Little White Dress, New York City

Creative Process Journal: Exhibiting Absence in the Museum

Mona Lisa by Leonardo Da Vinci

When you visit a museum exhibition, do you ever think about what is not there? Do you notice when your favourite artwork or costume piece has been removed from display? After the Louvre reopened after the theft of the Mona Lisa, thousands of visitors came to gaze at the "blank space and the three nails from which the picture had formally hung" (Belting qtd. in Leahy 256).

Helen Rees Leahy wrote an article called "Exhibiting Absence in the Museum" which expores the idea of absence in a museum and the "fantasy of completion" that exists within the walls of a museum. She suggests that "absence in the museum hovers between memory (of objects lost, forgotten or beyond reach) and anticipation (of objects that will be found, returned or acquired)".  Visitors to a museum are typically presented with the illusion that a collection is complete, since most art museums create narratives around the objects that they have on hand, glossing over the gaps. The curator's knowledge of the "ones that got away" and the "reservoir of possibiities" is the fuel for future acquisitions (251-253).

While this article makes no reference to fashion, the idea of absence in a collection is something I am aware of as I continue my work on editing the Ryerson Fashion Research Collection. I see gaps - Canadian designers like Claire Haddad and Marilyn Brooks whose work is underrepresented in the collection. I know that it will not be easy to correct that gap and that absence haunts me. In another sense, I am also haunted by the spectres of the women who wore the rare and fragile historic pieces in the collection. Some of these items are at this point no more than wisps of silk. I cannot replace them and yet feel so protective of them. I am obsessed with these threads of memory and the absence of the vital bodies that once wore them.

In her article Rees Leahy references Brunos Latour's work on the relationship between the original and the reproduction, and cites the "dialectics of presence/absence, visiblity/invisibility, and reproduction/originality". Although her analysis is in reference to artwork, these concepts resonate with me and seem pivotal to what I am trying to accomplish with this project. The question is now how to convey the concepts of "presence/absence" and "visiblity/invisiblity" within my photographs of selected fragile historic garments and fragments of the Ryerson Fashion Research Collection.

References:

Rees Leahy, Helen. "Exhibiting Absence in the Museum". The Thing About Museums: Objects and Experiences, Representation and Contestation. Ed. Sandra Dudley. Routledge, New York. 2012. Print.

Reading Between the Lines at Ivy Style

Ivy Style, an exhibition that considers the origins of the "Ivy League Look"in menswear, opened on September 14, 2012 at The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in New York. Presented thematically in vignettes that evoke an Ivy League university campus, including a quad, a dorm room, an athletic club, a chemistry lab and a university shop, the exhibition features around 60 ensembles of menswear that show the evolution of the style from the late 1910s to present day reinterpretations.

Although this classic or preppy style of dressing might seem staid, the "Ivy League Look" was once considered "cutting-edge" and was originally worn by upper class young men from the Ivy League -- Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Columbia. According to legend, representatives from these four universities convened in 1876 to discuss athletic rules and created "a moniker using the Roman numbers for four - IV - and the phonetic pronunciation of the letters "I" and "V".

Ivy Style is a thematic exhibition with focussed on menswear from the Ivy League and its contemporary reinterpretation by such designers as Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, Brooks Brothers, Gant, and Thom Browne. This narrow lens gives the exhibition a coherence and focus that belies the considerable research that must have taken place. Menswear is rarely the subject of fashion exhibitions and is often under-represented in museum collections. A close read of the labels in Ivy Style shows that a very significant proportion of garments on display are on loan from designers or individuals, and most of the accompanying period photographs and sports ephemera come from the Carey Collection. Structuring an exhibition around loans suggests a significant investment in both research and time for curator Patricia Mears. Reading between the lines, it would also mean that the research was likely not object based (as would happen within an archive), but instead the desired object was identified from print sources and sought out for loan.

The theme of the show was brought to life in the exhibition gallery space with the focal point being the  grass-covered quadrangle, positioned in front of a Gothic-style building façade covered with ivy vines. Along the sides of the room, vignettes of a classroom, a library, a dorm room, an athletic club, and the campus store reinforce the setting and a sound track of A cappella groups, school bands and other music completes the illusion.

