Fashion writing: Fashioning identities

During the 1980s and 90s I turned my personal fascination with appearances into a career as an academic - researching, writing and talking about how we use clothes to fashion our identities.

My ground breaking work at the Courtauld Institute and Middlesex University combined fashion theory with a detailed documentation and analysis of subjective experiences and appearances, to reveal the lived realities and motivations behind the way we present ourselves to the world.

Back then at the start of my independent life, I investigated the experiences of other older women to find out more about myself. And now that I’ve got a lifetime of my own experiences to draw on, these academic studies are the foundation for my current creative exploration of how we imagine, fashion and inhabit our individual sense of self.

Black and white studio photograph of two young fashionable-looking white women dressed in early 20th-century riding clothes posing confidently together. One has a skirt on and the other wears riding breeches.

Teddie Gerard and Doddy Durand, 1914. Bassano (NPG x33206)

Black-and-white studio photograph of Princess Sudhira, an Indian woman wearing fashionable early 20th-century European evening dress of white net, seated elegantly on a bench looking directly at us.

Princess Sudhira of Cooch Behar. Bassano (NPG x33317)

Black-and-white photograph of two suffragettes, middle-aged white women in long white dresses and wide-brimmed hats, holding flower staffs and standing outside with other women behind them.

Suffragettes Lena Ashwell and Gertrude Elliott, 1911 (LSE Library)

Black-and-white studio photograph of Naomi Jacob, a middle-aged white woman in a man’s suit and tie with short dark wavy hair, holding a monocle.

Naomi Jacob, writer and actress, 1939. Bassano (NPG x27066)

The Lesbian Dandy

The role of dress and appearance in the construction of lesbian identities, Britain 1918–1939

MPhil thesis 1995

Portrait of Una Troubridge, a white woman with bobbed dark hair wearing a dinner jacket and monocle standing beside two dachshunds, painted in a bold stylized manner with muted colours and a plain background.

Lady Troubridge by Romaine Brooks, 1924 (Smithsonian CC)

The Lesbian Dandy explores the role of dress and appearance in the construction of lesbian identities through detailed documentation and analysis of eight self-identified lesbians living in Britain during the inter-war period. It formulates a new approach to the documentation and analysis of the role of self-presentation in the construction of subjective identity, whilst also challenging many existing assumptions surrounding the development of a lesbian identity and subculture in Britain during the inter-war period.

Excerpt:
This thesis suggests that the lesbian may be likened to the dandy, in that she has ‘shown herself in peculiar guise’, in order that ‘you would recognise her existence’. Indeed it proposes that for the subjects of this investigation, the construction of an appearance which was visibly different to that of heterosexual women played a fundamental part in the fashioning of a lesbian identity, making clothes as integral to the existence of the lesbian as they were to the existence of the dandy.
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Fashion in Photographs 1900-1920

In association with The National Portrait Gallery and with contributions from Caroline Aish.

Batsford 1992.

Book cover titled Fashion in Photographs 1900–1920 by Katrina Rolley featuring a vintage photograph of two young fashionable-looking white women dressed in early 20th-century riding clothes.

Fashion in Photographs 1900–1920 highlights how social changes including the suffrage movement, the First World War, shifting class structures and the movement of people influenced fashion. Rather than focusing solely on elite or designer fashion, the book provides a visual record of how styles were worn in real life and demonstrates how fashion both reflected and shaped the identities and aspirations of individuals during a time of major cultural transformation.

Excerpt:
Whilst few of the people in these photographs were ordinary in one sense, few were famous primarily for their looks or clothes. These images are about personality as much as appearance, but the way the two work together and are mutual reinforcing helps suggest how all of us manipulate our self-presentation and construct our public persona. In this area the diversity of the collection is surprising. It contains images of people of all ages, classes and occupations and from many different parts of the world all of whom - consciously or unconsciously - use their dress and appearance to express and communicate aspects of their identity. Approaching dress in this way, through an interest in and understanding of the individual wearer, can help us appreciate both the personal and the public aspects of the language of clothes.

Essays

(Ad)dressing the Dyke: Lesbian looks and lesbians looking

Outlooks: Lesbian and gay sexualities and visual cultures, Ed. Horne and Lewis, Routledge 1996

Book cover of Outlooks: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities and Visual Cultures, edited by Peter Horne and Reina Lewis featuring abstract, painted figures in red and pink tones.

Written in conjunction with Reina Lewis, (Ad)dressing the dyke approaches the lesbian gaze from a variety of angles: how the fashion magazine functions as a mainstream space in which a plurality of possible deviant sexual positionings can be expressed / explored; theories of narcissism and female visual pleasure; and the specifically lesbian pleasures offered by a series of mainstream fashion images.

