- In their introduction to Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), Donald Preziosi and Clare Farego describe this as ‘the crises and challenges of European self-knowledge resulting from a half-millennium-long global expansion of experience through conquest and commerce’ (3).
- Valerie Cumming, Understanding Fashion History (Hollywood: Costume and Fashion Press, 2004), 38–9.
- Marion Fletcher, Costume in Australia 1788–1901 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1984), and Margaret Maynard, Fashioned from Penury: Dress as Cultural Practice in Colonial Australia (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
- Traditionally, curators discouraged photographing original costumes on conservation grounds, because of the quantity of light and heat to which they would be exposed. Digital photography, however, can not only create images under a wider range of light conditions, it can create multiple images and short moving sequences that can valuably substitute for the examination of actual garments to enable preliminary, quantitative, and comparative studies.
- Christopher Breward, The Culture of Fashion: A New History of Fashionable Dress (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 228.
- Valerie Cumming Understanding Fashion History, 72.
- Ibid.
- See Fashion Theory 13, no. 4, December 2009. This issue on ‘Australian Fashion Perspectives’ arose from papers originally presented at the Cultural Studies Association of Australia Conference, University of Canberra, in 2006.
- These ideas were first raised in a session on fashion studies chaired by Peter McNeil at the 2008 AAANZ conference. Part of the session acknowledged Margaret Maynard's role as a pioneering scholar of exacting rigour, as well as her editorship of the aforementioned volume of the Encyclopaedia. Similar ideas were circulated in another recent forum, ‘The Future of Fashion Studies’, at the University of Warwick. Surveying the state of fashion studies in Australia, it was reported that, ‘Although dress studies had got off to a good start in the late 1980s, the retirements of Maynard and Carter and the concentration of fashion studies within design schools without a history of research activity commensurate with the Humanities did not point to a large critical mass of research-based endeavor.’ Fashion studies in Italy similarly suffered from being ‘frequently uncritical’. Peter McNeil, ‘Conference Report: “The Future of Fashion Studies’”, Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture 14, no. 1, 2010, 107–8.
- Tony Fry, Design History Australia (Sydney: Hale and Ironmonger, 1988), 74–5; Peter McNeil, ‘Rarely Looking In: The Writing of Australian Design History, c. 1900–1990’, Journal of Australian Studies 19, no. 44, 1995, 62.
- Juliette Peers ‘Et in Arcady Ego’, in 1940s Melbourne: Photographs by Albert Tucker (Bulleen, Vic.: Heide Museum of Modern Art, 2009), 29–35.
- Ibid., 33.
- Ian McLean,‘The Necessity of (un)Australian Art History: Writing for the New World’, Artlink 26, no. 1, 2006, 51.
- I note a similar scenario in the recent debate on contemporary Australian film. Now that the nationalist nostalgia of the film renaissance is rejected, films frequently centre on ‘dark’, bleak, outsider characters and situations of marginal and working-class identity. However, generally (and, in recent years, consistently), they fail to find a mainstream audience outside of film circles and funding bodies. See Louis Nowra ‘Nowhere Near Hollywood: Australian Film’, The Monthly, December 2009-January 2010, 44–52.
- Peter Coleman, Australian Civilisation (1962), cited in Stephen Murray-Smith, Indirections: A Literary Autobiography (Townsville: Foundation for Australian Literary Studies, James Cook University of North Queensland, 1981), 50.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Martin Boyd, The Cardboard Crown (Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin, 1992), 37.
- Ibid., 132. Although writing of the nineteenth century, Boyd's idiom also recalled his interwar years in London, when, as Stella Mary Newton recalls, ‘in the 1930s no one (and they did not have to be rich) who cared about their appearance bought ready-made clothes’. Stella Mary Newton, ‘London Haute Couture in the 1930s’, Costume 35, 2005, 4.
- Gwen Morton Spencer, ‘Inside Story of Fashion in Australia’, Australia National Journal, 1939, 59–61, 76–9.
- Ibid.
- See Stella Mary Newton, ‘London Haute Couture in the 1930s’, 9–10. One should note that in Australia by the 1920s there were a number of companies, including Lucy Secor (of Melbourne) and Madame Pellier (of Sydney), that defined themselves as couture houses and followed expected ritualised French practices. Boasting lavish public showrooms as well as substantial workrooms, Melbourne's Sorelle (which opened in the early 1900s and ran until 1923), run by the Misses Clapp, may have been one of the earliest of such businesses in Australia with a consciously French tone.
