The thesis sets out to explore the enduring and widespread appeal of sunglasses in western popular culture as evident in the fields of fashion, film and advertising. The emergence of sunglasses as a fashion accessory is established through evidence from UK and US fashion magazines of the early Twentieth century, optical trade and professional journals and the collection of sunglasses and tinted spectacles held by the British Optical Association. The strong association in popular culture between sunglasses and contemporary notions of ‘cool’ is explored through analysis of images of sunglasses, consideration of their function as a ‘material agent’, existing histories and theories of ‘cool’, modernity and attendant changes to emotional culture, behaviour and personality. The relationship between sunglasses, vision and the gaze is also considered as the study explores the potential meanings of the shaded eye in these contexts. The study contributes to knowledge by providing a more detailed history of sunglasses emergence and transition to the status of fashion accessory than exists elsewhere and by using sunglasses as an object study (or fragment) from which the phenomenon of ‘cool’ can be examined. Existing perspectives on cool are shown to lack the usefully broad understanding of the appeal of ‘cool’ that sunglasses can provide, in so far as they draw together a number of aspects of cool in one object. The study concludes that this allows us to see both cool and sunglasses as demonstrative of a superior adaptation to the conditions of modernity – a value so desirable and broadly applicable as to help to explain not only the enduring appeal of sunglasses but the increasing significance of cool in western culture.

Two centuries-old mask traditions native to Austria and Bavaria enjoy ongoing popularity due to a creative mingling of old and new elements (heavy metal music and fireworks alongside hand-carved wooden masks and birch rod switches). The Krampus is the menacing companion of St. Nikolaus, who visits children on December 5 and 6, although nowadays groups of Krampusse may appear alone. The Perchten, who are associated with the magical female folk-figure Perchta, appear on January 5 and the week before. While the Perchten and Krampusse represent distinct traditions, their history has intersected at various points, and their contemporary manifestations share many elements, including a movement towards a “modern” aesthetic and the employment of such resources as tourist publicity and the internet to promote their appearances, educate the public, and network with each other. While the house visit was formerly the primary setting for these masked figures (or mummers), today it is the public parade. These parades, while rooted in and resembling conventional display-custom performances marked by a static division between performer and spectator, actually consist of a kind of fluid, interactive ritual theater in which the partially improvised, partially scripted performances of masked figures and the responses of spectators shape one another. Contemporary manifestations of Perchten and Krampus traditions will be explored in light of the ongoing cultural dialogue between performers and non-performers who seek to define and interpret the tradition, and the interplay of academic and popular discourses surrounding invented tradition, Folklorismus (folklorism) and Rücklauf (feedback), and the nature of authenticity. Questions of cultural heritage “ownership” surface in the debates over form and meaning, while in the hands of the Perchten and Krampusse themselves, tradition emerges as an active process and collaborative artwork rather than a fixed commodity with boundaries which can be defined and navigated by outside observers.

Through their narrative incorporation in fairy tales, song lyrics, in movies and on television shoes have become a ‘loaded device’ recycled as metonymy for the wearer or as metaphor for experience (Pine, 2006: 353). This research argues that in academic studies a consequence of their visual and symbolic ubiquity has been the material invisibility or ‘humility’ of the shoe as a ‘thing’ (Miller, 2005). Following Magritte’s lead in his painting The Treachery of Images (1928-29) I suggest that a tendency to see and analyse the messages shoes convey, rather than the things themselves, has led to a lack of empirical interrogation into the role shoes play in everyday processes of identity and identification. This research addresses this lack, yet rather than separate the shoe from its representations to do so, it unites the material and visual to understand the relationship between representations and embodied experiences of shoes in processes of being and becoming. With a focus on the styles that comprise the Clarks Originals brand, particularly the Desert Boot, the study observes the ‘situated bodily practice’ (Entwistle, 2000b) of those who both produce and wear the shoes to understand them as medium rather than message in processes of identification and transformation. This approach enables us to identify the material and semiotic affordances that lead to their cultural visibility and to gain a picture of the complex ‘networks’ (Latour, 2005) and ‘meshworks’ (Ingold, 2010a) such significant objects facilitate. Consequently, the thesis addresses shortcomings in sociological approaches to fashion theory by offering a meso-level between structure and agency which undermines common dualities between production and consumption, masculine and feminine, and the material and visual. Ultimately, the research argues that Clarks Originals offer a valuable opportunity to understand how and why particular objects become culturally and socially significant and valuable.

