Fontes documentais para o estudo da história da moda e da indumentária: o caso James Laver e novas perspectivas investiga o uso das fontes documentais na história da moda e da indumentária, no passado, atualmente e nas projeções de uso para o futuro, já sob uma perspectiva atual de conservação, preservação e manutenção através de um viés museológico e arquivístico. A base de trabalho são as propostas feitas pelo pesquisador de traje James Laver (1899-1975), um inglês que foi curador do Departamento de Gravura, Ilustração e Design do Victoria and Albert Museum / Documental Sources for the study of fashion and costume history: the case study James Laver and new perspectives investigate the use of documental sources in the history of fashion and costume, in the past, now and in future projections, under a contemporary perspective of conservation, preservation and maintenance based on archives and museology. The fundamentals of the research are based on the proposals made by the costume historian and researcher James Laver (1899-1975), an Englishman who was the Keeper of the Department of Prints, Drawings and Paintings of the Victoria and Albert Museum

The childlike character of ideal femininities has long been critiqued in feminist literature, from Mary Wollstonecraft (1792) to Susan Faludi (1992). Yet, despite the partial gains of feminism the ‘woman-child’ continues to be a prominent subject-position in fashion photography of the West. This thesis builds upon earlier feminist critiques of the infantilisation of women by considering the meaning of childlike femininities in the period spanning 1990 to 2015. In particular, it questions whether representations of childlike femininities can shed their dehumanising, ‘second sex’ connotations and be resignified to a more progressive end in the contemporary context. The possible appeal of ‘girly’ subject-positions to women, following several waves of feminism, is explored through reception studies carried out with female participants in focus groups, as well as theory on the ‘female gaze’. Images were principally drawn from three British fashion magazines: Vogue (UK), i-D, and Lula. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, this thesis demonstrates the ways in which discourses on childhood, girlhood and womanhood overlap and intersect to produce the figure of the ‘woman-child’ in the fashion media and beyond. This subject-position is shown not to be singular but rather as appearing in a number of guises. The many permutations of childlike femininity are subsumed into four overarching categories: the Romantic woman-child; the femme-enfant-fatale; Lolita style; and the Parodic woman-child. This thesis thereby contributes to existing debates in fashion studies by considering in greater detail the different discourses on childhood and femininity that come into play when women are positioned as childlike. A multi-faceted visual methodology is employed, combining visual analysis of imagery with experimental reception studies. Reception studies were conducted in focus groups with female participants and provide insight into the way these women made sense of the ‘woman-child’. In addition, they provide an indication as to whether the participants liked or disliked childlike femininities in the fashion media, thus pointing to the possible investments women might have in childlike subject-positions. Finally, including an element of social research served to challenge and/or reinforce the researcher’s own readings of the imagery, pointing to new avenues of research and expanding the discursive field of enquiry. This aspect of the thesis makes a methodological contribution to literature on the reception of still media imagery in fashion studies, magazine studies and feminist media studies.

Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo (1871-1949) was a Spanish-born polymath who, though mostly remembered for his historically inspired fashion designs, was first trained as a painter in Paris and would become a lighting and set designer, photographer, costume designer, and inventor. Working in Venice at the turn of the 20th century with an insatiable appetite for the historic, the notoriously secretive artist was often called a magician. Fortuny was able to produce a realistic night sky using his own electric stage lighting system. He inverted traditional photographic processes by printing horizontally with natural light from the window in his darkroom. And his most enigmatic creation is a series of rarely seen photographic prints made in a lightless process where mounds of damp fabric were pressed onto sensitized paper to form an abstract multiplicity of wrinkles. Despite being an inventor who relied on technological advancements and experiments, Fortuny’s deeply historical temperament is evident in his own declaration: ‘Nothing is new in this world, so I do not pretend to bring new ideas’.He invented a machine for permanently pressing the Classical pleats of his delicate silk Delphos gown and with painted stencilling he re-created the glittering patterns of woven brocades and damasks from the Italian Renaissance – often copied from 16th-century painting. Marcel Proust utilized these garments, which remained largely unchanged over forty years of production, as Venetian emblems of memory in À la recherche du temps perdu, where they conjure Carpaccio’s exquisitely painted velvet robes. Inspired by classical Greece and Renaissance Italy, amongst other eras, Fortuny was wildly historic in the way he brought together forms and patterns from disparate times and places. Invoking Michel Serres’ illustration of multitemporality as a crumpled handkerchief, ‘Reviving Fortuny’s Phantasmagorias’ argues that Fortuny’s sense of time (like Proustian time) is pleated time – where the past touches the present. This thesis utilizes the concept of phantasmagoria in multiple ways. The antique-filled Gothic palazzo in which Fortuny lived and worked, which like the 19th-century interiors that Walter Benjamin describes, manifests a phantasmagoric layering of past upon present. ‘Reviving Fortuny’s Phantasmagorias’ also employs Theodor Adorno’s writing on Wagnerian opera and Marina Warner’s historicised account of phantasmagoria to apply the term to Fortuny’s stage lighting designs, clothing, and photography. The thesis follows Fortuny’s self-assessment that he was ‘first and foremost a painter’ to argue that it was ‘as a painter’ that he thought of light throughout his work across various media. Though he is often relegated to footnotes in the large bodies of scholarship on Proust and Wagner, ‘Reviving Fortuny’s Phantasmagorias’ centres on Fortuny and his work in Venice (a pivotal point of intersection for all three): the watery city of both memory and desire, of flickering golden light and dark, damp shadows. This thesis argues that Fortuny, as a revivalist, accessed the past through art objects and material visual culture, in his personal collection and from reproductions, to re-create them in the early 20th century. His work is phantasmagoric because of the way it uses light and darkness, shadows and projections, and movement and colour to bring historical images to life, bringing together a multiplicity of times. Though these themes are easily identifiable in Fortuny’s work, they have yet to be traced throughout his oeuvre in any major piece of writing.

By use of qualitative, semiotic analysis of screenshots taken from Part I of the three-part anthologyfilm The House (2022), an adult stop-motion animation using puppets, the clothing of the charactersis analysed to examine how they convey class and power based on theory by Stuart Hall, PierreBourdieu, Beverly Skeggs and Marita Sturken & Lisa Cartwright. The text further uses fashionhistory to contextualise and interpret visual references to British monarchs Elizabeth I and Henry VIII. The study finds Part I of The House portrays the anxiety and exploitation of the working-classcharacters through the colour, number of layers, fabrics, references and changes in the characters’costumes in a way that lines up with the arguments presented by Bourdieu and Skeggs about culturalcapital and popular representation of the working class. Part I’s construction of class may not reflectthe diversity of class experiences found in the real world, but through further analysis including thetwo other parts of The House this reading may differ as those include other characters and settings.

Fashion history is an integral subfield of history as a whole. Fashion plates provide important evidence of what fashion once looked like and as such are a valuable window into the lives of the people in ages past. The rise of digitization opens new avenues for aiding historians in the dating of fashion plates; following on from this, digitization also brings a greater need for artworks to be digitized and AI can be utilized in order to keep up with the demand. This provides unique challenges such as gathering data and working with a relatively limited database. Due to the lack of prior research into the subject of dating fashion plates using Artificial Intelligence (AI), said application of AI in the dating process could help future historians automate the task. Transfer learning can help streamline the dating process of fashion plates. I used several approaches with three different models (ResNet101, NasNetMobile, and InceptionV3) and achieved the best mean absolute error of 2.8 years in a range of 60 years using NasNetMobile with a simple output layer and no fine-tuning.