The exhibition is both charming and entertaining, but by nature implicitly conservative. A few cutting edge contemporary interpretations of the look are offered up, but are easily overlooked in the montage of looks. And although it might have been true that "Ivy style was once a cutting-edge look worn by young men of means"(as referenced in the press release), I cannot recall how that was conveyed within the exhibition - which means that I either missed that in the exhibition or it was not there.

Included amongst the 60+ ensembles are two women's wear ensembles: a Perry Ellis women's pantsuit and sweater (1981) and a Thom Browne for Brooks Brother's ensemble (Fall 2012). Because there were only two women's ensembles, I was a little confused why they were there. It offered the promise of something exciting, but left me hanging.

In the end, I left the show charmed. Exhibitions of men's wear are few and far between, and I now have a deeper appreciation for the origins of this look.

The Ivy Style exhibition runs until January 5, 2013. For more information, visit www.fitnyc.edu/museum.

References:

Exhibition Phamplet:  Ivy Style: The Museum at FIT

Exhibition Press Release: Ivy Style

Bill Cunningham on 5th Avenue, New York City

True Love, Amsterdam

Memories of a Dress: Weekly Reflective Journal

In practice-led research, self-reflection is an integral part of the research process. The act of stepping back from creative practice to document and self-critique the development of the work is an essential part of the protocol.

"The creative individual must reject the wisdom of the field, yet she must also incorporate its standards into a self-criticism. And for this one must learn to achieve the dialectical tension between involvement and detachment that is so characteristic of every creative process" (Csikszentmihaly qtd. in Aziz 70).

Separating one's self from one's work is never easy, especially when the act of documentation takes place in the public sphere such as I am doing on this blog. To be self-critical in a public forum makes the degree of risk seem exponential. It is in this place that my identities as blogger, researcher and curator merge. Even though Maria Luisa Frisa said "the notion of risk as implicit to the working method of the curator (171)", most academics seem to see risk as abhorrent. Risk scares me but it also excites me, because it offers up a chance to explore and grow.

In undertaking this creative project which crosses interdisciplinary boundaries, I have assumed enormous risk.  Examining the intersection of fashion curation, photography, collecting practices, and the embodiment of history and memory in clothing is a challenge. It is a messy process and not always linear. It may appear to be linear on this blog, but there is so much that happens outside of this forum. I discover something new in the Ryerson archive, see a photo of a disembodied McQueen dress by Anne Deniau, ask Andrew Bolton some questions about his curatorial process, attend the Ivy Style exhibition at FIT, and marvel at Andy Warhol's influence on contemporary art at the Met. Even at an event that I thought had nothing to do with this project (the Design Intelligence event at Parsons), I learned that emotional attachment to clothing is an implicit assumption across disciplines and considered a possible solution to reducing post-consumer waste. To make sense of all this, I make notes, create lists, draw diagrams, and clip images, which I then organize in a project binder.

I am at that place in the process where things seem chaotic. It is unsettling and uncomfortable, but I know from past experience that this is where ideas are born. Because I think by writing, much of my process work is thus in written form. Even though I can sketch, I don't often do so for this purpose - although I seem to constantly be making pictures and photographs in my head. I've also started taking test photos of the items from the Ryerson archive that fascinate me - the wisps of silk, lace and beading that are so very fragile that they require special handling with gloves. These rare and beautiful treasures are so delicate that I should define and articulate exactly what I plan to do with them before I move forward. They should only be handled once, as many of them are literally shreds of silk just waiting to disintegrate into dust.

There is much yet to do. Research is an essential part of the curatorial process if the exhibition is to be anything more than a historical display of costume. Although I could easily produce that, it is not exciting to me as it lacks the element of emotional connection. In my future research, I want to readdress curatorial perspectives in fashion as delineated by such writers as Valerie Steele, and to consider the nature of curatorial practice as seen in recent exhibitions such as the presentation of the Balenciaga archive in Paris. I want to explore the nature of fashion and death through the writings of Caroline Evans in "fashion at the edge" and its interpretation as an exhibition by Judith Clarke called "Spectres: When Fashion Turns Back".  At the same time, I will keep my eyes open and camera at the ready to capture the fragments in the collection that offer up glimpses of the spectres that wore them.

References:

Azia, Tahera. "Shifting the frame: from critical reflective arts practice to practice-based research". Journal of Media Practice 10(1), 2009: 69-80. Print.


