Beastly Encounters with Moderns: Animals, Architecture & Interiors, c.1920–1939 by Catherine Gregg

‘A filthy bloody swine of an animal? But what animal? An animal in the house?’ – Collette, The Cat, 1933

The significance of the animal in the 1920s and 1930s, as a metaphorical construction, a designed object, and an animate inhabitant of designed space, is the mainstay of this study. Animal beings are potent instruments in the articulation of human identities and social discourses; human-animal relationships are implicated in cultural constructions of modernity. For the design historian, however, the animal strays into new territory. Corporeally shaped by human breeders, primped and preened by human owners, animals are revealed as designed objects, yet living beings. Produced by the designed spaces they animate, animal beings perform the construction of modernity particular to those spaces, as living embodiments of fashion and luxury, for example, or as experimental bodies, articulating the reforming principles of modernist architecture. However, as living objects, animals have the capacity, and the disruptive agency, to subvert human design. Moreover, as a metaphorical construction the animal is loaded with human signification; invoked as a symbol of instinctual life, primitive desire or irrationality, the animal illuminates human states of mind, behaviour and aesthetics.  Thus, animal materials and animal beings are engaged in a complex network of human cultural expression. Focussing on the animal in the modern interior, this dissertation establishes a dialogue traversing Surrealism and Modernism, ornament and utility, sentiment and science. What happened to the modern home when the animal crossed the threshold?

catherine.gregg@network.rca.ac.uk

Widening the Boundaries of the Spectacular: Constructing and Consuming the Female Gymnast and the Salome Dancer in Fin de Siècle Britain by Rachael Smith

Drawing upon understudied collections of circus and theatre ephemera, Rachael’s work explores the ways in which female perfomers utilised objects to cultivate alternative, often overtly erotic, performance selves before proceeding to examine the movement of sexualised images of female perfomers into the home via goods produced specifically for women and children.

rachael.smith@network.rca.ac.uk

Power Dressing and Corporate Femininity in 1980s Britain: Stephanie Benjamin

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.