Collecting on the Periphery: Pocket Contents and Biography in the Clothing of Francis Golding

This paper will explore the often-overlooked area on the dressed body which intersects memory and the garment, the pocket. Acting as a liminal space linking the intimate self and the public world, pockets are a place of practical storage, an avenue of gesture and a site of embodied memory in clothing.

Reflecting on my curatorial practice and research within the Francis Golding Collections of clothing (acquired in 2015 collaboratively between the Museum of London and London College of Fashion Archives) I will discuss the discovery and analysis of an avid collector and self- documentarian’s pocket contents and how they have been catalogued as part of Golding’s (1944-2013) larger collection of contemporary LGTBQ+ menswear.

This paper embraces Dr. Carole Hunt’s assertion that textiles have the ability “to embody both a communal, historical moment and a local individual, specific story…” (2014), and proposes that the pocket provides a peripheral space for authorship of the private and the social selves. The contents of Golding’s pocket are further suggested as a form of historian Jacob Presser’s “egodocument” (Dekker, 2002): life-writing made material.