Fashion history is a fascinating topic that captivates many of us, but it can be overwhelming. If it is on the academic side, it can often draw on art history theory and material culture theory (among others), and not all of us have backgrounds in them. However, there are a few dress historians who make their work entirely accessible no matter what they are writing about. And Kate Strasdin is one of those historians. After Inside the Royal Wardrobe immediately became one of my favourite books, I knew that The Dress Diary would also fascinate me. For Style File Friday, let’s chat about The Dress Diary by Kate Strasdin.
I have to give a massive thank you to Pegasus Books for sending me a copy of The Dress Diary!
The Dress Diary: Secrets from a Victorian Woman’s Wardrobe, Kate Strasdin
A revealing and unique portrait of Victorian life as told through the discovery of one woman’s textile scrapbook.
In 1838, a young woman was given a diary on her wedding day. Collecting snippets of fabric from a range of garments – some her own, others donated by family and friends – she carefully annotated each one, creating a unique record of their lives. Her name was Mrs Anne Sykes.
Nearly two hundred years later, the diary fell into the hands of Kate Strasdin, a fashion historian and museum curator. Using her expertise, Strasdin spent the next six years unravelling the secrets contained within the album’s pages, and the lives of the people within. Her findings are remarkable. Piece by piece, she charts Anne’s journey from the mills of Lancashire to the port of Singapore before tracing her return to England in later years.
Fragments of cloth become windows into Victorian pirates in Borneo, the complicated etiquette of mourning, poisonous dyes, the British Empire in full swing, rioting over working conditions and the terrible human cost of Britain’s cotton industry. This is life writing that celebrates ordinary not the grandees of traditional written histories, but the hidden figures, the participants in everyday life. Through the evidence of waistcoats, ball gowns and mourning outfits, Strasdin lays bare the whole of human experience in the most intimate of the clothes we choose to wear.
Why You Should Read This…
If you are newer to An Historian About Town, you may not know that Inside the Royal Wardrobe: A Dress History of Queen Alexandra is one of my favourite books. Although it was written based on her academic work, Strasdin makes her subject incredibly readable. She takes us on a tour of Queen Alexandra’s surviving and recorded wardrobe and breaks down what that can tell us about her clothing, her life, and her legacy. And it truly emphasises exactly why fashion history is an important field of study. Whether we realise it or not, our wardrobes can say a lot about us.
The Dress Diary is another exploration of fashion, textiles, and the immense amount of information that they can tell you about a person. And it is ever the more poignant as this is not a member of the royal family or aristocracy whose clothing would be saved for the records but rather a commoner, a young woman who simply happened to keep a record of many of the textiles that she used and came in contact with. Theoretically, this could be you or me.
Strasdin has chosen to structure this book around themes: Family, Abroad, Letters From Home, and Return. I thought that this worked well and made for a very compelling read. (While we tend to think of lives as chronological at all times, there is no requirement that we look back on them in that way!) It also allows the author to delve more into the history of some of these fabrics, very helpful to most readers (aside from those incredibly well-versed in textile history). I think that these inclusions help make the book that much more accessible to the general reader- you do not need to come to The Dress Diary with any previous knowledge.
In terms of the book itself, there are colour photographs of many of the sample fabrics from the album. Given that Sykes’ album contains over 2,000 pieces of fabric, it is obvious while all could not be included but there is a wide a range and it really gives you an idea of the scope of this collection. And the notes that accompanied each sample in the album itself are included here, a little clue for us to work through ourselves.
All in all, I think that this is an incredible book, and it is a must-read for anyone interested in fashion and textile history, or in family history. This is the story of many interconnected lives through a common element that we all share today- clothing and textiles- and is one of the stand-out books of 2023.
Is The Dress Diary by Kate Strasdin on your to-read list?
Cheers,
The Historian
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