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Reimagining the 'Thin Ideal': An Alternative Materiality of the Fashionable Silhouette c.1880-1930: Abigail Jubb (University of York)
From the turn of the twentieth century a modern ‘thin ideal’ proliferated in Britain, and especially within the mass printed imagery of the women’s fashion industry. Indeed, research on this corporeal, sartorial and cultural standard has focused primarily on visual sources. In this paper, however, I review these alongside other, previously unresearched, practical and sartorial representations of contemporaneous garment sizing to reconsider how the thinning visualisation of fashion materially shaped women’s bodies.
From the late nineteenth-century fashion retailers’ catalogues sold garments in new ‘stock sizes’ and sketched or photographed these on ever slimmer silhouettes. My research compares these, the sizes published in manufacturers’ ‘tables of average’ measurements and the fit of consumers’ size labelled garments to investigate their multi-media relations and contradictions. Through this new approach, I demonstrate how the developing proportions of garment sizes fattened as those of not just printed silhouettes but also dressed bodies apparently thinned. In doing so, I reimagine an alternate materiality of the ‘thin ideal’ by arguing that women’s real bodies were fashioned to fit into not the size but only the picture and therefore culture of this modern standard.
More widely, then, my research challenges the typically independent study of stages, stakeholders and objects from across the fashion supply chain as it interconnects the material histories of women’s changing garment construction and theoretical body constructs of modernity.
Abigail Jubb is a Wolfson Foundation Scholar and PhD candidate in the department of History of Art at the University of York. Her ongoing research project, Sizing Garments, Bodies and Identities: The Women’s Fashion Industry Production of the Modern Middle-class Consumer in Britain circa 1870-1930, focuses on the introduction of garment sizing and modern contradictions of individuality within the materiality of the newly industrialised fashion supply chain. A fashion practitioner by background, Abigail’s research interweaves her expertise and experience in fashion scholarship, heritage and industry. In addition to her PhD, Abigail co-runs Worn Workshop, producing creative projects about people’s relationships with their clothes.
- Venue
- 50/52 College Bounds