The Dress Diary

Secrets from a Victorian Woman's Wardrobe

De: Kate Strasdin

Narrado por: Karen Cass

In 1838, a young woman was given a diary on her wedding day. Collecting snippets of fabric from a range of garments—some her own, others donated by family and friends—she carefully annotated each one, creating a unique record of their lives. Her name was Mrs. Anne Sykes.

Nearly two hundred years later, the diary fell into the hands of Kate Strasdin, a fashion historian and museum curator. Using her expertise, Strasdin spent the next six years unraveling the secrets contained within the album's pages, and the lives of the people within. Her findings are remarkable. Piece by piece, she charts Anne's journey from the mills of Lancashire to the port of Singapore before tracing her return to England in later years. Fragments of cloth become windows into Victorian life: pirates in Borneo, the complicated etiquette of mourning, poisonous dyes, the British Empire in full swing, rioting over working conditions, and the terrible human cost of Britain's cotton industry. This is life writing that celebrates ordinary people: not the grandees of traditional written histories, but the hidden figures, the participants in everyday life. Through the evidence of waistcoats, ball gowns, and mourning outfits, Strasdin lays bare the whole of human experience in the most intimate of mediums: the clothes we choose to wear.

©2023 Kate Strasdin (P)2023 Tantor

Excellent!!

This book was phenomenal! I loved everything about it and will definitely be listening to it again!

Excellent and unique look at victorian womenals and fashion history

Really enjoyed everything about this book. Unique perspective of the victorian experience. Loved learning more about textiles and fashion.

A Fabulous Microhistory of Dress

I was intrigued by the story of this book, even though I'm not much of a fashion person. But I do love microhistories and a good story, which this fit the bill for, so this audiobook was my choice.

In Victorian England, a young woman named Anne began keeping a "dress diary" on her wedding day composed of snippets of cloth from friends, family, business associates of her husband's, acquaintances and others. It lasted over the course of a lifetime, showcasing fashion trends and traveling around the world as Anne followed her husband in his work in a shipping company in Malaysia, China and other countries before returning to England.

Kate Strasdin did a fabulous job of showing how even bits of cloth can tell us much about life in this time period: from living in colonial Singapore, to the factories of northern England where Anne and her husband came from and retirement in the south. But Strasdin also shows the dark sides of these enterprises, such as how cotton in Victorian England was a cost to both the people who worked in the factories and those who were forced to produce it in the United States. She also discusses the costs of colonization in Singapore, which you can see glimpses of in the diary but only if you look carefully at times. The pirate flag is the best example, but Strasdin's comment on the lack of indigenous cloth in the diary is also telling about what British colonizers chose to import and what they saw as fit to wear socially.

And Strasdin did this despite Anne not being always easy to find at times. Though eventually she realized who the owner of the diary was and was able to track her down in Lancashire, which then made it somewhat easier to follow her over the course of her life, other people who contributed cloth were not so easy to follow. If Anne did not provide context to why the item was given or when, Strasdin tried to put the pieces together but if a name was common it could be harder. Since Anne and her husband also moved a lot, names changed and people passed away too.

Karen Cass did a wonderful job reading this and Kate Strasdin created an interesting book that got me curious about fashion history, which I wasn't before. I'd love to listen to another like this and recommend it to a casual listener if you love a good history book!

Fascinating History

A very interesting diary, about women thru fabric and fashion. Enjoyed and would recommend it takes us away from our daily life and the life of another era of women’s lives.

Interesting and well-written!

Anyone that works with fabric, or has an interest in fabric, should read this book.
I loved how the personal life of the woman was intertwined with bits of history.