Enfilade

From Bloomsbury:

Serena Dyer, Material Lives: Women Makers and Consumer Culture in the 18th Century (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2021), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-1350126978 (hardcover), £80 / ISBN: 978-1350126961 (paperback), £27.

Eighteenth-century women told their life stories through making. With its compelling stories of women’s material experiences and practices, Material Lives offers a new perspective on eighteenth-century production and consumption. Genteel women’s making has traditionally been seen as decorative, trivial and superficial. Yet their material archives, forged through fabric samples, watercolours, dressed prints and dolls’ garments, reveal how women used the material culture of making to record and navigate their lives.

Material Lives positions women as ‘makers’ in a consumer society. Through fragments of fabric and paper, Dyer explores an innovative way of accessing the lives of otherwise obscured women. For researchers and students of material culture, dress history, consumption, gender and women’s history, it offers a rich resource to illuminate the power of needles, paintbrushes and scissors.

Serena Dyer is Lecturer in History of Design and Material Culture at De Montfort University. She has taught at the University of Warwick and the University of Hertfordshire, and was Postdoctoral Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. She was previously Curator of the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture. She has published on albums, wallpaper, consumer culture, and childhood in the eighteenth century.

C O N T E N T S

List of Illustrations
List of Charts and Tables
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations

1  Introduction: Making Material Lives
• Material Life Writing
• The Consumer Culture of Making
• Four Material Lives

2  Material Accounting: A Sartorial Account Book
• Barbara Johnson (1738–1825)
• Educating Barbara Johnson
• Accounting for Herself
• Material Literacy
• A Chronicle of Fashion

3  Dress of the Year: Watercolours
• Ann Frankland Lewis (1757–1842)
• Sartorial Timekeeping and the Fashion Plate
• Accomplishment and Creative Practice
• Society and Fashionable Display
• Selfhood, Emotion, and the Mourning Watercolours

4  Adorned in Silk: Dressed Prints
• Sabine Winn (1734–1798)
• Paper Textiles, Dress and the Dressed Print
• Sabine Winn’s Dressed Prints
• Print and Making at Nostell

5  Fashions in Miniature: Dolls
• Laetitia Powell (1741–1801)
• The Powell Dolls
• Mimetic Dolls and Miniature Selves
• Dolls as Sartorial Social Narrators

6  Conclusion: Material Afterlives

Glossary
Bibliography
Index

From Simon & Schuster:

Richard Thompson Ford, Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2021), 464 pages, ISBN: 978-1501180064, $30.

Dress codes are as old as clothing itself. For centuries, clothing has been a wearable status symbol; fashion, a weapon in struggles for social change; and dress codes, a way to maintain political control. Merchants who dressed like princes and butchers’ wives wearing gem-encrusted crowns were public enemies in medieval societies structured by social hierarchy and defined by spectacle. In Tudor England, silk, velvet, and fur were reserved for the nobility and ballooning pants called “trunk hose” could be considered a menace to good order. The Renaissance era Florentine patriarch Cosimo de Medici captured the power of fashion and dress codes when he remarked, “One can make a gentleman from two yards of red cloth.” Dress codes evolved along with the social and political ideals of the day, but they always reflected struggles for power and status. In the 1700s, South Carolina’s “Negro Act” made it illegal for Black people to dress “above their condition.” In the 1920s, the bobbed hair and form-fitting dresses worn by free-spirited flappers were banned in workplaces throughout the United States and in the 1940s the baggy zoot suits favored by Black and Latino men caused riots in cities from coast to coast.

Even in today’s more informal world, dress codes still determine what we wear, when we wear it—and what our clothing means. People lose their jobs for wearing braided hair, long fingernails, large earrings, beards, and tattoos or refusing to wear a suit and tie or make-up and high heels. In some cities, wearing sagging pants is a crime. And even when there are no written rules, implicit dress codes still influence opportunities and social mobility. Silicon Valley CEOs wear t-shirts and flip flops, setting the tone for an entire industry: women wearing fashionable dresses or high heels face ridicule in the tech world, and some venture capitalists refuse to invest in any company run by someone wearing a suit.

