Browsing by Author "Dyer, Serena"
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Item Embargo Barbara Johnson's Album: Material Literacy and Consumer Practice, 1746‐1823(Wiley, 2019-03-20) Dyer, SerenaThis article examines Barbara Johnson's Album, a prolific record of the dress consumption of a vicar's daughter. The album contains over a hundred samples of dress fabrics acquired by Johnson between the ages of eight and eighty‐five. Interrogated alongside the Johnson family correspondence and didactic tools produced by Johnson's mother, this article argues that the album acted as a material form of account book, conceived as a moral, financial and material regulator. Considered within the emerging framework of material knowledge and consumer skill, the album provides important evidence of how consumers maintained and developed their material literacy.Item Metadata only Disseminating Dress: Britain’s Fashion Networks 1500-1960(Bloomsbury, 2022-06-16) Dyer, Serena; Halbert, Jade; Littlewood, SophieFashion travels. Every new shape of sleeve, each novel method of cutting and any innovation in fabric has spread through complex networks of makers, retailers and consumers. Disseminating Dress represents the first historical study of how these networks of fashion communication functioned and evolved in an increasingly global material world. Focussing on Britain – separated from mainland Europe, yet increasingly globally-linked – this volume will trace how dress was disseminated in and out of one island nation. The paths made by print, image and commodities around the globe have enabled historians to reimagine a connected material world. The influence of innovations in dissemination shape this volume, which asks urgent questions about the extent of global influence on fashion, and the intertwining nature of written, printed, visual and material fashion news. This collection brings together innovative scholarship from an interdisciplinary group of historians, art historians and fashion scholars to consider how global and local networks of dress dissemination converged to shape fashionable dress in Britain, and how British methods and aesthetics spread outwards across the world. From the drawing rooms of 19th-century London, to the verandas of 19th-century Australia, contributors to Disseminating Dress develop narratives of commodity and knowledge exchange to consider how fashion circulated.Item Embargo Fashioning Consumers: Ackermann’s Repository of Arts and the Cultivation of the Female Consumer(Edinburgh University Press, 2018-01-31) Dyer, SerenaSerena Dyer argues that the Anglo-German Rudolph Ackermann’s Repository of Arts, Literature, Commerce, Manufactures, Fashions, and Politics (1809–29) provides evidence of a decisive and conscious acknowledgement of the power of print to promote commerce and to establish the figure of the female consumer. In part through the fashion plate, periodicals were an indispensable tool for female readers looking to hone their economic skills and make spending decisions as responsible British subjects. Although it had wide interests, the Repository stands out for its patriotic promotion of British manufacture, prominently promoted through a series of woodcuts celebrating British manufacture and industry that framed actual fabric samples. Instead of simply encouraging a blind, novelty-based desire for the latest items, women’s periodicals such as the Repository acted to provide women with market knowledge, and to keep them commercially active. The women’s periodical aimed to mould women into urbane, economically dynamic, market-aware, discerning, and knowledgeable consumers.Item Open Access ‘I Have Been a Collector of Costumes’: Women, Dress Histories and the Temporalities of Eighteenth-Century Fashion(Wiley, 2021-10-04) Dyer, SerenaBy the early nineteenth century, the ‘costume book’ genre was well established as a catalogue of national habits. These chronologically, socially and geographically devised sartorial indexes to the world strove to use dress as a means of categorising and delineating humankind. Such publications espouse a sense of neat chronological evolution, situated within a framework of masculine progress. While the majority of published costume books from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were authored by men, this article explores the myriad ways in which women too constructed, subverted and engaged in sartorial histories. Published dress histories attempted to use dress as a means of constructing a coherent chronological narrative of a national heritage. Yet amateur women, such as Catherine Hutton, Mary White and Laetitia Powell, used pens, scissors, paste and needles to reach back through that time-tunnel, borrowing from and taking possession of the sartorial past.Item Embargo ‘Magnificent as Well as Singular’: Hester Thrale’s Polynesian Court Dress of 1781(Palgrave, 2020-02-13) Dyer, SerenaIn January 1781, Hester Thrale appeared at the court of George III wearing a court mantua which was at once described by the newspapers as elegant and vulgar. This remarkable gown materialized and anticipated the authorial identity which Thrale would later embody as an author, diarist, and literary hostess. The gown was of Thrale’s own invention, inspired by the Polynesian goods which brought back by Captain James Cook in 1780. This chapter argues that an interrogation of Thrale’s sartorial self-authorship can shed light on the literary authorial identity she would later construct. It focuses on the materiality and reception of Thrale’s 1781 court gown and considers the parallels between Thrale’s gown and her writing.Item Embargo Making the Material Home: Consumption, Craft, and Gender in Domestic Spaces(Bloomsbury, 2020-12-30) Dyer, SerenaThe material culture of domestic life has habitually been gendered as feminine. The traditional narrative has painted women as home-makers and consumers, creating a comfortable domestic space, and conceiving of their work as that of a household manager, wife, and mother. However, this gendered binary has overshadowed the domestic craft skill displayed by men, and male contributions to the material life of the home. This chapter explores how both men and women made and crafted items for use in domestic space, and how these items were integrated into a wider culture of collaborative domestic consumption. Building on the work of Vickery, Sarti, and