Participants
Tamsin Ace
London College of Fashion
Tamsin Ace is Head of Cultural Programming at the London College of Fashion.
Julie Blanchard-Emmerson
University for the Creative Arts
Dr Blanchard-Emmerson is a senior lecturer in fashion histories and theories at UCA, teaching about the relationship between the body, identity, materiality, and dress. Her article ‘Feeling Time, Fashioning Age: Pre-teen Girls Negotiating Life Course and the Ageing Process through Dress’ was published in Sociology in 2021.
Katy Canales
Young V&A
Katy has worked in the museum sector for a decade, creating exhibitions, displays, and community engagement activities. Katy’s specialism is in children’s clothing and she is responsible for the UK’s National Childhood Collection of children’s clothing held at the Young V&A. She currently developing content for the V&A’s transformative FuturePlan project.
Jane Suzanne Carroll
Trinity College Dublin
Jane Suzanne Carroll is Ussher assistant professor of children’s literature at Trinity. Her teaching and research interests centre on children’s literature, landscape, and material culture in children’s fiction. Her new book British Children’s Literature and Material Culture was recently published by Bloomsbury.
Gerry Connolly
Worthing Theatres and Museum
Gerry is an experienced museum professional and curator with a specialism in dress and fashion. Gerry has worked for many years in the museums sector developing exhibitions, events, and talks that encourage engagement with museums and their collections.
Nuno Ferreira
University of Sussex
Nuno Ferreira joined Sussex as a professor of law in 2016. He led the Horizon 2020 European Research Council Starting Grant project SOGICA - Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Claims of Asylum and brings expertise in uniform and human rights to Not Only Dressed.
Jennifer Farley Gordon
Iowa State University
Dr Gordon is a lecturer in apparel, merchandising, and design at Iowa State and the digital curator for its Textiles and Clothing Museum. She teaches courses in the history of fashion and conducts research on the history of the children’s wear industry. She previously worked as an assistant curator at the museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology.
Helen Hancocks
Helen Hancocks is a bestselling author-illustrator of picturebooks. Why Do We Wear Clothes? was published by Puffin in 2020, bringing clothes from designers and cultures around the world to seven- to nine-year-old readers. Visit Helen’s website here.
Rachel Hann
Northumbria University
Dr Hann is a senior lecturer in performance and design, with research interests including cultural scenography and trans* performance. In 2013, she co-founded the biennial conference and exhibition Critical Costume.
Anne-Charlotte Hartmann
Studio Abi
Anne-Charlotte Hartmann is the talent behind Studio Abi, which offers creative workshops that encourage children and young people to explore their creativity through the magic of dressing-up.
Ben Hinson
V&A Museum
An assistant curator in the Asian Department at the V&A (Middle East section), Dr Hinson is an expert in the archaeology of childhood. His doctoral thesis at the University of Cambridge focused on childhood in New Kingdom Egypt.
Aude Le Guennec
University of Glasgow
Design anthropologist Dr Le Guennec is research and teaching fellow in future heritage at the Glasgow School of Art. She specializes in children’s material culture and clothing. Her PhD at the Sorbonne addressed the socialization of children through clothing from the eighteenth century onwards. As a curator and consultant, Aude explores innovative approaches to inclusive, sustainable, and educational children’s fashion.
Nicola Miles
University of Brighton
Nicola Miles is currently doing a PhD at Brighton, where she researches children's clothes with particular reference to the company Clothkits. She recently contributed to a forthcoming book on Clothkits by Jason Kennedy. Nicola also has a background in textile design and works freelance designing prints for children.
Maria Federica Moscati
University of Sussex
Dr Moscati is senior lecturer in family law at Sussex. Her current research includes a funded project by the Socio-Legal Studies Association, which investigates the voices of trans young people in England concerning reforms to the Gender Recognition Act 2004.
Susan North
V&A Museum
Dr North is curator of fashion, 1550–1800, at the V&A. She is the author of Sweet and Clean? Bodies and Clothes in Early Modern England (2020), which examines baby clothes and babies’ health as the foundation of cleanliness habits in the past.
Maija Nygren
Almaborealis
Maija Nygren is a knitwear designer and educator based in Edinburgh who learned to crochet at the age of five with her Finnish grandmother. She founded Almaborealis, where she creates educational, child-led kids’ textiles which embrace local and ethical production.
Jane Pilcher
Nottingham Trent University
In her research Dr Pilcher, associate professor of sociology at NTU, often considers the sociocultural significance of children as consuming agents of clothing fashions, as well as girls, clothing, and the sexualization of childhood.
Annebella Pollen
University of Brighton
Annebella Pollen is professor of visual and material culture at Brighton. Her main research interests are in histories of photography and dress. She has published on children’s dressing-up costumes and on youth movement dress, as well as on histories of dress reform. She is currently working on a new Leverhulme-funded project about photography and children.
Clare Rose
Dr Rose has over twenty years of experience as a historian of fashion, textiles, and childhood. Her ground-breaking book Making, Selling, and Wearing Boys’ Clothes in Late-Victorian England was published by Routledge in 2010.
Josephine Rout
V&A Museum
Josephine is a curator in the V&A Asian Department and the author of Japanese Dress in Detail (2020). She recently co-curated the exhibition ‘Kimono: Kyoto to Catwalk’. She is from Aotearoa New Zealand.
Tony Rutherford
National Theatre
Tony is the deputy tailor at the National Theatre where he cuts and makes costumes for a diverse range of productions. As a freelancer he has cut for the theatre, opera, ballet, TV, and film. Tony’s particular area of interest is the development of men’s historic and modern cutting systems.
Alice Sage
Hill Top
Alice Sage is property curator at Hill Top, Beatrix Potter’s Lake District home. Her PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London, investigated fantasies of interwar childhood through fairies, dreams, and stage performance. She has held curatorial roles at museums of childhood at the V&A and Edinburgh.
Annamari Vänskä
Aalto University
Vänskä is adjunct professor of fashion research in the Department of Design at Aalto. Her book Fashionable Childhood (2017) is the first to examine representations of children in fashion media.
Ben Wild
Manchester Metropolitan University
Cultural historian Dr Wild is currently senior lecturer in contextual studies (fashion) within Manchester Fashion Institute. His research situates contemporary and historic dress and fashions within their social and cultural contexts. He published Carnival to Catwalk, a global study of fancy dress, in 2020.
Verity Wilson
Verity Wilson worked for 25 years at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, as a curator in the Asian Department. Between 2009 and 2014, she co-edited the peer-reviewed dress studies journal Costume. Her latest book, Dressing Up: A History of Fancy Dress in Britain, is due from Reaktion Books in June 2022. Her current work centres around the changing depiction of dress with the advent of photography.
Dominique Zarini
Musée du Textile et de la Mode de Cholet
Dominique Zarini has been in charge of Cholet’s extensive costume and textile collections for more than ten years. She commissions exhibitions on children’s clothing and textile arts.
