Book Review: The Ambassador Magazine: Promoting Post-War British Textiles and Fashion, edited by Christopher Breward & Claire Wilcox (London: V&A Publishing 2012)

The Ambassador Magazine is a publication that explores the Victoria and Albert Museum's archive of the same name, housed at the institution's Archive of Art and Design since the late 1980s. The publication of this text is timely as it coincides with the V&A's large-scale exhibition and accompanying catalogue British Design From 1948: Innovation in the Modern Age, both of which were curated and edited by Breward and Ghislaine Wood. Published between 1945 and 1970, The Ambassador offers further insight into a period of post-war British history, prior to the mid-1960s.

[...]

Breward claims that this publication aims to provide a sense of the magazine's ‘importance and a rehabilitation of its values for the future’. This somewhat introductory feeling continues to pervade the text and this can leave a sense of more questions having been raised than answered. For instance, its ‘readers’ are continually referred to, but never clearly defined. We are led to understand that this was an international, subscription-based readership, but was this gender biased? What were their positions within culture and society? And so forth.

For scholars of dress and fashion with an interest in the post-war period, this publication provides a useful overview of a valuable archival source. In this sense its introductory approach appears less a flaw and more an invitation for further research and investigation. The end section, provided by Alexia Kirk, which meticulously lists the contents of the archive, presents a beginning point from which different sets of questions may be asked and hints at potential and future uses for this source material.