Journal

Who Wore This? Reading a Costume With a Dress Historian

I don’t often have a guest on the channel, but this week I did. Dr Robyne Calvert, dress historian at the University of Glasgow, came round to look at two pieces from my own collection with me.

One was the first thing I ever bought, aged sixteen, at an antique fair in Edinburgh. I’d just seen A Room with a View and wanted to be Lucy Honeychurch. The other arrived last week, a small aesthetic-dress bodice with sunflower embroidery, bought off Vinted for £35.

What we actually did

Neither of us went in with answers. We turned the garments inside out, looked at the construction, worked out what would have been worn underneath, and argued gently over whether a piece of embroidery had been added to the walking costume afterwards or was part of the original design.

The label inside the jacket dates it fairly precisely, to between 1909 and 1913, from Fraser & Sons of Glasgow. And the embroidery itself, purple on a ground that was once green, worn over a white blouse, raises a question neither of us can answer with certainty: whether this was a piece of quiet suffrage signalling. The colours were announced in 1908. The dates line up. But dates lining up isn’t proof, and we say so in the film.

Who wore this

That’s really the question underneath everything we did. Not just what date something is from, or what it’s made of, but who was the woman who chose it, wore it, mended it, sweated in it. 

We don’t get to know her name. What we get instead is a slower kind of looking, at construction, at wear, at the small decisions someone made about how something should be put together and finished. That’s the part I find most interesting, more than any single date or attribution.

If you’ve got old things in your own house that you’ve never quite looked at properly, this might be a nudge to spend some time with them paying quiet attention and asking questions.

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