A PhD graduate from the University of Michigan, Mina Roces is a Professor of History in the School of Humanities and Languages in the Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. She is the author of five books: Women, Power and Kinship Politics in Post-War Philippines (Praeger 1998, Anvil Publishing 2001), Kinship Politics in Post-War Philippines: The Lopez Family, 1946-2000 (de la Salle University Press, 2001), Women’s Movements and the Filipina, 1986-2008 (University of Hawaii Press, 2012), The Filipino Migration Experience: Global Agents of Change (Cornell University Press, 2021) which won the NSW Premier’s General History Prize in 2022, and Gender in Southeast Asia (2022) published in Cambridge University Press’s Elements Series.

In addition, she was co-editor of several anthologies including The Politics of Dress in Asia and the Americas (Sussex Academic Press, 2007) and in 2022 she edited a Special Issue on Dress as Symbolic Resistance for the International Quarterly for Asian Studies, 53 (1).

Her research interests lie in twentieth-century Philippine history, particularly women’s history, and Filipino migration history, as well as the history of dress. In 2016 she was elected fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and in 2019 she received the Grant Goodman Prize (from the Philippines Studies Group of the Association of Asian Studies USA) for excellence in Philippine historical studies.

Reviving, Reinventing and Rethinking an Indigenous Luxury Textile: Piña Cloth, and Fashion in the Philippines

Piña cloth, or textile woven from the delicate fibers of the pineapple plant used to be the epitome of luxury and high fashion in mid-nineteenth century Philippines. The weaving and wearing of piña experienced a rapid decline largely caused by the influx of British cotton textiles so that by the last half or the 20th century it had all but disappeared. This paper analyses the history of reviving piña and its afterlives. It argues that reviving piña resulted in re-inventing new blended forms of the textile (with silk, cotton, and linen), and creating new ones such as piña shifu. Because these blended varieties are cheaper and faster to make, piña has been democratized. The revival process has caused a re-thinking of piña to make it ‘modern’ and ‘chic’—from adding color to it (as traditionally it was worn in its natural ecru color), turning it into casual or everyday wear, and painting on it to make it wearable art. Finally, the revival project has also altered the status of weavers and challenged gender norms. Comparisons between the pineapple cloth industry revival and the Thai silk revival will also be made using the case study of Shinawatra Silk.

Matthew McCormack is Professor of History and Head of the Graduate School at the University of Northampton. He has published widely on British history and his most recent book is Citizenship and Gender in Britain, 1688-1928 (Routledge, 2019). He is currently writing Shoes and the Georgian Man for Bloomsbury.

Shoes and the Georgian Man

Shoes have a close relationship with the human body. Shoes impact the body, since they support its weight and motions; but the body also impacts shoes, leaving a lasting imprint of their wearer. This project focuses on men’s shoes from the Georgian period, and thinks about them in terms of masculinity and the body. Historic examples of shoes from museum collections have been studied in this light, and the project also had an autoethnographic element, since I commissioned a pair of replica Georgian shoes and wore them for an extended period.

Dr Meg Kobza is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Newcastle University where she is researching the roots of commercialised cultural appropriation in costumed leisure culture (1770-1850). Her first book, The Domino: A Social Biography of a Costume, is now available through Cambridge University Press and her second book, Masquerade, is under contract with Yale University Press. She is also leading a British Academy-funded collaboration with the National Trust to curate a pop-up exhibition and event that brings the Georgian experience of fancy dress to life in the Bath Assembly Rooms.

Fashioning Georgian Fancy Dress

Fancy dress is fun, but its perceived frivolity has camouflaged its intense value as a reflection of and tool for the propagation of cultural, colonial, and economic meaning. This is the underlying narrative behind a collaborative pop-up exhibition on the history and legacy of Georgian fancy dress that I am curating with the National Trust at the Bath Assembly Rooms. The project stems from my research on the roots of cultural appropriation in British leisure costume (1770-1850) and is guided by the NT’s interest in co-creating a multi-sensory experience for heritage visitors.

This paper will explore some of the obstacles we have been facing and how we are working around them. It will examine the pros and cons of delivering a research-led exhibition, including how we are filling gaps in knowledge left by sparse archival sources and few extant garments. Collaboration with historical makers, like Serena Dyer and Tom Whitefield, and fashion collections, like the John Bright Collection and Bath Fashion Museum, have provided important insight and inspired interactive, creative components for the exhibition which help complete the narrative of fancy dress while asking bigger questions about its role in the modern world. With all this in mind, we hope the exhibition will lead visitors re-evaluate how they think about and construct themselves in relation to the ‘other’, be that other was globally, colonially, temporally, or fantastically imagined.

Dr Kathy Haslam FSA, Curator at Kelmscott Manor, is a specialist in William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement. She has worked in curatorial roles at national, local authority and trust-funded institutions including the Victoria & Albert Museum, The Museum of the Home (formerly Geffrye Museum) and Blackwell, The Arts & Crafts House. Since 2012 she has been responsible for the collection, displays and exhibitions at Kelmscott Manor and was a member of the Project Board for the Manor’s recent £6million capital project Kelmscott and Morris: Past, Present and Future, with particular responsibility for research, presentation and interpretation.

