Making Historical Dress: Hands, bodies and methods

制作衣服基本上是一种身体体验。然而，服装、纺织品和制造的历史往往缺乏对服装制造的物质意识或承认。这样的过程很少在文本中被捕获，现存的物质对象通常只代表成品。“制作历史服装网络”将在各种学者和实践者之间引入对话，并使传统的等级制度扁平化，这些学者和实践者已经认识到这一空白，并着手重新获得过去的实用缝纫知识。通过这些“具体化”的方法，服装结构可以逆向工程，丢失的技能可以恢复，并且可以测试说明和图表。创造性的方法推翻了在档案中占主导地位的专业化和男性化生产的叙述。对手工制作历史实践的关注为劳动者提供了一个喉舌，尤其是女性和BAME制造者，她们往往在行业记录和实业家的描述中被掩盖。重要的是，娱乐恢复了被当今快时尚贬低的手工技能。它阐明并重现了制作服装所需的体力劳动，而这种劳动在历史上的叙述和当前的大规模生产实践中已经减少了。实验方法在考古学和技术艺术史等学科中已经得到了很好的确立，但直到最近才在历史学家中得到了关注，因为娱乐和实用方法通常留在学院之外。最近主要由服装史学家主导的“制造”和“体现”的转变要求学者们考虑这些物品是如何与历史主体相互作用并由历史主体形成的。现有的学术研究，如阿诺德和提拉马尼的《戏剧服装研究》和霍赫蒂·埃里克森和皮特曼的《历史》，在学科和专业方面都是支离破碎的。然而，在2012年提拉马尼的历史服装学院成立和戴维森2019年的文章发表后，这种方法在学者中得到了加速的关注。与此同时，自2018年以来，YouTube和Instagram上的历史娱乐活动的增长（2021年被《Vogue》认定为一种时尚现象）创造了一个全球历史制造者社区，他们在学院之外创造知识。尽管该领域在不断发展，但对关键术语和方法的凝聚力或广泛接受程度却很低。这一领域的研究是由英国、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、艺术史和文化研究等学科的服装学者与服装制作、策展和保护领域的从业者以及历史服装消费者的社交媒体社区联合起来。在这样做的过程中，该网络将提供一个论坛，供讨论和制定该领域的共同基本准则。该网络将解决该领域内缺乏多样性的问题，这是该学院面临的一个特别挑战，它将阐明过去不同和受奴役的制造者的工作，并提高BAME从业者的声音。该网络将整合现有的零散工作，与非学术从业者共同创造知识，并使参与者能够建立定义领域的最佳实践。

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.