Output details

The Land Girls: Cinderellas of the Soil

This output comprises a curated exhibition Brighton Museum October 2009 – March 2010 (45,000 visitors) and authored catalogue. They form the first outcomes that scrutinise land girl uniform and exploit this material evidence to propose new strategies for interpreting dress in historical and museum contexts. These strategies included exhibiting multiples (museums usually emphasize singularity); exhibiting individually customised uniforms (uniform is conventionally exhibited as the regulation issue); deconstructing an object to reveal component parts; immateriality – representing objects which haven't survived (ghostly paper silhouettes of absent objects).

Biography of uniform was explored from materials through manufacture, including: distribution, war-time wear, postwar warehousing in Europe of surplus items (now selling on e-Bay as vintage fashion), and authentic dress for wartime re-enactors (the longer term biography of dress had not previously been presented in museum contexts). Comparisons were also drawn with wartime and contemporary circumstances – austerity, local and home grown food, fear for future and forging inter-generational relationships.

The work led to invitations to lecture at the ‘Spaces of Fashion’ conference, Pottsdam University 2011, which included dress in the context of the museum, subsequently published in German; at a conference on gendered dress at St John’s College, Cambridge University 2012; at a conference on curating fashion and dress, Stockholm, 2012, at ‘The Lives of Objects’ conference at Wolfson College, Oxford University, September 2013 and invitations to run workshops on curatorship in Moscow and Tblisi by the British Council, 2012. A related article by de la Haye in Fashion Theory One Object, Multiple Interpretations was published by Russian Fashion Theory, 2013.