Fashioning London: Clothing and the Modern Metropolis

Abstract

This monograph aimed to reposition London’s status as a fashion city, moving away from celebratory accounts that have emphasized its familiar role as a centre for traditional crafts (Savile Row) and avant-gardism (Central Saint Martins) towards a more historically-rooted and geographically-aware examination of local clothing cultures, and their impact on the development of global fashion and the role played by the fabric of the city and its inhabitants in forming a shifting sense of London style. It also shows how the production and consumption of clothing in the city has maintained a close relationship with London’s economic fortunes, cultural status and demographic character. Most importantly, by looking towards the methods employed by cultural geographers, literary theorists and sociologists of the ‘everyday’ the book fore-grounded fashion as a memorializing practice which has the potential to underpin conceptions of space and time as vividly as the built environment or the social, economic and cultural infrastructures through which cities have commonly been read. As a form of historical writing the book deliberately experimented with a poetic treatment of the fragmentary evidence provided by surviving dress, autobiographical accounts, journalism, trade ephemera and street photography to reflect the subjective, romantic and fragile nature of the subject-matter.

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