26 Research Hubs Update
28 RAE 2008 Update
29 Research News and Events
01
Foreword
Welcome to a packed edition of the LCF research newsletter, which is a testament
to the extraordinary range of research activities and networks which colleagues
have been engaged in from May to September in our Centenary year. In this edition,
we have profiles of recently appointed research staff along with our new Artscom
Centenary Chair in Fashion Studies, Professor Reina Lewis, who joined us on
September 1st. As well as discussions about current research projects by staff and
students, we have a number of reviews of conferences, symposia and exhibitions.
For example, Christopher Cook, Broadcaster and Music Critic, who chaired our
Centenary Lecture Series last year, offers his incisive, critical reflections on the
lectures. Amy de la Haye reviews Harold Koda’s lecture on the Costume Institute
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with which he launched the University Centre
for Fashion, the Body and Material Cultures and Sonia Ashmore casts her
participant’s eye over the ‘Shopping Routes’ research project, which is coming
to a close with the ‘Sixties Fashion’ exhibition at the V&A. All this and much more
too, including an article on the EMap archive, revealing the strength and diversity
of practice-based, applied and theoretical research at LCF, which feeds directly into
the curriculum. This, in turn, leads to very marketable, thoughtful students, who
stay in the industry long after they have graduated, as Jo Entwistle points out in
the reprint of her recent article in the Times Higher Educational Supplement.
Professor Helen Thomas
Research Director
Project Profile – Pain and Injury in a Cultural
Context: Dancers’ Embodied Understandings
and Visual Mapping
Professor Helen Thomas,
Dr Jen Tarr September 2006.
Screenshot from Body Scan 1
Screenshot from Body Scan 2
Screenshot from Body Scan 3
Research Context
This research project (Sept. 2006-April 2007)
focuses on dance injuries and is funded by the Arts
and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Helen
Thomas is the Principal Investigator and Jen Tarr is
the Research Fellow, both of whom are trained in
dance and sociology. Biomedical and psychological
research has shown that dancers are injured at
rates of around 81% per year (Laws 2005), and
that they tend to ignore the warning signs of injury.
As in elite athletics (Curry and Strauss 1994), pain
becomes a normalised feature of the dancer’s
experience. This suggests that injury in dance is
something of a ‘social fact’ and as such, worthy
of further exploration from a socio-cultural
perspective. The majority of the research in this
area, and this is slight in comparison with for
example, sports injuries, has been conducted from
bio-medical or psychological perspectives. This
research, however, examines the socio-cultural
context of dance injuries, addressing the ways that
dancers distinguish between pain and injury and
the consequences of this distinction for their
careers and performance. Because the majority
of research into dance injuries has focused on ballet
dancers, this project targets dancers whose training
and work primarily involves modern or contemporary
dance, whilst at the same time recognising that most
dancers will have encountered a number of dance
techniques, including ballet, during their training.
The research explores the use of visual
representation through body scanning and pain
and injury mapping and its benefits for injury
identification and warning. It also considers the
effect of alternative body techniques (eg Pilates,
Alexander technique) and style of dance technique
on dancers’ bodies and injuries.
Research Process
The project involves 200 interviews and body scans
using a three-dimensional body scanner, which was
used in the national Size UK project to scan 11,000
people. The researchers, using a variety of strategies,
have targeted dancers of all ages, from those who
are in training in conservatoires, colleges and
universities, to company and independent dancers,
mixed ability companies, teachers, community
dancers and older or former dancers. Dance UK,
which has pioneered the Healthy Dancer, for
example, sent information on the project to their
members and to dancers who had assisted with
Dance UK’s research.
Prior to the interview process, the 3D body
scanner is used to create surface images of
dancers’ bodies. The scans and a short questionnaire
form the basis for the semi-structured interview
process where the dancers are asked to map
current and past pain and injury sites and strengths
and weaknesses onto the visual representations
02
of their body. The interviews also address how and
when dancers decide to seek treatment and how
the nature of dance work, which is usually poorly
paid and based on temporary contracts, affects
how they see their injuries.
Over 100 dancers have been interviewed and
scanned. The researchers have given presentations
at Trinity Laban to the MA Dance Science students
and staff, to the British Sociological Society’s
Sociology of Medicine annual conference, and
will give another presentation at Roehampton
University in November. Two further abstracts have
been submitted for consideration to two other
refereed conferences in Turkey and in Belgium.
Dissemination to Potential Users
The AHRC has awarded additional funds to the
project to disseminate the findings as they are
beginning to emerge through preliminary analysis
to a range of potential users and beneficiaries and
non-dance research audiences. The dissemination
scheme is a new initiative to the AHRC and the
project has been chosen as one of five to be
evaluated by consultants from Price Waterhouse
Cooper.
Part of the dissemination process involves
generating a road show to discuss the ways in
which the methods of research could perhaps be
used with other groups, such as musicians, who are
also prone to injury through repetitive movement.
The researchers are also keen to work with
physiotherapists and other health professionals
involved with dancers, and to this end a workshop
and a conference are planned as part of the
dissemination process. These will focus on the role
of body scanning and pain and injury mapping as a
potentially reflexive and therapeutic tool in assisting
dancers to maximise their performance potential.
The concern is to explore the potential
uses/problems of employing this tool with other
individual or client groups.
A website, with two levels of access is currently
under construction and should be operational
by October. The first ‘public’ level will offer details
of the overall project: aims, methods, stage of
development, associated activities and tentative
outcomes. The second level will be accessed
by interviewees and others (teachers and
physiotherapists) involved in the research by means
of an individual password. Preliminary findings
will be posted on the website. Participants will be
encouraged to comment on these. The intention
is to a) set up a discussion forum between
practitioners and b) provide further data for future
work in this field. The participants (who are also end
users) will have an active role in the research as
it moves towards its completion.
Enquiries and interested dancers, contact
j.tarr@fashion.arts.ac.uk 0207 514 2288
03
Staff Profile – Reina Lewis
Centenary Chair
Reina Lewis
Photo: Neil Turner © TSL Education
I was delighted to take up the Centenary
Chair in Fashion Studies both for the wider
opportunities offered by the research culture
of LCF and for the particular ways in which
the College’s links with the national and
international fashion industry dovetail with
new developments in my personal research.
Having trained initially in Fine Art and Art
History and spent the early years of my
career teaching in art schools I was keen to
return to a practice-based environment, after
thirteen years in Cultural Studies at the
University of East London. I am inspired by
the innovative ways in which the wide-
Staff Profile – Dr Eiluned Edwards
Research Fellow
I have been researching aspects of textiles
and dress, and traditions of handicrafts since
I was a student in the 1980s. After
graduating, I was self-employed as a textile
artist and juggled commissions, workshops
and part-time lecturing with research trips
abroad - at that time chiefly to Latin America
(Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Cuba).
A large commission from the Church of
England for altar cloths and vestments for
St Anne’s Church, Soho, in 1991, funded my
first trip to Asia, and I have been going back
to India ever since. Subsequent research
has included a two and half year project
documenting the textiles and dress of the
farming and herding communities of Kachchh
district, Gujarat (sponsored by the
Leverhulme Trust) and a three year study
of the material culture of the Rabari nomads
of Kachchh (funded by the British Academy)
which culminated in a PhD in 2000 (The
Desert and the Sewn: Textiles and Dress of
the Rabari of Kachchh). As a result of living
in Kachchh/rural Gujarat for such extended
ranging research practices fostered by LCF
are disseminated to academic, industry, and
public audiences and look forward to
contributing to this.
My current work in feminist postcolonial
studies is concerned with the ways in which
the figure of the Muslim woman, veiled or
unveiled, is central to changing debates
about relations between Islam and the west.
My first book in this area, Gendering
Orientalism: Race, Femininity and
Representation (1996), brought to light the
contribution to imperial cultures of
nineteenth-century western women artists
and writers in order to demonstrate the
heterogeneity and contested nature of
Orientalist discourse. Rethinking Orientalism:
Women, Travel and the Ottoman Harem
(2004), on the early twentieth century,
revealed how women codified as Oriental
(and stereotyped as silenced and oppressed)
were in fact able to manipulate western
cultural codes and challenge western
assumptions about middle eastern life.
My new research examines the
contemporary commodification of Muslim
femininities, including current veiling debates,
the development of diaspora fashion circuits,
and the neo-Orientalisms emerging in
periods, I now speak ‘village Gujarati’ and the
Kachchhi dialect, and sound like a yokel.
I have continued to work in Kachchh and
Gujarat, but have extended the range of my
research to other parts of India, including
Rajasthan, Ladakh and south India.
There are two distinct strands to my
current research: the first is directed towards
a book on the traditions of textiles and dress
in Gujarat. This draws on fieldwork and
archival research in India since 1991 and will
ally ethnographic material to object-based
research at the V&A, where I am presently
working on the collection of Gujarati textiles.
This combined approach will offer a unique
perspective on an aspect of contemporary
dress in India. The focus of the second is the
use of natural dyes, particularly indigo, by
artisans in three traditional centres of textile
printing and painting in India. A two-year
programme of research is currently underway,
which is funded jointly by the Dallapiccola
Trust, the Nehru Trust and the British
Academy. This involves deep fieldwork with
relation to Turkey’s bid for EU accession. This
work focuses, for example, on how the dress
acts of veiled staff working in fashion retail
impact on the personal experience of other
staff, the retail geographies of consumers,
and the industrial policies of employers and
brands. Using the hyper-visibility of the veiled
body as a lens through which to view
contemporary postcolonial cultural crises, this
research includes attention to alternative
modes of fashion innovation and mediation
such as the new Muslim lifestyle media.
My other area of work is in sexualities
studies. In addition to my co-edited collection
Outlooks: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities and
Visual Culture (with Peter Horne, 1996),
I have written on lesbians as readers of
mainstream fashion magazines, and as
producers and consumers of queer lifestyle
publications. My new project involves a
reconsideration of performativity – analysing
the historicised cultural competencies
needed to enact and decode the dressed
performance of ethnicised, sexual, and
gender identities. Always keen for a reason
to dress up, my new work in this field is being
developed as part of an ongoing performance
piece called ‘Out of the Closet and into the
Wardrobe’.
temple cloth painters at Srikalahasti and
printers at Machilipatnam, both in Andhra
Pradesh; printers at Jaipur, Bagru and
Sanganer in Rajasthan; and printers at
Dhamadka and Ajrakhpur in Kachchh,
Gujarat. Work is also being developed with
indigo farmers in Cuddapah district, Andhra
Pradesh and Tindivanam, Tamil Nadu. The
project has been developed in collaboration
with artisans at the sites mentioned above,
with technical advice from Dr Ismail
Mohammad Khatri, a master printer and dyer
from Kachchh K Anbalagan, an indigo farmer
from Tindivanam is advising on the processes
of cultivating and manufacturing indigo.
I will be filming the indigo harvest in
September of this year, unless the monsoon
fails… A number of articles are planned
based on this research and also a book on
the traditions of ajrakh and other blockprints
in Kachchh, to be co-authored with Ismail
Khatri.
Staff Profile – Charlotte Hodes
Senior Research Fellow
Charlotte Hodes
Current Exhibitions
Flow Gallery, London
15-28 September 2006
Solo show of ceramics
and papercuts
Jerwood Drawing Prize
Exhibtion
Jerwood Space, London
20 September – 22 October
2006 and tour.
A large papercut selected for
this important national open
submission drawing show.
The Drawing Gallery, London
From September 2006
A new sequence of papercuts
Histoires Naturelles can
be viewed as a portfolio.
Staff Profile – Dr Silvia Sovic
CLIP CETL Research Coordinator
Dr Silvia Sovic
04
I am delighted to have been recently appointed to embraces Fine Art practice more broadly. Digital
the post of Senior Research Fellow in Drawing at Responses 2001-2002 was a ribbon of one person
LCF and look forward to forging new links and shows in a ‘laboratory’ space at the Victoria and
making new friends. I join LCF from Camberwell Albert Museum in which each artist, using the digital
College of Arts where I have recently completed a process within their research, responded to the
year as Acting Subject Leader in MA Drawing 2005 collection. My own response was a cabinet of
–2006. Prior to this, I was teaching at Camberwell ceramic vases collaged profusely with hand drawn
as an Associate Lecturer on both the BA Ceramics and digitally manipulated colour transfers which
and Fine Art Painting courses. echoed the museum’s display of functional ceramic
I am deeply committed to the role of drawing works. A more recent project The Digital Surface
within the visual arts and the way in which it cuts supported by the European Union, Culture 2000
across subject specialties. Whilst at LCF, I hope was a collaboration between three colleges, at
to encourage a dialogue with students, staff and Camberwell, NCAD, Dublin and University
researchers as to the contemporary relevance of of Art, Helsinki resulting in a conference at Tate
drawing both as a hands on, direct process and one Britain 2003.
which embraces new technologies. I believe that For my current research, as the first Associate
drawing is central to visual thinking. It enables the Artist at The Wallace Collection, London, I am using
artist / designer to develop, adapt and respond both their Fine Arts and Decorative Arts collections
creatively to our fast moving contemporary as a source for new artworks. I am looking at the
environment. way in which the 18th Century Rococo Sèvres
My own research is centered on my practice porcelain with its elaborate ornamentation and
as a painter which includes large scale papercuts pictorial imagery can be interpreted and re-
which have been both digitally collaged and hand presented within a contemporary context. As part of
cut as well as ceramic forms which are ornately this research, which has been supported by the Arts
decorated. My imagery is concerned with the Council of England and the AHRC, I am creating
representation of the female figure as a motif a visual archive of drawings from which I make the
juxtaposed with elements of pattern, drapery, papercuts and ceramics. This new artwork looks
contemporary motifs such as computer icons and to working processes that were utilized by the
domestic elements including cooking pots in an 18th century artist Antoine Watteau, who is well
ordered cacophony. represented in The Wallace Collection. The Wallace
In conjunction with Camberwell and Chelsea Collection as a whole emanates a female sensuality
Colleges of Art I have been involved with the
research project The Integration of Computers
and lushness and so for me, an important question
within the research is how to both acknowledge and
and Fine Art Print now entitled Fine Art Digital
Environment (FADE) which initially explored
subvert this so that the new art works address a
contemporary and personal notion of femaleness.
the relationship between traditional and digital This two year project will culminate in a solo show
technologies in printmaking but which now at The Wallace Collection next year, May 2007.
We welcome the appointment of Dr Silvia Sovic to the CLIP CETL team. Silvia will be working on a
one-year project to investigate the first-year experience of our international students. This project will
sample key student groups and interview them in their own language. It is hoped the results will add to
our understanding of the key issues that affect study and enable international students to succeed and
enjoy their learning in art and design based courses at UAL.
