Textile Artist and Dress Historian Talks.

Hannah Lamb is a textile artist, lecturer and author, based at her home studio in Bingley, West Yorkshire. She works with a range of textile processes, including stitch, print and fabric manipulation, creating textile artworks from an intimate scale to larger installation works. An interest in textile archives and local textile industry has led to recent research projects and exhibitions with Salts Mill, Bradford Textile Archive, Sunny Bank Mills, 509 Arts and The Brontë Parsonage Museum. Hannah gained a BA (Hons.) Embroidery (2001) and MA Textiles (2010) from Manchester Metropolitan University. She has lectured in textiles at Bradford School of Art (Bradford College) since 2004, where she is currently Programme Leader for the Foundation Degree and BA (Hons) Textiles Practice. Hannah exhibits nationally and is an exhibiting member of the 62 Group of Textile Artists. Hannah's first solo book, Poetic Cloth; Creating Meaning in Textile Art, was published by Batsford in 2019 and she is currently writing her second book, which will focus on textile art inspired by historical textiles.

Abigail’s research focuses on the introduction of standard sizing systems within the new fashion industry of tailoring for women in Britain circa 1870-1930; and interprets to what extent the materiality of these systems changed a developing market of middle-class women consumers’ experiences of their bodies within the context of modernity. She is also co-founder of Worn Workshop, which produces creative projects about people’s relationships with their clothes to challenge contemporary fashion through new approaches. Here’s how Abigail describes her talk: ‘From the turn of the twentieth century a modern ‘thin ideal’ proliferated in Britain, and especially within the mass printed imagery of the women’s fashion industry. As such, research on this fashion/body standard has focused primarily on visual sources but, in this talk, I consider these alongside other, previously unresearched, technical and sartorial case studies as I investigate the research question: to what extent did fashion’s thinning ideal silhouette change the shape and size of real women’s bodies? From the late nineteenthcentury fashion retailers’ catalogues not only sketched or photographed garments on ever slimmer silhouettes but also sold these in new ‘stock sizes’. My research compares these with the sizes published in manufacturers’ trade literature and the fit of extant size-labelled garments worn by consumers. Through this new source material and methodology, I show how the developing proportions of garment sizes actually got bigger as those of not just printed ‘figures’ but also dressed bodies apparently got thinner. In doing so, I explore what sizing up the thin ideal can reveal about women’s experiences of fitting into this newly fashionable standard size.’ Abigail’s research brings together her multidisciplinary knowledge, skills and experience in fashion, developed through her background in industry, heritage and education. She is currently a University of Glasgow Library Visiting Research Fellow (2024), Wolfson Foundation Scholar and PhD candidate at the University of York, where her ongoing research project is titled: Sizing Women’s Garments and Bodes: The Fashion Industry’s Production of the Modern Middle-class Consumer in Britain circa 1870 to 1930.

Host or Publisher The Northern Society of Costume and Textiles