In Dress Codes, law professor and cultural critic Richard Thompson Ford presents an insightful and entertaining history of the laws of fashion from the middle ages to the present day, a walk down history’s red carpet to uncover and examine the canons, mores, and customs of clothing—rules that we often take for granted.

Richard Thompson Ford is a Professor at Stanford Law School. He has written about law, social and cultural issues, and race relations for The New York Times, The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and Slate, and has appeared on The Colbert Report and The Rachel Maddow Show. He is the author of The New York Times notable books The Race Card and Rights Gone Wrong: How Law Corrupts the Struggle for Equality. He lives in San Francisco.

Distributed for Modern Art Press by Yale UP:

Susan Sloman, Gainsborough in London (London: Modern Art Press, 2021), 412 pages, ISBN: 978-0956800787, £35 / $45.

Thomas Gainsborough’s (1727–1788) London years, from 1774 to 1788, were the pinnacle and conclusion of his career. They coincided with the establishment of the Royal Academy, of which Gainsborough was a founding member, and the city’s ascendance as a center for the arts. This is a meticulously researched and readable account of how Gainsborough designed his home and studio and maintained a growing schedule of influential patrons, making a place for himself in the art world of late-18th-century London. New material about Gainsborough’s technique is based on examinations of his pictures and firsthand accounts by studio visitors. His fractious relationship with the Royal Academy and its exhibition culture is reexamined through the works he sent to its annual shows. The full range of Gainsborough’s art, from fashionable portraits to landscapes and fancy pictures, is addressed in this major contribution, not just to the study of a great artist, but to 18th-century studies in general.

Susan Sloman is an independent scholar and curator specialising in eighteenth-century studies. Gainsborough in London is the follow-up to her previous book, Gainsborough in Bath.

For more information, see Dr. Sloman’s posting at the Yale Books Blog.

Distributed in the US and Canada by The University of Chicago Press:

Geoffrey Bond and Christine Kenyon Jones, Dangerous to Show: Byron and His Portraits (London: Unicorn Publishing Group, 2020), 160 pages, ISBN: 978-1912690718, £25 / $38.

“Don’t look at him. He is dangerous to look at,” said Lady Liddell to her daughter in 1817. Handsome, charismatic, aristocratic, and allegedly “mad, bad and dangerous to know,” Lord Byron (1788–1824) is one of the most captivating and recognizable figures of the Romantic Age. His face, figure, and appearance added to the appeal of his poetry, and the close association of the man with his poetic creations encouraged a wide range of artists to create portraits during his lifetime and to memorialize him after his heroic death in Greece.

The first work on the subjects of the portraits of the poet, and written by two authorities on the subject, Dangerous to Show explores Byron’s life through the intriguing stories behind one hundred of these images. Reproduced in color for the first time, we can explore the key paintings, miniatures, sculptures, drawings, and sketches, along with a selection of prints, cartoons, engravings, and other representations of the artist. The book uses Byron’s own wit with words to recount his attempts to manage his own image through the way he was presented in his portraits, as well as through fashion, weight control, and the disguise of his lameness.

Christine Kenyon Jones is a writer and lecturer, and an expert on Lord Byron and the Romantic period. She has been published widely on Byron’s image and his portraiture; on his politics and his pronunciation; on his disability and his dieting; on his relationship with his publisher John Murray, his religious background and his afterlife as a science-fiction character. Her book Kindred Brutes is a study of animals in the Romantic period, in which Byron figures largely. She has also written, lectured and broadcast widely about the Regency period and Jane Austen. She is a Research Fellow in the Department of English at King’s College London.

Geoffrey Bond is a polymath, having had careers as a solicitor, businessman, and broadcaster. His special interests now are the creation and promotion of education initiatives for young people in the heritage, law and engineering sectors. He has written and lectured on heritage matters and chaired a variety of heritage organisations at regional and national level. A collector and antiquarian, living in an historic house, he is a Fellow and former member of the council of the Antiquaries Society of London. He has one of the best collections of Byron first editions and Byron memorabilia in the country.