The Dress Detective is the first practical guide to analysing fashion objects, clearly demonstrating how their close analysis can enhance and enrich interdisciplinary research. This accessible book provides readers with the tools to uncover the hidden stories in garments, setting out a carefully developed research methodology specific to dress, and providing easy to use checklists that guide the reader through the process. Beautifully illustrated, the book contains seven case studies of fashionable Western garments - ranging from an 1820s coat to a 2004 Kenzo jacket - that articulate the methodological framework for the process, illustrate the use of the checklists, and show how evidence from the garment itself can be used to corroborate theories of dress or fashion. This book outlines a skillset that has, until now, typically been passed on informally. Written in plain language, this book will give any budding fashion historian, curator or researcher the knowledge and confidence to analyse the material in front of them effectively.

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Dress and fashion are central to our understanding of art. From the stylization of the body to subtle textile embellishments and richly symbolic colors, dress tells a story and provides clues as to the cultural beliefs of the time in which artworks were produced. This concise and accessible book provides a step-by-step guide to analysing dress in art, including paintings, photographs, drawings and art installations.. The first section of the book includes an introduction to visual analysis and explains how to 'read' fashion and dress in an artwork using the checklists. The second section offers case studies which demonstrate how artworks can be analysed from the point of view of key themes including status and identity, modernity, ideals of beauty, gender, race, globalization and politics. The book includes iconic as well as lesser known works of art, including work by Elisabeth Vigée le Brun, Thomas Gainsborough, James Jacques Tissot, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, Yinka Shonibare, Mickalene Thomas, Kent Monkman and many others.. Reading Fashion in Art is the perfect text for students of fashion coming to art history for the first time as well as art history students studying dress in art and will be an essential handbook for any gallery visitor. The step-by-step methodology helps the reader learn to look at any work of art that includes the dressed or undressed body and confidently develop a critical analysis of what they see.

Clothing is often cherished long after memories have begun to fade and the inevitable process of decay have begun. Such is the case with the silk wedding dress and bridal veil worn by Evelyn Normand Wilkie (1902-1969) in her 1927 wedding to Douglas Howard in Nova Scotia, Canada. Her homemade dress has now yellowed and the silk is shattered and given its poor condition the dress is an unlikely candidate for acceptance into a museum or study collection. This object biography probes the thingly presence of Wilkie's wedding dress as an object and as the source of creative inspiration for the drawings of artist Sarah Casey that became the focus of a 2019 exhibition at Ryerson University in Toronto.

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