Silvia took her BA in history and ethnology at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, her MA at the
Institute of Historical Research, University of London, and her PhD at the University of Essex. She has
worked as Research Training Development Officer at the School of Advanced Study, University of London,
researcher at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, and Campaigner
and Research Assistant at Amnesty International.
Silvia will be based at John Princes Street and can be contacted through email
s.sovic@fashion.arts.ac.uk
05
One of the fashion related disciplines that
have found their home at LCF is the
cosmetic science area. It is a small and
specialist, but highly research-active field,
led by Dr Danka Tamburic, Reader in
Cosmetic Science.
Area Profile –‘Cosmetic science is a
science-based, but fashion-led discipline’,
Dr Danka Tamburic
LCF entered the company of research active
institutions in cosmetic science in 1998, with Dr
Tamburic’s publication of a scientific paper in the
well-known international journal – Cosmetics &
Toiletries Magazine. This was two years before the
first graduate course in the UK in this discipline,
the BSc (Hons) Cosmetic Science, was established
at LCF. The BSc, which is a four-year sandwich
course, has now produced its third cohort of
graduate students and is well established within
the UK cosmetic industry.
Since 1998, the cosmetic science research
area has grown, especially between 2002 and
2004, when it was supported by HEFCE via
the Science Research Investment Fund (SRIF).
This facilitated the acquisition of a range of
bio-engineering equipment, enabling the
Dr Danka Tamburic measurement of skin hydration, skin pH values,
sebum level, trans-epidermal water loss, skin
elasticity and skin colour, as well as the visualisation
of skin topography. In addition, the polarising
microscope, rheometer and texture analyser
provided an insight into the structure and properties
of various product forms used in cosmetics and
toiletries. These instruments are extensively used
in both teaching and research, as well as in the
laboratory work leading to final year projects.
In 2005, Dr Danka Tamburic was awarded a
UAL research sabbatical to assess the application
of some novel encapsulation techniques to naturals.
The project entitled ‘Exploring the efficacy of
natural actives in cosmetics: Does novel technology
make a difference?’ resulted in a paper published
in the Journal of Applied Cosmetology, another
paper in Euro Cosmetics and a poster presentation
(accompanied with a full-paper in the congress
proceedings) at the World Congress on Emulsion,
which will took place in October 2006 in Lyon.
The LCF research group has established
a number of internal and external research links.
Inside the University, cosmetic science researchers
belong to the Materials and the Arts Research
Centre (MATAR), University of the Arts, alongside
06
Area profile
continued>
Research student in cosmetic science laboratory
conservation experts from Camberwell College of Taking into account the breadth of existing research The emerging research strand of cosmetic
Arts and printing and digital colour experts from activities, it is possible to identify the following packaging is currently supported by an LCF funded
London College of Communication. research strands within the area: project. With the acquisition of specialist equipment,
In terms of external collaboration, the following Exploring the efficacy of cosmetic products which is now completed, this under-researched
institutions are in different ways involved in the using skin bio-engineering methods field offers great potential to develop to a niche,
on-going projects: (non-invasive in vivo testing) LCF-specific area.
Since its humble beginnings in 1998, cosmetic
Evaluating internal structure of semisolid
University of London, King’s College science at LCF has produced a respectful number
systems for cosmetic and pharmaceutical
Department of Pharmacy of research outcomes –12 scientific papers, 16
application and its effect on product efficacy
University of Technology Warsaw conference presentations, one book chapter and
Exploring the use of novel technology two review papers. With further strengthening
Chemistry Department
(especially nanotechnology) in cosmetics of its PhD provision, the planned development of
University of Belgrade, Faculty of Pharmacy
Biotechnological approach as a method taught postgraduate courses and the enhancement
Institute for Pharmaceutical Technology
for obtaining novel multifunctional cosmetic of its staff base, cosmetic science at LCF has the
and Cosmetology
ingredients potential to develop into a unique research unit
University of London, Queen Mary College within the UK HE sector.
Exploring the potential of water-soluble
Centre for Materials Science
adhesive films as carriers for cosmetic actives
University of Westminster
Packaging aspect of cosmetics & toiletries:
School of Biomedical Sciences
balancing product stability requirements and
environmental impact of packaging
LCF is the only HE institution in the UK offering
a PhD in Cosmetic Science. The first PhD of this
kind, entitled “The use of novel technology in
enhancing the efficacy of cosmetic actives of
natural origin” is being undertaken by Mojgan
Moddaresi and is being realised in collaboration
Press Release: Mojgan Moddaresi’s work
with King’s College London. Dealing with the
production, characterisation and testing of the
features in British Pharmaceutical Conference
novel nano-suspension cosmetic forms, it is
progressing well through its second full-time The work of Mojgan Moddaresi, a cosmetic science PhD student, was recently featured in
year. Mojgan was invited to present a review of the British Pharmaceutical Conference (BPC) held in Manchester in September. Mojgan
nanotechnology in cosmetics to the members submitted a poster for the Conference which attracted attention from the pharmaceutical
of Royal Chemical Society at their meeting in world. The poster featured the work she has been researching for her PhD. Mojgan is
September. developing ideas to combat the problem of vitamin E and its resistance to being dissolved in
The second PhD in cosmetic science is in the water. It is currently applied topically using heavy or oily bases that are difficult to apply
application stage, Madhuri Shamanna is due to and release only a small proportion of vitamin E.
start in October 2006. The project proposal entitled
Using new-age nanotechnology, Mojgan and other researchers at London College of
‘Development of natural multifunctional cosmetic Fashion and King’s College London have come up with an anti-ageing gel that is more
ingredients using biotechnological approach’ is
effective and easier to use than existing products.
planned to take place in collaboration with the
University of Westminster, School of Biomedical
Sciences.
Mojgan Moddaresi
07 08

Research student Centenary Conference:

profiles New Directions in Fashion Research,
Renate Stauss
27 and 28 September 2006
(un)dressing the self: working with dress
on concepts of self in therapeutic settings
If ‘clothes maketh the man’, can man
maketh himself?
In our late-modern consumerist setting dress is said to play a central
role in the construction and maintenance of identity. Dress has come
to be the most important form of non-verbal communication,
appearance a ‘central element of the reflexive production of the self’.
The following question arises from these claims: if dress plays such
a vital role in identity construction, could it not be used, consciously
and constructively in relation to the self? And indeed, a number of
practices of working with dress exist, which I have divided into two
categories: image work and self-concept work. Image work describes
the way in which the ‘power of appearance’ is being exploited within
the commercial context of image and style consulting. Recent
decades have seen a significant number of style guides, of people
Centenary exhibition sign that doubled as a takeaway box
marketing their advice on (life)style and fashion in different media
(Halbreich, 1997; Kressley, 2005; Levene & Mayfiled; Mather, 1996; The Centenary Conference was a huge success with
Reed, 2005; Woodall & Constantine, 2000, 2002, 2003). Dress is
international delegates from The Costume Society,
being employed, and appearances managed to project a particular
Universities around the UK, The Photographers Gallery,
image, one that promises more success. Some identity aspects of
Victoria and Albert Museum, MoMu – Fashion Museum
image work practices have been discussed by Holdermann (2003).
Antwerp, Fashion Awareness Direct, Museum of London,
Self-concept work on the other hand refers to ways in which dress Hays Davidson, The Hearst Corporation, The British Council,
and cosmetics have been used in a small number of therapeutic
The Design Museum, and Universities in the Netherlands,
settings for the past few years, e.g. soin culturel/vêtothèque,
France, Sweden, and China.
cosmetic therapy, sensory stimulation treatment and phototherapy.
Self-concept work is not only concerned with the way others perceive The lively pace of the Conference was created from the
us, but how we see and understand ourselves. Although the two different types of presentations given by the speakers over
are inherently connected, the vital difference is the emphasis on the two days Valerie Steele gave an exciting powerpoint
concepts of self rather than on self image. In this context dress is presentation illustrating the latest exhibition which she
for instance being used to ‘build a relationship with oneself -
curated ‘Love and War: The Weaponised Woman’, at The
restoring one’s self-esteem by accepting one’s body’ (L’Espace Arthur,
Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York.
2001). Self-concept work includes different, new and unrelated ways
Robert Violette created an inspiring atmosphere by opening
of applying dress to self, and has hardly been explored let alone Robert Violette’s magazine
analysed. Therefore this project proposes to investigate how dress, up the whole Rootstein Hopkins Space and introducing his
its role, meaning and materiality in relation to the gendered self, magazine production team who had the task of creating a
has been and can be used within self-concept work. magazine in an hour and a half. He took ideas and questions
from the audience who also joined in with the magazine
This thesis aims to investigate current approaches to dress/self-
concept work that use both touch and vision within a small number
production process.
of therapeutic settings and to posit that dress can be applied to Maria Luisa Frisa, Director of the Fashion Design Degree
concepts of self in new ways when used in an intentional, knowing, Programme, IUAV University of Venice talked about her
self-conscious and reflexive way. career and then presented her work with a video. Research
Students from LCF gave some interesting presentations,
showing the research that they were currently developing.
The Pedagogy and Student Learning session proved very
interesting with enlightening presentations from Professor
Lin Norton, Liverpool Hope University and Geraldine Biddle-
Perry. The last session of the conference was as exciting as
anticipated with presentations from Dr Jose Teunissen,
Conservator Mode en Kostuums, Central Museum, Utrecht,
Nilgin Yusuf and one of her reader’s Alan Cannon-Jones, Simon Thorogood and Lucy Orta.
letters at the centenary conference
09
Reflection on Research Fellows Lecture Series,
Christopher Cook
The Art of the Impossible:
Research Lectures 2006: Christopher Cook
A friend once described his research as the ‘art of
the impossible’, by which he meant taking an idea
and seeing how far he could stretch it before it
snapped. Leaving aside images of string, rubber
bands or even bubble gum it’s a useful reminder
that for all the best scholarly practice in the
academic world, the most exciting research in the
humanities or the sciences, in art and design is
about stretching ideas into new, and maybe
impossible shapes.
The happy band of brothers and sisters who
met at John Princes Street on Wednesday evenings
for the Centenary Research Fellows Lectures were
all up for stretching, and the mental gymnastics
began with the extraordinary array of topics under
investigation. To name but three - and they are
pulled from my memory at random - there was
Judith Clark meditating on Anna Piaggi as a fashion
mediator, Lucy Orta interrogating the idea of
community in her work and Pamela Church Gibson
undressing costume in The Matrix. As an Art and
Design outsider, although I was on the staff for a
while at Central School before it was married off to
St Martins, these early evening sessions were
rather like being the small boy who for years has
pressed his nose up against the window of a sweet
shop. Suddenly the door opens and he is invited
inside, encouraged to taste everything and told he
can take anything he likes home with him!
What I took home most often was the
thoughtful marriage of theory and practice, and
above all a sense of how the ‘historical’, as we
construct it at any given moment impinges on the
present. Amy de la Haye’s paper grew out of a fine
exhibition that she co-curated at the Brighton
Museum and Art Gallery, A Family of Fashion – The
Messels: Six Generations of Dress. This was the
first time that dress worn and preserved by women
from one family – the Sambornes, Messels and the
Rosses - had been identified, studied and exhibited,
she told us. And her lecture explored ‘how a
detailed material culture study of clothes can
provide insights into the socio-cultural
circumstances of the women who chose, made,
embellished, wore and subsequently preserved
them.’ These then were fashion garments to be
worn and subsequently studied for what they tell us
about how certain women lived, but they had
another more personal life too. Anne Countess of
Rosse, born a Messel, had kept her clothes
carefully packed in boxes each with its own
descriptive label - what the garment was called,
when it was worn etc. ‘Items … preserved as
triggers of memory’, said de la Haye. Here was
another history and she and her fellow curators held
faith with the personal histories of these clothes,
often resisting the temptation to restore or repair
The Art of the Impossible:
continued>
them ‘deciding, for example, to show a dress that
was virtually perished and retaining the lipstick
traces on a 1925 wedding dress.’
Becky Conekin too has been rescuing a
woman’s story, or more accurately inviting us to
reconsider a celebrated, if not celebrity, life. Lee
Miller’s history behind and in front of the camera as
a model, a muse and photographer is a matter of
public record. What Conekin has been exploring is
Miller’s professional life beyond her time as a staff
photographer at Vogue; her work as a writer and in
particular as a war correspondent. This was a
lecture that raised a rush of questions. ‘Why has
Miller’s work as a writer been overlooked?’, ‘Is it that
Miller quite deliberately crosses professional
‘frontiers’ in her work?’ And are these ‘frontiers’ a
masculinised version of professional practice?’
Here, as was so often the case, it was the general
discussion as well as the lecture itself that made us
in the audience think. And think in new ways about
the familiar – it’s the art of the impossible again,
stretching an idea to breaking point.
Good research also takes us to places that we
can never hope to visit, with the researcher blending
the skills of the travel writer and the anthropologist
with economics and sociology and cultural studies.
A heady brew when Eiluned Edwards transported
us to Western India, to Gujerat and the Rabari of
Kachchh. She chose a punning title for her lecture.
The Social Fabric: The Role of Hand Embroidery
in Western India. Craft and economics had collided
Research Fellows Lecture Series 06/07
here to change a pattern of traditional working.
Historically, said Edwards, it’s been customary
‘to divide embroidery into two distinct categories:
dowry embroidery for home consumption made
by women; and trade or commercial embroidery
made for patrons in India and abroad, which was
traditionally made by men.’ The market for trade
embroideries flourished from the sixteenth century
until the early twentieth century when it finally
petered out. ‘In the past thirty to forty years, the
distinction between the domestic and commercial
traditions has become blurred; women whose skills
have developed through making dowry, have
started to establish themselves as professional
artisans.’ Edwards traced these new patterns of
women’s work and their embroidery patterns too,
noting how traditional motifs develop and change.
And there on a table beside the lectern she had
arranged samples of the work. Once again practice
and theory were seamlessly stitched together.
Helen Thomas took us on a journey nearer
home, but no less remarkable. To Penge in South
East London where in 2000-2001 she directed a
research project Dancing into the Third Age: Social
Dance as Cultural Text. While working on the
project she and her colleagues found a Quadrille
10
Dance Class being run by Desmond Clarke, a title Aesthetic Labour began with fashion and led
remarkable Afro-Caribbean who was born in us to labour. As she wrote ‘Fashionable clothing is
Jamaica. And this led to a simple question ‘How did not just about changing styles of clothes, it is also
an early nineteenth century dance from fashionable about changing ideals as to the design and look of
European ballrooms cross the Atlantic and return
150 years later to be danced by the Afro-Caribbean
clothes.’ So fashion is about aesthetics and we
should pay attention to not just the clothes ‘but the
community in South East London?’ And what
precisely did the dance signify? Answers to both
production of aesthetic value around such
garments.’ In this context ‘labour of aesthetics’
questions only came after Thomas and a colleague became a study of the making of fashion and the
were coaxed onto the dance floor to experience the ‘aesthetics of labour’ the ‘making of the fashionable
quadrille for themselves. However, judging by what body’. Fashion buyers and agencies, provided
we were told of their Penge Days neither Helen Entwistle with her study model.