This study investigates the relationship between the fashion and film industries during the classical era between the early 1930s and mid-1940s. It focuses on the three-strip Technicolor process as the binding force upon which these two industries relied in collaborations during that time and looks at technical challenges the new process presented to productions in terms of wardrobe design. Another issue explored is fashion’s role in the actual development of the three-strip process, allowing the Technicolor laboratory to improve the technology through a popular, marketable, and readily available product. Using Technicolor as a point of focus and continuity, this dissertation explores different types of productions filmed in the three-strip process, including shorts and newsreels, industrial and sponsored films, as well as feature-length films.  Drawing from a wide range of archival material and a highly interdisciplinary approach, the study delves into the relationship between the fashion and film industries. While the ties between them have been strong since the advent of cinema, previous research has approached their relationship almost exclusively from a promotional perspective. Technicolor’s multifaceted affiliation with the fashion industry, however, warrants a more thorough investigation and this dissertation takes steps towards expanding that research area through a series of case studies. The first chapter provides an overview of color film methods that preceded three-strip Technicolor and outlines some of the key discourses involving color and realism. Chapter 2 addresses the intertwined relationship between the fashion and film industries through a study of fashion department in the popular fan magazine Photoplay and also examines the use of color in that publication. Chapter 3 investigates the fashion short as a vehicle for demonstrating the commercial potential of the three-strip process. It does this by examining the making and promotion of Vyvyan Donner’s Fashion Forecast series. This chapter also looks at the specific work carried out by Technicolor’s Color Control Department. Chapter 4 explores industrial and sponsored films in three-strip Technicolor for the fashion industry with an emphasis on those made to promote rayon. The second half of this chapter examines the 1930/1940 seasons of the New York World’s Fair, focusing on the presence there of Technicolor and the American rayon industry. Lastly, Chapter 5 looks at three-strip Technicolor in feature-length films by considering its collaborations with the fashion industry that took place in the classical era. This chapter also examines design considerations made regarding wardrobe in those films.  The study concludes that color’s versatility made it incredibly influential on consumer culture and was key to ventures between the fashion and film industries in this era and beyond. It also ultimately demonstrates the ways in which color, fashion, and film intersected and complemented one another in terms of their aesthetic and commercial commonalities.

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Fashion in the Renaissance became intensely political, highly gendered, and anatomized (i.e. emphasizing human anatomy rather than masking it). Court culture placed a particular emphasis on the body of the courtier, as skills such as dancing and dressing fashionably became crucial to political success in states throughout Europe. In sixteenth-century Florence, the Medici attempted to install a duchy in what was at the time a republican city (with strong republican heritage). Florentine fears of foreign domination and resentment towards non-republican forms of government made the Medici’s task nearly impossible. Fashion became a primary pillar of the Medicean political agenda, as the first members of the Medici family to hold official power in the Florentine Grand Duchy (and their wives) dressed quite modestly in comparison to other sixteenth-century heads of state, so as not to appear to have imperial or monarchical pretensions and thus arouse dangerous levels of antipathy from their Florentine subjects. The first Grand Duchess, Eleonora di Toledo, and the second, Giovanna d’Austria, faced an additional challenge as foreign brides marrying into the Medici duchy, as they were themselves representatives of the influence of imperial power in Florentine politics. They both were faced with countless factors to consider as they made choices about how to dress, and each choice had political, social, and economic implications and consequences.

O presente trabalho pretende contribuir com a historiografia brasileira referente aos estudos de história da moda e suas implicações sócio-culturais. O objetivo é realizar uma análise comparativa das colunas de moda da revista O Cruzeiro entre 1929 e 1948. O recorte temporal escolhido deve-se ao acervo que serviu para a busca das fontes de pesquisa, o Museu de Comunicação Social Hipólito José da Costa na cidade de Porto Alegre. A metodologia utilizada originou-se da análise do conceito da moda e colheu na fonte grande número de imagens que gerou um banco de dados. Tais fotografias, após analisadas, sofreram uma triagem e as escolhidas geraram séries de relatórios. A partir disso, foi preciso ouvir o que elas queriam comunicar para então eleger as colunas de moda a serem trabalhadas de forma específica na dissertação. O que pretendi analisar é: como a revista O Cruzeiro apresentava a moda, levando em conta o papel desempenhado pelo estrangeiro e pelo nacional. O Brasil apenas copiava a moda estrangeira ou também iniciava um processo criativo particular – ou, ao menos, uma visão própria da moda? Ao longo da pesquisa foram estabelecidas relações entre a moda e o conhecimento, a verdade, a estética, a identidade e a própria história. A construção de uma visão nacional da moda ocorreu através de um longo processo que dependeu da análise das colunas de moda. Inicialmente elas eram escritas por uma estrangeira - Madame Thérèse Clemenceau - passaram a ter contribuições anônimas, temáticas nacionalistas, até que acabaram sob o comando do ilustrador Alceu Penna. Durante a passagem do tempo muitas silhuetas foram mostradas e através delas podemos perceber também um modelo de corpo e de mulher que cada período elegeu. A pesquisa deu conta das feminilidades sucessivas na moda apresentada pela fonte. / This thesis intends to contribute to brazilian historiography concerning fashion history, and its social and historical implications. The goal is to perform a comparative analysis of editorial sections about fashion and style within the magazine O Cruzeiro between 1929 and 1948. During the research, those sections have been photographed, producing a wide database. A report has been organized with the selected images. By analyzing them, I tried to answer the following question: how did the magazine present fashion, taking into account the role played by foreign and national elements? Was foreign fashion simply copied in Brazil? Or was the period marked by the beginnings of a particular creative process – or, at least, the beginnings of a national vision of fashion and style? The construction of a Brazilian image of fashion took place after a long process, in which the analysis of editorial sections concerning fashion was very important. Initially, those sections were produced by a foreign writer - Madame Thérèse Clemenceau. Later, anonymous contributions were incorporated, as well as nationalistic themes. Finally, those sections came under the control of illustrator Alceu Penna. Through different periods of time, different female silhouettes have been shown within the magazine; through them, we can analyze the images of the ideal woman and the ideal body that each period has chosen. The research has taken into account, also, those successive models of femininity.

