John Styles
I am Professor Emeritus in History at the University of Hertfordshire and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. I specialize in the history of early-modern Britain and its colonies, especially the study of material life, manufacturing and design. I am currently writing a book on fashion, textiles and the origins of Industrial Revolution. My most recent books are The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England (Yale University Press, 2007) and Threads of Feeling: The London Foundling Hospital's Textile Tokens, 1740-1770 (Foundling Museum, 2010). My 'Threads of Feeling' exhibition was displayed at the Foundling Museum in London in 2010-11. Subsequently, from May 2013 to May 2014, it was shown at the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum at Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, USA.
Address: School of Humanities
University of Hertfordshire
Hatfield
Hertfordshire AL10 9AB
UK
Address: School of Humanities
University of Hertfordshire
Hatfield
Hertfordshire AL10 9AB
UK
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Ownership of new fabrics and new fashions was not confined to the rich. It extended far down the social scale to the small farmers, day labourers, and petty tradespeople who formed a majority of the population. The Dress of the People uses unfamiliar kinds of evidence – from descriptions of stolen clothes in the records of criminal trials to small pieces of fabric left at the London Foundling Hospital by impoverished mothers who abandoned their babies – to show that humble men and women could be beneficiaries of the new commercial society arising in eighteenth-century England. They were not just its victims. Their everyday fashion was rooted in a world of popular custom, of fairs and holidays, of parish feasts and harvest homes. Popular custom, often portrayed as a conservative force hostile to commercial innovation, emerges as the midwife of popular consumerism.