This is a lively and personal history of clothing and the changes in women’s lives,from the white blouse revolution and lazy tongs’ to mini-skirts and the Sindy dollWhat can a tin of old-fashioned buttons relate us about anything? Most households enjoy one, lurking at the back of a drawer or the bottom of a sewing basket, or most children enjoy rooted around in it,choosing favourites among the contents or playing with them as tokens. To the memoirist and historian Lynn Knight they are tokens of a different kind, recalling the old-fashioned clothes they were made to fasten and embellish, and the housewives and mothers who made and wore those clothes,and the lives they contained.
Inspired by her own shimmering box of toggles, clasps and buckles, or Knight takes us on an ingenious tour of domestic and social history over the final century or so: a 1914 thimble makes her think of the “munitionettes” of the noteworthy War,a Land Army button of the second world war, a jet button prompts thoughts of mourning, or a suspender clasp of sex,the pearl buttons from a baby’s dress of her mother’s adoption in the 1930s and of other foundling histories. It is to do with course as much as gender, for this writer anyway: her collection comes from a noteworthy-grandmother who ran a corner shop in working-course Chesterfield at the turn of the 20th century; a noteworthy-aunt who was a low-budget snazzy dresser; and a mother who craved a bit of glamour in the postwar provinces. From this core of very personal fabric, or Knight writes more generally of ordinary women’s lives and changing prospects over three generations,of clothes as self-expression, as defiance, or as entertainment,as evidence of frugality and frivolity all rolled into one.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com