Thomas nor her collaborator needed much in the Fashion too took Ceri Isaac on a journey
way of coaxing! Embodied Sensitivities, Dance and through the history of CAD and in a sequence of
Difference: from ethnography to History was fine images she explored how digital technology,
Thomas’s title, but she described it more informally and in particular printing techniques has had an
as ‘ethnography meets history meets ethnography’. impact on her own work. Once again a history and
And like the best ethnographers there were videos theory informed practice. Lots of mental stretching
and images of the work that established a timeline here as with Lucy Orta’s work which began the
between the fashionable classes in Europe in the lecture series. But it was Isaac who tempted me to
latter part of the eighteenth century and slavery in be flip. She called her lecture ‘Rogue Pixels’ and
the West Indies. Shades here of Edward Said’s that encouraged me to try a joke about it sounding
great insight that it’s slavery that enables the rather like an Indie band of the kind that used to
culture of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. Then there play in pubs along the Goldhawk Road. I laughed
is the reverse journey, the descendants of slaves when I was preparing my introduction to her lecture,
bringing the dance back to Europe where they had but the audience in Rootstein Hopkins East Space
entered into (and this was my own particular gloss sat on their hands. They’d clearly come to be
on Helen Thomas’s lecture) a kind of economic and serious. And they were amply rewarded on
perhaps cultural ‘slavery’. Wednesday evenings from October to May when
The simplest lesson of these lectures was that the ‘art of the impossible’ suddenly seemed
Fashion with a capital letter is the starting point for perfectly possible! As for myself, next time I’ll leave
as many journeys as a research fellow is willing to the joke at home.
undertake. Joanne Entwistle’s lecture with the witty
The current LCF centenary celebrations have given the college a chance to reflect on the areas and issues
that will play a key role in the future of the College and the fashion industry over the next generations.
Areas such as health, textiles, sustainability, ethical design and science, (including nanotechnology,
medicine, engineering and cosmetic science) and well–being are presenting fashion with a paradox.
How do we bring these issues into the mainstream whilst also meeting the fashion industry’s need to be
ever changing and consuming?
The Research Office is pleased to be hosting another Research Fellows Lecture Series. The series will
focus, in the Autumn Term, on the theme of ‘Better Lives’ profiling the variety of exciting new research in the
area of fashion, health and well-being. They will begin with an introductory lecture by the Head of College,
Dr Frances Corner, on 11 October.
We are very happy to announce that the lectures, like last year, will be chaired by Christopher Cook.
The lectures will be held in the Rootstein Hopkins East Space, entry is free and all are welcome. The
lectures start at 5.30pm, last for about an hour including questions and discussion and are followed by
refreshments.
Wednesday 11 October 2006, Dr Frances Corner, Better Lives: Furthering the Influence of Fashion;
Wednesday 1 November 2006, Dr Penelope Watkins, Fit to Feel Good;
Wednesday 8 November 2006, Helen Storey, Eye and I;
Wednesday 29 November 2006, Professor Helen Thomas and Dr Jen Tarr, Pain and Injury
in a Cultural Context;
Wednesday 6 December 2006, Professor Christopher Fairburn, Anorexia and Fashion.
The series recommences in the Spring Term on the following dates; Wednesday 24 January 2007,
Wednesday 14 February 2007, Wednesday 14 March 2007, Wednesday 25 April 2007,
Wednesday 23 May 2007, Wednesday 13 June 2007.
11 12

The EMap Special Collection is a research archive managed by Library and Learning
Resources (LLR) at the London College of Fashion in co-operation with the
Research Department. This is a collection of British fashion clothing and footwear
trade journals from the late 19th century until the present day published by
EMap Publishing Ltd and given by EMap to the College. The collection is open
to researchers by appointment (details at the end of the article).

EMap Special Collection at the

London College of Fashion, Jane Holt
Shoe & Leather News, p.485,
May 29 1919
The journals offer an insight into how clothing,
domestic textiles, and footwear were produced,
disseminated and consumed from the late 19th
century through to the 21st century. The key titles
held are Drapers Record from 1887 but with some
gaps, Fashion Weekly from 1959, Men’s Wear from
1902 to 2001, The Outfitter from 1906 until it
merged with Men’s Wear in 1965, Shoe and
Leather News 1916 -1954, and Shoe and Leather
Record 1897-1947. All the journals are in bound
volumes.
The collection was the beneficiary of AHRC
funding over two years, 2003-2005. The funding
enabled articles in all the journals to be indexed.
This was a major project and really opens up the
collection to researchers. Articles by title or subject
can be located by searching the library catalogue
(accessible via the internet and the i page at
www.arts.ac.uk/library), under the collection section
for Emap. Items appear on the library catalogue
with the shelfmarks EMAP PERIODICALS, EMAP
ARTICLES or EMAP ARCHIVE.
However, part of the joy of using the collection
is that even when a specific article is identified the
context that article is in within the journal opens up
further leads such as the adverts on the same page
as the article or in the same issue. Other articles on
the same page, or editorials, or letters, all enrich the
research process and expand knowledge on the
subject.
The AHRC funding also enabled consultation
on the best ways to preserve and conserve the
collection. Preliminary conservation of the bound
volumes was carried out and additional
conservation is being done as funding allows.
This has been an opportunity for us to collaborate
with Camberwell College of Art as students on their
conservation course worked on a six day placement
doing basic repairs and dealing with red rot which
some of the bindings had.
The journals had been housed in very poor
conditions in a damp basement away from the
EMap head offices and they were covered with
dust and spiders’ webs – all of which Katherine
Baird, Head of LLR at LCF had to tackle before the
collection could be moved to LCF! Some of the
journals are fragile, in particular those from the war
periods 1914-1918 and 1940-1945 due to the
poor quality paper that had to be used for publishing
then, but generally the volumes are in good
condition, and are now all usable with care.
The collection provides a rich archive of
fashion clothing, domestic textile, and footwear
manufacture and retail information in the UK from
the later part of the 19th century through the 20th
century. This gives not just an overview of the
respective trades but also provides researchers
with detailed information about individual
companies and retailers, their management and
production methods, and even individuals involved
in the production, management, distribution and
retailing of clothing and footwear. This in turns
offers researchers the opportunity to trace the
history, development and changes the industries
and the relevant markets underwent over the
last century. The collection maps the rapid
development of one of Britain’s key industrial
sectors, that of clothing and footwear. Innovations
in technology and marketing and the introduction
of mass production methods increased the volume
of ready-to-wear clothing for men and women
throughout the twentieth century. Footwear
manufacture also changed and developed as new
materials, production techniques and management
innovations were introduced.
Developments in ready-to-wear and mass
production clothing and footwear stimulated the
growth of what we now consider as ‘high-street’
fashion. The trade journals show this development.
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries the
focus in Drapers Record for example, was on the
Drapers Record, cover,
March 12 1921
Men’s Wear, cover, June 5 1975
materials and accessories produced and sold for
the drapery trade, the trade that provided the means
for clothing to be produced at home or in small
workshops and sold through the independent
small clothing shops and department stores which
dominated the clothing market. By the 1920s
and 1930s new retail and distribution management
methods, many pioneered in the United States,
were introduced by retailers such as Burton, Marks
& Spencer, C&A and Woolworths into the UK.
These companies set up multiple stores across
the country selling a wide range of cheap items
from clothing and shoes to household goods.
They continued to develop into what we now call
‘chain stores’ and their market share increased
rapidly throughout the 20th century.
To meet this competition department stores,
which were pioneering retail sites in the nineteenth
century, refocused their stock and services to
provide an up-market alternative to the chain store.
Service, exclusivity and novelty became the keys
to the continued success of stores like Selfridges,
Harrods, Whitley’s, Debenham & Freebody, Peter
Jones, Fenwicks and many more.
As the century progressed there was a shift,
as clothing increasingly became ‘fashion’. Men’s
clothing is an interesting example of this shift.
Journals such as The Outfitter and early issues
of Men’s Wear focus on tailoring, shirt making and
underwear for men and boys. The styles and
materials are not specifically ‘fashion’ orientated
until the late 1960s and 1970s when gradually
a sense of ‘fashion for men’ becomes prevalent.
The losers in the changing retail landscape
were the small independent shops and increasingly
they turned their focus on niche and specialist
markets to adapt and survive. But by the 1960s and
1970s independent clothing shops gained in the
market as boutiques catering for new young
fashion consumers opened.
Likewise with the shoe and boot industries,
the focus during the 19th and early 20th century
was on production and distribution with style and
form secondary. However, what is interesting in
the footwear sector is the predominance of multiple
and chain stores from much earlier than clothing
stores and the rare appearance of shoes in any
quantity in department stores.
Researchers have been using the collection
since it opened in 1999 to investigate topics such
as fashion history, clothing and footwear trends
and developments; department stores, chain stores,
boutiques and specific retailers; development of
brands; textile developments, in particular artificial
fibres and textile innovations; history of sportswear
especially sports footwear and swimwear; men’s
and women’s underwear; jewellery; window display,
visual display and merchandising; advertising and
marketing; clothing and war. The range of subjects
being researched gives an idea of the wealth
of information and visual material the collection
contains.
Researchers using the collection include
research staff and students from the college and
other colleges in the University of the Arts London;
researchers from other universities and museums;
authors, journalists, and freelance writers;
individuals with personal interest; and students
from the college, in particular postgraduate
students looking at clothing and footwear
trade history.
We would be more than happy to introduce you
to the collection. Appointments need to be made
in advance. It is only open during term time, on
Thursdays from 10.00 to 18.00. To make an
appointment to use the EMap Special Collection
please contact the EMap Special Collection
Librarian email: v.buchanan@fashion.arts.ac.uk
or telephone: 0207 514 8392. The EMap Special
Collection is located in Room 306, 20 John
Princes Street, London W1G 0BJ.
13
A review by Amy de la Haye, Reader in Fashion
Curation and Material Culture. On 24 June 2006,
LCF welcomed influential fashion curator and
author Harold Koda to launch the opening of
the Research Centre for Fashion, The Body and
Material Cultures with a lecture, followed by drinks
and further discussion in the Fashion Space.
‘The Costume Institute: an evolving idea’:
a lecture by Harold Koda, Curator-in-Charge
of The Costume Institute of the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York
Harold Koda began his museum career by working
as an intern with Diana Vreeland at The Costume
Institute (TCI). In 1979 he left to work as Associate
Curator at The Fashion Institute of Technology’s
Museum, and was joined there by Richard Martin
in 1981 (their exhibitions included Balenciaga,
Fashion and Surrealism and Jocks and Nerds).
In 1993 Koda returned to TCI with Martin, where
together they staged many seminal exhibitions,
including Diana Vreeland: Immoderate Style,
Orientalism, Haute Couture and Christian Dior.
TCI’s gallery space of 5,000 square feet and five
fixed cases stages three impressive exhibitions
each year, displaying fashion from the Institute’s
superlative collection. Koda left TCI once again
in 1997 to pursue another passion – landscape
architecture – while continuing to work on various
individual exhibitions, including the blockbuster
Armani (which he co-curated with Germano Celant)
at the Guggenheim in New York. In 2000 he
became TCI’s Curator-in-Charge, and appointed
former LCF and V&A Research Fellow Andrew
Bolton to work with him. During the course of his
career, Koda has written and co-written numerous
books (one of my favourites is Goddess: the
Classical Mode) and exhibition catalogues, in
addition to contributing a number of scholarly
articles to Textiles and Text. He has twice (in 1986
and 1997) won a special award from the Council of
Fashion Designers of America. LCF was delighted
that the pre-eminent fashion curator travelled from
New York to mark this special event.
In 1946 The Costume Institute of New York’s
Metropolitan Museum of Art was launched with –
interestingly – the support of the American fashion
industry. Since this date, it has exerted a major
influence upon exhibiting modern and historical
fashion and world dress. The nucleus of the dress
collection was put together by a group of theatre-
loving civic dignitaries who were passionate about
stylistic accuracy and encouraged scholarship in
what they considered to be a universal art form.
In a lecture illustrated by fantastic slides, Harold
Koda documented the curatorial shifts that have
taken place at TCI over the years, and provided
fascinating insights into the curatorial interventions
involved in recent exhibitions.
Whilst attendance figures for fashion
exhibitions are at an all-time high, and many new
venues are engaging with fashion for the first time
(in London, the Imperial War Museum and the Royal
Academy are amongst the institutions to have
staged fashion exhibitions), this popularity is rarely
matched by investment in dress collections and the
employment of professional curators. Koda
explained that, unlike the Met’s other curatorial
departments, TCI must seek all of its funding from
external sources. As a result, alongside their
curatorial duties, TCI’s staff are unashamedly and
necessarily “media mongers”. The TCI’s major
annual fund-raising event is its glitzy Party of the
Year, which was first staged in 1948 by socialite
publicist Eleanor Lambert. Since 2003, when TCI
started to work with Anna Wintour, editor of
American Vogue, the guest-list of this major social
event has become even more elite than in previous
years. The photographs of famous attendees are
used extensively by the press, and bring an
additional source of income to the Institute. Koda
explained that, because of its financial status, it is
sometimes (mistakenly) assumed that TCI lacks
curatorial autonomy (for a critique of TCI’s
programme during Diana Vreeland’s tenure in the
1980s, see Deborah Silverman’s book Selling
Culture, Pantheon, 1984). He emphasised that the
benefit for the Institute’s sponsors comes not from
the exhibition itself, but from the association with a
grand cultural institution.
14
The Costume Institute: Koda went on to case-study the curatorial historical dress in historical settings: a mid-
continued> processes undertaken for the Chanel exhibition nineteenth-century gown by Worth is juxtaposed
(2005), explaining its focus on modernity, his and with a design by John Galliano, and Punk styles
Bolton’s selection of garments, the installation’s set beside Savile Row suits. By choosing to exhibit
design (inspired by le Corbusier), and the choice in Anglomania a unique mantua (the term for
of mannequins (based upon those used in the a woman’s gown at the turn of the eighteenth
Paris 1925 exhibition). The installation and the century) which, unusually, has not been altered,
mannequins were designed by Creative Consultant Koda highlighted the ongoing museological debate
Olivier Saillard, of the Musée de la Mode et du about care versus access (there were concerns that
Textile in Paris; Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel had
insisted that mannequins would not be used in
the gown would fade), and discussed the possibility
of using virtual effects as a future solution.
the exhibition, but changed his mind when he Harold Koda’s lecture was fascinating and
saw Saillard’s designs. Koda also described the insightful for this audience with a shared interest
Dangerous Liaisons exhibition (2004), which in fashion in its various contexts. To the staff and
was staged in The Wrightsman’s Galleries, the
museum’s French-period rooms, and which
student cohort involved in LCF’s recent MA in
Fashion Curation, and members of the Fashion
explored the dressed body’s spatial negotiation of
the eighteenth-century interior as a choreography
Curation Research Hub, this event will be especially
memorable.
of seduction and erotic display. Finally, the audience
was shown images from the recently opened
Anglomania exhibition which locates modern and
Research Centre for Fashion,
the Body and Material Cultures Seminar Series
The Research Centre has now started to hold seminars on a regular basis. The first of the
Centre’s Research Seminars was held by Clare Rose, a Senior Lecturer in the History of
Textiles, Chelsea College of Art & Design London. Her PhD, Boyswear and the Formation
of Gender and Class Identity in Urban England, 1840-1900 has recently been completed
at the University of Brighton. Designing Little Men, Christopher Breward’s work on the
`Hidden Consumer’ revealed the importance of clothing in forming and presenting masculine
identities. Clare’s research and indeed seminar, has shown that the design of clothing was
even more important for boys, and that this formed a catalyst for new developments in
clothing manufacturing, promotion, and consumption.
