On the last Friday of the year, I am looking back on some of my favourite 2023 Style File Friday posts! Fashion history is only becoming more and more accessible, and I hope that I am doing my part to help. Over the past year I’ve covered a wide variety of topics for Style File Friday, and I love that they have all challenged me in different ways. Onto the fashion history!
My Favourite 2023 Style File Friday Posts
Visiting the Costume Museum of Canada
In May of 2023, I was lucky enough to visit the Costume Museum of Canada’s exhibition for Doors Open Winnipeg. You may not think that a city on the Canadian prairies would be a hotbed of fashion history, but the Costume Museum has an incredible collection of historic garments. (And impressively it is run entirely by volunteers.) I have shared some of my favourite garments that were on display, including a gown that is older than the French Revolution.
If you are interested in fashion history, I would recommend taking a few minutes to do some Googling and find out if there are any museums or exhibitions while you are travelling- you never know what you will find!
Barbie’s Relationship with Fashion
Barbie dominated 2023 in nearly every area of life. Yes, every company under the sun had a Barbie-themed collection, but I think that more importantly, the movie made many of us stop and ask ourselves many questions.
Given that Margot Robbie’s red carpet and press tour outfits were a topic of conversation for much of the summer, I immediately started digging into Barbie’s relationship with fashion. It has grown and evolved throughout the years, but she has been surprisingly dialled into designers for much of her lifetime.
5 Easy-to-Read Fashion History Books
While I am an academically trained historian who enjoys reading academic monographs, I completely understand that those are for a niche audience, and often do little to make a topic accessible to the wider public. I greatly appreciate any fashion historian who writes and publishes books that make this fascinating field available to anyone. These 5 books are very easy to read, do not require any prior knowledge to dive in and enjoy, and are fairly easy to get a hold of. (My library holds copies of several, so I would recommend checking yours!)
Royal Jewellers series: Fabergé, Cartier, Garrard, Boucheron, Chaumet, Bolin
I will admit, this series is quite possibly one of my favourites in the near-decade that I’ve had An Historian About Town. While we never actually got tiaras at the coronation, I loved researching the history of several different royal jewellers behind some of our favourite royal pieces today. Sure, we’ve all heard of Fabergé and Cartier, but there are some lesser known royal jewellers that have fascinating stories of their own. (And gorgeous tiaras, necklaces, and more that we can still enjoy today.) I feel that the British Royal jewellery collection steals a lot of attention, but there are some stunning pieces in other royal collections that deserve to have their history told. (In particular, I found researching both Bolin and Boucheron’s histories to be a lot of fun!)
The Future of Style File Friday
I truly love researching and writing Style File Friday posts. I believe that fashion history deserves more attention and more respect- it is so often mocked and ignored for being a “female” history. (While the “male” political, military, and sports histories are all “acceptable”…) However, they are trickier posts for me for a few reasons
Firstly, it often involves purchasing rather expensive books for research (most are not available through the library), and I do not earn anything from the blog to cover these costs. Secondly, there are oftentimes very few photos available (even using Getty Images), and I know that everyone (myself included) gets frustrated when there are no images.
So, I am still mulling over what Style File Friday will look like going forward. It may be a post every second Friday instead of every Friday, or a hiatus for a month or two at a time. I will keep my schedule up-to-date, though, so that you can know what to expect on Fridays.
And as always, if there is a topic you would like to see on Style File Friday, please let me know! I am always happy to add new topics to my research list.
Of these 2023 Style File Friday posts, which was your favourite?
Cheers,
The Historian
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