This year marks 25 years since the first graduation of students on the History of Design programme run by the Royal College of Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum. On this blog, we announce the MA dissertations of the Class of 2009, with subjects covering design and the decorative arts from 1400 to the present.
As always, thematic connections emerge across a group, sometimes quite unexpectedly. Here, for instance, we have a timely interest in design and nature, with the topics on animals and the twentieth-century interior, shopping for minerals and the Sublime in the early-19th century, and Smithfield and butchery in Hanoverian London. Other studies develop the subject of spectacle and experience, exploring the invented traditions of historical re-enactment in late-19th and 20th-century Britain, the transfixed mobility of the Eiffel tower and Ferris wheel, the appropriation of the Orient in the performance of female sexuality, and the design of the Hollywood backlot.
Fashion and textiles remain an important focus within the Course and this year, themes span women’s play-clothes in mid-20th century California, power dressing and corporate femininity of 1980s Britain and the 1920s exclusive silk-design company Cryséde. Design History is well-equipped to interrogate the relationships between people, objects and spaces: here, we have bricolage in late 1970s-80s London and the case of electromagnetic radiation in the post-war British home. From the designer’s perspective, the aesthetic ideals and political philosophy of Walter Crane are considered. Miya Itabashi, a PhD candidate, explored the impact of Japanese printmaking techniques within the phenomenon of Japonisme of late-19th and early-20th century Britain.
The impact of World War 2 on design is the subject of two studies, the consumption of luxury goods in war-time London and the formation of the British holiday camp in this period. Last, but certainly not least, two works explore the place of material culture within religion, in early-English Catholic domestic settings, and through the artisanship of Devonshire parish churches.
It is exciting that such a strong group of dissertations should appear in this very special year for the Course. This new research prepares a new generation of graduates to extend the boundaries of our evolving discipline and prepare the foundations for future scholarship.
We wish them every success!
May 2009
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