Charlotte Hodes a Senior Research Fellow at LCF held a Research Seminar entitled ‘Cut,
Torn and Pasted’. Charlotte introduced her recent practice led research and her current
project at The Wallace Collection, London.
Wessie Ling presents her work, summarised in an article by Christian Huck later in this
newsletter, at the next Research Seminar which will be held on Wednesday 15 November
at 5.30pm in Room 105, John Princes Street.
15 16

Christian Huck, Visiting Research Fellow, reviews

Wessie Ling’s recent exhibition ‘Mapping Motifs’ UK talent cut from a quality cloth
which was open to the public from April 26 to May
06, in the AVA Gallery, School of Architecture and
Fashion graduates are far from June is the month in which final-year fashion focused less on creating outlandish garments that
the Visual Arts, University of East London. Wessie is
fluffy. They are one of this students face their biggest test. Up and down the propel them to mega-stardom than they are on
a Senior Lecturer at LCF.
country’s unsung creative and country, the culmination of their studies is on learning their craft.
commercial success stories, display. With Graduate Fashion Week at the Two graduates of Westminster University at

Mapping Motifs: An Explorative Journey as Jo Entwistle explains.

through Fashion, Cities and Identities,
An Exhibition by Dr Wessie Ling
Wessie Ling, Mapping Motifs images © Paul Burroughs
‘Mapping Motifs’ is Wessie Ling’s most recent
exhibition. It was accompanied by two talks she
held at the UAL Centre for Transnational Art,
Identity and Nation (TrAIN) and the Discourse,
Power & Resistance 5 conference at Manchester
Metropolitan University, where she also showed
part of her exhibits.
Wessie’s installation consists of six dresses.
Otherwise identical, each dress has the fashionable
streets of a different fashion metropolis printed on
the textile: Paris, London, New York, Milan, Hong
Kong, Shanghai. The topography of each of the
cities is customized according to the fashionable
mind; in London, for example, Savile Row leads
straight to Notting Hill. The bespoke tailored
dresses are presented hanging from two ready
made, albeit modified, clotheshorses. The show
room itself is covered in wallpaper which converges
the six maps displayed on the dresses. The dresses
themselves are tailored in the style of a cheongsam,
the Chinese-women’s dress that first emerged in
Shanghai in the1920s. The dresses have been
made in traditional form and method by a Chinese
Qipao tailor from ink-printed fabric, itself a mixture
Published: 23 June 2006
of cotton and satin specially designed to facilitate
the modern printing technique.
The installation opens a number of questions
about the cultural identity of fashionable goods:
How, and where, are cultural stereotypes
produced? How much is the wearer involved in
such a process, and how much the spectator?
What is the relationship between the fashionable
and the exotic, between fashion and the city?
By turning the exhibition into an interactive event,
eg through the introduction of coloured lenses that
have to be employed to decipher hidden writings
on the dresses, Wessie also calls into question the
role of institutional cultural sites in the production
of such stereotypes, and presents ways to
deconstruct traditional forms of museal presentations.
Wessie will further develop some of these themes
in two upcoming exhibitions, a group show during
the London Design Festival in September, and
a later solo show at the Empty Space Gallery.
Look out for details, and don’t miss it!
For more information on her latest as well as
upcoming exhibitions, please contact Wessie Ling
at: w.w.ling@fashion.arts.ac.uk.
beginning of the month and the New Designers
show at the end, it is a good time to reflect on the
nature of UK fashion education.
Fashion students tend not to have a good
image. They are seen as superficial or trivial. Even
in comparison with those on other art and design
courses, they come off badly: it’s hard to imagine
architecture students being treated as fluffy. If
fashion gets any sort of serious treatment in the
press, the focus is all too frequently on the UK’s
lack of a proper fashion infrastructure and on how
students will, at the first opportunity, flee to jobs
overseas, with the obvious examples being
designers such as Julien Macdonald, Stella
McCartney and John Galliano.
But below the surface of this stereotype the
reality is very different. Fashion education is an
unsung British success story. British fashion is held
in high esteem abroad: that exodus of UK-trained
designers is itself a sign of the high value placed on
our students, many of whom are snapped up by
companies in New York, Milan and Paris. The
courses are well thought of and attract large
numbers of international students, who see a
degree from a UK institution as globally recognised
gold standard.
‘Art and design education in the UK is the best
in the world,’ claims Audrey Cresswell, academic
chair of Graduate Fashion Week.
Since 1996-97, there has been a seven-and
-a-half fold increase in the number of international
students enrolling on the womenswear design
course at the London College of Fashion, and
the increase is fivefold on menswear.
This is repeated across the country, although,
according to Colin Renfrew, associate dean of the
honours degree at LCF, London is the centre of
gravity because it is the hub of Britain’s art and
creative industries.
Graduate Fashion Week, which celebrated
its15th birthday this year, is itself a success story.
The event, once a small operation promoting the
work of fashion students by consolidating all the
college shows under one umbrella event, is now
an important fixture in the fashion calendar that
is attended by international buyers and press and
industry insiders scouting for talent. Roy Peach,
Dean of Postgraduate Portfolio at LCF and a
founder of Graduate Fashion Week, credits
companies such as BHS, Topshop and River
Island, which sponsor the event, for making it
so successful.
The traditional view of British design education
is that it turns out people who are creative and can
think conceptually about fashion but who lack a
commercial edge. Times are changing, however.
While it is true that British design is famed for its
creative edginess, it is also the case that many
students graduating with fashion degrees today are
this year’s fashion week provide an example of how
aware students are of the business side. Emma
Downing and Nicola Stewart both chose to rework
the classic trenchcoat, Downing by customising
second-hand coats, with stains and marks included.
The reworking could be described as conceptual,
but both students are clear that they want to learn
their craft by working their way through the industry
from the bottom up.
For Caroline Evans, Professor of Fashion at
Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design,
the most interesting thing about contemporary
British fashion students is the incredible diversity
and range of talent they show and, in particular,
the exciting ways in which students are cutting
and draping cloth. What also strikes her is how
hard working they tend to be and the significant
economic impact they make. Many courses have
strong industry links and offer sandwich courses
and resource centres, such as the Fashion
Business Resource Studio at the LCF, that
embed business and entrepreneurial skills in the
curriculum. They run competitions for students
to gain experience in the fashion industry.
But the real success of British fashion design
– and perhaps what sets the UK apart – is the
way that students are encouraged to think.
Renfrew says that students graduating from US
institutions are trained to go straight into industry,
but UK students are taught to ‘push at boundaries
of aesthetic and business practices and question
them’.
Ursula Hudson of the LCF agrees. UK fashion
education ‘does not set out to merely train students
but (to teach them) how to think and reflect on their
practice’, she says, which means that students
develop the ability to combine creativity with
strategic design. The result may be, for example,
a dress made of hair that is uncommercial but
demonstrates a designer’s ability, Hudson says,
to ‘challenge conventions and work with new
materials - skills demanded by fashion’.
The kind of conceptual approach associated
with UK fashion students is essential to the
lifeblood of the fashion industry, which is constantly
in search of new ideas and lateral thinkers. It is,
Renfrew says, all about contexts: a grass suit may
not appeal to Esprit or Gap, but it may excite a high
fashion house. Alexander McQueen’s departure to
France is evidence that even the big fashion houses
such as Givenchy value conceptual and challenging
work. This may explain why, according to Cresswell,
most UK fashion graduates are still working in the
industry five years after graduating. The same
cannot be said of those graduating with other
vocational degrees. Maybe fashion students are
not so fluffy after all.
THES Editorial (c)2006 TSL Education Ltd.
17
Reconstructing Sixties Fashion at the V&A
This is the story of an In 2002, a research team led by Professor
exhibition about the innovative Christopher Breward, then Research Co-ordinator
fashion cultures of 1960s at LCF, and Professor David Gilbert of Royal
London, which some readers Holloway University of London, was awarded a
may remember. As many grant by the ESRC and AHRC through their
research projects start out ‘Cultures of Consumption’ programme. ‘Shopping
with an exhibition in mind, Routes: Networks of Fashion Consumption in
how this one materialized London’s West End, 1945-1979’ brought together
may be of interest to other historians of fashion, design, architecture and
researchers and curators. cinema with a historical geographer to examine
By Sonia Ashmore how the consumption and distribution of fashion
evolved in London during the post war period, and
the implications for the social and material fabric
of the capital (see The Hub Issue 3).
It was always intended that the project should
produce an exhibition of interest to the general
public, as well as more academic publications,
but an exhibition, like a book, is not always easy
to achieve. Chris Breward’s move from LCF to the
V&A as Deputy Director of Research, in 2004,
allowed him to present an idea for a book on sixties
fashion to the V&A Publications Committee in the
autumn. This was at first turned down. A proposal
for a fashion exhibition drawn from the museum’s
collections, to coincide with the fortieth anniversary
of Time magazine’s depiction of ‘Swinging London’,
was eventually approved by the museum’s Panel
for Public Programmes early in 2005. The book
then became a viable prospect. This left a relatively
short time in which to prepare both the exhibition
and associated publication, Swinging Sixties,
published in May 2006. Although the book was
written to a tight deadline, the intensive research
involved, and other work already done on the
project, proved invaluable in informing the
development of the exhibition. The emphasis was
to be on the innovative and influential designs of
a new, mostly art school-trained, generation setting
a new ‘London’ style, rather than on Paris-led
couture or popular high street fashions of the
period. From the start, the exhibition was conceived
spatially as well as chronologically, reflecting the
subtle alterations in the fashion character of
different London districts, sometimes only a street
or two apart. Recording the ‘ripple’ effect spreading
Knightsbridge 1961 – 1967, Garments from left to right:
Foale and Tuffin, Gerald McCann, Young Jaeger, John
Bates, Caroline Charles © V&A
outside London and abroad was also part of the
original concept, but space limitations, and the
restricted size of the fixed museum cases
effectively reduced the scope of these sections.
Perhaps more fundamental were the constraints
of the V&A collections themselves; 1960s youth
fashion was not their strongest point. As Jenny
Lister, the V&A curator chosen to organise the
exhibition, notes, the collection of contemporary
dress was generally only just starting in the 1960s.
The Bath Museum of Costume started its ‘Dress of
the Year’ scheme in 1963, while the Museum of
London continued to take a social history approach
to collecting dress as it was worn, rather than
couture garments. Even when less elite fashions
began to be acquired by the V&A, the immediate
past was naturally not seen as being of special
interest; Cecil Beaton’s ‘Fashion Anthology’
exhibition of 1971-72 marked a shift in focus.
When the ‘Sixties Fashion’ exhibition began to
be planned in detail, it became clear that a number
of key designers such as Foale and Tuffin were not
well represented with pieces of appropriate date;
nor were clothes from influential boutiques such as
Countdown and Top Gear. At this point Jenny Lister
made contact with Sylvia Ayton, an innovative
designer in the 1960s in partnership with Zandra
Rhodes, and through her involvement with the
Costume Society a link between museums and the
academic world. Ayton lent pieces of her own and
also provided the key to a network of other lenders.
One of these was Marit Allen, now a successful
film costume designer. As a fashion editor at both
Queen and Vogue in the 1960s, Allen had helped
to establish many young designers, and as super-
fashionable young woman herself, had built up her
own cutting edge, and still intact collection of
contemporary clothes, from which she lent items
to the exhibition. Other garments were lent by the
Bath Museum of Costume and the Museum of
London and by individuals who responded to a call
put out on the museum website. Being sensitive
to the reputations of living designers was a
constant preoccupation. ‘It is very different from
dealing with historical subjects’, remarked Jenny
Out of London: Paris to New York 1965 – 1968,
Garments from left to right: Paco Rabanne,
Yves St Laurent, Pierre Cardin © V&A
Contemporary fashion shot
(a version of this dress is in the
exhibition). Patti Boyd in crepe
‘Alice’ dress by Mary Quant (Ginger
Group), pictured with the Rolling
Stones. April 1964. Photograph:
John French (V&A)
Detail: Paco Rabanne, dress.
Plastic and metal. French, 1967.
V&A: T.165 - 198 © V&A
Lister, whose previous experience was primarily
with eighteenth and nineteenth-century dress.
In terms of display, an early decision was to use
original sixties mannequins as far as possible.
As the V&A did not have any, Adele Rootstein,
pioneer makers of mannequins, were approached
early on, and renovated and loaned thirteen period
mannequins. Modelled on contemporary fashion
celebrities, they range from ‘Audrey Hepburn’
(1961) to ‘Marie Helvin’ (1975). The rest are
Stockman calico stands which are easier to pad
out to fit the garments than fibreglass ones.
Matching original mannequins with the dresses was
a problem however, as neither the period fibreglass
bodies nor the dresses could be altered.
The exhibition designers were involved from the
start, discussing many possibilities such as the use
of photographic montage and contemporary
patterns as background to the clothes. Eventually,
the least expensive and least visually confusing
solution was adopted: strong background colours
based on 1960s posters. The display of disposable
paper dresses had special supports – custom-made
Perspex coat hangers - made in the Museum’s
workshops. Lighting, always problematic in a
costume gallery where the levels have to be kept
low, and always irritating to the viewing public, was
nonetheless the final transforming feature.
Jenny Lister managed all these aspects of the
exhibition, and was also responsible for the physical
production of the final show, including organising
external loans, the photography of about sixty
garments for the book and website, and arranging
for technicians and contractors. Besides
contributing to the book, she and Chris Breward
also wrote more than 85 labels and text panels in
conjunction with the museum’s text editor Lucy
Trench. Jenny also co-ordinated information for the
exhibition website which includes ten interviews by
members of the research team with key individuals
associated with sixties fashion. Other tasks
included collaboration with the museum’s
marketing and development departments, publicity
and sponsorship - from Miss Selfridge, and advising
on the guest list for the private view that also
included the Che Guevara: Revolutionary and Icon
and Sixties Graphics exhibitions.