The sinking of the RMS Titanic has achieved a difficult feat ��� it has remained culturally relevant. The dedication of the general public to understanding Titanic is evident in many avenues of popular and consumer culture. For those individuals who did not get enough of the 1997 Titanic movie, there are numerous Titanic museums and attractions to visit. What interests me as a scholar of historic dress is that the 1997 film is often used as a lens through which the historical events are interpreted and understood. More specifically the character of Rose (from the 1997 Titanic movie) has been translated from a film character to a living history character. Rose has become an integral part of the marketing and exhibiting techniques at some Titanic museum attractions. The purpose of this research was to conduct an introductory exploration of the role of film costume iconography in learning about a historical event and the development of a personal connection with an iconic character in the context of that event. Four permanent Titanic museum attractions were selected as sites of study: museum attractions in Branson, Missouri; Pigeon Forge, Tennessee; Orlando, Florida; and Las Vegas, Nevada. A total of 32 participants were included. Both museum attraction visitors and staff participated in this study; twenty-nine participants were classified as visitors and three participants were classified as staff. Phenomenological and inductive approaches were undertaken. Qualitative (personal phenomenology, phenomenological interviews, and brief participant observation) data collection techniques were employed. Both descriptive and experiential phenomenological and narrative approaches were combined to analyze the resulting data. I utilized a descriptive phenomenological method outlined by Giorgi and Giorgi (2003), and I made modifications to the procedure to fit the unique needs of my data. Data collection occurred in two phases at each location. In phase one, I participated in personal phenomenology during a visit to each museum attraction. In phase two, I collected data with participants. Data collection with visitor participants occurred in three stages: (1) pre-museum attraction visit interview, (2) the participant visited a Titanic museum attraction, and (3) post-museum attraction visit interview. I collected data with each staff participant during one interview. The findings of this study revealed that there are many perspectives from which to tell the story of Titanic and help museum attraction visitors learn the history of the ill-fated ship. I found that Rose did not factor into the decision of the participants to visit a Titanic museum attraction. If a participant learned from or about Rose, she did not factor into the learning or personal meaning-making process until he or she was inside the museum attraction. It was more common for participants to relate to the historical events of Titanic through the movie as a whole, as opposed to the specific character of Rose. The scenario of including a Rose living history interpreter as part of the lived experience of a museum visit elicited a wide range of reactions from participants. It was more common for participants to oppose the presence of a Rose living history interpreter than favor her presence. Several participants reported instances when they drew a spontaneous connection to the movie or were reminded of the movie in their own mind. Several participants used the movie as a foundation to build further historical understanding about Titanic. Some participants used the movie as a source of comparison to explore or confirm the accuracy of the movie. The primary difference in the museum attraction experience for visitors who had not seen the movie was that they encountered difficulty in relating and paying attention to any content or reference to the movie. A general phenomenological structure was formed from the data. As part of this study, I sought to further expand the body of literature that applies visual rhetorical theory and semiotic theory to dress and costume. A discussion of the resulting theoretical implications is included. An outcome of the phenomenological data collection and analysis was a list of recommendations for future practice specifically related to the display of dress and costume in both Titanic museum attractions and museums in general. I conclude with recommendations for future research and a reflective summary. / Graduation date: 2013