Research

Research Interests

• History of clothing and fashion
• Fancy dress costume
• Marginality
• Cultural Appropriation

A historian, my research seeks to situate contemporary and historic dress and fashions within their social and cultural context. Chiefly, I am keen to understand how material objects - primarily clothing and jewellery - become imbued with meaning to convey their owner's and wearer's values. Much of my research is characterised by an interdisciplinary and diachronic approach, which I believe is most effective to identify continuities and changes in cultural history.

My research interests initially focused on the dress and appearance of a society’s leaders and elite, but I have become increasingly interested in the self- and group presentation of people marginalised by a society. Previous research inclines me to believe that what a society chooses to repudiate is often more revealing of its values than what it publicly champions; for to deny, fear and hold back often requires more conscious and sustained effort than to acquiesce and blithely accept. This thinking did much to shape my recent book project on fancy dress costume, Carnival to Catwalk: Global Perspectives on Fancy Dress Costume, which is underpinned by Barbara Babcock’s observation that the ‘socially peripheral is often symbolically central, and if we ignore or minimize inversion or other forms of cultural negation we often fail to understand the dynamics of social process generally’.

I explore these ideas further in my current book project, Wearing Culture: Controversy, Negotiation and the Pursuit of Fashion, which explores why the fashion industry struggles to convey diverse cultural and global perspectives. The book aims to elucidate the cultural construction and negotiation of controversies that arise from the fashionable appearance and adornment of human bodies and to explain how this creates acceptance, causes offence and sometimes sparks resistance.

In a related project, I am writing Appropriation for Bloomsbury's new Fashion in Action series. The book offers an introductory guide to the topic of cultural appropriation in fashionable dress and appearance.

The relevance of my research focuses encourages me to share my work with broad audiences. For example, in May 2019, marginality was the subject of my TED talk.

Conference organisation

Face Off: The Provocation and Possibilities of Masks and Head Coverings, 13-14 January 2021. Further information here.