The Heart of Swinging London: Carnaby Street
1964 – 1972. Shop Sign: I was Lord Kitchener’s Valet.
Garments left to right: I was Lord Kitchener’s Valet,
Lord John, Pussy Galore © V&A
18
Not least of these tasks was training and organizing
ten volunteers, a crucial hidden part of the
museum’s economy, who came to the museum
to help prepare and dress the 71 mannequins over
six months. This was enormously time consuming.
‘They had to make soft arms, petticoats and so on
in conservation approved materials’, Jenny noted.
‘It is like custom-making the garments from the
inside.’ Despite the casual, flung-together look of
some of the sixties clothes, their display required
attention to detail; some of the simplest looking
ones, such as the Paco Rabanne shift made of
plastic paillettes with metal links, were actually
the hardest to dress.
Despite constraints of time, money and the
limitations imposed by the gallery space, ‘Sixties
Fashion’ remained fundamentally consistent with
its original aims, although some plans, such as
interactive features – listening posts, message
boards, proved either technically problematic or
beyond the limits of the budget. The interest of
the visiting public has been apparent however, and
even the critics tended to fall back on their own
sixties memories, which may or may not be a sign
of success.
‘Sixties Fashion’ is at the V&A until 25 February
2007. The exhibition website is at
http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/fashion/1960s/
sixtiesfashion. Swinging Sixties, edited by
Christopher Breward, David Gilbert and Jenny
Lister is published by V&A Publications (London,
2006).
Other ‘Shopping Routes’ publications include a
special edition of the London Journal (31:1, 2006)
and a book, Fashion’s World Cities, edited by
Christopher Breward and David Gilbert (Oxford
Berg, 2006), based on an international conference
held at LCF and the Museum of London in 2005.
Other members of the ‘Shopping Routes’
research project were Dr Sonia Ashmore, LCF
Research Fellow, Dr Bronwen Edwards, Lecturer
in Geography, University of Hull and Pamela Church
Gibson, Reader in Cultural and Historical Studies at
LCF. Dr Rob Lutton was the Project Administrator.
ERSC/AHRC ‘Cultures of Consumption’
project RES-143-25-0038
Behind the Scenes, Chris Breward and Jenny Lister
preparing mannequins at the V&A
19
Scythia:
Sixth International Symposium
and Exhibition of Textile Art
The Sixth Symposium and
Biennial Exhibition of Textile
Art recently took place in the
town of Kherson, situated just
north of the Dnepr delta in the
Black Sea region of the Ukraine.
By Jennifer Shellard
Scythia: Sixth International
Symposium and Exhibition of
Textile Art, Jennifer Shellard
Despite previous collaborations and support from
the European Textile Network, as well as the Forum
of Cultural Networks for the Council of Europe, this
event was a private initiative, organized by one of
Ukraine’s foremost textile practitioners Andrew
Schneider and his partner, critic and curator
Ludmila Egorova.
The symposium opened on the evening of
Wednesday June 14 with the exhibition’s private
view, attended by national press, television and local
dignitaries. There were 38 participants from
13 countries including the UK, USA, Japan and
Australia. Many textiles artists from the host country
showed work, so it was interesting to witness the
distinct approaches, materials and techniques that
were characteristic of this part of Ukraine, an area
that considers itself for the most part fiercely
European and loyal to the ‘Orange Revolution.’ Like
much of Eastern Europe, a strong tradition of felted
work was in evidence – a number of examples
given a more noticeably contemporary feel with
experimental and painterly approaches now made
possible there through newly emerging needle
punch and digital technologies. Figurative and
abstract tapestries were also familiar, with a
distinctly decorative and symbolic vocabulary,
developed during Soviet times when combining
traditional folk art imagery and coded political and
religious themes provided valid means of
expression. More recent departures such as batik
and silk painting relied generally on high levels of
technical skill and decorative overload rather than
sensibility or subtlety.
Previous conferences and exhibitions in the
capital Kiev and in the Kherson region have, it
seems, gone some way to stimulating and reviving
interest and practice in traditional textile work
around the Black Sea and Mediterranean and it was
evident from the exhibition that a textile community
is now burgeoning within the region and beginning
to network effectively outside it.
On Thursday the 15th, there followed
presentations, workshops, and a tour of the
museum and town. Included in the tour was a visit
to an extraordinary gallery dedicated to the art work
of local children aged between five and sixteen –
impressive evidence of the importance placed on
art, creativity and culture within Ukrainian society.
The symposium also coincided with the town’s
annual cultural festival, where dance, performance,
costume and music events were staged in parks
and plaza’s around the centre, presided over by
Ukraine’s Minister of Culture and attended, it
seemed, by Kherson’s entire population.
The symposium lectures, workshops and
presentations took place over three days at the
town’s Local Lore Museum, alongside the
exhibition, and consisted of an opening address by
the organizers followed by series of key speakers.
Andrejeva Anna, Senior Researcher from the
Museum’s ethnography department gave a visual
presentation on the traditional textile crafts of the
Kherson region, featuring hand woven and
embroidered garments, early examples of textile
footwear and simple constructions of felted
outerwear. Olena Tryhub, lecturer and researcher
from Kiev’s National University of Art and Culture
showed examples of 9th and 10th century
Bulgarian costume and silver jewellery.
Brett Alexander from Newcastle University in
Australia showed images and described his own
practice and development as a textile artist. Brett’s
work deals wittily and at times poignantly with
issues of gender and sexuality and is intensely
personal. He has exhibited widely, and took part in
the exhibition Men Who Sew at the Crafts Council
in 2004. Despite the metaphoric and coded use
of textiles and objets trouves in his installations,
his presentation at the Symposium was open,
lighthearted and courageous in a country where
the gay are still oppressed.
Fashion designer Catharina Schmeer from
Copenhagen talked about her creative relationship
with digital print. Her textiles combine an eclectic
mix of photographic imagery, the product of
extensive travel and visual kleptomania.
Compositions are dynamic; cleverly manipulated
elements of saturated colour, mirrored image and
repeat. These bold, graphic and colourful prints are
contained within simple, elegant and contemporary
garment shapes, reflecting a strongly European
urban feel. Her prints cleverly combine elements
of iconic industrial landscape – architecture,
construction, machinery – together with symbols
of popular culture – music posters, slogans, graffiti.
These she contrasts with subversive socio political
references to sustainability and globalisation.
Compositions are constructed within
uncomplicated and well cut garments in natural
fabrics; parka style jackets, shirts and trousers
for both men and women.
Two of the pieces were displayed in the
exhibition, where they fitted well alongside art
textiles. However, Catharina’s full collection was
also included at the Scythia fashion show, the final
event of the symposium which took place on
Saturday 17th July at Kherson’s Art Museum,
a short walk from the main venue. One of the
museum’s recently refurbished galleries was set
up with seating and runway for the occasion and
many of Ukraine’s established fashion designers
showed alongside a showcase for recent
graduates. In keeping with the theme of the
symposium, there was an emphasis on surface
pattern and embellishment, with many examples
of knit, print and surface effects. Looks and
Scythia continued >
IMB Clothing Technology Fair, Cologne Germany
May 2006, by Alan Cannon-Jones
Digiflash’ Powerpoint slide from
IMB Clothing Technology Fair
‘Maier’ Powerpoint slide from IMB
Clothing Technology Fair, Cologne
Germany May 2006
silhouettes were distinctly Ukrainian with little
evidence of current ‘western’ trend influence – a
result perhaps of the county’s relative isolation and
history. The choice of venue - a small provincial
town some distance from the capital – no doubt
contributed to this impression, though Elizabeth and
Helen Lavrik were to some extent an exception,
with their linen-based collection involving chunky
The IMB Cologne fair is the major international
event for Clothing Technology and as such covers
the complete spectrum of technology and
machinery available to the fashion and clothing
industries.
It is held every three years and at the last
event in 2003 there were 692 Exhibitors, from 39
Countries, which drew 24,369 visitors from 114
countries.
The web site: www.imb2006.com gives access
to a full range of information regarding statistics,
innovations, awards, newsletters, fair guides,
forums, speakers, and a complete contact list for
all companies exhibiting at the event.
If you require detailed information regarding
any contacts and products then the web site is the
easiest method for researching.
The LCF team attending this event were able
to represent and research across the range of
technologies to keep the College updated and
informed:
Alan Cannon Jones: Garment Manufacturing
Technology
Pauline Kenny: Surface Textiles
Sharon Blackford: CAD/CAM
Georgina Carr: Technical Development
Stephen Honeyball: Technical Development
and Maintenance
The report includes highlights of the new
developments seen and will provide the strategy
for future investment and staff development in
the subject area of Fashion Design Technology
and Realisation.
The team would welcome further discussion
and are prepared to give advice and share opinion
in regard to this visit to IMB 2006.
Highlights of the new developments
Cutting
Various companies were demonstrating new
developments in tension free fabric spreading,
more flexible check fabric cutting, robotic spreading
and roll changing (10 seconds change over of a roll
of fabric – Setec), software for robotic handing,
flexible cutting systems for leather/hides/skins,
and fabric inspection.
20
knit, crochet and unstructured shapes. On the
whole though, Catharina Schmeer’s collection
stood out as contemporary and youthful and, above
all, wearable.
The symposium closed with a final address from
Ludmila Egorova, who thanked participants,
contributors and fellow organizers who had helped
to make the event a success
Sewing
The new developments for sewing and garment
production/manufacturing included, automatic
long seamers, buttonhole equipment,
programmable decorative stitching, feed transport
systems, flexible twin needle and zig zag machines,
automatic hemming on underwear, ultrasonic
seaming, workplace engineering for tailoring
production, flexible short sewing sequence
machines, electronic programmable short cycle
machines, sleeve setting, tailored lapel padding,
pocket creasing, direct drive equipment, pocket
preparation and insertion.
Finishing
Further developments in both semi and fully
automatic pressing machines, improvements in
three dimensional pressing shapes/bucks and
improvements in fusing technology.
Software
Demonstration of new 3D simulation programmes,
smart pattern systems for mass customisation,
automatic size grading, 3D to 2D software,
PDM/PLM (Product Lifestyle Management) fabric
scanning to virtual models, digital input direct form
digital cameras and software for management
systems.
Innovation Awards
N-hega – digital scanning input
Smart Textiles – ITA textile matrix tester
Optitex – software for surface textiles
Audaces – Digi-flash
Ardmel – ultrasonic welding
Human Solutions – X-Fit software
Pfaff – Hot Edge ultrasonic welding and seaming
Kessler – electronic adjustable machine stands
Durkopp – M-type machine for very thick fabrics
Ctex – programmable reinforcing machines
Infor Run Time – advanced p.o.s. planning software
Juki – active tension systems – stitching
EPFL – adaptable system for bra wire insertion
E-Tape – electronic tape measure
21
Design 2 Business Symposium Shanghai 2006
by Frances Ross
The D2B (Design to Business) 1st International
Design Management Symposium took place on
16 -19 March 2006 in the four star Galaxy Hotel
situated in the Hongqiao Business district of
Shanghai. This was the culmination of two years
planning following the formulation of the Design
Management Forum by Dr Philipa Ashton, Bath
School of Art & Design; Frances Ross, LCF,
University of the Arts, London and Dr David Hands,
University of Salford with other key personnel from
academic design schools. Design management is
a new discipline, first recognised in the early 1980s
and considered as a hybrid research field because
of the diversity of topics covered in many aspects
of business and design.
The main objectives set out by the forum were
to establish a contemporary research agenda and
to be inclusive and accessible to students, industry
and academics. Additional aims were to make
design management information and news easily
available on current research, practice,
conferences, new publications and emerging
trends. News is communicated via a regular
newsletter and website to all members for a small
subscription fee.
The D2B logo has been designed and patented
specifically for use on all future newsletters, papers,
proceedings and research articles. For a new
conference only recently added to the already busy
academic design calendar a very good response of
over 100 abstracts was received from the initial call
for papers. Eventually the reviewers selected 55
research papers to be presented and published in
a semi-hardback proceedings book. This book was
sent to interested libraries, universities (including
LCF) and industrial design managers. The aim
was not only to provide a reference text of the
symposium but also to act as an ambassador for
this new discipline and stimulate further design
management research activities.
The themes of the symposium were divided
into four categories:
1 Design Education & Research;
2 Strategic Design – Achieving Competitive
Advantage;
3 Design & the Business Dimension
4 Emergent Design.
Design 2 Business Symposium
continued >
The contributors comprised a mixture of PhD
students, academics and design practitioners and
were truly international, representing Europe,
America, the Far East and Australasia.
Given the cultural mix and diverse design
management topics delegates were looking
forward to some stimulating debates. Representing
LCF I delivered two papers the first ‘Defining and
determining the 21st century menswear luxury
consumer’ in the ‘Emergent Design’ track and the
second entitled ‘Eastern symbolism meets western
styling in ‘Oriental’ lingerie’ in ‘Design & the
Business Dimension’ track .
The second paper discusses both western and
eastern respondents’ knowledge and perceptions
of different sets of Oriental images and style
descriptors. For example the colour yellow has
perceived associations with the Emperor of China;
while lanterns and wall-coverings in red and black
can give connotations of a Chinese bordello in a
working class district for those respondents that
have been educated in a design/art history
background or those that are simply well travelled.
The different levels of recognition and
contextualisation of these motifs and symbols were
attributed to each nationality interviewed.
Additionally ten sets of photographs that illustrated
oriental-style lingerie and retail environmental
design were shown in turn to each respondent and
their responses were also recorded. Analysis of the
findings were visualised in bar charts.
The second paper caused an unusual ripple
from the normally polite but silent substantially
Oriental audience and I took five questions from
the floor (mostly translated from Chinese.) I was
also kept busy during the coffee break with further
questions and exchange of numerous business
cards. I had half expected that the re-appropriation
of eastern symbols and motifs by western
designers would be considered controversial at a
Shanghai symposium, especially as this city typifies
the meeting of eastern and western styles and the
merging of ideologies. However, at the time neither
the chair-person nor I expected the important
design discourse that emerged.
The discussion that the paper triggered can
best be understood by the following question posed
to me by a young Chinese male designer. ‘How
could the Chinese design style become more
popular with western consumers?’ As an example
he cited how the Japanese have a paired- down
style that translates well into western art and
popular culture. This style was developed after
world war two by Japanese industry exchange trips
to the USA and American investment in Japanese
business which placed value on design as a
strategy for staying ahead of the competition.
However the Japanese and Chinese art and design
style had been popular in Europe since the 18th
and 19th centuries and was ‘...used to sell
everything from cigarettes to candy...’ (Oshinsky,
2005 cited by Ross, F., 2006)
His concern and that of the rest of the Chinese
audience was not how the west should respect and
value the origins of Chinese design or even if it
could receive a contemporary twist; but how an
aesthetic could be created as a commodity that
would be accessible to a wider consumer market.
