Narratives of Dress: the Pink Silk Dress

Narratives of Dress: the Pink Silk Dress explored the lived biography of the pink silk dress. The pink silk dress is one of three objects being investigated as part of the practice for a practice-based PhD entitled 'Costuming as an Authorial Practice: Reading and Re-Authoring an Assemblage of Every day, Aesthetic Womenswear from the Birmingham School of Art 1795-1885.'

Narratives of Dress: the Pink Silk Dress aimed to renegotiate the contract for participation (Machon 2016) between the spectator of dress exhibitions and every day dress. Informed by my confirmation in 2019, performative practices were adapted and adopted from theatre to create an immersive encounter with the pink silk dress.

Hosted in the Great Western Arcade in Birmingham Narratives of Dress: the Pink Silk Dress explored how everyday dress could be employed to evolve unheard and 'hard to reach' narratives of dress using the object as the stimulus for the development of narrative and biography through imagination.(Gerber 2022)

Upstairs, a reinterpretation of a dress- makers studio from the late nineteenth century captured the moment of the pink silk dresses creation by the dressmakers Misses Gell. The maker narratives were explored through cutting, and the construction of toiles (prototypes)featured in the upstairs studio space.(Davidson 2019)

Whilst in the cellar attendees were invited to 'Hear the Dress!' The pink silk dress was displayed as it had been found, amongst fabric remnants in a box with the pink silk dress emerging out of the darkness and the fabric. Fictional writing (Iser 1996,Leavy 2016) in the form of an object- narrative (Blackwell 2014) was employed to evoke the pink silk dress within a soundscape of a dialogue between researcher and object.

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