- Ibid.
- Margaret Maynard, Fashioned from Penury, 124–5.
- Andrew Lemon, Success: The Charles Moore Story (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 1996), 23–4.
- Michael Bogle, Design in Australia (Sydney: Craftsman House and G+B Arts International, 1998), 9–12.
- Andrew Montana, The Art Movement in Australia: Design, Taste and Society 1875–1900 (Carlton, Vic.: Miegunyah Press, 2000), xv.
- Suzanne Spunner, ‘Remembrances of Things Past and Waists Lost: From Paris to Melbourne (Bendigo)’, Art Monthly Australia 226, December 2009-February 2010, 20. This article gives, perhaps unconsciously, a comprehensive overview of the orthodox vision of a legendary golden age of Australian haute couture in the late 1940s and ‘50s, including Mary Horden and the French fashion parades of the 1940s, the early showings of Dior's New Look in Australia, designs by Lillian Wightman, Hall Ludlow, Bambi and Athol Smith, Helmet Newtown, and George and Mirka Mora, as well as modern representatives, Colette Dinnigan and Martin Grant. In comparison with the breadth of surviving evidence that stretches back far beyond the 1950s, the legend of Australia's golden era of couture is like many of the legendary cultural constructs of the post-war era: narrow, self-justifying, and edited.
- Robert O'Byrne, Style City: How London Became a Fashion Capital (London: Frances Lincoln, 2009); Alistair O'Neill, London: After a Fashion (London: Reaktion, 2007); Christopher Breward, Edwina Ehrman, and Caroline Evans, The London Look: Fashion from Street to Catwalk (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004); Christopher Breward, David Gilbert, and Jenny Lister, Swinging Sixties: Fashion in London and Beyond 1955–1970 (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2006).
- Christopher Breward and David Gilbert, eds., Fashion's World Cities (Oxford: Berg, 2006).
- Additionally, an increasing number of publications examine the relationship between fashion and architecture and reinforce this link between urban image and dress, which is becoming a key area of research and discussion at present. See, for example, Ruth Hanisch, Absolutely Fabulous!: Architecture for Fashion (London: Prestel, 2006); Brooke Hodge, Skin + Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson, 2006); Bradley Quinn, The Fashion of Architecture (Oxford: Berg, 2003).
- Walter Benjamin, ‘Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, Perspecta 12, 1969, 165.
- Valerie Steele, ‘The Black Prince of Fashion’, in Paris Fashion (Oxford: Berg, 1998), 77–96. Here, Steele discusses Baudelaire's artistic and intellectual validation of fashion.
- Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (1863) (http://athena.wells.edu:6080/special/userwganis/ARTH270/Baudelaire.pdf).
- Asa Briggs, ‘Melbourne: A Victorian Community Overseas’, in Victorian Cities (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 277–310.
- Christopher Breward, ‘Sartorial Splendour: Clothing and Masculine Identities in the Imperial City 1860–1914’, in Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity, ed. Felix Driver and David Gilbert (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999), 238–53.
- 4 January 1890.
- For an overview of the presence of fashion in historic Australian art, see Juliette Peers, ‘The Practice of Australian Arf, In/Stead 1, 2005 (www.doubledialogues.com/in_stead/in_stead_iss01/peers.html).
- Brisbane Courier, 27 December 1866, 3.
- The Mercury, 1 May 1909, 4.
- ‘Women's World Lady Normans's reception’, Brisbane Courier, 6 July 1894, 6.
- Argus, 7 June 1941, 15.
- West Australian, 4 January 1893, 6.
- Ibid.
- One example is ‘Government House Cup Party of Lord and Lady Northcote’, H94.166/4.
- See, for example, ‘Cup Day Costumes’, Australasian Sketcher, 27 November 1875; or Anon, ‘The Cup Day: A Sketch on the Lawn’, Australasian Sketcher, 29 November 1873.
- See Nanette Carter, Savage Luxury: Modernist Design in Melbourne (Bulleen: Heide Museum of Modern Art, 2007).
- Ann Stephen, Philip Goad, and Andrew McNamara, eds., Modern Times: The Untold Story of Modernism in Australia (Carlton, Vic.: Miegunyah Press in association with Powerhouse Publishing, 2008).