Frisa, Maria Luisa. "The Curator's Risk". Fashion Theory, Volume 12, Issue 2, (2008): 171-180. Print.

Bleecker Street, New York City

Sustainability is Sexy: Design Intelligence;Fashion

Design Intelligence; Fashion New York City, September 18-19, 2012

Fashion acts as a mirror of society, which is what art used to be.  It seems that fashion has supplanted art in reflecting cultural values, but has largely lacked critical reflection on its practices.  At the Design Intelligence; Fashion event which took place this week in New York, questions of how intelligent design could impact the issue of sustainability were considered. In the first day of the two-day event, the 100 “influential players” in fashion were divided into small groups of five to six people to talk through some of the issues.   The second day featured a range of speakers including Joel Towers, Hazel Clark, Gundrun Sjoden, Otto von Busch, Sarah Scaturro, and Rebecca Earley. This post summarizes my thoughts after the event.

At my table, the question posed to the group was: Emotions make us buy, whilst feelings make us keep. How do we create fashion that has a chance not only to connect emotionally, and create attachment, but also to retain it?

This question made me think of my work with the Ryerson Fashion Research Collection. Each garment is imbued with the memory of its wearer, in the imprints of their body, in the stains and signs of wear in the textile and in the stories sometimes noted in the records and more often untold but embedded in the folds. Garments offered for donation to a collection typically are ones that hold a special memory to the owner. They might have hung at the back of a closet for years before they are offered for donation.

You only need to ever handle an item of couture once to know that such items demonstrate enduring quality. Think of the Hermes Kelly bag or a Chanel jacket. These are not items that get tossed in the bin after a season, because they are classics, and made to endure. Buying such a thing represents an investment and involves a ceremony of purchase. In the past, there was also a deeper level of involvement in the making of a garment. Whether it was a visit to a couture house or a local tailor, acquiring a garment was a thoughtful process that had an element of ceremony, imbuing the piece with emotion and memory.

In contemporary society, consumers are divorced from the production process. Clothes have become commodities and the purchase of a garment can be an impulsive act.  Getting something new for a single event is not uncommon, and that piece might only be worn once, after which it might be discarded and end up in a landfill. Fast fashion and the media fuel desire for the latest item and the result is long-term environmental damage from toxic production processes and post-consumer textile waste. It is estimated that over 21 billion pounds of post-consumer textile waste gets dumped into US landfills each year. If some of that could be diverted for reuse and up-cycling, this could have an enormous impact.

The idea of attachment and emotional connection to a garment encourages the wearer to retain that garment and to wear it beyond a fashion cycle. Engaging in thoughtful design is part of the solution, but is only part of the story. People need to make more thoughtful purchases and consider such options such as resale or swaps and the remaking or recycling of the garment. Some companies have already implemented such practices, with labels offering recycling information and facilitating sharing among communities of wearers.

But, there is no single prescription to the problem, because our economic model is driven by consumption. Fashion has become linked to entertainment, and people want to buy more than they need in order to fit in, to create an emotional lift, and/or to satisfy aspirational motives. The fashionable image, hyped by the media, has created an insatiable cycle of desire for change.

To date, sustainability has largely been presented in the media as a fringe issue when it actually is an issue that affects us all. The question is: can we really afford cheap things? The cost of an item at the register actually represents a very small piece of the “real” cost if the costs of disposal as well as the costs of human rights violations and environmental damage were factored into the price tag.

What is needed is a fundamental shift of values so that sustainability becomes a shared paradigm. This might seem like an unattainable goal, but there is a precedent. Smoking used to be cool, but over time, government policy, education and social censure have redefined smoking behavior. For a similar thing to happen with sustainability, there must be a fundamental shift in values. Our purchases must be considered in terms of their true costs to the community and to society as a whole. Such a paradigm shift requires collaboration between designers, producers, consumers, media, educators, and government. In a visual map, this would take the form of a spider web with the values of sustainability at the core, and webs linking all the players in a shared goal to encourage thoughtful participation in the acts of producing and consuming fashion.

