Staff Profile
Lecturer
Academic and professional qualifications
Fellow of the Royal Historical Society
Previous Employment
Conde Nast College of Fashion & Design, London
Sotheby's Institute of Art, London
Victoria & Albert Museum, London
Undergraduate teaching
Unit lead Fashion Cultures 1
Postgraduate research supervision
Available for PhD supervision
Projects and initiatives
Co-host Dress:Fancy podcast.
Media appearances or involvement
Ted Talk - 'The Magnificence of Marginality'.
Research
Research Interests
A historian of the decorative arts, 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.
Books
Wild, BL., 2020. 'Carnival to Catwalk Global Reflections on Fancy Dress Costume', Bloomsbury Visual Arts.
Wild, B., Walker, T., 2016. 'A Life in Fashion The Wardrobe of Cecil Beaton'.
Book Chapters
Wild, B., 2019. 'Clothing Royal Bodies: Changing attitudes to royal dress and appearance from the Middle Ages to Modernity'. In The Routledge History of Monarchy, Routledge.
Wild, B., 2019. 'Romantic Recreations: Remembering Stuart Monarchy in Nineteenth-Century Fancy Dress Entertainments'. In Remembering Kings and Queens in Early Modern England and France: Reputation, Reinterpretation, Reincarnation, Palgrave MacMillan.
Journal Articles
Wild, B., 2016. 'Imitation in fashion: Further reflections on the work of Thorstein Veblen and Georg Simmel', Fashion, Style & Popular Culture, 3 (3), pp. 281-294.
Wild, BL., 2015. 'To have and to hold: Masculinity and the clutch bag', Critical Studies in Men???s Fashion, 2 (1), pp. 43-54.
Wild, BL., 2014. 'Secrecy, splendour and statecraft: the jewel accounts of King Henry III of England, 1216-72', Historical Research, 83 (221), pp. 409-430.
Wild, B., 2014. 'The civilizing process and sartorial studies', Clothing Cultures, 1 (3), pp. 213-224.
Wild, BL., 2011. 'Emblems and enigmas: Revisiting the ‘sword’ belt of Fernando de la Cerda', Journal of Medieval History, 37 (4), pp. 378-396.
Wild, BL., 2010. 'A Gift Inventory from the Reign of Henry III', The English Historical Review, CXXV (514), pp. 529-569.
Office Location
Room C2.32
Cavendish South
Manchester Fashion Institute
Manchester Metropolitan University
Cavendish Street
Manchester M15 6BG