Excerpt:
This article stemmed from our realisation that a lifetime’s commitment to reading fashion magazines was neither a solitary nor an un-lesbian activity. Nor only were lots of other lesbians doing it, but we all seemed to like the same spreads. A straw poll of who had cut out what to stick on or in which wall / desk / wallet revealed a commonality of visual pleasures. This lead us to explore what it was about these particular images which attracted lesbian viewers.
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The Treatment of Homosexuality and The Well of Loneliness

Writing and Censorship in Britain, Ed. Hyland and Sammells, Routledge 1992

Black-and-white studio photograph of Radclyffe Hall, a middle-aged white woman with short hair, wearing a suit and bow tie, gazing thoughtfully at us with one hand resting on her face and the other holding a monocle.

Radclyffe Hall, 1932. Howard Coster (NPG x10422)

This essay analyses the many different forms of censorship surrounding Radclyffe Hall's novel The Well of Loneliness (1928), with its ground breaking and controversial depiction of female homosexuality. It explores how different types of censorship are central to the novel itself together with the outcry that led to the book being banned shortly after it was published. And references more contemporary concerns about how lesbians could and should be represented.

Excerpt:
Censorship remains central to ‘the homosexual experience’, as censorship has remained central to the biography of The Well: current concerns around ‘positive images’ have resulted in Hall and her novel being censored as oppressive by the very community they sought to defend. However, for those who read the novel as Hall wrote it - from the heart - and who hear its emotional as well as its theoretical discourse, the book remains a resonant evocation of survival within a censoring, censorious culture.
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Love, Desire and the Pursuit of the Whole: Dress and the lesbian couple

Chic Thrills, Ed. Ash and Wilson, Pandora 1992

Book cover of Chic Thrills: A Fashion Reader edited by Juliet Ash and Elizabeth Wilson featuring a close-up of a person wearing a white T-shirt with bold black text reading Chic Thrills.

This essay argues that for lesbian couples dress is a complex form of communication expressing intimacy, shared identity and individual desires. It explores how lesbian couples have used clothes and appearance to signal their connection to each other and their difference from heterosexual norms, challenging and subverting traditional gender expressions and societal expectations around love and desire.

Excerpt:
Once gender was freed from the body endless possibilities came into play. A lesbian couple’s bodies might be the same sex, but what gender were they? Masculine? Feminine? Or a combination of the two? And if so in what proportions? As Joan Nestle puts it: ‘When we broke gender lines in the 1950s, we fell off the biologically charted maps’. How else was a woman recognisable as a lesbian except through her body, her clothes, and the dialogue between the two? ‘I loved my lover [Nestle writes] for how she stood as well as for what she did. Dress was a part of it: the erotic signal of her hair at the nape of her neck, touching the shirt collar; how she held a cigarette; the symbolic pinky ring flashing as she waved her hand.’

Articles and reviews

The Lafayette Collection at the National Portrait Gallery Archive

Costume, Volume 29, 1995

Printed page with a black-and-white photo of Olive Sylvia, Baroness Inverclyde, in an elegant 1926 wedding gown with a long train and veil, standing in a formal room.

The article highlights the significance of the National Portrait Gallery’s Lafayette photographic archive as a valuable resource for researchers studying early 20th century fashion.

Excerpt:
These contemporary prints - unlike the less distinct images surviving in the illustrated magazines and papers - enable the researcher to perceive the extent of the retouching necessary to obtain the smooth, unblemished complexions, immaculate hair and svelte figures of the published images; for example, it is interesting to note how many of the busts of the female sitters of the 1920s were retouched in order to make them appear smaller, just as so many women’s waists had been similarly artificially diminished during the pre-war period.

Review of Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and cultural anxiety

Feminist Review, Spring 1993

Cover of Feminist Review No. 43, Spring 1993, featuring bold block colours and text patterns with words including feminism, pornography, the veil, menopause and disability.

A critical examination of Marjorie Garber's book Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and cultural anxiety, Routledge 1992.

Excerpt:
The book is structured around Garber’s theoretical premise that the transvestite acts as an indication of ‘category crisis, disrupting and calling attention to cultural, social, or aesthetic dissonances’. Ultimately, she asserts, ‘transvestism is a space of possibility structuring and confounding culture: the disruptive element that intervenes, not just a category crisis of male and female, but the crisis of category itself’. Given the book’s theoretical motivation, Garber reasonably disavows any attempt ‘to produce a seamless narrative of the development of the transvestite figure’. Rather, Vested Interests utilises an undeniably fascinating miscellany of sources - the plays of Shakespeare, Madonna’s pop videos, the film Tootsie, or transvestite / transsexual self-help manuals - with Garber ranging from one to another in support of her argument.