de Vries, this chapter will engage with the corpus of material goods purchased for and produced in eighteenth-century English households. From embroideries and furniture, to wooden figures and shell crafts, both men and women actively engaged in the production of the material goods which filled the home, and in overseeing and managing the bespoke production of items they consumed. This chapter will begin with an examination of the domestic consumption of Sir Rowland and Lady Sabine Winn of Nostell Priory in Yorkshire, as they renovated the interior of their house in the 1760s. From Chippendale furniture to Lady Winn’s handcrafted adorned prints, the interiors of Nostell contained a full range of consumed and crafted goods. The dynamics of the material culture of this grand domestic space existed between fashionable finery and creative craft, as both husband and wife engaged in a collaborative process of domestic design. Captured in correspondence between the couple, and from tradespeople, as well as the preserved interiors, Nostell demonstrates the collaborative creation of a joint domestic material culture. The chapter will then expand to consider a broader array of collaborative partnerships during the creation of domestic spaces. The letters and accounts of couples setting up and maintaining home in eighteenth-century England will be examined, painting a picture of the socio-economic spread of couples’ collaborative homemaking. Both genders will be shown to have actively participated in the production of domestic material culture, countering the consumer (female) and producer (male) binary, prevalent in scholarship. It was together that these couples consumed and crafted domestic items, making the material home together.Item Embargo Masculinities, Wallpaper, and Crafting Domestic Space within the University, 1795-1914(2019-01-13) Dyer, SerenaDuring routine renovations, a ‘wallpaper sandwich’ - made up of twelve preserved layers of wallpaper - was removed from the wall of a student dorm room at Peterhouse College, Cambridge. Carefully separated and conserved, these wallpapers provide a glimpse into the decorative domestic surroundings inhabited by students over 180 years, from the late eighteenth century onwards. Able to mimic or defy the aesthetic conventions of their parents’ homes, students were given relative freedom to decorate their college rooms as they wished. As such, these rooms represent a domestic haven within the institutional confines of the Cambridge college. This was a space in which students could explore and express their own ideas of domestic comfort and, for many students, create their first home. Using a selection of the wallpaper fragments as a framework, this article explores the decorative choices made by the young men who were students at Peterhouse in the nineteenth century, and contextualises them within a broader narrative of masculine material culture and domestic consumption. This article draws from the ‘wallpaper sandwich’, college photographic archives, and records of student experience. It argues that the domestic autonomy granted to the students who inhabited these rooms allowed them to craft a domestic interior within the college on their own terms.Item Embargo Material Literacy in Eighteenth-Century Britain: A Nation of Makers(Bloomsbury, 2020-10-01) Dyer, SerenaThe eighteenth century has been hailed for its revolution in consumer culture, but Material Literacy in Eighteenth-Century Britain repositions Britain as a nation of makers. It brings new attention to eighteenth-century craftswomen and men with its focus on the material knowledge possessed not only by professional artisans and amateur makers, but also by skilled consumers. This edited collection gathers together a group of interdisciplinary scholars working in the fields of art history, history, literature, and museum studies to unearth the tactile and tacit knowledge that underpinned fashion, tailoring, and textile production. It invites us into the workshops, drawing rooms, and backrooms of a broad range of creators, and uncovers how production and tacit knowledge extended beyond the factories and machines which dominate industrial histories. This book illuminates, for the first time, the material literacies learnt, enacted, and understood by British producers and consumers. The skills required for sewing, embroidering, and the textile arts were possessed by a large proportion of the British population: men, women and children, professional and amateur alike. Building on previous studies of shoppers and consumption in the period, as well as narratives of manufacture, these essays document the multiplicity of small producers behind Britain's consumer revolution, reshaping our understanding of the dynamics between making and objects, consumption and production. It demonstrates how material knowledge formed an essential part of daily life for eighteenth-century Britons. Craft technique, practice, and production, the contributors show, constituted forms of tactile languages that joined makers together, whether they produced objects for profit or pleasure.Item Open Access Material Lives: Women Makers and Consumer Culture in the 18th Century(Bloomsbury, 2021-02-25) Dyer, SerenaEighteenth-century women told their life stories through making. With its compelling stories of women's material experiences and practices, Material Lives offers a new perspective on eighteenth-century production and consumption. Genteel women's making has traditionally been seen as decorative, trivial and superficial. Yet their material archives, forged through fabric samples, watercolours, dressed prints and dolls' garments, reveal how women used the material culture of making to record and navigate their lives. Material Lives positions women as 'makers' in a consumer society. Through fragments of fabric and paper, Dyer explores an innovative way of accessing the lives of otherwise obscured women. For researchers and students of material culture, dress history, consumption, gender and women's history, it offers a rich resource to illuminate the power of needles, paintbrushes and scissors.Item Embargo Object in Focus. A Wallpaper Sandwich: Comfort in the Student Room in 19th-Century Cambridge(Bloomsbury, 2020-02-20) Dyer, SerenaDuring renovations in the late 1990s, a ‘wallpaper sandwich’, made up of twelve preserved layers of wallpaper, was removed from