Threads and fleeces

Kate Macdonald on collecting books about fabrics, fashion and fashioning

Today’s Bibliomania is brought to you by Kate Macdonald of Handheld Press – a small press with an impressive line in rediscovering “forgotten fiction and lost authors, and biographies, letters and memoirs”. (I’m particularly taken with the Handheld editions of Inez Holden and John Llewelyn Rhys, whose works are relatively uncommon on the market in their original editions.) Many thanks to Kate for sharing these examples of books on her shelves; one of them, Patchwork by Claire Wilcox, also happens to be on mine, for a different reason: it won the Ackerley Prize, which I wrote about last week, in the first year I judged it.

Mary Cassatt - Knitting in the Library

I have a textiles/knitting/sewing/embroidery collection of books that has spread from those about merely frocks (as a child I used to trace the pictures from the Ladybird book of fashion and then colour them in) to art books featuring frocks (in my teens I used to trace the fabulous ruffled bustled dresses in Tissot paintings and then colour them in too), and then to books about sewing, knitting, embroidery and couture. But not weaving, spinning and dyeing: I leave those to my mother.

I prefer non-instructional books, the ones I can read at night for pleasure rather than poring over for instruction. (This, however, is an instructional book I love: the 1920s Patons’ knitting book my grandmother gave me.) Here are some that I still refuse to ditch whenever a culling of the books has to happen in our quite small house.

Kassia St Clair’s The Golden Thread is about the history of fabric in human society. The introduction grabbed me straight away, because when I first read this book I was writing a novel about the Greek Fates. Kassia begins her book with the idea of three women in a cave spinning, carding and weaving, as a multicultural metaphor for the progress of life. Each chapter is subdivided with quotes from poetry, folk song, plays, archives, about the subject she’s writing about, so although this is a hefty book, it’s well broken up to make the reading faster. I particularly like Chapter 4, about the Vikings’ knitted woollen sails, how sails were invented, how a sail has to be made, how the Viking women would have done the work over the winter, and how a knitted fabric can be made as tough as modern canvas.

I interviewed Esther Rutter online this month for Westminster Libraries, because I wanted to talk to her about This Golden Fleece, her history of knitting in Britain. This Golden Fleece is her exploration of the history of knitting by visiting different experts and places, and knitting something for each chapter. So we get a history of the knitting of several garments, the history behind the patterns, the slog of knitting through the long and wide boring bits, and the hard work of learning new techniques. One revelation that stayed with me was that knitted garments had, until the late nineteenth century, been traditionally knitted in the round, without the seams that catch and chafe on skin when wet. It was the application of couture practices, of sewing cut shapes of cloth into garments, to the construction of knitted garments, that fundamentally changed the way knitting was done for much of the twentieth century. Thankfully, knitting in the round has been returning to favour for some time.

Clare Hunter is a sewing historian and a community artist, exhibition curator and banner maker in Glasgow, where she runs community sewing projects. Threads of Life is terrific history, full of corners and obscurities matched with the obvious and the well-known, that aren’t well-known in their entirety. Chapter 2 is about the embroidery of Mary Queen of Scots, the history of embroidered cloths of different weights, from gauze ruffs to heavy furnishing fabrics, in late medieval Scotland and Europe, their function and purpose in different levels of society, their manufacture and their costs. Then she goes into Mary’s travelling wardrobe and considers how much needlework went into those garments, and what the quantity and quality of her clothing said about Mary’s status as a queen and her expectation for her then and future roles in politics and royalty. Where the evidence is available Clare gives an outline of what Mary wore on certain public or private occasions, the sewing she did herself while she was imprisoned, and the political and emotional messages she conveyed with embroidered gifts. I mean, that’s proper historical research, just from looking at some threads . . .

