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fiona hackney

Manchester Metropolitan University, Fashion, Faculty Member

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Fiona Hackney is Professor Fashion Cultures at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. She specialises in research on interwar periodicals, sustainability and fashion with a focus on the power of quiet activism, cultural heritage, crafts, co-production and communities including what she terms well-making.
Phone: +447585060105
Address: 36
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Papers by fiona hackney

Book Review: Alan Powers, Enid Marx: The Pleasures of Pattern

Interview with Angela Maddock

Journal of Applied Arts and Health, Dec 1, 2022

This interview with Angela Maddock explores well-making in the context of her own textile arts pr... more This interview with Angela Maddock explores well-making in the context of her own textile arts practice, teaching and research. Describing well-making as a potentially transformative act of making, both physically and psychologically, Maddock associates it with processes of contributing, building, attaching and connecting – enabling agencies and affects that bring people and things together. Projects range from the knitted performance piece Bloodline, which she co-made with her mother, and quilts made collaboratively with midwifery students from their own repurposed underwear. Maddock’s work ranges from public commissions to informal domestic pieces made for herself, friends and family, but she is always attuned to the memories and meanings embodied in the materiality of fabric. Knitting, trauma, family, feminism and subjectivity are themes that run throughout Maddock’s work which includes unmaking as much as making, disassembly and repurposing, in a process of remaking the self as much as the stuff of everyday life.

22. Beyond Utility: Pushing the Frontiers in Women’s Monthlies: Modern Woman 1943–51

Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Oct 27, 2020

<Author> Fiona Hackney <A> Introduction: active citizenship and feminist consciousness This chapt... more <Author> Fiona Hackney <A> Introduction: active citizenship and feminist consciousness This chapter examines a 'new consciousness' that emerged, albeit unevenly, in the women's 'service' monthly Modern Woman in the 1940s. Published by George Newnes, Modern Woman was a mid-range consumer magazine targeted at a readership of professional women and the wives of professionals that first appeared in the mid-1920s. Subject to rationing, magazines reduced in size, yet the women's press took on new importance as a conduit for Government and as a vital support for women dealing with wartime conditions. This chapter argues that the ethos of publications also changed as the home became central to public discourse. The new conditions opened a space to rethink women's social and political participation as 'active citizens' and discursive articles took on a new prominence in the magazine. Looking back on the woman's magazine industry in the early 1940s James Drawbell, then newly appointed Managing Editor of George Newnes' weekly Woman's Own, recalled those years as a unique time when editors could focus on meeting their readers' needs unhampered by commercial considerations. This was the great time, and it would last only a few years, when magazines would sell solely on their reader-value. It was a journalist's dream. We could plan our magazine as a magazine … It was the quality of the editorial, in fact, which in those early days caused the magazine revolution to happen … (Drawbell 1968: 125

Book Review C. Fowler The Modern Embroidery Movement

A book review of The Modern Embroidery Movement, Cynthia Fowler, (2018) London, New York: Bloomsb... more A book review of The Modern Embroidery Movement, Cynthia Fowler, (2018) London, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 259 pp., 16 colour and 75 b/w illustrations, ISBN: HB: 9781350033313This meticulously researched, well-illustrated and lucidly written book provides a detailed critical history of the work and lives of a group of American women artists who chose to work in embroidery in the first half of the twentieth century

Woman Appeal. A New Rhetoric of Consumption: Women’s Domestic Magazines in the 1920s and 1930s

