Cheryl Roberts

Symposium The Design of History and the History of Design

A symposium for UAL’s Design History research community

The Design of History and the History of Design is a one-day symposium that maps research into, through or at the boundaries of design history at UAL. While design history may underpin our teaching across different disciplines, research in design history across UAL is somewhat hidden. This symposium aims to share and make visible the work of researchers (staff and students) at all career stages across all UAL colleges.

Exploring the intersections of historical narrative and design practice, it examines how history is constructed, represented, and mediated through design, and how the discipline of design itself is shaped by its evolving historiography.

The symposium will serve as the starting point for a Design Histories Research Network at UAL, bringing together researchers from across the university. It also lays the foundation for a welcoming research community in design history, with potential for ongoing events, collaboration, publications, and curriculum development.

If you have any questions or would like to be involved in future activities, please get in touch with the convenors:

Rujana Rebernjak
r.rebernjak@lcc.arts.ac.uk

Tai Cossich
t.cossich@lcc.arts.ac.uk

Please also sign up for the UAL Design Histories Newsletter

PROGRAMME

Narratives of Fur and Empires of Fashion Materialities

In London’s Hammersmith Market, 1935, amongst the multifaceted sellers of a discordance of goods, James Dear was skinning rabbits with astonishing rapidity. He began skinning them at 8 o’clock and went on all day only stopping to attend to customers. When asked what happened to the skins he replied, 'we dry ‘em and sell ‘em to a firm that cure ‘em and make ‘em into fur [stoles], coats and bowler hats' (Benedetta 1936, p. 87). Seductive, sensual, and somatic, fur was historically coveted as the most highly prized fashion adornment, a sign of style and status. Found in wardrobes of the fashion hungry, these neatly arranged carcasses were transformed through a system of material manipulation from empty bodies to luxurious adornment. In the street market, pelts of fox, mink, ermine, musquash, monkey, rabbit, mole and cat were to be found nestled amongst the vegetable stalls and street bakeries. Dismembered bodies hanging from the stall canopy or uniformly lining the drying racks in the surrounding back street furriers. Lifeless cadavers teeming with untold narratives. Resourceful butchers such as James Dear would pare rabbits, separating the flesh for eating and the fur for curing, in a process that Christopher Schmidt refers to as 'the messy […] between the aesthetic and the overflow form' (2014, p. xii).

Fashion fur creates a reaction on many levels—the sadistic, grotesque, fetish, fantasy, luxury, practical, environmental, social, economic—each dependent on the current cultural rationale. However, human affect and interaction with design, historical practices of repurposing the materials of human and animal waste, and the processes of creativity can help us to understand the often-conflicting meanings in the contemporary moment. This paper will untangle the murky histories of fashionable fur fuelled by tensions between objects and subjects to consider how these garments were and continue to be reflections of empire, ethics, class, race, fashion literacy, material knowledge and possibility. By delinking historical tropes, cultural and moral positions I will consider how resourceful practices of the past could inform future sustainable design thinking.

References

Benedetta, Mary (1936). The Street Markets of London. London: John Miles
Schmidt, Christopher. (2014). The Poetics of Waste. London: Palgrave Macmillan

— Cheryl Roberts

Dr Cheryl Roberts is a cultural and design historian whose research focuses on the material culture of objects, in particular the consumption of dress and textiles, and how they acquire meaning through their relationship with specific acts in historical and cultural contexts. Her recently published monograph, Consuming Mass Fashion in 1930s England: Design, Manufacture and Retailing for Young Working-class Women (London: Palgrave Macmillan) and book chapters ‘Synergy and Dissonance of the Senses: Negotiating Fashion through Second-hand Dealing, Seconds Trading, Jumble Sales and Street Markets’ in Serena Dyer (ed). Shopping and the Senses: A Sensory History of Retail and Consumption since 1700 (London: Palgrave Macmillan), and ‘Furland: Global Fur and Empires of Fashion Materialities’ in Alex Burchmore (ed.) Material Selves: Object Biographies and Identities in Motion (London: Bloomsbury) are the historical starting point for her current research into the possibilities of human and animal waste that could inform our sustainable present and future fashion design thinking, education and industry.