Material Strategies

Material Strategies brings together scholars from different disciplines to explore what dress and textiles can tell us about gender history. Experts from the fields of dress, design and textile history, business history, cultural anthropology, social history, art history and cultural history consider particular periods, places, individual garments, and moments of transformation. The book is broad in scope, covering women, men, social groupings and nations from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. At the same time, it incorporates illustrations that provide detailed visual evidence for gendered strategies of dress. Material Strategies both demonstrates the potential of this field of enquiry and helps to define its parameters. A jargon-free style makes it accessible to readers from a wide range of backgrounds.

Author Biography

Barbara Burman teaches at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, where she is Director of the Centre for the History of Textiles and Dress. Her research interests and publications focus on the cultural and social history of dress and textiles in the modern period. She edited The Culture of Sewing: Gender, Consumption and Home Dressmaking (Berg. 1999). Carole Turbin is Professor Emeritus of History and Sociology at SUNY/Empire State College. She is author of Working Women of Collar City: Gender, Class and Community in Troy, New York, 1864-86 (University of Illinois, 1992) and numerous articles, including ‘Collars and Consumers: Changing Images of American Manliss and Business’, in Beauty and Business, ed. Phillip Scranton (Routledge, 2001.) She is also an artist who has exhibited in the NY area.