Edinburgh University Press eBooks, 2018

women' with salaries of £250-£350 per year and £500 in exceptional circumstances (Aug 1932: 30). ... more women' with salaries of £250-£350 per year and £500 in exceptional circumstances (Aug 1932: 30). The American J. Walter Thompson (JWT) agency installed a Women's Editorial Department entirely staffed by female copywriters and W. S. Crawford launched their Women's Department run by Margaret Havinden (Scanlon 1994). Magazine historian Jennifer Scanlon highlighted the 'missionary spirit' and 'social service goals' of advertising at JWT where women advertisers believed that they could 'improve the position of women' (1994: 171). In Britain, women such as Ethel Wood, a Director of the British Samson Clarke agency and lifelong advocate for women, and the social reformer, author and magazine Agony Aunt, Leonora Eyles, agreed (Wood 1925: 180; Hackney 2016). Service magazines were characterised by closer ties between specialists and advertisers, and a light, informal tone influenced by advertising. Lightness of style, Crawshay assured, did not necessarily mean low standards, while 'rudimentary facts about housekeeping and other feminine matters,' were no longer sufficient; 'writing had to have "news value,"' another idea co-opted from advertising (1932: 27). The new style was designed to engage readers in an imagined conversation and participate in a cultural imaginary that referenced the aural-visual, commercial language of radio and cinema rather than literature and the written word. Even gossip was modernised. The 'modern gossip feature,' according to Peacocke, was a 'versatile, vital, stimulating, wholesome and healthy' branch of the journalist's craft, which imparted news about the 'phases of modern social life' in a 'chatty informative style' and 'friendly spirit' (1936: 28). Topics included: new houses and flats, original ideas in interior decoration, clothes and parties, celebrity babies, debutantes, trends in dinner-table talk, novel foods, witty sayings, comments of notable people on the affairs of the day and novel holiday plans. The 'heart-to-heart' talk with advice on 'problems and perplexities, emotional, philosophical, psychological, domestic, aesthetic

Second-hand Cultures

Journal of Design History, Jun 1, 2005

It is many years since Angela McRobbie&amp;amp;#x27;s Zoot Suits and Second-hand Dresses was ... more It is many years since Angela McRobbie&amp;amp;#x27;s Zoot Suits and Second-hand Dresses was published in 1989, and a thoroughgoing exploration of the intriguing world of the &amp;amp;#x27;second-hand&amp;amp;#x27;that she pointed to in that book has been a long time in coming. Gregson and Crewe&amp;amp;#x27;s Second-hand Cultures, nevertheless, has been worth the wait. Their methodology, a painstaking combination of quantitative large-scale survey work, intensive interviews and discursive, textual analysis, results in a publication that is both rigorous and entertaining to ...

Crafting with a purpose: How the ‘work’ of the workshop makes, promotes and embodies well-being

Journal of Applied Arts and Health, Dec 1, 2022

This article examines two community arts textile projects to consider the relationship between wo... more This article examines two community arts textile projects to consider the relationship between workshops, as method (and methodology), and the research/knowledge that emerges from and through them. The ‘workshop’ is understood as the structural relationship between people, processes, materials and place, while ‘work’ is the knowledge/research that emerges from these interactions. While different in intent and structure, both projects share concerns about making, health and well-being. Craftivist Garden #wellMAKING worked with a network of local amateur craft groups across the United Kingdom to think critically about health and well-being, while Kotha and Kantha examined how stitch serves as an alternative well-making strategy for a group of Bangladeshi-born women living in Manchester, United Kingdom. The article argues that thinking about the workshop as a ‘holding form’ and/or ‘bloom space’ and paying attention to the stories told and artefacts (knowledge objects) made in workshops is vital to understanding their value.

