The Dress Diary of Mrs Anne Sykes

 

The Dress Diary of Mrs Anne Sykes- Kate Strasdin

Chatto & Windus/Vintage/Pegasus

Release Date: February 23, 2023

Rating: 📚📚📚📚📚

Synopsis: In 1838, a young woman was given a diary on her wedding day. Collecting snippets of fabric from a range of garments she carefully annotated each one, creating a unique record of her life and times. Her name was Mrs Anne Sykes.

Nearly two hundred years later, the diary fell into the hands of Kate Strasdin, a fashion historian and museum curator. Strasdin spent the next six years unravelling the secrets contained within the album's pages.

Piece by piece, she charts Anne's journey from the mills of Lancashire to the port of Singapore before tracing her return to England in later years. Fragments of cloth become windows into Victorian life: pirates in Borneo, the complicated etiquette of mourning, poisonous dyes, the British Empire in full swing, rioting over working conditions and the terrible human cost of Britain's cotton industry.

This is life writing that celebrates ordinary people: the hidden figures, the participants in everyday life. Through the evidence of waistcoats, ball gowns and mourning outfits, Strasdin lays bare the whole of human experience in the most intimate of mediums: the clothes we choose to wear.

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This was a book I was excited to read since I first heard about it through social media. Author and fashion historian Kate Strasdin was given an album, a 'dress diary' in 2016. The album consisted of swatches of fabrics from the 1830s through about the 1870s and, with the exception of brief captions identifying the fabric in a way only the album's creator would have recognized, there was no writing. Strasdin spent years researching the people named in the captions and the stories she could connect to them and their fabrics. The result is the fascinating book The Dress Diary of Mrs Anne Sykes: Secrets from a Victorian Woman's Wardrobe (called The Dress Diary: Secrets from a Victorian Woman's Wardrobe in the US). 

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.

But this book isn't just a biography of a middle-class cloth merchant's wife. It is a history of the textiles and fashion in England during Anne's lifetime. From the textile mills of northern England to the machines that increased production and put hundreds of employees out of work; to a chapter on how the patterns were created (which I'd always wondered about!) and how the printing of cloth changed over time; the change in colors with the discovery of aniline dyes in the 1850s and 1860s (along with the associated poisons for both the workers and occasionally the wearers of the material); and the fancy dress costume balls that became the rage in both England and Singapore, Strasdin connects each chapter of fashion history to swatches of fabric in Anne's diary. The fabric acts as a starting point in each chapter for something Anne would have known about or been affected by, from mourning clothes to Singaporean pirates (there's a piece of a pirate flag in the album that an admiral gave her!)

The Dress Diary of Anne Sykes and Kate Strasdin proves beyond a doubt that fashion history stands as a part of the social history of any time period that must be considered when we truly try to know a time and place. Women were hugely influential in the choices connected to fashion, letting us find some of their stories within the shadows of "important" history as so often focused on by men, but Strasdin reminds us in this book of the huge web of social and global economic influences a phrase like "fashion history" truly means. Not something to be scoffed at, it is a growing field of study that should be both celebrated and encouraged.

I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in the social or fashion history of the Victorian era. It is a great adventure that Strasdin allows us to share along with her.