Making, material objects, and memoirs

What happens when scholars stitch, dye, drape, and embroider their way into the past – can creative processes reveal new dimensions to dress and textile history? And what can we learn from studying historic costume garments in close detail?

These are just a few of the questions explored in the new articles, garment study videos, and books now available on the Bloomsbury Dress and Costume Library, following its latest content update.

Individual reflections on recreative practice as a tactile and embodied form of research are mapped out in a new series of online-exclusive articles called Recreative Reflections, written by scholars turned maker-researchers. From Edwardian boot-making as a modern woman to plus-sized historical patternmaking, you can learn more about their diverse approaches below.

Whether you’re interested in domestic craft, digital fashion, or the politics of patternmaking, these new resources invite deeper exploration into how clothing connects us to the past.

Introducing Recreative Reflections

Can making be both method and metaphor for unlocking hidden histories and challenging dominant narratives within dress scholarship?

In Boots, Babies and Community: A Reflection on Historic Bootmaking in the Modern World, Emma Treleaven describes the emotional experience of recreating a pair of Edwardian boots using period-accurate shoemaking methodology, in the modern day and while pregnant.

Reinvigorating original techniques when faced with a scarcity of source material is also a theme of Plus-Sized Patternmaking as Historic Dress Scholarship, which examines how the plus-sized body ‘was accommodated and rendered fashionable’ in the 1870s.

Poignant insights from the ‘practice of living history through making’ come to light in The History in Our Hands : How Sewing Can Access the Silences in the Written Archive. It offers reflections on a sewing workshop for descendants of young Black girls of the 1760s-70s, both free and enslaved, and how this event unlocked a more profound understanding of the girls’ experiences.

And the unlikely pairing of the ‘worlds of traditional embroidery and digital fashion technology’ emerges as an opportunity to consider the parallels between these creative processes and their future implications for couture, in Wearing the Unwearable: Embroidery, Digital Fashion and the Joy of Creating.

From Little Lord Fauntleroy Suits to the Art of Parisian Chic

In the newest garment study videos such as Little Lord Fauntleroy Suits or Gentlemen’s Embroidered Slippers and Suspenders, you can get up close with costume garments and examine their key features in detail through the lens of expert case studies created in collaboration with the Fashion Archives and Museum of Shippensburg, Pennsylvania.

From the polished boots of Georgian gentlemen to the effortless chic of the Parisienne, discover new books to enrich your research or teaching. This chapter from Shoes and the Georgian Man by Matthew McCormack traces how men’s boots in this era evolved from rigid riding gear into bespoke symbols of status and individuality, shaping ideas of masculinity along the way. And in La Parisienne: The Symbol of Paris, Justine De Young examines the rise of the iconic Parisienne ‘type’, through paintings by artists from Carolus-Duran to Renoir - exploring the context around their critical reception.