Sustainable fashion can embrace a cool and sexy vibe, but requires thoughtful and intelligent choices on the part of both the designer and the consumer.  Sweden seems to be on the forefront of this issue by sponsoring this Design Boost event and the rest of the world should take note. Government policy can encourage and support our actions and education can help change value systems, but in the end, we each make choices and by making small steps towards better choices, we are all better off. Some of the choices we can all make include:

1. Making more thoughtful purchases, looking for lasting quality and when possible, embracing designers who use sustainable practices. Some designers to consider include: Gudrun Sjoden www.gudrunsjoden.com, Preloved www.preloved.ca, and bodkinbrooklyn www.bodkinbrooklyn.com.

2. Washing clothes less often, using less detergent and hanging to dry when possible.

3. Repairing and remaking clothes. Try fashion hacking as a way to "recreate" a designer piece.

4. Recycling all clothing, footwear and textiles, either through resale or donation to charities that support recycling initiatives (such as Goodwill). Do not throw clothing items into the garbage, even if they are torn or stained. Visit www.weardonaterecycle.org for more information on recycling your clothing.

Over the course of the event,  it was clear that embracing sustainability as a cause does not equate to frumpy and unfashionable. One look around the room told me that. I think it is time to say sustainability is sexy.

Red Dress, New York City

After The Victoria Beckham Show, New York City

Creative Process Journal: Fashion Images and McQueen Backstage by Anne Deniau

New York Times Style Section Page 8, Sunday, September 9, 2012
Photo by Anne Deniau

A red and white strapless evening gown by Alexander McQueen hangs on a clothes rack. The dress is reminiscent of a Dior's New Look with a skirt is so enormous that the dress takes up half the space on the rack. The dress is ready for the runway, waiting for the model who will wear this glamourous confection and fill it with life. A small head shot is visible on a runway log. Until then, the dress hangs like a disembodied form - the deep red of the bodice and skirt front reminiscent of blood. The high contrast of the lighting creates patterns of light and dark across the image, with the huge shadows from the dress filling more than a third of the frame.

The photo by Anne Deniau was featured in an article called McQueen Backstage, in Front of the Lens by Eric Wilson in the New York Times on Sunday, September 9, 2012. Deniau has an upcoming book called "Loves Looks Not With the Eyes: Thirteen Years with Lee Alexander McQueen".  These 400 images were compiled in the course of photographing backstage images for the designer's archives and publicity material.

What I like about Deniau's photo is how this singular image conveys life and death, glamour and gloom. The dress seems alive. The background is plain, and the lighting simple and yet this one image says so much. When I photograph the selected items from the Ryerson Fashion Research Collection for the Memories of a Dress Project, I want the images to be alive - to be more than dusty, old dresses.

References:

Wilson, Eric. "McQueen Backstage, in Front of the Lens" The New York Times 9 Sept. 2012, S8. Print.

Andrew Bolton and the Curatorial Process

McQueen's Raven Dress made of 2000 raven feathers
Photo by Solve Sundbro
Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 2011

Andrew Bolton, curator of the Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty exhibition at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2011, changed the paradigm of fashion exhibitions. Creating a multi-sensory experience akin to the charged emotional experience of being at a runway show, Bolton paid homage to McQueen as a designer with an extraordinary imagination "who challenged the idea of what is fashion". 

In a talk at New York's Pratt Institute on Monday, September 17, Andrew Bolton talked about his curatorial process in creating the McQueen exhibition. Generously sharing the credit with the McQueen team, including Sarah Burton, as well as his own staff, Bolton said that one of the reasons that the exhibition was staged so closely after McQueen's death was because it seemed possible that the team and the McQueen house might not survive the loss of their founder. Concerned about access to the archive and the possible dispersion of the team, the Met acted quickly to create the show. Bolton also "wanted to avoid revisionism" and capitalize on the "freshness, and rawness of memories". 

Bolton talked about McQueen's enormous creative talent and intensity in "using fashion as a way to convey complex ideas".  He cited McQueen's use of unorthodox materials in using such things as razor clam shells and microscope slides to "challenge the idea of what is fashion". McQueen also took inspiration from everywhere including films, paintings, and dolls. 

