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

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This is a wonderful book! The life of a woman, a time and an industry, woven, like cloth, into something unique and beguiling. A treat for the curious reader Pip Williams, author of The Dictionary of Lost Words

This is a fascinating and beyond amazing look into the life, culture, society, and everyday adventures of a woman in the Victorian era. Through this journey, through this seemingly “normal” scrapbook of materials, swatches, and samples, we learn so much more of the woman behind the artistry, Anne Sykes, and the lives of not only herself and her family, but her friends, acquaintances, neighbors, and society as a whole. A whole world pf women, their respective voices and lives are brought to life, a multitude of windows that allow us to gaze into the hopes, dreams, loves, losses, and souls of so many women that had been looked over and forgotten. 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 Teeming with history and detail - a fascinating exploration of how even the smallest scraps of fabric can open up large stories Lynn Knight, author of THE BUTTON BOXFrom a few snippets of information, the author was able to piece together a patchwork of life in the mid 1800s. The way the author has approached the content makes it very accessible. Each chapter focusses on a different aspect of Anne Sykes’s life and combines the evidence from the scrapbook with genealogical research and associated historical information. Only seventy fragments were associated with male garments, and only seventeen of the names recorded were those of men. It seemed that at a time when so much of literature and the arts was focused on the endeavors of men, this was a book dedicated to the world of women. I decided to try to piece together the lives of some of these women through the clues that were left behind, scant though they often were. Using what felt like a forensic approach in its detail, I focused on fragments of cloth to illuminate the world these women inhabited, enabling a wider context to emerge. What began to appear were the tales of an era, placing these lives into the industrial maelstrom of the nineteenth century, with all its noise, color, and innovation. This interjection of broader and sometimes darker histories running alongside Anne’s does not come withoutbeing ableto share in the joy of these wonderful textiles. While the book does not have frequent images of these, Strasdin’s vivid descriptions of not only the textilesthemselves but the ways and settings in which they would be worn or used are so transportive, it doesnot leave asmuch to be desired by way of imageryas you might expect. Unexpectedly, perhaps, the element of surprise is present even through the textiles documented by Anneas much as the stories that come from them. I would consider myself relatively familiar with textiles and prints typical of the period, but even I was fascinated at Strasdin’s detailing of an 1842 leopard print waxed cotton, captioned as being used for Anne’s furniture. Leopard print, that I would associate as having emerged in popular usein the mid-20th century, used in interiors two centuries earlier! Further evidence that the personal objects of one, seemingly ordinary for her standing, woman can bring so much to our ownpictureof the past (a theme throughout thebook, as you might sense).

Oh, how I enjoyed this book! Not only is it a great read, but it's quite informative and very well-written, too. Despite all the knowledge we have gained as a result of Anne’s diary finding itself in Strasdin’s hands, there is also so much we can never know. Throughout the book, alongside the concrete findings, are queries about the intricacies of their thoughts, emotions, and activities. How close the relationships between Anne and those mentioned in her diary, whether they genuinely liked or politely accepted the fabrics and garments gifted to them, all these personal thoughts and more that are just beyond our reach, not recorded in marriage records or newspaper cuttings. In many ways, thisadds to the intrigue maintained throughout the book. We know Anne so well, having been able to trace her life (and wardrobe) from these fragments of cloth, and yet we also come out knowing so little about her personality. Ultimately though, this remains a value, not a disappointment – these questions that are raised providing a constant reminder of the individual people, with all their thoughts and feelings, mundanehabits and routines, excitements and tragedies, attached to every historical artefact. This appears to me as a fascination, more than a frustration, at least as I read it. ‘The Dress Diary of Mrs Anne Sykes’ may start with snippets of fabric collected by just one Lancashire woman, but it certainly does not end there. This is a journey Kate Strasdin takes us on with her; the precision, openness, and curiousity, with which she does so filling me with positive affirmation of my fascination with history (and love of prints!). The author captures it best herself: ‘Anne’s story is both remarkable and ordinary’. In fact, in the whole of the UK, I failed to find another album like either Barbara Johnson’s or the one that had fallen into my own hands. That is not to say they do not exist, or were not created in greater numbers in decades past. My mystery diarist could not have been the only one in the nineteenth century to choose to record an aspect of her life in this way, and the very tactility of cloth lends itself to this form of remembrance. There may well be volumes of fabric scraps languishing in trunks in attics, or wrapped in the bottom drawer of an elderly chest. There may even be examples that were once catalogued and then forgotten in an archive or a museum, their value yet to be identified. There's a chapter on Victorian mourning customs (as there are several swatches in the diary captioned for the mourning attire of various people Anne Sykes knew), with fascinating information about how the sartorial expectations of "proper" mourning were codified, marketed, and observed by people at varying levels depending on gender, class, geographic location, etc.

Featured Reviews

An acquaintance of the author gave her a book that had been found in a thrift shop, knowing her interest in textile and fashion history. A homemade journal of types, but filled with fabric swatches from the Victorian Era in England, rather than written entries. The fabrics have caption like "Mary's dress for Helen's wedding" and a date, but not much else.

This results in a book that gathers so much information about the textile industry & clothing in one place – the history of cotton, wool and silk, the changes and developments in dyeing and printing techniques as well as glimpses into the trade of the time. For instance we have a whole chapter devoted to lace, which explains how the traditional handmade bobbin lace of Honiton & the surrounding Devon villages became virtually obsolete due to the invention of machine made net that was so much cheaper to produce, but then saved by Queen Victoria who used handmade Honiton lace on her wedding dress. Honiton lace is now a luxury product, still made in the traditional way by hand.Anne Sykes grew up in Lancashire, the daughter of a cloth merchant in a part of England focused at the time on the cloth industry. She married a cloth merchant from a family of fabric printers, so needless to say Anne understood the importance of fabric in daily life- both as fashion, gifts, and probably the basis for family economics. Anne and her husband Adam traveled to Singapore for his work and lived there (and briefly Shanghai) for nearly ten years before returning to England. Strasdin scoured records, newspapers, ship's logs and more for hints of the Sykes and other names that appear in Anne's diary, often with surprising success. While no letters have been found from Anne, Strasdin helps us discover what her life in Singapore might have been like through letters of other women who lived there at the time, and who knew Anne and donated fabric to her album. The colour plates of the material fragments are a revelation - over a century and a half later their gleaming colours and patterns shine out like jewels. It's so easy to think of the Victorians as drab and grey, or, worse still, sepia. These bright and often beautiful materials make me realise that they loved fashionable colours and patterns every bit as much as we do now.