Getting close to clothes: Using material objects to rethink the creative geographies of post‐war London fashion

Abstract

Getting close to clothes provides new perspectives on the geographies of fashion cities and the processes and collaborations by which they function. Taking the history of London's garment industry in the post-war 1940s as a case study, this paper traces the major stages of the making process of clothespattern making, cutting, machining and finishingthrough four garments from the Museum of London's fashion collection. By understanding these material fashion objects as processes, it uncovers the hidden stories of historic garment workers through the tiny clues left in old stitching, revealing the creativity of the individuals who made them and how they contributed to the creative cultures of the historic fashion city. This study of material processes shows how individual makers shaped garments and contributed to a creative culture that played a vital role in London's growing post-war reputation as a fashion city. It also broadens the boundaries of London as a fashion city beyond the confines of the West End by revealing that a network of workrooms and factories across the city supported this centrally located cluster of fashion businesses. Having established the historical role of making in the creative cultures of London fashion, this paper concludes by questioning how future studies of contemporary fashion cities might look to material objects in order to reconsider the creative agency of subcontracted garment workers in the new international division of labour and the contributions they make towards the symbolic reputations of major fashion cities, in spite of geographical distances.

Geographies of Fashion and Style: Setting the Scene

“…Meanwhile Crang et al (2020, 2) highlight the violent relations that exist between the bio and the geo in the ever accumulating "Discardscapes" of the contemporary fashion industry, specifically the forms of "living, labor and harm" that take place on pre-consumer waste sites in Cambodia. Geographers are increasingly applying creative methodologies to apprehend the intersecting scales of fashion, from "getting close to clothes" (Bide 2019) to using Lego to restage and think through difficult conversations and exchanges associated with the catastrophic Rana Plaza garment complex collapse in April 2013 (Cook et al 2018). Most recently geographers have been at the forefront of rethinking the fashion city and fashion's connection to the urban (Bide 2020;Gilbert and Casadei 2020) and are also beginning to think through the ways austerity (Gilbert 2017;Hall and Jayne 2016), the internet (Brydges and Hracs 2018;Luvaas 2018) and Covid-19 (Brydges and Hanlon 2020;Lawreniuk 2020) are transforming the fashion industry and consumers.…”

Feather-Work: A Fashioned Ostrich Plume Embodies Hybrid and Violent Labors of Growing and Making

“…A recent vein of creative historical research has highlighted that material encounters and material sources can be rich resources for historical geographers (Bide 2017(Bide , 2019Haines 2019;Slatter 2019a/b;Stockton 2019). For my own part, I have developed methodological and curatorial strategies that have used taxidermy specimens as the starting point for historical recovery.…”

London Leads the World: The Reinvention of London Fashion in the Aftermath of the Second World War

“…This tendency had real consequences for these workers in terms of their pay and conditions: in a talk on "the case for equal pay" held at Toynbee Hall in East London on 25 October 1947, Chancellor Hugh Dalton dismissed the case for equal pay for women garment workers as unnecessary, imagining them to be entirely replicable should they choose to pursue other, better paid work (Hackney Archives, D/S/24/3/7). Subsequently, it has also caused fashion historians to overlook the importance of the creative role played by cutters and machinists in innovating fashion production during this period (Bide 2019).…”