How to Read a Dress: A Guide to Changing Fashion from the 16th to 20th Century by Lydia Edwards (review)

Fashion has played an increasingly important role in recent studies of eighteenth-century texts, in particular as scholars have turned to dress as a framework for explorations of femininity in novels from the mid-eighteenth century onward. Although the literary dimensions of dress have been fleshed out, less critical attention has been given to dress as a material object. Responding to this gap in scholarship with her exceptional monograph How to Read a Dress: A Guide to Changing Fashion from the 16th to 20th Century, Lydia Edwards has created a visual masterpiece charting the development of women’s fashion and underscoring the merits of integrating dress into historical studies more broadly.

How to Read a Dress is a detailed and beautiful reference work of women’s garments over almost five centuries. Edwards’ declared double objective in How to Read a Dress is to teach the reader how to identify the details of garments and to provide an overarching narrative of the development of dress that takes the reader on a “sartorial journey” through women’s fashion (8). Her annotations of the book’s many images ably achieve this aim, both highlighting the stylistic hallmarks of each specific era and illustrating continuity and change in Western fashion for women. Edwards presents her knowledge in terms that are easily accessible to a non-expert audience and includes a detailed glossary of terms in the book, equipping the reader with the tools necessary to recognize key stylistic shifts and to engage thoughtfully with women’s fashion in both academic and non-academic contexts.

The book’s introduction and preface describe the challenges faced by those who would study women’s fashion with an eye to history and by those, like her, who aim to create narratives of women’s fashion spanning many centuries. Edwards identifies two particularly significant barriers to scholars focused on clothing, a candid presentation of the challenges of working with material objects that both increases the reader’s appreciation of the labor and learning that undergird her narrative and encourages readers to explore her collection of garments for themselves. Practical difficulties faced by scholars of clothing include the paucity of surviving examples, the majority of which represent the taste and clothing practices of only middle and upper-class women.

Each of the eleven chapters of How to Read a Dress meticulously documents the intimate linkages among women’s fashion, particular historical events, and broad cultural trends. This structure both clarifies Edwards’ prefatory rejection of simplistic definitions of dress as a single entity that could be represented adequately as a picture on a page (13) and highlights the importance of dress in relation to female identity in both the public and private spheres. Edwards argues that fashion acts as a language of expression and that the aesthetics and the function of dress are essential to historical study, claims with powerful implications for the scholarship focused on the lived realities of women (16). Each of the book’s eleven era-focused chapters advance these large claims by providing, first, a general overview of the period’s major trends and then annotated examples of dresses from the period found in collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the McCord Museum, detailing the socio-cultural implications of the stylistic features of each item.

I will comment here only on the three chapters focused on the long eighteenth century. Surviving examples of dress from the years 1610–1699, the focus of Chapter Two, are so exceptionally scarce that Edwards relies largely on paintings and sketches to illustrate the stylistic hallmarks of the period. Including artistic renderings of dress alongside the few remaining examples of garments allows Edwards to chart the development of this period’s primary stylistic innovation: women’s adoption of the one-piece gown...