I Have Been a Collector of Costumes’

By the early nineteenth century, the ‘costume book’ genre was well established as a catalogue of national habits. These chronologically, socially and geographically devised sartorial indexes to the world strove to use dress as a means of categorising and delineating humankind. Such publications espouse a sense of neat chronological evolution, situated within a framework of masculine progress. While the majority of published costume books from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were authored by men, this article explores the myriad ways in which women too constructed, subverted and engaged in sartorial histories. Published dress histories attempted to use dress as a means of constructing a coherent chronological narrative of a national heritage. Yet amateur women, such as Catherine Hutton, Mary White and Laetitia Powell, used pens, scissors, paste and needles to reach back through that time‐tunnel, borrowing from and taking possession of the sartorial past

Amateur · Archaeology · Art · Clothing · Fashion design · Literature · Narrative · Possession (linguistics · Situated · Temporalities · Visual arts · White (mutation · Decadence, Literature, and Society · Fashion and Cultural Textiles · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · History · Law · Philosophy