A Life of Fashion and A Fashionable Life: Alison Settle’s Clothes Line (1937)

Throughout the early to mid-twentieth century a number of autobiographies, memoirs and educative books emerged from the field of fashion. Whilst such texts are regularly referenced and used as sources of information for the study and writing of histories of fashion, they have often been overlooked as subjects of study in their own right. In this paper I introduce a body of textual sources authored by various female figures who worked as editors, journalists, models, buyers and educators within the British fashion industry between 1930–1960. Whilst considered neither ‘scholarly’ nor ‘literary’ writings, and are works of commerce, I argue that these texts are invite a re-evaluation of women’s writing and its role within histories of fashion, womanhood, modernity, labour and subjectivity.

In its discussion of ‘fashion’ writing, this paper focuses on Alison Settle’s 1937 publication Clothes Line. In this book Settle, a fashion journalist and former British Vogue editor (1926-1935), writes a quasi-philosophical deliberation over what fashion is in the socio-historical context of 1930s Britain. It also advises its reader on how to plan, wear, and maintain their clothes so that one can achieve and sustain a fashionable life. Examining this text in conjunction with Settle’s later memoirs published in The Observer (c.1960–1970) I draw upon critical discussions and theories of life-writing and advice literature to analyse the various and overlapping narratives of modern Western womanhood that emerge in the writing and reading of these fashion texts.

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