This research by practice explores our relationship with and attachment to shoes. Focusing upon the shoe as an everyday object, and on the embodied experience of wearing, it examines how through touch and use we become entangled with the things we wear. Drawing on anthropological and psychoanalytic perspectives on attachment, affect and the self, it asks: How can the act of wearing create attachment between the wearer and the worn? What is our relationship with the used and empty shoe – the shoe without the body, the shoe no longer worn? It suggests that our particular relationship to footwear is located in our intimate and tactile relationship to it; that touch and duration of wear create attachment. This research suggests that through use and wear shoes become, not only a record of the wearer’s lived experience, but also an extended part of them - a distributed aspect of the self. That the affective power of the worn shoe is a result of this intermingling, the cleaving of garment and self. Despite a growing body of research on footwear, the worn and the used shoe is absent from much of fashion research. The shoe tends to be interpreted as a symbolic, metaphorical, or imaginary artefact; its material qualities and the embodied experience of wearing the shoe are seldom referred to. This research seeks to place the artefact, the shoe, at its centre. Through an iterative process of making, wear, and observation, it aims to make apparent the intimacies of our relationship with shoes. Rather than record the narratives which we apply to footwear, it seeks to highlight the material traces of these relationships: to present the ways they are embodied within the artefacts themselves. This research is research through practice, into the nature of our relationships with shoes, through making artefacts and images (installation, film and photographs). It is material culture research enacted through the production of artefacts. It situates itself as art practice; the shoes produced are not footwear in a conventional sense but instead are objects designed to amplify and make explicit their role as records of gesture and experience. These empty shoes are records of an absent performance, of gestures which are lost to the viewer, so that only their traces, the marks upon the shoe, remain.

This thesis analyses a 12% sample of the 900 extant pairs of eighteenth-century women’s shoes in British museums and argues that shoes are a valuable but currently underused historical resource. The analysis is supported by both primary and secondary literature and contemporary images and much of the research is presented in a visual format such as images, diagrams and tables. The thesis revolves around the following questions: What can women’s shoes tell us about eighteenth-century culture? How can object based analysis of shoes enhance our current understanding of women’s footwear in the eighteenth century? How can we characterise materials, construction and manufacture of such shoes based on extant examples? What implications do these findings have for conservators and others responsible for the survival and management of the extant corpus? By recording the complexity of shoes as composite objects and examining how they are made; from what and how their components were processed and manufactured the thesis greatly increases the current available knowledge. It proposes a methodology for studying shoes and recording subsequent findings. The thesis also recognises the potential of shoes as historical sources. In addition it examines how we might seek to manage shoes as heritage assets in the future and acknowledges the significant role of the conservator in this. A holistic approach involving both curators and conservators in the decision making process relating to conservation and preservation is given. The appendices give full details of the sampled shoes and show the completed survey forms.

Over the past thirty years, the study of dress has flourished as a field of interdisciplinary enquiry, emerging from consumer studies by economic historians and artefact-based research. More recent scholarship has addressed clothing in terms of material culture and as a marker of identity, adopting approaches from anthropology, cultural studies, history of art, material culture studies and history. However, despite these advances in understandings of eighteenth-century dress, the social and cultural consequence of many garments has yet to be fully teased out. This thesis aims to amend that oversight and shed light on the significance of underwear and accessories in Britain and, to a lesser extent, colonial America from the period of 1666 to 1819. Five garments, each stemming from a different region of the body, form the chapters of this thesis: banyans, cork rumps, calashes, muffs, and stays. As structural undergarments, accessories and undress, these objects were auxiliary to the main garments of eighteenth-century dress, a man’s three-piece suit and woman’s mantua or polonaise gown. However, they were fashionable necessities, required to give the essential shape to the silhouette, complete an ensemble, or sartorially facilitate the expression of politeness and sociability. This discussion looks beyond these items as articles of fashion to establish their cultural currency through the study, where possible, of surviving material artefacts and their visual and discursive representations in painted portraiture, graphic satire, archival manuscripts, and published newspapers and magazines. Marrying aspects of artefact-based approaches with visual analysis exposes the discourses between the material artefacts and their representational constructions. First, the thesis discusses the banyan’s relation to time, exposing it as an agent of time that thwarted the chrononormative paths of the male sex. Issues of evidence, or the lack thereof, are addressed in Chapter Two, through an examination of the cork rump in satirical prints. The third chapter charts the material, spatial and social mobility of the calash and its wearer. Addressing embroidered and satin print silk muffs, the fourth chapter positions the silk muff as a haptic receptacle of expression, as well as portable canvas of female art and patronage. The final chapter examines the divergent associations of the stay, both as a mediator of gender normativity, and as an iconographic vessel of gender, class and national anxiety. Through the close analysis of these previously overlooked articles of dress, this thesis reveals the charged and weighted associations embedded within and ascribed to underwear and accessories in the long eighteenth century.

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