In walking the audience through the exhibition, Bolton outlined the curatorial narrative of each gallery and said that he designed the experience to be that of entering a gothic fairly tale. The choices of materials used within each gallery, such as rusty metal, wallpaper, acrylic tiles, and wood, all had parallels to themes of McQueen's runway presentations, such as the broken floorboards being from the "Highland Rape" show. Bolton also showed many clips of the runway shows to depict the dramatic intensity of these presentations, and said that McQueen used the concept of the runway show as inspiration for the garments he designed. 

In the question and answer session that followed, I asked Andrew Bolton how he edited the enormous McQueen archive to come up with a coherent narrative for the show. He said that the process was object based and that he had a difficult time given McQueen's enormous talent. Bolton made a storyboard and suggested that the themes emerged from that. 

I also asked Bolton where he stood on the debate around the intersection of fashion and art, and whether curators had a role in whether or not a designer's work is presented as art. He said that the debate is in effect "redundant", that "Fashion is a barometer of our times, and a mirror of what is happening in culture. Fashion is not just about functionality; it could also express complex ideas in the same way that art can."

Bolton said that the role of the fashion curator is "to interpret fashion through exhibitions" and "to interpret current events." He cited punk as one of the most exciting moments in fashion history which is the subject of the upcoming 2013 show at the Met Costume Institute Punk: Chaos to Couture. Bolton also said that he looked forward to the reopening of the Costume Institute's permanent galleries, mentioning his desire to encourage a different reading of fashion through the juxtaposition of historical and contemporary garments. 

The Big Four Fashion Weeks: New York, London, Milan and Paris

The four major Fashion Weeks are held semi-annually and internationally. Each one of the Fashion Weeks has a unique style, all their own.

In 1943, New York held the first Fashion Week, and has been the quintessential idea of fashion week ever since. Now known as the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week, it does seem to be the most commercialized of the big fashion shows, in that the clothes are created ready-for-market. Its styles and designs are arguably a lot 'safer' than the other three locations.

In 1984, London jumped on the fashion train and recently has been making a splash with its high-end couture. London Fashion Week has not yet reached the commercial level of New York and is less likely to follow fashion trends. Rather, each London fashion house showcases its unique take on fashion-forward concepts, and their collections are still market ready. The heavy hitters in London like Richard Nicholl, Christopher Kane and Giles Deacon are all amazing designers who produce commercially viable collections that would stand out at any of the fashion shows around the world.

Milan's version of the week was established in 1958 and is part of the Big Four internationally. It is owned by a nonprofit association which disciplines, coordinates and promotes the development of Italian Fashion and is responsible for hosting the fashion events and shows of Milan called Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana. The original Italian Fashion Week was not held in Milan, instead it was held in Florence at the hands of Giovan Battista Giorgini. He held the first "fashion parade" in the living room of his house "Villa Torrigiani". Then the Italian week later moved to Rome, and then Milan where it is currently held in haute style today.

Paris is known as the fashion capital of the world, and holds the finale position in the fashion show tour. Paris Fashion Week brings each season's chaotic schedule of international fashion weeks to an end. High-end French designers include: Christian Dior, Coco Chanel, and Louis Vuitton along with many more stunningly talented designers. Typically, Paris has some of the most extravagant shows, especially with Paris Couture Week.

No matter which of the Big Four is your favorite, each week is sure to dazzle its audience with new haute couture designs year after year. In addition to haute couture trends, innovative fashion designs have also been making a big impact, especially in New York, the only location that allows a fashion school to feature its students' designs, which are often very fresh and inspirational. It is definitely important to keep up with the latest runway styles from all four weeks to stay on top of upcoming trends for the next season.

Creative Process Journal: Reflecting On the Nature of Photography

In the absence of a specific exhibition venue, the creative component of this project will take the form of photographs, which in the end might be presented as a book or in a gallery exhibition. This constraint, seemingly limiting, serves a  purpose since it will momentarily stop the clock on the inevitable decay and death of the object. 

From the moment they are born as garments, textiles begin the inevitable creep towards decay and death, ultimately turning to dust. Dust, dirt and skin plus moisture from sweat, spills and stains, serve to hasten that process of decay. Add insects or rodents into the mix and an entire collection can be imperilled. Archival storage and gentle handling with gloves or clean hands can help preserve a garment, but it doesn't entirely halt the process. Some of the most exquisite garments from 1880-1920 were made with weighted silks and the metallic salts within the fabric hasten the decay, with the result that the garment can literally crumble on touch, becoming a health hazard. 
The photos I create will in effect stop time, marking a moment in the garment's biography as time and the processes of decay marching forward. 