- Nanette Carter, Savage Luxury, 75.
- Robert Holden, Cover Up: The Art of Magazine Covers in Australia (Rydalmere, NSW: Hodder and Stoughton, 1995).
- The Paris End: Photography, Fashion and Glamour, curated by Susan van Wyk, 3 June-1 October 2006.
- Michael Webber and Sally Weller, Refashioning the Ragtrade: Internationalising Australia's Textiles, Clothing and Footwear Industries (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2001), 15.
- Collingwood Historical Society, ‘Collingwood Plaques Project Former Denton Hat Mills’ (www.yarracity.vic.gov.au/rates/Arts%20&%20Culture/Plaque%20Denton.asp).
- Douglas James Amos, The Story of the Commonwealth Woollen Mills (Adelaide: E. J. McAlister, 1934).
- An annotated set of photographs of Borg wearing his racer-back used for the advertising campaigns is in the Powerhouse Museum collection, Sydney (Registration 95/232/1).
- Sue Best, ‘Foundations of Femininity: Berlei Corsets and the (Un)making of the Modern Body’, Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 1, 1991, 191–214.
- Henry Oliver Lancaster ‘Some Anthropometric Values of Women in Australia’, Medical Journal of Australia, 21 December 1957, 897–900.
- Kate Kennedy, ‘What Size Am I?: Decoding Women's Clothing Size’, Fashion Theory 13, no. 4, 2009, 511–30.
- Interestingly, the business was initially partly intended to be a form of practical, quasi-diversion therapy, rather than the foundation of a retail and manufacturing empire.
- See ‘Jones, Sir David Fletcher (1895–1977)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 14 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1996), 579–81.
- George Foletta, Woven Threads: A Family Story (Ivanhoe, Vic.: self published, 1975), 91.
- Ibid., 61.
- Stephen Crafti, ‘Gerard Herbsf (www.dia.org.au/content.cfm?news=35&id=102).
- See the Queensland Museum's website on Walker's design business (www.qm.qld.gov.au/features/walker/index.asp).
- Michael Marendy, ‘Walker, Janet (1850–1940)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography (http://adbonline.anu.edu.au/biogs/AS10476b.htm).
- As reported in Sydney Morning Herald, 14 June 1911, 13; Adelaide Advertiser, 7 February 1914, 18; and Brisbane Courier, 19 May 1914, 9.
- The Argus (Supplement: Week-End Magazine), 6 February 1937, 29.
- Alex Taylor, Perils of the Studio (North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2007).
- Sydney Morning Herald, 3 April 1941, 22.
- Richmond Guardian, 27 January 1917, cited in Shirley Joy, Oscar and Johanna Weigel: Proprietors of ‘Weigel's Journal of Fashions’ and Creators of Madame Weigel's Paper Dress Patterns (Sandringham, Vic.: self published, 2004), 49.
- Madame Weigel ‘Fifty Years Ago’, Madame Weigel's Journal of Fashion, 1 February 1930, 487.
- Ibid.
- Lawrie Carew with Dianne Masters, Behind Glass (Melbourne: School of Architecture and Design, RMIT, 2003), 11–2.
- In mid-twentieth-century Perth, for example, Ahearns and Boans represented two different communities, with their managing families respectively Catholic and Anglican. Counter to popular stereotype, the Anglican convert Henry Boan (1860–1941) was a keen investor in horse-racing and breeding.
- Stella Barber, Sydney Myer: A Life A Legacy (Prahran: Hardie Grant, 2006).
- Nicholas Brash, The Model Store 1885–1985 (Sydney: Weldon, 1985), 22.
- David Jones Archives, reproduced in Norma Martyn, The Look: Australian Women in Their Fashion (Stanmore, NSW: Cassell, 1976), 50.
- Ulrich Lehman, Tigersprung: Fashion in Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).
- This was not Proctor's only visual deployment of fashion as a female-inflected sign of passing historical epochs. Her watercolour Jupe Culotte (1911) contrasts the harem pants of radical pre-First World War fashion with mid-nineteenth-century crinolines. However, in her The Home cover, fashion is extended to be a metaphor beyond its own history.
Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art
Volume 10, 2009 - Issue 1: The Conference Issue