Bethan Bide

Looking forward to this enormously!

📢 Our next seminar is scheduled for Tuesday 25 November with Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth @carolinemccaff.bsky.social,
presenting a paper on ‘James Tassie: A Maker of the Scottish Enlightenment’.
🗓️ Tuesday 25 November, 5pm
📍 HG/09, Heslington Hall

www.york.ac.uk/eighteenth-c...

Bookings are now open for the Royal School of Needlework's first ever conference, “Stitched Together: Needlework Research and Making”! Join us at Hampton Court Palace on Thursday 21 and Friday 22 August, either in person or virtually. Find the conference schedule and tickets here: bit.ly/3FUc4kB

Photo of an Art Deco dining room. There’s a bright floral rug in pinks, blues, yellows and greens on the floor and a tapestry with fish and deer on it over the dining table. The image is framed by multi-coloured floral curtains.

Photo of a sitting room with parquet floors and a huge abstract floral rug that looks like a series of enormous blooms and clouds. It’s red and yellow and pink and green.

Pre-conference trip to Museum David and Alice van Buuren in Brussels. Rugs by Maurice Dufrene, tapestries, carpets and curtains by Jaap Gidding, and sofa cushions by Sonia Delaunay. Art Deco textile heaven.

Mapping Fashion Savoir Faire: Craft, Space and Scale 16th-21st centuries International Conference Paris 11-13 décembre

Upcoming conference in Paris this December on space and fashion crafts coorganised by myself and Emilumie Hammen
Deadline for submissions is July 15th
mappingfashionsavoirfaire4.wordpress.com

You joke, but as someone who runs a seminar dedicated to looking at trouser crotch stains, I’m delighted the OfS has my back.

Not In Our Name: Feminist Academics and Educators Speak Out Against Transphobia We call on all trans-inclusive feminist academics and educators to sign this statement: ‘Not In Our Name’ We are non-trans feminist academics and educators. We write in support of trans rights, tran...

STATEMENT: 'Not In Our Name: Feminist Academics and Educators Speak Out Against Transphobia'
Read the statement online here: tinyurl.com/mud7va29
Co-sign the statement, fill in this form: forms.gle/oDYgnobrMiSc...

Material Scotland: Stana Nenadic Memorial Conference 15th and 16th May 2025

Registration for Material Scotland: Stana Nenadic Memorial Conference is now open! Full details can be found here:

www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/material-s...

First page of the advert for the funded PhD at York, with the National Trust. Follow the link in the post for full info about the funding.

📣 Funded PhD at York with the National Trust: ‘At Home with Angelica Kauffman: The Material and Print Culture of an Eighteenth-Century Artist’. Co-supervised by Chloe Wigston Smith @chloewigstonsmith.bsky.social & Rachel Conroy @curatorrachel.bsky.social #18thC
wrocah.ac.uk/cda-projects...

Do you research textile and dress history? Give @pasoldresearchfund.bsky.social a follow for news about funding grants, conferences, and new research.

I’m delighted to announce the launch of the new Neaverson Pasold Postdoctoral Fellowship, intended to fund postdoctoral research in textile and dress history for a period of 3-10 months. Deadline: 1 April 2025. More info: www.pasold.co.uk/neaverson-pa...
Please help us spread the good news!

What five historical fashion trends would I bring back for Christmas? Find out (and maybe even have a more sustainable Christmas) here: theconversation.com/five-christm...

British-Bangladeshis and the East End rag trade: a personal story | Museum of London This story is representative of the many British-Bangladeshis who made London their home, with beginnings in the rag trade.

This wonderful piece by Asma Begum is a great reminder of the human stories behind the fashion industry this International Migrants Day.

www.museumoflondon.org.uk/discover/bri...

Hard to choose, but my favourite part of Napoleon was probably watching the Directory being overthrown in the coup d'État du 18 brumaire under the watchful gaze of James Thornhill’s monumental depictions of George I and St Paul’s cathedral?

A (very) brief introduction to the what, when, where, and why of the deindustrialisation of London’s fashion industry as a coda to #FashionCity www.museumoflondon.org.uk/discover/whe...

On Tuesday 14 November I’ll be chairing a special panel talk at the Museum of London Docklands with an incredible group of speakers. We’ll be exploring how migrants from all over the world have made London a unique and vibrant fashion city. Please join us: www.museumoflondon.org.uk/museum-londo...

I absolutely loved Mary Quant! Jenny Lister did a fabulous job capturing the the energy and appeal of the clothes as well as their social reach and details of the business.

Fashion in the City at the Museum of London is fabulous, beautifully & intelligently curated by @bethanbide.bsky.social & @luciewhitmore.bsky.social. Wonderful clothes telling the stories of the people that made them, sold them & wore them. Such resilience from the depths of horror & tragedy.

The Pasold Fund promotes and supports research on textile history:

PUBLICATION GRANTS
The aim is to subsidise the publication of essential illustrative material in high quality research, particularly in research monographs.

Grants will normally have a ceiling of £1,000

Today I took over as the new director of the Pasold Research Fund. We offer funding to support research into textile and dress history and you should definitely check out what we offer if that’s something you do: www.pasold.co.uk/index

Oh this is perfection.

Dennison's Bogie Book, 1920.

A catalogue of Halloween party supplies & decorating ideas, from the legendary producer of stationery & notions.

archive.org/details/denn...

Bales of cloth stacked up with a green banner reading ‘how do we make fashion fair?’

Discussions about sustainable fashion often centre western consumers. If you’re interested in how we can work towards a sustainable future that’s fair for both consumers and producers, check out our new podcast ‘How to fix fashion’ listen.podmasters.uk/HTFFairFashi...

Photograph of a woman in a blue skirt and shoes holding a large map of the West End of London that covers most of her body.

Immediately replacing all professional work headshots with this photo of me, rampaging through a museum with an enormous fashion map. Thanks @luciewhitmore.bsky.social for capturing my joy.

Yes, and of course it’s always the pieces I want to see most that are on top!

I was also pretty uncomfortable with some of the framing surrounding Aryanization and Chanel’s activities during WW2. Whilst narratives of collaboration and resistance are often complex, the horror of what happened to Jewish people in the fashion industry should be front and centre in those stories.

Two rows of Chanel suits stacked in glass cases.

Peach wool 1920s dress with a row of buttons down the front.

Front page from a retail price list for Chanel perfume from 1936, featuring a photo of the Bond Street showroom full of sleek steel and glass cases in a modern design.

Photo of two women (one Chanel) wearing oversized tweed blazers, large cravats and petting a dog.

Had a nice time looking at some lovely things in the Chanel exhibition at the V&A yesterday, but fundamentally it felt like an advert for a multinational brand. Deeply depressing to me that fashion history is hollowed out in this way - fund museums to tell better stories.

…which is a long way of saying that the Fashion City exhibition opens in a week and I’m very excited.

High-street staple Moss Bros was founded by Jewish second hand clothes dealer Moses Moses in 1881. Since then it’s helped thousands of customers negotiate the social dress codes required by British society events, including Hellmut Feisenberger, Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, who wore this suit.

Book cover featuring a photograph of a purple beaded silk with the title ‘fashion city’

It lives! Out in two weeks…