Claire Wilcox is a senior curator of fashion at the V&A and Professor in Fashion Curation at the London College of Fashion, and Patch Work is a memoir of her life interspersed with writing about the clothes that have shaped and clothed and troubled and delighted her. It’s quite self-consciously literary writing, a memoir, told in patches of her life. I think the ‘work’ in the title relates to the unavoidable fact that many of these pieces of memoir are therapeutic. The patches are framed in episodes of her work at the V&A in the fashion archives, looking at garments, considering their conservation, their storage, their construction, and their history: who wore them, and how they could be displayed in the museum. Every scrap of memoir is anchored to clothing or textiles: her grandmother’s way of washing towels, her mother’s skill with an iron, as she’d been taught how to goffer frills at school; the second-hand wedding dress Claire wore to a party; her first disastrous job in a haberdashery department where the ribbon wouldn’t lie flat.

Linda Grant’s The Thoughtful Dresser, also a memoir, was a surprise and a joy, about the ways that fashion and dressing create our places in the world. Her thesis is that clothes matter: they present our view of ourselves to the world, and she interviews designers and buyers on why and how they make and stock the clothes they sell, and for whom.  I really liked her pages on the history of the handbag and how its construction relates to history as well as technology.

I’ve kept James Laver’s Costume and Fashion: A concise history for years, because every time I was writing something learned about dress in a novel and was stuck for contextual corroboration, Laver had the answer, and sometimes also an illustration to show what he was talking about. Most recently he has been invaluable for me on spats (I was writing about Bertie Wooster): he’s just so good on obscure and overlooked garments.

Catherine Horwood’s Keeping Up Appearances: Fashion and class between the wars, is another excellent modern history of fashion with masses of pictures. This is particularly good for its use of letters and domestic memoir, evidence from real life how people wore their clothes and where they bought them. This is fashion history at the level of adverts for Liberty dresses and for London department stores, and gives more evidence for leisure wear history than I had seen before.

Nicholas Storey’s History of Men’s Fashion: What the well-dressed man is wearing was also bought for that Wooster writing, as I was struggling to find references to the practice of wearing a slip (a fake lining) as part of a waistcoat, and why it was considered a bit nouveau in the 1930s. Storey didn’t give the answer, but he helped with the context. The King wears one now, of course, and his dress sense is widely regarded as being excellent, so that’s another question to answer: when and how do naff styles become haute? (You can download a version of that 2015 Wooster chapter, ‘Problematic menswear’, here.)

I have a lovely catalogue from the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1995, In Style: Celebrating fifty years of the Costume Institute, which has the most gorgeous close-up photography of seventeenth-century coat buttonholes and Victorian sleeve tassels. The whitework embroidery is exquisite, showing exactly how transparent Jane Austen’s white ballgowns might have been without petticoats.

While living abroad I went back to London specially to the V&A’s exhibition The Golden Age of Couture: Paris and London 1947–57, and probably spent the entire day in the galleries. I bought the heavy catalogue (edited by Claire Wilcox!) to lug home in triumph, and was rather embarrassed, and touched, that a friend had also bought me a copy when he went to the exhibition a week later. (He kept it for himself.) This is my go-to book to mug up on the designers of the period and their aesthetics: the shapes, colours, textures and fastening details that fascinate me. And the photo of Jacques Fath with his shirt open to the navel in 1947 is mesmerising.

I talk about some of these books for Westminster Libraries online on Wednesday February 22 (now 100% booked up, but there is a waiting list), and on 16^th April 2024.

And finally, in a serendipitous slide into literature, I was browsing in the craft section of a Bridport second-hand bookshop last winter, and spotted a slim red spine saying Tatting. Thinking that tatting was a craft that I knew nothing about and should do, I pulled it out, and found a mis-shelved novel by an author I knew nothing about, Faith Compton Mackenzie. The novel uses tatting as a metaphor for creating confusion and order out of knitted thread, the confusion being created in onlookers who know nothing about handwork, and the order being observed with approval by those who can recognise the skill. The novel is terrific, about a destitute Wildean artist and an eccentric High Anglican vicar in a Cornish parish. As I’m a publisher specializing in the recovery of forgotten women writers and outstanding lost stories, we’re republishing Tatting in June.