Making Historical Dress: Hands, bodies and methods

从根本上说，制作服装是一种物质体验。然而，服装、纺织品和制造的历史往往缺乏对服装制造的物理意义的认识或承认。这样的过程很少在文本中捕捉到，现存的物质对象通常只代表成品。制作历史服饰网络将使一系列不同的学者和从业者之间的对话和传统等级关系变得平坦，他们已经认识到这一漏洞，并开始努力重新获得过去的缝纫实用知识。通过这些“具体化”的方法，服装结构可以被逆向工程，失去的技能可以恢复，说明书和示意图可以被测试。再创造的方法与专业和男性化制作的叙事背道而驰，后者主导着档案。对手工制作历史做法的关注为劳动者提供了一个代言人，特别是妇女和BAME制造商，他们在行会记录和工业家的描述中往往被掩盖。至关重要的是，娱乐恢复了被当今快速时尚贬低的手工技能。它阐明并恢复了制作服装所需的体力劳动，围绕这一点的历史叙述和当前的大规模生产实践已经减少。实验方法在考古学和技术艺术史等学科中得到了很好的确立，但直到最近才在历史学家中获得吸引力，因为娱乐和实用的方法往往留在学院之外。最近由服饰历史学家主导的“制造”和“体现”的转变，要求学者们思考这些物品是如何与历史实体互动并由历史实体形成的。现有的学术研究，如阿诺德和提拉马尼在戏剧服装研究方面的工作，以及霍蒂·埃里森和皮特曼在历史上的工作，在学科和专业方面一直是支离破碎的。然而，随着2012年提拉马尼的历史服饰学院和戴维森2019年的文章的推出，这种方法在学者中获得了加速的吸引力。与此同时，自2018年以来，YouTube和Instagram上历史娱乐的增长(2021年被Vogue视为一种时尚现象)创造了一个由历史创造者组成的全球社区，他们在学术之外创造知识。尽管该领域有所增长，但关键术语和方法几乎没有凝聚力，也没有被整个领域接受。这一领域的研究一直是由分散在英国、美国、欧洲和澳大利亚的学者和实践者进行的，他们在不同的时期工作，或者受雇于传统学术机构之外。制作历史服装网络将把历史、文学、艺术史和文化研究领域的知名和新兴服装学者与服装生产、管理和保护领域的从业人员以及历史服装人的社交媒体社区联系起来。在这样做的过程中，该网络将为讨论和建立外地共同的基本准则提供一个论坛。该网络将解决该领域内缺乏多样性的问题，这是学院面临的一个特别挑战，它将阐明不同的、被奴役的过去创造者的工作，并提高BAME实践者的声音。该网络将巩固现有零散的工作，与非学术从业人员共同创造知识，并使参与者能够建立界定领域的最佳做法。

Making clothing is a fundamentally corporeal experience. Yet histories of dress, textiles, and manufacture often lack awareness or acknowledgement of the physicality of garment making. Such processes were rarely captured in text, and extant material objects usually only represent the finished product. The Making Historical Dress Network will bring into conversation and flatten traditional hierarchies between a diverse range of scholars and practitioners who have recognised this lacuna and taken to their needles to recapture practical sewing knowledge of the past. Through these 'embodied' approaches, garment construction can be reverse engineered, lost skills can be recovered, and instructions and diagrams can be tested. Recreative methods push back against the narratives of professionalised and masculine production, which dominate the archive. Attention to historic practices of manual making offers a mouthpiece to labourers, particularly women and BAME makers, who are often obscured in guild records and industrialist accounts. Vitally, recreation recovers the manual skills devalued by present-day fast fashion. It illuminates and retrieves the physical human labour required to make clothing, which historic narratives around and current practices of mass manufacture have diminished.Experimental methodologies are well established in disciplines such as archaeology and technical art history but have only recently gained traction amongst historians, as recreation and practical approaches have often remained outside the academy. The recent 'making' and 'embodied' turns, led largely by dress historians, have asked scholars to consider how these objects interacted with and were formed by historical bodies. Existing scholarship, such as the work of Arnold and Tiramani in Theatrical Costume Studies and Hohti Erichsen and Pitman in History, has been fragmented along disciplinary and professional lines. However, this approach has gained accelerated traction amongst scholars following the launch of Tiramani's School of Historical Dress in 2012 and Davidson's 2019 article. Simultaneously, the growth of historical recreation on YouTube and Instagram since 2018 (recognised as a fashion phenomenon by Vogue in 2021) has created a global community of historical makers, who generate knowledge outside of the academy.Despite the field's growth, there is little cohesion or field-wide acceptance of key terms and methods. Research in this field has been undertaken by scholars and practitioners fragmented across the UK, USA, Europe, and Australia, working on different periods, or employed outside traditional academic institutions. The Making Historical Dress Network will unite established and emerging scholars of dress across the disciplines of History, Literature, Art History, and Cultural Studies with practitioners in the worlds of costume production, curation, and conservation, as well as the social media community of historical costumers. In doing so, the network will provide a forum for the discussion and establishment of a shared fundamental rubric for the field. The network will address the lack of diversity within the field, a particular challenge for the academy, by illuminating the work of diverse and enslaved makers of the past and raising up the voices of BAME practitioners. This network will consolidate existing fragmented work, co-create knowledge with non-academic practitioners, and enable participants to establish field-defining best practice.