Austerity and rationing traditionally characterise the home-front during World War Two. For a rich, cosmopolitan elite, however, the war meant a different home-front, one offering a continuation of a lifestyle built on luxury in which such colourful indulgences as diamond brooches, leather gas-mask cases, couture dresses, and fine dining survived.
neil.taylor@network.rca.ac.uk
Cryséde produced handmade woodblock printed textiles in Cornwall in the 1920s and 1930s. Jeanie’s work attempts to situate Cryséde within contemporary discourses surrounding production, retail and consumption. Alec Walker’s designs are discussed in relation to the production of a feminine conservative modernity, the blending of tradition and modernity that is evident in the playful aesthetic of the inter-war years that appealed broadly to the middle-class and middle-brow. If craft creates a ‘third space’ between fine art and design, according to contemporaneous debates, with all spaces separate and opposing the commercial or mass-produced, Walker’s textiles fall into an undefined void somewhere in between. An interstitial space, traversing and transgressing the borders of definition, Cryséde simultaneously occupied contradictory positions; large-scale craft production; hand-made yet flawless; industrial knowledge into traditional production methods; commercial with a painterly exclusivity.
jeanie.sinclair@network.rca.ac.uk
Play-clothes embodied the aspirations of the ‘good’ life promoted by the media and booster industries as an idealised conceptualisation of the Southern California leisured, sun-laden and outdoor lifestyle. Play-clothes were a metaphor for the California dream. Carly’s work situates play-clothes in three different locales; the beach, backyard and beyond California.
carly.eck@network.rca.ac.uk
Stephanie’s work explores the meanings invested in corporate femininity and practices of “dressing for success” in late twentieth-century Britain. The focus presents power dressing as distinct from the American context popularized in film and television drama and introduces the particularities inherent in a local case study. The project situates power dressing as a technique manipulated by “real” women working in the corporate sector, a mediated rhetoric of executive fashionability, and an ideological strategy implemented by organizations such as British Airways and Midland Bank Group to regulate the working body. Highlighting the dynamics of work clothing allows the various potentialities invested in corporate gender roles, and the ways in which those roles were manifested in contemporary design and culture, to be revealed. Power dressing and corporate femininity in this dissertation are not equated with synthetic glamour, but emerge as specific political, social, and economic discourses related to frameworks of aspiration, interpretation, and control.
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