Search results for ""author bethan bide""

Discover the extraordinary stories of the Jewish people who designed, made and sold fashion in twentieth-century London, revealing their vital role in making it an iconic fashion city. While Jewish people have long been associated with making clothes, the full extent of the contributions they made to London’s growing reputation as a global fashion capital and the democratisation of fashion through the development of ready-to-wear clothes in the twentieth century have been widely forgotten. Spanning all sectors of the fashion industry – from homeworking to haute couture – the book draws stories from generations of Jewish Londoners and is richly illustrated with images from across the city and the Museum of London’s collections. Fashion City takes you on a journey across London, from the busy clothing factories of the East End to the swinging boutiques of Carnaby Street and the manicured squares of Mayfair. Along the way it introduces you to the intriguing stories of the key figures behind London fashion, such as Frederick Starke, a boy from the East End whose ability to tell a creative story changed the way the world saw British ready-to-wear fashion; Otto Lucas, a gay Jewish German hat maker who became the most financially successful milliner in the world; Mr Fish, the rule-defying tailor who dressed Mick Jagger and Muhammed Ali; and Netty Spiegel, who escaped the Nazis on the Kindertransport and became a London wedding dress designer of choice under her ‘Neymar’ label. Bringing together a wealth of new research and presenting a novel perspective of London fashion, this book gives a voice to the city’s overlooked and often forgotten Jewish fashion makers.

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Ordinary clothes have extraordinary stories. In contrast to academic and curatorial focus on the spectacular and the luxurious, Everyday Fashion makes the case that your grandmother’s wardrobe is an archive as interesting and important as any museum store. From the moment we wake and get dressed in the morning until we get undressed again in the evening, fashion is a central medium through which we experience the world and negotiate our place within it. Because of this, the ways that supposedly ‘ordinary’ and ‘everyday’ fashion objects have been designed, manufactured, worn, cared for, and remembered matters deeply to our historical understanding. Beginning at 1550 – the start of an era during which the word ‘fashion’ came to mean stylistic change rather than the act of making – each chapter explores the definition of everyday fashion and how this has changed over time, demonstrating innovative methodologies for researching the everyday. The variety and significance of everyday fashion cultures are further highlighted by a series of illustrated object biographies written by Britain’s leading fashion curators, showcasing the rich diversity of everyday fashion in British museum collections. Collectively, this volume scratches below the glossy surface of fashion to expose the mechanics of fashion business, the hidden world of the workroom and the diversity and role of makers; and the experiences of consuming, wearing, and caring for ordinary clothes in the United Kingdom from the 16th century to the present day. In doing so it challenges readers to rethink how fashion systems evolve and to reassess the boundaries between fashion and dress scholarship.

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