In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes wrote about the emotional aspect of photography linking it to the transformation of “subject into object and even, one might say, into a museum object” (13), as well as to death and loss (92-97). Barthes defined photography as an artistic medium that was intimately linked with death as “a witness of something that is no more” (xi). Barthes also wrote that: "It is because each photograph always contains this imperious sign of my future death that each one, however attached it seems to be to the excited world of the living, challenges each of us, one by one, outside of any generality (but not outside of any transcendence) (97). 

The key to transforming these photos into something more than just a documentation of the collection will be to define a point of connection, a defining element in the threads of memory, in the traces of the wearer in the folds. 

References:

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Tran. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1980. Print. 

Creative Process Journal: Curation and Obsessions

From a curatorial perspective, finding a narrative from among the hundreds of dresses in the Ryerson Fashion Research Collection that come from different donors and span over a century of fashion history is a challenge. 

Garments represent important artifacts of material culture, giving evidence of the fashions and social history of a period. Museologist Susan Pearce describes the way objects can reflect our identity: "Objects hang before the eyes of the imagination, continuously representing ourselves to ourselves and telling the stories of our lives in ways which would be impossible otherwise" (qtd. in de la Haye 12). 

Clothing is material memory, carrying the marks and imprint of its wearer. Quentin Bell described clothing as being so much part of one’s identity that “it is as though the fabric were indeed a natural extension of the body, or even of the soul” (qtd. in Dant 85). The clothing that is kept beyond its fashionable life often has “symbolic qualities” and holds “personal memories” for the owner (de la Haye 14). In a poetic essay by Peter Stallybrass entitled “Worn Worlds: Clothes, Mourning and the Life of Things”, the author describes how the clothes of his late colleague Allon White triggered sensory memories. “He was there in the wrinkles of the elbows, wrinkles that in the technical jargon of sewing are called ‘memory’; he was there in the stains at the very bottom of the jacket; he was there in the smell of the armpits” (36). 

            If I draw on my obsessions as suggested by curator Maria Luisa Frisa, those centre on the traces of the former owners of these garment within the archive itself. Very few pieces have any associated photos or letters, making those that do have fragments of their history as evidence take on even greater importance, especially as some of them are extremely fragile. In my work, I've discovered: the wedding dress worn by Mary Suddon for her wedding in 1955 to Alan Suddon, an important collector of historical costume in Toronto, along with a box of bodices and gowns from the late nineteenth century donated to the collection by Alan Suddon; a set of three gowns designed in Paris and worn to the coronation of King George V; and, a Balmain gown labeled “Marie Antoinette” c.1957 donated by socialite Somer Rosenberg. 

There are also many historic pieces from the turn of the century that lack provenance but which bare traces of their former owners, in the faint stains of sweat under the arms, in the worn patches on the elbows, and in the shreds of silk that threaten to disintegrate into dust.  Yet there is a haunting beauty emanating from these pieces, an uncanny reminder of the former owners. 

Curator Judith Clark's reference to the "double loss of life" in terms of "the garment without its body, and the garment out of sight, embedded within an archive" (from The Concise Dictionary of Dress which has no page numbers) haunts me. In fashion exhibitions, the viewer almost never sees the archive. Garments are typically presented in a pristine state and evidence of the wearer, in terms of stains, rips or tears, would make a garment ineligible for display. 

It is this gap that excites me. The first time I went behind the scenes in a museum, at the musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris in Paris,  my heart literally pounded in my chest as treasures in storage were revealed to me. Only a small fraction of a museum's collection can be made visible to the public. And now when I examine an unmarked bin in the archives or can share a garment to a student related to their research as part of my job as Collection Co-ordinator, I get that same heady frisson of excitement. This is what I want to share in an exhibition.... 

Dant, Tim. Material Culture in the Social World. Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1999. Print.

De La Haye, Amy. A Family of Fashion: The Messels: Six Generations of Dress. Eds. Lou Taylor and Eleanor Thompson. London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2005. Print.

Stallybrass, Peter. "Worn Worlds: Clothes, Mourning and the Life of Things." The Yale Review 81.2 (1993): 35-50. Print.