Tailoring the Past: An Approach to Dress, Making, and Embodied Knowledge

This presentation examines how history can be constructed and made visible through design, using a methodology that brings together object analysis, making, remaking, and embodied research. Focusing on early- to mid nineteenth-century historical garments, this presentation explores how dress functions as material evidence and participant in the shaping of historical knowledge. This reflection positions design as a means of historical analysis by using three interconnected approaches: ‘dress as object of evidence’, ‘remaking as research method’, and ‘embodied research as process of knowing’. Together, these methods offer a way of accessing forms of historical understanding that are sensory, practice-based, and materially based. Through the examination of museum collection garments, historical tailoring techniques, and the experiential act of wearing remade clothing, this study highlights how the history of design is not only told through text, but also designed—using cut, construction, and movement. By engaging with the materiality of the past, this investigation challenges conventional historical narratives that neglect the labour, technique, and embodied knowledge embedded in clothing. It asks: what can made, or remade garments tell us that archival documents cannot? And how might historical research change when it is practiced through the hands and the body, rather than through the written word? This paper contributes to a growing discourse around practice informed design history, demonstrating how the relationship between design, making and theory can open new ways for understanding the past—not only as it was recorded, but as it was worn, made, and experienced.