#2 Gill’s Cycling Semi-Skirt – Patent #6794
Madame Julia Gill, a Court Dressmaker, filed a patent a 5th Jan 1895 for 'A Cycling Costume for Ladies'. It was accepted on 16th Feb 1895.
‘master copies’ or ‘mistress copies’
The irony of the traced, re-drawn, copied and re-copied 'master' copy. And yet again Kat point out another ridiculous gendering which goes unnoticed.
Digital label embroidery designs
I have been excited to get making labels for the cycling collection. Having collated a few ideas from existing examples of dressmaking labels (from original 1890s garments), a range of…
Full House!
Today we've tested our new office to with 4 of us working simultaneously. It made for a really exciting time to have some collaboration on the information we all had…
Back to the Manchester Museum of Costume
Yesterday Kat took me to Manchester Costume Museum - on bikes, of course - to revisit some of the missing archival materials which have since proven very useful. This gave…
Understanding patents without drawings
Convertible garments with hidden elements are already hard to understand with drawings present. Patents without drawings pose further challenges. So, we started to make our own visuals. Mary Ward's patent…
Coming close to ‘The Real Thing’
The last few weeks have involved contacting a whole range of costume, sporting and women's archives to ensure we aren't making something that already exists, or that if we are,…
The Mauve Decade
As mentioned in my post about materials on offer at Woolcrest, I have been thinking more about the colours available to women in the 1890s. The film footage shows pale…
Choosing materials for mock-ups
Today’s trip to the vast Woolcrest textile warehouse on Hackney’s Well Street leaves us relieved and excited. We are planing to make real wool toiles to get a sense of…
Can a reproduction ever be historically accurate? Should it?
As we start entering into physical production of the cycling garments for this project, a series of questions around our aims in relation to authenticity are arising, and it is…