the wall of a student room at Peterhouse College at the University of Cambridge. This sandwich, now in the collection of the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture at Middlesex University, provides a tangible connection to the temporary domestic spaces created by the students at the college. Unique within the museum’s collections, these wallpapers were chosen, hung and lived with by generation after generation of students. The wallpapers salvaged from this discovery had been hung between 1795 and the twentieth century, and their designs are diverse. Together, these papers provide a microcosmic view of the tastes and domestic priorities of Cambridge students over two hundred years.Item Embargo Portable Patriotism: Britannia and Material Nationhood in Miniature(Cambridge University Press, 2022-09) Dyer, SerenaThis chapter tackles how the concept of British nationhood was mediated by small, portable material goods in the century that followed the 1707 Acts of Union. While existing narratives of nation-making have focused on the political, religious, and military forging of Britishness, this chapter instead considers how Britain’s intersecting industrial and commercial transformations offered opportunities for manufacturers and retailers to commoditize nationhood through material culture. This chapter restores the materiality of nationhood to historical narratives of patriotism to show that the commercialization of Britishness, through small things, provided a means of manufacturing and molding an affective form of British identity. This chapter focuses specifically on how the figurehead of Britannia signalled a material patriotism that could be worn, carried, and displayed at moments of national importance. Her image, as warrior queen, mother of the nation, and colonial pioneer, was replicated on fans, jewelry, and other decorative objects to formulate miniature material articulations of a national rhetoric. These small items held chronometric and affective significance for their owners and were complex signals of both transient and more enduring feelings of patriotism.Item Metadata only Shopping and the Senses: A Sensory History of Retailing and Consumption(Palgrave, 2022-03-13) Dyer, SerenaThis book demonstrates the primacy of touch, smell, taste, sight and sound within the retail landscape. It shows that histories of the senses, body, and emotions were inextricably intertwined with processes and practices of retail and consumption. Shops are sensory feasts. From the rustle of silk to the tempting aroma of coffee, the multi-sensory appeal of goods has long been at the heart of how we shop. This book delves into and beyond this seductive idyl of consumer sensuality. Shopping was a sensory activity for consumers and retailers alike, but this experience was not always positive. This book is inhabited by tired feet and weary workers, as well as eager shoppers. It considers embodied sensory experiences and practices, and it represents both a celebration and interrogation of the integration of sensory histories into the study of retail and consumption. Crucially, this book places breathing, feeling human bodies back into the retail space.Item Embargo Shopping and the Senses: Retail, Browsing and Consumption in Eighteenth-Century England(2014-09-15) Dyer, SerenaInterest in the senses has blossomed over the last decade, leading to numerous explorations of touch, smell, sound, taste and sight throughout history. Increasingly, historians are considering how this sensory methodology can enrich other fields of historical study. This article explores the potential for sensory history to open new avenues of thought in the field of urban consumption history. Focusing on the period of the so called ‘consumer revolution’, this article promotes a reassessment of shopping in 18th‐century English towns. This intersection of consumption history and sensory history encourages us to rethink numerous aspects of the process of shopping in the 18th century, including browsing, gender, urban space and agency. This article begins by assessing the current state of scholarship in these two branches of historical enquiry, before considering how their juncture impacts research moving forward.Item Open Access State of the Field: Material Culture(Wiley, 2021-01-26) Dyer, SerenaThis article surveys the state of the field of material culture within the discipline of history. The study of material culture – the myriad layers of cultural meaning embedded within objects – has been adopted by historians from colleagues in anthropology, archaeology and museum studies, and continues to thrive as an interdisciplinary field in tandem with art history and literary studies. As inventive digital and embodied methodologies within material culture begin to shape the future of the field, this article takes the opportunity to reflect upon the opportunities and impediments presented to scholars of material culture. It elucidates the diverse and often unfamiliar vernaculars of material objects, and reflects upon future directions in the study of material culture.Item Embargo Training the Child Consumer: Play, Toys, and Learning to Shop in Eighteenth-Century Britain(Bloomsbury Academic, 2018-04-19) Dyer, SerenaAs consumers-in-training, active engagement with financial and material tasks were key didactic tools for eighteenth-century children. The expanding and tempting world of goods, which rose to ever-increasing prominence in the eighteenth century, brought with it a threat of moral decay, material decadence, and financial ruin. The importance of arming children in order to resist the allure of the commercial world was an issue of great importance to pedagogical writers such as Locke and Edgeworth, and was recognised as an appealing selling point by publishers such as Newbery and the Fullers. The didactic materials produced to promote the training of children to be economically literate, rational consumers were utilised with varying degrees of success. However, the material training of children to understand where things came from and how they were made was prevalent both in pedagogical literature, and in the practice of children making clothing for their dolls. This self-conscious development of children’s knowledge of the material world and consumer goods through unmaking and making aimed to promote restraint, and an understanding of the value of things.