Abi Jubb
Abi is a Wolfson Foundation Scholar in the final stages of her PhD at the University of York, where she is also project lead on the ‘Re-making Research’ and ‘Foregrounding Fashion’ networks. She is also Co-founder of Worn Workshop, which produces creative projects about people’s relationships with their clothes to challenge throwaway fashion cultures. Her research brings together her interdisciplinary knowledge, skills and experience across fashion to focus on the sartorial, corporal and wider cultural development of its modern industrial systems from the mid nineteenth-century to now.
Over her Visiting Research Fellowship, Abi will be researching the House of Fraser Archive as she develops part of her PhD research project, ‘Sizing Women’s Garments and Bodies: The Fashion Industry’s Production of the Modern Middle-class Consumer in Britain circa 1870-1930’, with a focus on fashion retail. Within this archive’s extensive records that relate to over 100 companies acquired by the major department store retail group, she will explore: their introduction of standardised fashion production for widening consumer markets; and how this materialised two contradictory problems for the women within these. Namely, their new physical, psychological and socio-cultural need to fit their real bodies into idealised sizes and want to individualise themselves through standard fashions. Abi has previously researched the approaches of London’s department stores to profitably solving these problems, particularly within their new postal-order retail catalogues from as early as 1847. Their example shows how retailers misappropriated the reputation of traditional tailors, their practices and products, to suggest the wholesale costumes they promoted were bespoke and therefore tailored to the choices and bodies of their customers. Study of the House of Fraser archive will therefore enable Abi to not only further determine but also develop upon this argument because of the brick-and-mortar retail and behind-the-scenes documentation it represents. As such, this research will directly inform Abi’s forthcoming publications, development of a monograph based on her PhD thesis and future post-doctoral research. More broadly, it will also contribute new interpretation of the House of Fraser Archive archive, relevant to interdisciplinary interests across fashion, the body and modernity as well as contemporary fashion industry issues such as supply chain transparency and size exclusivity.
I am absolutely delighted to have been awarded this Visiting Research Fellowship and would like to express my gratitude to the William Lind Foundation for their kind support. Being able to undertake extended archival research of this kind is integral to my object-focused scholarship, and I look forward to relishing four glorious weeks of doing just that in-person at the University of Glasgow. I have long wanted to visit the House of Fraser Archive, which has represented something of a gap in my research to date, and I can’t wait to finally discover all that it has to offer. I have no doubt that what I find within its records will help me to develop my existing research interests in exciting new directions!
