Textiles and costumes often only reveal their full meaning and value through a detailed study of the objects themselves in their context. This interdisciplinary volume brings together papers by leading authorities in textile and costume studies, including historians, curators and conservators discussing a wide range of textiles and costume from tapestries to embroideries, archaeological and ethnographic textiles and exotic costumes at the Danish court as well as European dress in Japan
Well-illustrated, this book will be of interest to all those concerned with understanding, preserving and presenting textiles in the widest sense.
Acknowledgements
Notes on contributors
Abbreviations
Introduction
Textiles revealed: object-based research
Mary M Brooks
Hidden meanings
Textiles as documents of history and those who care for them
Karen Finch
Textiles as multiple and competing histories
Dinah Eastop
Preserving the evidence: survival issues and research on ethnographic objects
Sherry Doyal
Meaning from fragments
English embroidery before Alfred the Great
Donald King
Make or break: the Testing of theory by reproducing historic techniques
Janet Arnold
Buttons for an eighteenth-century man's coat at Platt Hall: a re-maker's problem
Jenny Fitzgerald Bond
Clinging to tradition
How to read historic textiles
Katia Johansen
Hairdressing in Norwegian folkdress: a study based on fieldwork between 1956 and the 1980s
Aagot Noss
Archaism in dress: observations from east to west 1850-1914
Joanna Marschner
Revealing textiles
Fitted for survival: what the selection made by survival reveals
Santina M Levey
Tapestry repairs: for better or for worse
Danielle L Bosworth
Let there be light: Winterthur's lighting project
Linda Eaton
Hidden meanings: the revelations of conservation
Alison Lister and Amber J Rowe
Looking at costume
Barbara J Heiberger
Evidence of maker and making
Peeling back the layers: alterations
June Swann
Re-threading: notes towards a history of sewing thread in Britain
Philip A Sykas
Following the clue: seeking a solution by means of object-based research
Wendy Hefford
Analysis and preservation
From test-tubes to 3D fluorescence spectra
Ã?gnes Tímár-Balázsy
Down among the molecules: chemical analysis in the study of historic and archaeological textiles
Anthony W Smith
Annotated bibliography
An annotated bibliography of the published writings of Karen Finch, OBE, D.Litt, FIIC
Compiled by Mary M Brooks
Textiles Revealed is an interdisciplinary book bringing together papers by leading authorities in textile and costume studies. The book will appeal particularly to specialists, especially conservationists. However, with the interest and enthusiasm shown by the public for exhibitions featuring costume and textiles, there is much in the text that will interest the casual reader.
Journal for Weavers, Spinners and Dyers 198 (June 2001) 40
Textiles Revealed illuminates the potential of object-based study for unveiling the historical and cultural significance of textiles, and the comprehensive scholarship of its distinguished contributors pays tribute to [Karen] Finch's vision for the field of textile conservation.
Journal of the American Institute for Conservation 40 (2001) 271
