The Dress Diary of Mrs Anne Sykes: Secrets from a Victorian Woman’s Wardrobe

Product Information

I knew very little about the history of fashion or textiles outside of North and South, but I found this approach to the subject really engaging. The detail is cleverly contextualised so that it feels part of the fabric of every day life. Collecting snippets of fabric from a range of garments she carefully annotated each one, creating a unique record of her life and times. Her name was Mrs Anne Sykes. Nearly two hundred years later, the diary fell into the hands of Kate Strasdin, a fashion historian and museum curator. In a sense, Anne’s album is a form of life writing—taking in ordinary folk, not the grandees of traditional written histories but the bystanders, the participants in everyday life, their loves and losses, joys and sorrows. It is a fragmentary story of life experienced at home and abroad, in a domestic world and an international one, of courage in unfamiliar lands and of building a community of friends. Through small and seemingly inconsequential wisps of fabric, Anne Sykes’s diary lays bare the whole of human experience in that most intimate of mediums: the clothes that we choose to wear. I saw a social media post by the author of this book, and really wanted to read this. It took a while until my turn came up at the library, but it was worth the wait! At times the author gets somewhat effusive in her descriptions and overly speculative about the could-have-beens. Readers don’t have to be reminded time and again that the historical record is sparse. And I wish that Anne’s actual (unreadable) captions had been replaced by a modern font.

The Dress Diary of Anne Sykes and Kate Strasdin proves beyond a doubt that fashion history stands as a part of the social history of any time period that must be considered when we truly try to know a time and place. Women were hugely influential in the choices connected to fashion, letting us find some of their stories within the shadows of "important" history as so often focused on by men, but Strasdin reminds us in this book of the huge web of social and global economic influences a phrase like "fashion history" truly means. Not something to be scoffed at, it is a growing field of study that should be both celebrated and encouraged.

Featured Reviews

Kate Strasdin wanted to know more & set out on a quest to find out as much as she could about the woman behind the book, and this is the result of several years of research.

Dr. Kate Strasdin is a fashion historian, museum curator and lecturer at Falmouth University, where she teaches the history of fashion design, marketing, and photography. British fashion historian Kate Strasdin took a lace-making class, partly from professional interest in women's home-work and handwork (before industrialization lace was made by hand, of course), but also because she enjoyed the other participants. In 2016 an older woman in the class gave her an extraordinary gift: Anne Sykes' scrapbook. Anne's husband Adam gave it to her on their wedding day in 1838 and for more than 40 years Anne pasted scraps of fabric from women's dresses--hers and her friends and acquaintances, documenting each in a fine copperplate hand. Strasdin spend the next six years finding out more about Anne and Adam, both of whom came from textile-manufacturing families in Lancashire. They spent seven years in the British colony in Singapore and several in Shanghai before returning to England. In this engaging book, Strasdin proves triumphantly that the study of fashion is not a frothy sideshow but can provide a textured account of history... [a] compelling account of 19th-century life seen through women's eyes Daily Mirror In the C18th and C19th, clothes were made for the wearer; there were almost no “off-the-peg” dresses, suits, etc.. One would buy a length of material and make it (or have it made by someone else) into clothing, upholstery or curtains. Anne Sykes obtained small fragments of the leftover material from friends and relations for her book. A typical inscription might state “Adam’s vest new on his birthday July 12th 1843.”

First night reviews

This was a fascinating story, or groups of stories, giving insights into time, place, and lives of mostly the industrialist class as it develops in England. What the author was able to learn about Anne, her family, and their social milieu was fascinating. The book is written in a very readable way, though it is a research project report. In 1838, a young woman was given a diary on her wedding day. Collecting snippets of fabric from a range of garments she carefully annotated each one, creating a unique record of her life and times. Her name was Mrs Anne Sykes.