China is a vast culturally-mixed country with many
people and design styles; to develop a stereotypical
set of motifs that represents this diverse country in
a ‘mono’ way would be difficult and reductive.
China is currently on the verge of reinventing
itself in what is known as the economic ‘third way’
a mixture of the communist state-owned and
collective ethic and western capitalist privatisation
for the consumption orientated lifestyle
(www.oycf.org/perspectives/5_043000/china
18/08/2006 Wu, Jinglian). The higher education
systems are also in a constant state of flux and
change. In particular social-economic change
caused by the impact of globalisation has created
new needs in technology and design.
Manufacturing is being updated to state of the art
standards and a new Chinese design aesthetic is
under review. An extreme example of this was
presented by Cathy Treadaway an English textile
and ceramics designer at the symposium who
explained how she had been commissioned by the
British Design Council to go to China and redesign
the ‘Chinese Willow Pattern’ for a contemporary
western market as they did not have the expertise
nationally. Other cases of devaluing the traditional
Chinese aesthetic include the total destruction of
22
ancient architectural buildings for modernist forms
and the marginalising of traditional decorative
Chinese arts and fashion in favour of western
styles. Skyscraper luxury hotels go up almost
overnight in preference to the previously existing
Chinese 18th and 19th-century homes. American-
style shopping malls replace existing individually
owned shops and markets. And even the infamous
‘fake brand’ market of Shanghai is threatened with
closure in 2007 to give a more sophisticated
western ambience to visitors. Change is rapid, in
many cases without due consideration for the
historical cultural and aesthetic consequences.
The Chinese style that I observed while in
Shanghai at museums, galleries and markets is
masterfully crafted, colourful and decorative. In
some cases it is undoubtedly what the west might
consider ‘over-worked’. Their technically brilliant
craftsmanship and design-styles of weaving, dying
and painting are generally ornate but – new
aesthetics do not evolve overnight, any more than
design management can expect to become an
established, respected academic discipline in just
thirty years. However it is expected that with more
cultural exchange between China and Europe, this
will help both the east and west’s understanding of
contemporary design with historical context and its
value in a global business environment. Clearly
extensive further research is needed and with the
increasing pace of change in China this should be
conducted in the near future. It is intended that the
new MA Design Management for the Fashion
Industries which starts at LCF in October 06 will be
one of the platforms contributing to this and other
related research initiatives at the next D2B
conference in 2008.
23
AHRC Research Centre for Textile Conservation
and Textile Studies Third Annual Conference,
11-13 July 2006, University of Southampton
by Dr Sarah Cheang
When I look back on my doctoral student days,
I can recall enthusing wildly at conferences on
my subject of enquiry, the domestic ownership of
Chinese material culture in late-nineteenth and
early-twentieth century Britain. My fellow
conference delegates would listen politely, but quite
frequently ask: ‘And how are you doing that, then?’
Such questions are sometimes borne from genuine
and mutual interest, and sometimes from more
sceptical positions, but in truth, we are probably not
directly challenged often enough on the way that
we carry out our research. Therefore, the prospect
of a three-day conference devoted to the
processes of research should offer a welcome
oasis of scholarly introspection as well as a gallant
communication of ideas and experiences.
The AHRC Research Centre for Textile
Conservation and Textile Studies held its third
annual conference in July at the Textile
Conservation Centre, Winchester School of Art.
The conference theme was Textiles and Text:
Re-establishing the Links Between Archival and
Object-Based Research. Thus, the intention was
to stimulate discussion around the use of archival
resources when doing object-based research, new
or unusual approaches to the study of dress history,
and the interactions between conservators,
curators and scholars. Twenty-five papers were
presented, and the overall thrust of the conference
was to share the different research strategies that
may be employed in the study of textiles. The
papers will be published as post-prints in summer
2007, and copies can be ordered from the
Conference Secretariat by emailing
contex@soton.ac.uk.
The methodological emphasis of this
conference provided me with a valuable opportunity
to think about my postdoctoral work on the history
of Chinese textiles in Britain and the articulation
of class, gender and empire. My paper, ‘Chasing
the dragon: researching Chinese textiles in early-
twentieth century domestic interiors’, not only
reflected on how I had used archival material, but
also on the way that textual evidence can intersect
with an archive of empire. Thus, I was able to
engage with the very concept of the archive itself
within colonial and postcolonial contexts, in a
consideration of two contrasting early-twentieth
century displays of Chinese embroidery. The first
was a rare example of an Edwardian and interwar
AHRC Research Centre
continued >
domestic textile display that still exists today. It is
now part of the Powell-Cotton Museum of Zoology
and Ethnography at Quex House in Kent. Using the
diaries of the museum’s founder, Major Percy
Powell-Cotton, I was able to establish that the
embroidery panels were designed and executed by
Powell-Cotton himself as the finishing touch to his
Oriental-style drawing room, an exotic interior,
redolent of personal souvenir and expressions of
cultural standing. My second example was of the
Chinese embroidered textiles used by Queen Mary,
consort of George V, as cushion covers, curtain
decorations, and even as an evening coat, in the
1910s and 1920s. In these interactions with
Chinese textiles, the body of the Queen formed
a powerful site for the articulation of a British,
feminine imperial identity, and a queenship that
included the manipulation of a range of Chinese
textiles.
The two collections considered in my paper
were thus almost contemporary, but differed
considerably in terms of accessibility and cultural
status. The private and domestic forms of evidence
at Quex house were personal souvenirs of family
life. Queen Mary’s embroideries, on the other hand,
were not available for me to study in their physical
form, and neither had I consulted royal diaries or
photograph albums. In a sense, they were objects
of study that had only existed as text – as images
mediated by the press and by official biographers
– belonging to communal, national memory.
However, the element that united both these
collections was the position of China within an
imperialistic British world-view, and the collected
embroideries themselves functioned within the
imperial project as repositories of knowledge
about China.
At the conference, I also had the pleasure
of chairing a session on historical research into
everyday domestic objects, in which Barbara
Burman (University of Southampton) spoke about
an AHRC-funded project, Pockets of History, that
centres on the use of tie-on pockets (à la Lucy
Locket) during the seventeenth to nineteenth
centuries. Burman outlined a variety of methods
that had been used to investigate the pocket
and its contents, from texts such as paintings
and diaries, to the material evidence of museum
collections, and even the wearing of a tie-on
pocket by a researcher for a day. Alice McEwan
(independent scholar) also presented a fascinating
paper on representations of the anti-macassar,
an ordinary item of interior decoration that assumed
a highly derogatory status by the end of the
nineteenth century as a cloying item of feminine
invention, threatening to masculine authority
in the domestic interior. McEwan’s argument
thus focussed on the cultural power of the anti-
macassar at the level of textual representation.
Of the wealth of material presented, there were
other papers that were also mainly concerned
with representation rather than materiality, including
the keynote speech provided by Penny Sparke
(Kingston University). Sparke spoke about how
she had researched an early-twentieth century
American interior designer, Elsie de Wolfe, who
was known as ‘The Chintz Lady’. Elizabeth Kramer
(AHRC Research Centre for Textile Conservation
and Textile Studies) explored the way that Scottish
painter E. A. Hornel (1864-1933) visited Japan
and depicted women and girls wearing kimono.
The relationships between texts and textiles were
considered more directly by Lee Clatworthy
(Textile Conservation Centre) in the evidence
of eighteenth-century domestic account books,
and by Philip Sykas (Manchester Metropolitan
University) who provided a valuable study of the
ways that textile manufacturers’ pattern books
can be read and analysed. In contrast, papers
with a more material focus included the use of
archaeological evidence by Fiona Handley (AHRC
Research Centre for Textile Conservation and
Textile Studies) in reconstructing everyday
garments from discarded fragments of textiles
preserved in first to third-century Roman sites and
eleventh to fourteenth-century Islamic sites in
Egypt. Jane Malcolm-Davies (AHRC Research
Centre for Textile Conservation and Textile Studies)
explained how she had used sixteenth-century
church funereal monuments to add a more three-
dimensional understanding of Tudor dress to a
costume research image library.
Two papers on printed fabrics made a thought-
provoking pair, one being focussed on production,
and the other on consumption. Sue Kerry
(freelance) discussed how her archival research
into the Calyx pattern designed by Lucienne Day
was greatly assisted by a closer understanding of
the printing processes involved in its creation. Jo
Turney (Bath Spa University) spoke on her research
24
for an exhibition of twentieth-century floral fashions
that will be held at the Museum of Costume in Bath
in 2007, together with an interactive website. Her
investigation into the fashionable wearing of floral
prints highlighted the unofficial histories that oral
records of fashion consumption may provide in
comparison to textual representations in the media.
A session on collaborative approaches yielded
some interesting examples of how conservators,
curators and dress historians can work together.
Hilary Davidson (freelance) and Anna Hodson
(Smithsonian Institute) showed how a replica
of a late sixteenth-century bodice, and an early
seventeenth-century jacket, transformed their
understanding of how each piece functioned when
the bodice and the jacket were put together.
A fascinating demonstration of methods of
dressing in the 1540s was given by Ninya Mikhaila
and Jane Malcolm-Davies, the authors of a new
book, The Tudor Tailor: Reconstructing Sixteenth-
Century Dress. Researching, reproducing and
wearing period costume thus provided an evening
session that was both entertaining and
enlightening, reflecting the rich variety of
approaches that were embraced by this very
successful conference. A range of posters was
also exhibited, including the work of Carol Circuit
(furniture conservator) who had opened the
upholstery of a Victorian chaise longue to discover
a strange and tantalising collection of nineteenth-
century clothing and rags. Indeed, one of the most
poignant moments in the researching of textile and
dress history must surely be the way in which
clothing relates so strongly to the body and hence
to highly embodied and ritualistic subjectivities, an
aspect that was not forgotten in this three-day
investigation into text and textile.
25
An exciting review of a conference
which took place in Göttingen, Germany
by Pamela Church Gibson
American Studies as Media Studies?
– Annual Conference of the German
Association of American Studies 2006
When I was asked to give a keynote address at this
conference, I welcomed this opportunity to see,
from within, the current state of ‘American Studies’.
I assumed that the delegates would still be, in the
main, those working within literature and history,
though I believed, too, that Cultural Studies would
also be represented in force. The arrival of the
conference programme gave me a clearer idea
of the new, radical, interdisciplinary cast of
contemporary American Studies. The President of
the DGfA, Rüdiger Kunow, made this quite explicit
in his Introduction:
‘ In the wake of changes in the field of American
Studies during the last decade, the media have
become a central venue for the (re)formation of
a discipline no longer principally concerned with
policing the geo-cultural borders of the signifier
‘America’ but with locating that signifier inside
a virtual reality presumed to be without boundaries
but not without differences. American Studies has
thus energised new interdisciplinary projects
concerning, among other issues, the role of the
media for subject formation, the interrelations
between the media and the public domain, or
between individual imaginations and corporate
imaginaries.’
The first keynote speaker, interestingly, spoke
of ‘corporate imaginaries ‘ from a position of insider
privilege – for James Cortada, once an academic,
is now Head of IBM Global Services. His address,
‘From PCs to bipods and Beyond’, conjured up
his own particular ‘imaginary ‘ – a roseate future
benevolently shaped by the Internet, which is for
him the ‘Information Superhighway’ of our own
Prime Minister’s rhetoric. Predictably, there were
questions about the present uses – and abuses –
of cyberspace; there were, too, concerns about the
divisive potential of a future predicated upon the
individual acquisition and use of new technology,
and some discussion of what place there might be
for the ‘third world’ in this promised Utopia.
The next morning saw the beginning of the
parallel workshops, which ran for two days. The
‘Intermedial Crossing’ workshop offered papers
on computer games, ‘musico-textual Intermediality’
and different aspects of ethnic identity, while the
parallel session had equally thought-provoking
papers. Here,’ Eventing 9/11; the Transmedial
Construction of an American Nightmare’ was
followed by possibly the most compelling address
of the conference, Astrid Franck’s paper
‘Dismantling the Public Sphere: the Politics
of Apathy’ – disturbing and all too relevant for those
of us who live in a decaying Welfare State.
Also running in opposition were a series
of papers on US Politics and the media – a theme
picked up on the following day in the session
‘Representation of Crisis: Crisis of Representation’
which contained papers on Michael Moore’s
documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, the new raft of
Hollywood disaster movies – and an extraordinary
account of the various responses to Hurricane
Katrina in different segments of the media,
Annette Trefzer’s ‘Framing the Poor: Race,
Class and Katrina’.
Literature did indeed figure significantly but
there were not just papers on individual authors,
there was a symposium too on the book itself as
medium, one of the contributions being Jana
Fedtke’s description of what she called ‘the
Oprahfication of US-American book culture’.
And the future painted in the symposia was not
always the benign vision of the IBM executive –
though scope for resistance, too, was posited in
papers such as ‘Creative Resistance to the Net’
and ‘Approaching the Myth of Cyberterrorism’.
The three days were not only a fascinating
insight into a flourishing discipline, they were
also conducive to reflection on possible future
work within the English academy, particularly in
the field of Cultural Studies.
Lastly, the venue itself – and the timing of
the conference – deserve a mention. Göttingen
is a charming town, the size of the average
English village, built around the oldest university
in Germany. The buildings of both town and
academy survived the Allied bombing campaign,
since Churchill chose to spare this ancient home
of scholarship, just as Hitler demanded that no
bombs be dropped on either Oxford or Cambridge.
Germany, of course, was hosting the World Cup
and the conference coincided with the opening
ceremonies; while, as I discovered on my arrival,
Göttingen was hosting not only this international
conference but the Mexican football team. No
wives or girlfriends in evidence, no shopping,
no ostentatious parades of toned, honed bodies
or brandishing of designer handbags. Again,
scope for future work on the national specificities
of celebrity consumption?
The hub co-ordinators provide
an overview of fashion research hubs
The fashion
research hubs
Fashion Mediation Hub Update
Hub Co-ordinator: Alistair O’Neill,
Research Fellow
Members in attendance: Maggie Norden,
Agnès Rocamora, Nilgin Yusuf, Brenda
Polan, Antony Price and Alistair O’Neill
The hub has been busy organising the
forthcoming conference The Death of Taste:
Unpicking the Fashion Cycle at the ICA,
London. This is in association with the
Historical & Cultural Studies hub and the
University of Applied Arts, Vienna.
The Death of Taste examines the work of
making, styling and fashioning taste within
the context of increasingly speeded-up trends
and the constant plundering of the recent
past for styles in metropolitan centres of
creativity, such as London or Vienna.
