Dressing New England: Clothing, Fashion, and Identity

This publication is a collection of papers presented at the Dublin Seminar of New England Folklife conference in June of 2010. In some form, all of the wide-ranging papers presented at the Seminar addressed the same issues that consumed the attention of New England’s courts, ministers, and general population in the early colonial period-the pursuit of fashion, dressing appropriate to one’s station (whether high or low), expression of ideology (religious, intellectual, or political), and fashion’s value (emotional as well as financial).

The following is a list of the title and author of each paper:  Identity, Communication, and the Role of Diplomacy in Wabanaki Dress by Laureen LaBar, Supporting Role: The Hoop Skirt in 1860s Western-Massachusetts Fashion by David E. Lazaro, The Life and Death of the American Grenadier: Military Headgear and National Character in the Age of Revolution by Matthew Keagle, “Clothes that is fit to wear”: Fashion, Wage Work, and Community among Female Textile Workers in New England, 1825-1865 by Linzy Brekke-Aloise, Mehitable Primus and Addie Brown: Women of Color and Hartford’s Nineteenth-Century Dressmaking Trades by Marla R. Miller, Federal New England Fashion in the Diary of Sylvia Lewis by Alden O’Brien, Boston in Paris: The Fashions of Annie Bigelow Lawrence Rotch, 1850 – 1854 by Lauren D. Whitley, Folly Cove Designers: A Time and Place by Elena M. Sarni, “Uniform for Intellectuals”: Marimekko, Design Research, and Modernism in Mid Twentieth-Century Cambridge, Massachusetts by Susan Ward, Emily Wilkens: Connecticut-born Designer for All-American Teens by Rebecca Jumper Matheson, “Prized the more by me for having once been yours”: Gifts of Clothing in Nineteenth-Century New England by Mary Beth Sievens, “I Wish I Could Help You Turn, and Press, and Re-fit”: The Clothing of Missionary Daughters in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New England by Elizabeth C. Stevens and Jessie MacLeod, Bibliography of Selected Works on New England, American, English, and French Costume and Clothing History, 1600 – 1975 by Lynne Zacek Bassett and Marla Miller.