This edition starts with an article by David Wilcox that focuses on the clothing found on the remains of a late seventeenth-century body in a Scottish peat bog in 1920. It discusses these non-elite garments in the context of other Scottish finds of a similar date and contemporary dress; a future companion article will examine the cut and construction of the garments found. The next article, by Joanna Jarvis and Mary Collins, transports us to the world of the theatre and dance, as the authors track the development of ballet costume from the late seventeenth century, through the eighteenth century, analysing the close relationship between the choreography and the dress worn by the dancers. In this bicentenary year of Charlotte Brontë’s birth, we are especially pleased to have Eleanor Houghton’s article which discusses whether a dress in the collection of the Brontë Parsonage, Haworth, could and would have been worn by Brontë to a dinner with William Makepeace Thackeray. Laura Casal-Valls’ article is based on her doctoral research into the dressmakers of late nineteenth-century Barcelona and provides a fascinating regional study of the growing recognition of high-end dressmakers which helped to set the stage for the great couturiers of the twentieth century. Finally, Marie-Therese Gramstadt looks at the career of one of Britain’s best-known fashion designers, Zandra Rhodes, and examines the way her work in the 1980s represented different types of femininity, by considering five different designs and using the extensive Zandra Rhodes archive.
As always we have a thought-provoking collection of book reviews, ably organized by Christine Stevens, and a list of new books published in the last year, prepared by Anna Buruma.
The 2016 editions are the first to be produced by the new publishers of Costume, Taylor & Francis. We are very grateful to Linda Fisher for all her work in guiding these editions through new systems and protocols, and we are very grateful to Penelope Byrde for her assistance and support with this edition.
We would also like to remind readers that electronic access to the journal is through the Taylor & Francis website (http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ycos20/current). Readers can also find out more about the Costume Society and its vibrant programme of events and activities by visiting the Society’s website (http://www.costumesociety.org.uk/), which includes links to the Society’s social media presence. The programme includes the Society’s annual conference and the 2017 conference, to be held in London, will be particularly important for Costume as it will be fifty years since the publication of the first edition. To mark this occasion the conference theme for 2017 will explore writing about dress and fashion and we hope that many Costume readers will be able to join us for the event.