Log in
`Threads of Feeling', a major exhibition of the textile tokens left with abandoned infants at the London Foundling Hospital in the mid-eighteenth century, was curated and based on original research by Professor John Styles. Displayed at the London Foundling Museum in 2010-11, it received 19,132 visitors in six months. A permanent online presence from 2011 extended its reach, and when it travelled to the USA in 2013, a further 46,619 people saw it over two months. Its public popularity, enthusiastic critical reception and role in inspiring textile practitioners in particular have all ensured significant public awareness of this previously little known aspect of social history.
This case study covers the work of five researchers at University of the Arts London (UAL), who have played a role in establishing a field of academically rigorous fashion research with a new relevance for industry and society. This has been achieved through innovative curatorial practices, publications, collaboration with practitioners, and interaction with broadcast, print and new media. The work of this group of academics has influenced the way fashion is presented and communicated within the museum, gallery and publishing sector, and in the fashion industry itself, both nationally and internationally.
`Selling Consumption' explored and made widely available a special collection of French and other continental trade cards held at Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire. Built in 1874 to display the Rothschild family's outstanding collection of art treasures, Waddesdon was bequeathed to the National Trust in 1957. This innovative and collaborative Leverhulme Trust funded project examined how advertising contributed to the creation of new consumer markets. Warwick researchers highlighted the importance of the underused collection and rendered visible a collection that was previously invisible, first at Waddesdon and then to wider publics. The research expertise and knowledge of Warwick scholars shaped the digitisation and online-cataloguing of the French trade card collection, generating a change in future conservation and cataloguing practices at Waddesdon, and the resulting database greatly increased the accessibility of this source to a general audience. The research findings underpinned Waddesdon's 2008 exhibition `All that Glitters: Shopping in Eighteenth-Century Paris', which raised public awareness of eighteenth-century advertising and its role in the creation of modern consumer culture.
Angela McRobbie, Professor of Communications at Goldsmiths since 1998, is an expert on urban fashion start-ups. Her research chimes with government interest in self-employment among `young creatives'. It has shaped policy and thinking at the DCMS and London Fashion Week, and the Centre for Fashion Enterprise in East London. She has played a direct role in the development of start-ups in Germany, Austria and Italy across the full range of creative industries. Many of her now classic articles are key references in policy debate, and her original work has `handbook status' for young independent fashion designers. She has shaped thinking on newcomers and start-ups in the context of high youth unemployment across Europe, on the rise of 'new fashion cities' and on urban cultural policies including Fashion Weeks.
Dr Paul Chirico's research has directly shaped the work of the John Clare Trust. Dr Chirico has played a leading role in the work of the Trust, which he founded in 2004 with a view to the purchase of the poet's birthplace in Helpston, near Peterborough. Through the John Clare Cottage and the work of the Trust on which it depends, he has since 2008 achieved direct impact on the conservation, preservation and understanding of culture. He has had an impact on education through the materials he has developed for visitors to the Cottage, both school parties and the general public.
Through the establishing of a UNESCO Cultural Route, the Evliya Çelebi Way, Donna Landry's research has influenced cultural policymakers in Turkey, created new opportunities for tourism, promoted awareness of Ottoman and equestrian history internationally, and benefitted cultural providers through collaborations. In 2009 Landry and her research team re-enacted for 40 days the 1671 horseback journey undertaken by the celebrated Ottoman travel-writer Evliya Çelebi en route to Mecca. The team attracted media coverage and built links with local communities. Landry has since collaborated in developing the Way and otherwise promoting Ottoman history and horseback travel as resources capable of delivering economic and heritage benefits to Turkey.
Queen Mary's research in Renaissance Studies has informed curatorial practice at cultural institutions in the UK and abroad, including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Cini Foundation in Venice, producing displays that have reflected new conceptual approaches to the Renaissance and that have captured the imagination of large, general audiences. Their success was due, in part, to the close synergies between curators and Queen Mary scholars, including shared PhD student supervision through the AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award scheme and through co-curation. Novel research ideas influenced the conceptualisation and approach to exhibits on Renaissance topics, manifested in new ways of presenting images and objects and their accompanying interpretative materials, such as catalogues, wall texts, events, and engagement with the media.
Professor Sinclair's project on `Wrongdoing in Spain 1800-1936' explores the difference between cultural representations of wrongdoing and their underlying realities, and includes the digitization and cataloguing of c4500 items of popular Spanish material held at the University Library, Cambridge (UL), and the British Library (BL). This contributes significantly to the conservation, stewardship, and enhanced accessibility of this ephemeral material, increasingly valued and recognized as important in Spain as part of its social history and heritage. Digitization also makes this fragile material available to support teaching. An exhibition of this material and comparable material in English runs at the UL, Cambridge April — December 2013, strongly supported by a virtual exhibition. Public engagement events extend the understanding of the relevance of this material to modern Britain.
In expanding our understanding of how Henry VIII used clothes to fashion his image, this research has had a cultural impact nationally and internationally, while producing economic benefits for the British heritage industry and Hampton Court Palace in particular. It has helped to alter the practices of curators, designers, costume interpreters, and education officers in historic houses and beyond. Key outcomes were published to coincide with the 500th anniversary of Henry VIII's accession, thus benefiting from and contributing to, the large-scale public interest in the Tudors.