Taking the 1980s as its point of reference,
these symposia – one at the ICA and one at
the University of Arts, Vienna - explore the
sensory and temporal phenomenon of taste
and style. The first symposium in London
questions how tastes and trends are forged
through the combined work of designers,
models and model agents, photographers,
stylists, re-touchers, while the second
symposium in Vienna focuses attention on
the ways in which cities, as creative hubs and
centres of taste-making industries, establish
and maintain their identities. Here, London,
as the home of ‘streetstyle’ and ‘edgy’ chic
will be set in sharp contrast to Vienna,
which, while attempting to develop its own
taste identity and now promoting its own
‘fashion week’ is, according to trend-
forecasting industries, situated in a country
that is least likely to embrace style change
or product innovation.
Speakers will range across various areas
of the fashion industry working at different
intersections in the taste-making process:
designers and photographers, stylists and
model agents will discuss the ways in which
they help create, develop and kill off new and
old tastes.
Pedagogy Hub Update
Hub Co-ordinator, Alison James,
Learning and Teaching Co-ordinator
Members of the Hub have been very active
this year with meetings, diverse conference
papers, presentations and journal articles.
Examples of their work include Alison
Shreeve’s paper on assessment as a
community of practice which was published
in the proceedings of the 13th ISL
Symposium. In addition she gave diverse
papers in Bath, Manchester, Canada and
Portugal. Geraldine Biddle Perry and Polly
Kenny gave papers in Lisbon and at the UAL
Learning and Teaching Conference in May at
Chelsea; Geraldine’s on ways in which theory
might inform practice and stimulate critical
thinking in the theoretically timid, Polly’s
on her research into embroidery and blended
learning. In September Diana Aronstam
delivered a paper at Bath Spa on research
into a transition model for entrants to HE.
In addition to diverse papers on her Phd,
Alison James presented her research on non
textual reflection in student learning and
will give three papers this Autumn in
London, Oxford and Sweden (keynote) on
different themes in pedagogic research.
Hub members have also been enthusiastic
participants in the new UAL Pedagogic
Research Group.
Curating Hub Update
Hub Co-ordinator, Amy de la Haye,
Senoir Research Fellow
Regular members: Amy de la Haye,
Alistair O’Neill and Judith Clark
Dates of Meetings: 19 October 2006,
22 February 2007, 25 April 2007 +
Katherine Baird 8 May 2007, 12 June 2007,
17 August 2007
Curated outcomes and collaborations
Each member has curated exhibitions
which have opened this year:
Amy – (Co-curator) Fashion and Fancy
Dress: The Messel Family Dress Collection
1865-2005 at Brighton Museum
(22 October 2005 – 16 July 2006 and
touring to Sheffield in 2007)
Alistair – Fashion Lives at the British
Library (10 November 2005- 06 February
2006)
Judith – Anna Piaggi Fashion-ology Victoria
and Albert Museum (2 February – 8 April
2006); Dai Rees Carapace exhibition, British
Council, Mexico (October – November 2006)
26
Collaborations
The LCF Centenary Exhibition is being
jointly curated by the 3 members of the
Hub, working closely with Katherine Baird.
It is an archive-based exhibition highlighting
the role of the 3 women custodians who have
collected and cared for the objects.
Colleague Daniella Hatfield has been
unable to attend our meetings and so Amy
and Alistair have met regularly with her
individually to discuss her forthcoming
Fashion Space exhibition ‘Mother,
Daughter, Curator’.
Judith and Amy presented their recent work
at the Centenary Conference which explored
various curatorial interventions that can be
made working with one object (a Land Army
overall from the 1940s). Amy is working
on developing this into an exhibition about
the Women’s Land Army, which would
feature one section called ‘Exploding an
Object’ which would be a material culture
analysis of Land Army breeches, with one
pair taken apart.
Judith and Amy have also revised their book
proposal on Curating Fashion for Yale and it
has received positive reviews from readers.
They are waiting for a contract, but will
approach another publisher before
Christmas if this is not forthcoming.
Judith Clark has been working with LCF
Research Fellow Dai Rees on his exhibition to
be launched at the Guanajuato Festival in
Mexico. The festival is the largest ever
British/Mexican cultural partnership. Judith
Clark travelled to Mexico in July to promote
the exhibition and to secure a venue in
Mexico City. A London College of Fashion
research grant supported the small
catalogue that accompanies the exhibition.
Contacts made
We have had 3 colleagues in Australia make
contact with us about the Hub: Robyn Healy
(who is writing a PhD on fashion curation at
the University of Melbourne and was
formerly Senior Curator of Fashion &
Textiles at the National Gallery of Victoria)
Amy Silver (curator at Melbourne Museum)
and Vishna Collins (freelance curator).
They have been advised of the Fashion
Theory special issue on Curation that Alistair
is editing for 2008 and we will continue
to update them with developments.
The Fashion Curation special issue will be
issued as one part of a double issue: the first
is edited by Valerie Steele and is a record of
the Museum Quality conference staged at the
FIT this year, that included a paper given by
Judith Clark. The second issue will focus on
examples of fashion curation that are
informed by museological practice, but
extend into new territories of display.
27
Judith Clark invited Maria Luisa Frisa from
Pitti Immagine in Florence to speak at the
Centenary Conference as the key note
speaker. She is Pitti Immagine’s creative
consultant and Director of Studies of the
Fashion Design course at Venice
Architecture Faculty. Judith will be working
closely with Maria Luisa Frisa on her
forthcoming ‘Donna Simonetta’ exhibition
at Palazzo Pitti in 2007.
Judith Clark’s contact details have
changed to: info@judithclarkcostume.com
Fashion Science Hub Update
Hub Coordinator Sandy Black, Reader
in Fashion Design and Technology
Between January and December 2005,
many hub members took part in activities
promoting collaborative research
development within the EPSRC/AHRC
Interrogating Fashion research cluster,
led by Sandy Black, part of which is now
incorporated into the Fashion Science Hub.
Digital Fashion was a key theme, including
facilitating customisation through digital
printing in 2D and 3D. This name has now
been adopted for the new College Digital
Fashion Studios research and bureau
facilities which were opened in April 2006.
Philip Delamore is responsible for the 3D
design and rapid forming unit, and Ceri Isaac
is responsible for the digital printing bureau.
Links have been established with the colour
researchers at London College of
Communication, and with the University of
Philadelphia (USA) Centre for Excellence in
Digital printing, via the Interrogating
Fashion research cluster.
Several research bids have been submitted
during the year. A proposal was submitted
to the EPSRC/AHRC Designing for the 21st
Century scheme arising from the Digital
Fashion discussions of Interrogating
Fashion. This was led by Sandy Black as PI,
in collaboration with Dr Claudia Eckert from
Cambridge as co-investigator, and was a
portfolio bid with 3 sub-projects including
different areas of the hub and colleagues
within Interrogating Fashion: project 1 is
personalised knitwear with Sandy Black and
Penelope Watkins; project 2 is bespoke bags
with Steve Harkin and Frances Geesin;
project 3 is design for rapid manufacturing
for quasi-textiles from Philip Delamore
and Freedom of Creation. This has been
successful and the team have secured
£230,000 funding for the project.
Individual collaborative research bids have
also been submitted by Frances Geesin
(Wellcome) and Philip Delamore (EPSRC)
with scientists from other institutions.
Colour is a growing research focus for the
hub, from different standpoints. ‘Living
Colour’ is a project area incorporating
concepts for colour change in textiles
through material science and micro and
nanotechnology. A collaborative large
research bid in this area with Queen Mary
University of London (QM) Department of
Materials has been developed over a year with
several hub members, co-ordinated by Jeni
Bougourd and submitted to EPSRC, with
QM’s Dr Natalie Stingelin-Stutzmann as PI
and Philip Delamore as Co-investigator. As
yet, none of these bids has been successful,
but further avenues are being pursued.
Through colleagues’ involvement over the
last two years with Queen Mary, the college
is now organising a joint conference on
Nanotechnologies for Fashion and Textiles
in collaboration with hub members in April
2007.
Also through the Queen Mary link, over two
days in April several Fashion Science hub
members presented their research to
colleagues from the Institute of Material
Research and Engineering, Singapore who
are researching collaboration in areas
complementary to their scientific research,
specifically cosmetic science and product
development. There is clearly great potential
for exciting new research in these areas,
as fashion continues to delve deeper into
aspects of science to achieve new products
which are more intelligent, multifunctional,
fit for purpose, and are aesthetically highly
pleasing.
Finally, new work is being prepared for the
Centenary conference by four hub members
to integrate scanning for fit of jeans with
pattern preparation and engineered surface
decoration to create bespoke male and female
jeans.
The context for work in the area of Fashion
Science is constantly developing, as
evidenced by the increasing number of
external events, networks and conferences,
and greater awareness of the interfaces of
design with technology. With a large number
of active leads and projects, and new
collaborative initiatives emerging all the
time, this is an increasingly important area
of the College’s work. The project workload
now needs further rationalisation, and
an increase in active members as certain
individuals may become over-committed.
A drive to recruit doctoral students in these
areas would also be highly beneficial to the
research culture.
Hub members include:
Sandy Black (Reader) 3D knitwear design
and technology
Jeni Bougourd (Senior Research Fellow) 3D
Bodyscanning applications (Size UK)
Philip Delamore (Research Fellow) design for
3D printing and rapid prototyping
Dr Frances Geesin (Senior Research Fellow)
Innovative textiles using electro-deposition
Steve Harkin (Senior Lecturer) designer/
practitioner bespoke bags
Ceri Isaac (Research Fellow) 2D digital
printing design and colour management
Polly Kenny (Senior Lecturer) Surface
textile design
Prof Helen Storey (Senior Research Fellow)
Art/Science projects and exhibitions
Dr Danka Tamburic (Reader)
Cosmetic science product formulation
Dr Penelope Watkins (Research Fellow)
Pattern making for stretch and movement
Janet Wilson (Associate Lecturer) textile
technologist
Historical and Cultural Studies
Research Hub update
Hub Co-ordinator: Joanne Entwistle,
Senior Research Fellow
Under new full economic costs, a team from
within the Historical and Research hub has
submitted ‘Fashion and the City: how
fashion week sells the city’ to the Economic
and Social Research Council under their
Research Grants scheme.
The project sets out a cross-cultural
comparative study of fashion week in four
fashion capitals – London, Paris, Shanghai
and Sydney/Melbourne. If funded it will be the
first comprehensive study of fashion week
and the way in which it promotes or ‘brands’
the city. The amount bid for is about
£305,000. Dr Joanne Entwistle will act
as Principal Investigator, working with
Dr Wessie Ling, Dr Agnès Rocamora and
Frances Ross.
Artefact Hub Update
Hub Co-ordinator: Lucy Orta, Rootstein
Hopkins Chair of fashion
Hub Members: Dai Rees, Helen Storey,
Simon Thoroughgood, Paul Bevan, Alan
Cannon-Jones, Peter Cox, Dr Wessie Ling,
Dr Frances Geesin, Prof Lucy Orta, Ceri
Isaac, Donatella Barbieri, Jane Elson, Jane
McGrath, Polly Kenny, Mark Lebon
We welcomed to the 4th Hub discussion
group students from the MA Fashion
Curation course led by Alistair O’Neill at
London College of Fashion, as well
as new member Polly Kenny. Hub members
discussed upcoming research projects
including Frances Geesin who brought in
prototypes of her current work and discussed
the possibility of working in collaboration
with peers to develop research that focuses
on the interpretation of nano medical work.
Wessie Ling – Research Fellow
From April – May 2006 Wessie had a
solo exhibition Mapping Cities in AVA Gallery
at the University of East London. The work
focused on an explorative journey through
fashion, cities and identities.
Ceri Isaac – Research Fellow, LCF
Research involves exploration of the new
image styles for surface design made possible
through the use of digital photography, video
and inkjet textile printing.
Inspired by the photographer Muybridge,
Isaac has investigated patterns of movement
through the use of stills taken from video
footage and put into a sequence capturing a
pattern of movement for the human figure.
The advent of Organic Light Emitting
Polymers and flexible screen technology is
also an area of interest as the flexible screens
of the future will also be applied to fabrics
and decorative surfaces.
Ceri Isaac, Arial
Ceri Isaac, Treeline
Lucy Orta – artist, Rootstein
Hopkins Chair of fashion
A new sculptural installation entitled
‘Fallujah’ which reflects upon the social,
political and ethical consequences of the
Iraq war, to be exhibited in London and
internationally in 2007. The work is being
developed in collaboration with writer and
director Jonathan Holmes whose text, taken
from eyewitness accounts, describes the
appalling atmosphere in ‘Fallujah’ during
the American invasion. The series of
artworks will transform the ‘surplus’ that
this and other wars have left behind into
visual metaphors.
The group discussed plans for the upcoming
Artefact Hub exhibition ‘New Directions in
Research’ which took place in the Fashion
Space Gallery at John Princes Street from
14 September – 28 September, 2006
in conjunction with the Centenary
Conference. The exhibition, curated
by MA Fashion Curation students, featured
the work of Hub members Dai Rees, Lucy
Orta, Paul Bevan, Wessie Ling, Alan Cannon-
Jones and Simon Thorogood.
Lucy Orta, Working Drawing Fallujah, 2006
Alan Cannon-Jones – Senior Lecturer,
specialist in Bespoke Tailoring
Alan Cannon-Jones is currently developing
research into the 3D Realisation of the
Parametric Pattern Software. Cannon-Jones
is working with TPC Hong Kong who have
developed software for Three Dimensional
Pattern Cutting, having succeeded in
developing the first realisation of a Tailored
Garment. The generation of the garment
commenced with a body scan that has
driven the process through to the pattern
generation. The 3D outcome is the final
realisation and the only part that involves
‘human hands on’.
Alan Cannon-Jones, Screen shot of his working
project ‘3D Realisation of the Parametric Pattern
Software’
Paul Bevan – Photographer, Course
Director of Foundation Degree Specialist
Make Up and Photography
Paul Bevan’s performative,
photo-based installations explore
photography not only as a documentary tool,
but also draw on the photograph as an
artefact containing both a history and
physical presence. In previous work he has
explored lenticular photography and he is
currently developing research surrounding
photographs which can be worn to relate to
body posture and movement and developed
into patterns. His research practice seeks
to explore various relationships in process,
method and presentation (including fashion
28
and technology). The implication of the
viewer in playing out the work is a fabricated
condition that further enhances the
relationship between artist and audience,
where the work is co-opted by individual
enactment with each one becoming a unique
spectacle for a wider audience.