The Lesbian Sixth Sense: Dress as an expression and communication of lesbian identity

Feminist Arts News, Summer 1990

Cover of Feminist Arts News titled The Lesbian Issue, featuring a black-and-white illustration of different types of women and topics like The lesbian sixth sense and The pretended family album.

This article explores how clothing functions as a vital medium for expressing and signalling lesbian identity. It underscores the importance of fashion as a powerful tool for creating and communicating identities within the lesbian community and shows how clothing choices can serve as both personal and collective expressions of lesbian existence and resistance.

Excerpt:
Some months ago, whilst looking through photographs in the National Portrait Gallery’s archive, I came across an image, dating from 1914, titled ‘Miss Teddy Gerard and Miss Doddy Durand’. Although I knew nothing about either of the women, I felt certain that Teddy Gerard and Doddy Durand were lesbians. This is not an unusual experience. Most lesbians indulge in ‘dyke spotting’, a pastime made easier by the existence of certain symbols - the labyris, double women’s symbol or black triangle - designed specifically to communicate the wearer’s sexual identity to an audience who are ‘in the know’. But even without such unequivocal indicators, many of us lay claim to a Lesbian Sixth Sense which allows us to recognise, or think we recognise, ‘sisters’ both past and present.

Cutting a Dash: The dress of Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge

Feminist Review, Summer 1990

Cover of Feminist Review No. 35, Summer 1990, featuring a colourised photograph of two early 20th century white women wearing skirt suits and holding dogs, with titles including Cutting a Dash and The Mother's Manifesto

‘Cutting a Dash’ examines how clothing functioned as a medium of identity, resistance and visibility for the lesbian couple Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge in early 20th century Britain. It focuses on Hall and Troubridge not because they were typical but because their lives and appearances have been widely and accessibly documented; and it contextualises their appearances within their own specific and evolving personalities and circumstances, as well as the changing times they lived through.

Excerpt:
Dress allowed women like Radclyffe Hall and Naomi Jacob to create certainty out of confusion. Defining themselves ‘invert’ gave women who ‘weren’t women’ a gender, a sexuality and an identity, and dress allowed them to triumph over their female bodies and express and communicate this identity. Richard Ormrod records that whilst Una Troubridge and several female friends were happy to bathe naked when on holiday in France, Radclyffe Hall did not join them. Naked, stripped of her ‘masculine’ guise, Radclyffe Hall was revealed not as a ‘congenital invert’, a member of the third sex, but as a woman, and whilst the role of ‘invert’ may have been a compromised one, was it necessarily any more compromised than that of ‘woman’?
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Fashion, Femininity and the Fight for the Vote

Art History, March 1990

Historic black-and-white photo of suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, a middle-aged white woman being picked up and carried by police officers outside Buckingham Palace during a protest.

Emmeline Pankhurst's arrest, 1914. Central Press (NPG x137688)

This article explores the relationship to dress, appearance and the fashionable and feminine ideals of members of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), popularly known as the suffragettes. It demonstrates that appearing acceptably feminine was both a personal and a political strategy for women whose activities were a fundamental challenge to societal expectations of how women could and should behave. And who were subject to vicious verbal, visual and physical attacks as a consequence of their resistance and refusal.

Excerpt:
Hamilton recalls [that], ‘many of the militants were extraordinarily touchy’ on the subject of the ‘masculine’ suffragette, not simply because the caricature offended them, but because it threatened to deprive them of their sexual identity. Dominant definitions of femininity were kept intact by excluding the ‘sexless’ and ‘unnatural’ suffragette, the opposite of the ‘real’ woman, and ‘active feminists were [therefore] at pains to present an attractive, feminine and “ladylike” image … as a personal psychological device against the role-stripping nature of anti-feminist ideology.’ Role-stripping was often more distressing than physical injury. …A participant in such struggles later recalled that ‘each of the women … no matter how horribly hurt and torn, first put her hat straight.’
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Square Peg

Between 1988 and 1991 I regularly contributed articles and reviews to Square Peg, a radical queer cultural quarterly magazine ‘for contemporary perverts’ published in the United Kingdom from 1982 to 1991.

Speaking and teaching

As an academic I taught on undergraduate and postgraduate courses for many higher education institutions including Goldsmiths College, Winchester School of Art and Staffordshire University.

I spoke regularly at conferences, lectured at the National Portrait Gallery in London and was interviewed about fashion and the suffragette movement for the Arts and Votes episode of Kaleidoscope, BBC Radio 4 1993.