Labour of the Stitch
The Making and Remaking of Fashionable Georgian Dress

Labour of the Stitch activates recreative practice to stitch back together the complex and symbiotic eighteenth-century cultures of fashion.

Serena Dyer (Author)

9781009507493, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 18 April 2024

90 pages
23.5 x 15.9 x 1.1 cm, 0.28 kg

The making of fashionable women's dress in Georgian England necessitated an inordinate amount of manual labour. From the mantuamakers and seamstresses who wrought lengths of silk and linen into garments, to the artists and engravers who disseminated and immortalised the resulting outfits in print and on paper, Georgian garments were the products of many busy hands. This Element centres the sartorial hand as a point of connection across the trades which generated fashionable dress in the eighteenth century. Crucially, it engages with recreation methodologies to explore how the agency and skill of the stitching hand can inform understandings of craft, industry, gender, and labour in the eighteenth century. The labour of stitching, along with printmaking, drawing, and painting, composed a comprehensive culture of making and manual labour which, together, constructed eighteenth-century cultures of fashionable dress.

1. Introduction
2. Stitched dress
3. Recreating the English gown
4. The manual labour of style
References.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]