Paul Bevan, snap of his performative,
photo-based installations
Exhibitions/events
London College of Fashion Centenary
Conference LCF, London 27-28
September/Dai Rees Carapace Oaxaca
Biennale, Mexico Autumn 2006
Lucy Orta This is America! Group
Exhibition Centraal Museum, Utrecht
23 June – 7 October 2006
Wessie Ling Empty Space Project London
Design Festival September 2006
Wessie Ling Solo Exhibition Empty Space
Gallery November – December 2006
Lucy Orta Solo Exhibition Motive Gallery,
Amsterdam 9 September –10 October 2006
The Hub are currently building networks to
cross-disciplinary practitioners in the areas
of fashion, body, identity, textile, 2D/3D, and
seeking critical debate and collaborations
with curators and theorists; reflecting on
coordination of college technical support,
use of facilities for research fellows and staff;
establishing cohesive links between the MA
studios (practice-based) and fellows; and
generating interaction and fluid transfer
of knowledge to student body.
RAE 2008 Update
The Research Fellows were given advice to
help them with their 300 word statements.
Research Fellows then advised other
researchers within their Research Hub on
the 300 word statements, talking through
examples and important points to consider.
The deadline for the 300 word statements
has now been set and the Research Office is
gathering the information and logging it on
the database. The Research Office will soon
be asking research staff to provide Evidence
for each of their outputs described in
their 300 word statement.
29 Research news
Chapters in book
Sonia Ashmore 2006: ‘I Think They’re All
Mad’; Shopping in Swinging London’, in C.
Breward, D. Gilbert and J. Lister eds., Sixties
Fashion (London: V&A Publications).
Becky E. Conekin to appear in a book
entitled Fashion as Photograph, edited by
Eugenie Shinkle, with I. B. Tauris, 2007.
‘Lee Miller Simultaneity: Photographer?
Model in the Pages of Inter-War Vogue’
Pamela Church Gibson ‘Myths of the
Swinging City: The Media in the Sixties’ (In
The Swinging Sixties, ed. Chris Breward,
David Gilbert & Jenny Lister – V&A
Publications, June 2006, Book Chapter
Sandy Black June 2006, Fashioning
Fabrics: contemporary textiles in fashion.
Book published June 2006 by Black Dog
Publishers London. Sandy Black is overall
editor and author of introductory essay
plus several profiles.
Sandy Black ‘Textiles: A Futuristic view’.
Introductory chapter in book Smart Textiles
for Medical and Healthcare, Woodhead
Publishing, Cambridge
Reina Lewis Introductory chapter from co-
edited volume (with Nancy Micklewright)
‘Gender, Modernity and Liberty: Middle
Eastern and Western Women’s Writings: A
Critical Sourcebook’ (London: I.B. Tauris,
2006), has been extracted in Writing Turkey:
Explorations in Turkish History, Politics,
and Cultural Identity edited by Gerard
MacLean, Middlesex University Press
Journal articles
Bill Webb April 2006: ‘Fashion Retailing’ in
The Fashion Handbook (T. Jackson & I.
Shaw) published by Routledge
Danka Tamburic Arsic I., Vuleta G.,
‘Exploring moisturising potential of
naturals: the cases of St.John’s wort,
chamomile and blackthorn’, Euro Cosmetics,
vol. 13, issue 3 (2005) 14-21
Danka Tamburic Savic, S., Daniels,
R., Muller-Goymann, C. ‘Structural
characterization of multiphase emulsion
systems based on an alkylpolyglucosode non-
ionic emulsifier’, La Ravista Italiana delle
Sostanze Grasse, Vol 82, Settembre/Ottobre
2005, pp. 236-244.
Danka Tamburic ‘Effects of polymer
entrapment of Prunus spinosa fruit extract
on its cosmetic efficacy’, Journal of Approved
Cosmetology, Vol 24, No 2 (2006) 63-76
Sarah Cheang ‘Women, Pets and
Imperialism: The British Pekingese Dog and
Nostalgia for Old China,’ Journal of British
Studies, 45.2 (April 2006): 359-387
Sonia Ashmore 2006: ‘Extinction and
Evolution: department stores in London’s
West End, 1945-1982, London Journal
special edition (31:1)
Sonia Ashmore 2006: ‘Cosmopolitan
Shopping: Marketing the National and
Transnational in London’s West End’, in C.
Breward and D. Gilbert (eds.), Fashion’s
World Cities (Oxford, Berg).
Sonia Ashmore 2006: ‘Red House and Asia:
A House and its Heritage’, co authored with
Yasuko Suga, Journal of William Morris
Studies (Winter issue).
Sonia Ashmore 2006: Review of
Sarah Elvins, Sales and Celebrations:
Retailing and Regional Identity in Western
New York State, 1920-1940 (Athens, Ohio,
2004), Journal of Consumer Culture.
Pamela Church Gibson ‘From Up North to
Up West? London on Screen 1964-1967’, in
The London Journal (special edition) pub.
July 2006
Danka Tamburic Review: Nanotechnology/
lipid nanoparticles – Realising hope in a jar?
SPC Magazine, October 2005, pp. 55-56.
(review article with Mojgan Moddaresi)
Sarah Cheang ‘The Dogs of Fo: Gender,
Identity and Collecting,’ Collectors:
Expressions of Self and Other.
London/Coimbra: Horniman Museum/Museu
Antropologicao da Universidade de Coimbra,
2001, 55-72.
Sarah Cheang ‘Dragons in the Drawing
Room: Chinese Textiles in British Homes.’
Textiles in the Home Colloquium, V&A,
6 May 2006.
Sandy Black May 2006 ‘Asian Fusion’ Article
published in Selvedge Magazine on textile led
fashions from Asia.
Sandy Black Ceremony Exhibition catalogue,
The Pump House Gallery, Battersea, London.
Essay on ‘The Knitted Wedding’
Jo Entwistle and Agnes Rocamora ‘The
field of fashion realized: a case study of
London Fashion Week,’ Sociology 40 (4)
2006 pp 735-750
Jo Entwistle ‘The cultural economy
of fashion buying’ Special Issue, Encounters
in the Global Fashion Industry Current,
Sociology 54 (5) 2006 pp 704-724
Jo Entwistle ‘Keeping up Appearances:
aesthetic labour and identity in the fashion
modelling industries of London and New
York’ (with Elizabeth Wissinger) Sociological
Review 54 (4) 2006 pp 773-793.
Nilgin Yusuf ‘The Iconography of the
Outsider in Contemporary Fashion’,
Dialogues section, Textile, June 2006.
Pamela Church Gibson, Introduction:
Analysing Fashion – in The Fashion
Handbook ed. Tim Jackson & David Shaw,
Routledge, May 2006, Book Chapter
Conference papers
Bill Webb 11 May : ‘A Proposed Classification
of Flagship Outlets in the Fashion Sector’
Published paper at LCC Flagship Symposium,
Elephant & Castle.
Bill Webb 28 June: ‘Premium Retailing
in the UK’, published paper from ‘Premium
Laden 2006’. Conference held in Baden-
Baden, Germany.
Danka Tamburic S. Savic, G. Vuleta,
C.C. Muller-Goyman, ‘Effect of vehicle
composition on in vitro/ in vivo
hydrocortisone penetration’, European
Academy of Dermato-Venearology (EADV)
14th Congress, London, October 2005,
JEADV, Vol. 19, Supplement 2, October
2005, pages 04-36
Danka Tamburic I. Arsic, G.Vuleta, S. Savic,
‘In vivo skin performance of a cationic
emulsion base in comparison with an anionic
system’, World Congress on Emulsion, Lyon,
3-6 October 2006
Mojgan Moddaresi, Danka Tamburic
S. Jones, M. Brown, ‘Vitamin E
nanoparticles for dermal application’, British
Pharmaceutical Conference, Manchester,
4-6 September 2006
Sarah Cheang ‘Chasing the Dragon:
Researching Chinese Textiles in Early-
Twentieth Century Domestic Interiors.’
Textiles and Text: AHRC Research Centre
for Textile Conservation and Textile Studies
Third Annual Conference. University of
Southampton. 11-13 July 2006.
Sarah Cheang ‘Picturing the Pekingese Dog
in Early-Twentieth-Century Britain.’
Conception /Reception: Association of Art
Historians Annual Conference. University
of Bristol. 31 March-2 April 2005.
Becky E. Conekin Conference paper for
North American Conference in British
Studies, Boston, MA, USA, 16-19 November,
2006: ‘Vita Sackville-West, the traditional
Cottage Garden and notions of tasteful
Englishness in the 20th Century’. This for
part of a panel discussion with Professor
Michael Saler, Dept of History, University
of California, Davis and Professor Stuart
Semmel, Dept. of History, University of
Delaware, currently a Fellow at the National
Humanities Centre, N. Carolina, entitled
“Little Englands/Larger Worlds”. The panel
will be chaired by Assistant Professor
Deborah Cohen, Brown University and
commented upon by Prof Sonya Rose,
History, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Pamela Church Gibson Paper at the British
Screens conference in Manchester 12-14
September.
Pamela Church Gibson German Association
of American Studies – Annual Conference
August 2006, Göttingen, Keynote Paper.
Wessie Ling, ‘Towards a diasporic aesthetic:
Modes of style of foreign fashion ateurs in
Paris’, Paratre et Apparences en Europe
occidentale du Moyen nos jours, Universite
de Lille 3, France, September 2006 (invited
speaker)
Sandy Black April 2006, IFFTI conference,
NCSU, USA. Two papers presented: 1) ‘Digital
Knitting Design:comparison of seamless
knitwear development for weft knitting’;
2)’ Interrogating Fashion: Is the Future of
Fashion Digital?’
Sandy Black April 2006, AATCC/CITDA
conference, Philadelphia USA, presentation
‘An overview of seamless knitting
technology’
Sandy Black 11-12 October
‘Nanotechnologies and Smart Textiles for
Industry and Fashion’ Royal Society, London,
organised by the Institute of Nanotechnology
Sandy Black March 2006, ‘Interrogating
Fashion: Practice, Process and Presentation’
in Design Dialogues: Proceedings of
Designing for the 21st Century EPSRC/AHRC
symposium, London.
Sandy Black IFFTI conference Proceedings ,
NCSU, USA. ‘Digital Knitting Design:
comparison of seamless knitwear
development for weft knitting’
Reina Lewis ‘Negotiating Modernity: Spaces
of Religiosity, Fashion and Gender in Late
Ottoman Society’, Modernist Studies
Association, Tulsa, Oklahoma, October 2006
Reina Lewis ‘Opening the Closet: Lesbians,
Dress, and Identity’ York Lesbian Arts
Festival, October 2006
Reina Lewis Public talk at Tate Britain in
September as part of a panel to mark the
opening of a display called ‘ East/West:
Objects Between Cultures’
Danka Tamburic S. Savic, G. Vuleta.
‘Alkylpolyglycoside based self-tanning cream:
stability and efficacy studies’, APGI Skin and
Formulation, 2nd Symposium, Versailles,
9-10 October 2006
Danka Tamburic S. Savic, Milic, G. Vuleta,
‘Sugar surfactants-based hydrous and
anhydrous emulsion vehicles: physico-
chemical characterisation and skin
performance test’, APGI Skin and
Formulation, 2nd Symposium, Versailles,
9-10 October 2006
30
External lectures/talks Performances
Alison James ‘Is it all about me?’: The first Christopher Stevens has made the men’s
international residential seminar on costumes for the new stage production of
Researching and Evaluating PDP and e- Evita at the Adelphi Theatre which opened
portfolios, Oxford Belfry 9-11October 2006 on the 21 June 2006. Christopher worked
on the project from April to June 2006.
Alison James Keynote address on teaching
methodology and pedagogic research at LCF: Playwright Jim Grover 2006,
Swedish School of Textiles. Boras, Sweden, ww.nakedtheatre.co.uk/chandler.htm
13-14 November 2006. Chandler
Sonia Ashmore Organising/
participating in symposium on Charles
Grants Awarded
Holme, Tsuda Women’s College, Tokyo,
November 2006 Ane Lynge-Jorlén AHRC studentship
awarded for her Research Degree studies
Amy de la Haye Lecture about the Messel
in ‘Reading Fashion Magazines: Critical
exhibition at Nyman’s House, East Sussex,
research on the reading of fashion
9 November 2006.
magazines’
Sandy Black ‘Contemporary Knitting:
Geraldine Biddle-Perry UAL studentship
Intersections of Fashion, Craft, Art and
awarded for Research Degree studies in
Technology’. University of Wisconsin -
‘Productive leisure, style identity and social
Madison, USA. I was invited to give the
mobility in post-war Britain 1945-1970’.
annual lecture for the Helen Louise Allen
Madhuri Shamanna UAL studentship
Textile Collection, 6 April 2006.
awarded for Research Degree studies in
Steven Harkin ‘Where to Next’, An Essential
‘Development of natural multifunctional
Bag Masterclass Workshop, ISS Institute,
cosmetic ingredients using biotechnological
May 2006.
approach’
Steven Harkin Public Lecture at the ISS
Institute, Melbourne Australia, May 2006
Fellowships
Steven Harkin Public Lecture at the
Becky E Conekin was a fellow at the Centre
International Textiles Institute, London,
for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and
March 2006
Humanities, University of Cambridge for the
summer term 2005/06
Exhibitions and Curation
Charlotte Hodes Figures and Patterns:
Consultancy
Papercutouts and Ceramics 15 September -
Amy de la Haye is the Curatorial Consultant
30 October, Flow Gallery, 1- 5 Needham
Road, W11 on London couture for a forthcoming major
exhibition at the V&A called ‘Haute Couture:
Hodes’s work is concerned with images
Paris and London 1947-1957’ which will
constructed from collage and the motif
run at the V&A from 27 September 2007
of the female figure.
to 6 January 2008 and will then tour
Curated by Amy de la Haye, Alistair O’Neill internationally.
and Judith Clarke, Fashioning The Future
For 100 Years, A Centenary Exhibition,
Workshops
Monday 9 October - Friday 24 November
2006. Sandy Black ‘Interrogating the New Textiles’
Presentation at the ‘New Fabric of Life’
This exhibition charts the 100 years of
workshop at the Horniman Museum,
London College of Fashion through a variety
organised by anthropologists at UCL, funded
of archive material and personal accounts
by the Pasold 23 September 2006
and contributions. Venue: Fashion Space
Gallery , Rootstein Hopkins Space.
Wessie Ling ‘Game On: The fashion world
conquest’, Solo exhibition, Exhibit, London,
November-December 2006.
Wessie Ling ‘Golden Link’, Group show of
‘Golden Lane Celebration’, Exhibit at London
Design Festival, September 2006.
Designed by Crescent Lodge, London
Steven Harkin 2 Materials, Craft ACT
Accredited members exhibition, Canberra,
Australia, March 2006.
We hope that this Research Newsletter
will act as a catalyst to inform and
enhance our burgeoning research
culture and encourage colleagues and
students to tell us about their research
interests and up and coming activities
and events.

Please contact Rachel Jillions

Telephone 0207 514 2286
Email r.jillions@fashion.arts.ac.uk
London College of Fashion
20 John Princes Street
London W1G 0BJ