Kelmscott Manor’s Homestead and the Forest cot quilt

In 2015 Kelmscott Manor made a significant acquisition: the Homestead and the Forest cot quilt, designed in 1889 by William Morris’s younger daughter, May (1862–1938), and embroidered by her mother, Jane. Intended to serve a domestic function sadly never realized, and retained by May for the rest of her life, this complex object was not, however, amongst those items selected by her to remain at Kelmscott Manor after her death and was sold in 1939 when the auction took place of the greater proportion of the Manor’s contents.

May Morris was recognized in her own day as a respected Arts and Crafts designer of textiles, wallpaper and jewellery, a highly skilled embroidery practitioner, and an authority on historic embroidery. She also possessed more than a passing interest in antiquarian matters and was a practical advocate for craft and the handmade. As she represented her father’s living legacy in so many ways it is ironic, then, that she all but effaced herself from her own cultural legacy at Kelmscott when making provision for the Manor’s future in line with her stated intention of memorializing him. This paper will examine the philosophical and creative principles encapsulated by the Homestead and the Forest cot quilt, and look at the part it plays in resituating May Morris in the key narratives of Kelmscott Manor.

Tamsin Lewis is a musician and historian, with a particular interest in the early modern period. She studied violin at the Florence Conservatoire before reading Classics and Italian at Oxford. Her research uses sixteenth- and seventeenth-century music, words and song to examine aspects of social history in early modern England, transcribing material from manuscript and early printed sources. Particular areas of interest include popular music and song, broadside ballads, seasonal festivals, weddings, chocolate, coffee, clothing, and the plague. As a practitioner, Tamsin directs Passamezzo, an established early music ensemble, known for their ability to bring historical events to life through engaging performance and programming, and uses their performances, videos and productions to share my research with a wider audience.

Tamsin collaborates with university departments, schools, museums, and heritage organizations to recreate masques and other early modern entertainments. Her recent work in film and TV includes teaching Danny Dyer to sing in Danny Dyer’s Right Royal Family, talking with Lucy Worsley about sixteenth-century Christmas customs in A Merry Tudor Christmas, and working as historical and musical consultant on Firebrand, A Discovery of Witches, Becoming Elizabeth and Draw on Sweet Night.

Tamsin has written a number of books and articles on early modern music and society. She is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and an associate lecturer on Renaissance music and art at the Courtauld Institute.

Greensleeves: using a literary source to recreate sixteenth-century clothing and accessories

With its haunting melody, and the romantic (if erroneous) myth that it was written by Henry VIII as a love song for Anne Boleyn, ‘Greensleeves’ is probably the best known of all Tudor songs today. It’s a long song, written by a man who bombards his would-be beloved with gifts, dressing her from the skin upwards. My paper will examine these gifts – put together, they provide us with a rich resource of information on clothing, fabrics, embroidery, and other aspects of material culture. I will talk about my work with costume historians to recreate the items given to ‘Greensleeves’: her smock, her stockings, her garters, her petticoats, her shoes, girdle, kerchers, purse, pins, and, of course, her famous ‘gown…of the grossie green,’ with ‘sleeues of Satten hanging by’.

Ann French trained as a textile conservator at the Victoria and Albert Museum and has worked in that capacity for a variety of institutions including Glasgow Museums and the National Trust. ICON accredited since 2000, she has been employed at the Whitworth Art Gallery, the University of Manchester since 2002 being responsible for the care of all textile-based material in its collections encompassing post-Pharaonic textiles from Egypt to contemporary art textiles. She currently manages the Collection Care and Access Team of conservators and technicians at the gallery.

Since 2005, she has been researching the Greek domestic embroidery collecting of A J B Wace, R M Dawkins and their contemporaries; and is currently cataloguing the associated archives in Liverpool Museums with the aim of making these available to accompany a planned online catalogue of the Wace embroidery collection, together with a wider publication to be published by Hali magazine.

While a textile conservator by training, her research approach was initially museological and historiographical, but this has evolved to influence her approach to conservation practice and decision making.

Understanding the Legacy: The Greek Embroidery Collecting of A J B Wace and R M Dawkins

R M Dawkins and A J B Wace were classical scholars who, while based at the British School in Athens in the early twentieth century, collected over one thousand pieces of Eastern Mediterranean, primarily Greek, domestic embroideries. Their collections are now distributed across the V&A, Liverpool Museums, the Textile Museum Washington DC, Cleveland Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and they can be connected to almost every other such collection in museums outside Greece, and even some within Greece. Evaluating Dawkins’ & Wace’s approach to collecting via their archives together with reflecting on their exhibitions and writings reveals a lasting intellectual legacy regarding the study of such embroideries.

Anouska Lester is a cultural historian and the Programme Development Manager for the Society of Antiquaries. Her research examines material culture from the early modern period to the present day, with a particular focus on histories of collecting. Her PhD with the University of Roehampton examined sixteenth-century props, costumes and effects, such as snow, fruit, ruffs, mirrors, and dragons. She has worked with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Shakespeare’s Globe, V&A Museum, London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, and National Theatre. Anouska has spoken about her research on BBC Radio Three’s Free Thinking and BBC Radio Four’s Woman’s Hour. She is co-editing Marlowe and Nashe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage (Oxford University Press, 2027).