The Parlour and the Suburb: Domestic Identities, Class, Femininity and Modernity

Journal of Design History, 2006

In a concise but rich study of women's experiences of modernization during the first half of the ... more In a concise but rich study of women's experiences of modernization during the first half of the twentieth century, Judy Giles argues that scholars have tended to see modernity, modernism, and modernization in terms that exclude what she terms ''women's subjectivities.'' Indeed, modernity has been understood as the opposite of many qualities associated with women's lives-the traditional, the emotional, and, most importantly here, the domestic. Giles, professor of Gender and Cultural Criticism at York St. John College in York, England, argues that women's experiences of domesticity underwent significant changes during the first half of the twentieth century. Using methods of cultural studies, Giles does not focus on technological changes to the domestic environment. Rather, she looks for changes in women's experiences of themselves, or their subjectivities. Using a broad range of sources including novels, oral histories, sociological studies, and secondary material by historians, literary scholars, and philosophers, she finds change in three specific areas around which she organizes the main chapters of her book: class identification, interclass relationships, and the development of the consumer identity. In ''Something that Little Bit Better,'' Giles rejects the usual academic reading of the suburbs as a place of sterile conformity. For many women, she argues, the suburbs represented personal fulfillment and modernization, not the limitation of options. The growth of suburbs in the postwar era allowed many working-class women, through marriage, to achieve a level of material comfort unknown to their mothers. Not to understand this as modernity, Giles argues, is to miss the full complexity of the experience of modernization. ''Help for Housewives'' offers a fascinating exploration of how the decline in domestic service during and after the war changed the ways in which both working-class and middle-class women experienced their domestic identities. Giles suggests that the increase in opportunities for women during and after the war freed working-class women from the necessity of taking care of other women's homes and simultaneously destabilized middle-class women's sense of themselves as managers rather than workers in the home. In this way, she reminds readers that modernity is as much a matter of cultural subtraction as well as addition.

Use Your Hands for Happiness':: Home Craft and Make-do-and-Mend in British Women's Magazines in the 1920s and 1930s

Journal of Design History, 2006

With their kits, transfers, patterns, coupons, colourfully visualized transformation tips and ste... more With their kits, transfers, patterns, coupons, colourfully visualized transformation tips and step-by-step instructions, home craft features were a prominent and popular component of women&amp;amp;#x27;s consumer magazines in the 1920s and 1930s. More recently, this form of consumer craft has been accused of limiting and even suppressing women&amp;amp;#x27;s creativity. In contrast, this article will argue that home craft, as a component of a new commercial culture of home-making in the period, offered women opportunities for self-expression, agency and self-determination. It ...

Publication Review

Craft research, Mar 1, 2015

Reimagining Homes, Housewives, and Domesticity: Introduction

Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Dec 25, 2017

A HOME OF ONE’S own, one of the most compelling dreams of the period, was becoming a reality for ... more A HOME OF ONE’S own, one of the most compelling dreams of the period, was becoming a reality for increasing numbers of people in the interwar years. The interwar generation, social historian John Burnett observed, ‘was perhaps the most family-oriented and home-centred one in history’ (1978: 265). Over four million new houses, an unprecedented expansion in the state and private sectors, coupled with cheap mortgages, easy credit, and the mass manufacture of household consumer goods, underpinned the domestic focus of magazines aimed at women across a wide range of sectors including the commercial, political, religious, and literary magazines, and women’s pages in newspapers examined here. The essays in ...

Publication Reviews

Craft research, Mar 1, 2019

A Cottage Of One’s Own: Making Modern Women Through Word and Image in Interwar Women’s Homemaking Magazines

Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, Jun 1, 2022

A home with all modern conveniences became a reality for an increasing number of people, includin... more A home with all modern conveniences became a reality for an increasing number of people, including aspirational lower middle-and working-class families, in the interwar years. Magazines such as Modern Home and Weldon's Ladies' Journal helped forge a burgeoning home consumer culture and were an important factor shaping dreams of home ownership. This article examines the ideal modern home-its pleasures, discontents, and potential meaning for women-as it was constructed in and disseminated through domestic women's magazines. Conceptualizing periodicals as hybrid, composite texts, it argues that the multiple ways in which they framed, positioned, and reproduced word and image set up tensions and connections, opening a space for more diverse readers to engage with magazines in new ways. The metaphor of the magazine as both a "window" and "mirror" helps show how editors strove to balance appealing visions of modern living with advice that reflected readers' real circumstances. A focus on the dominant ideal of the modern cottage/suburban home helps unpack the complex relationship between rural and modern, the past and the present, conventional femininity and modern womanhood, and private and national life that operated in the pages of these popular magazines.

Quiet Activism and the New Amateur

Design and Culture, Jul 1, 2013

ABSTRACT This article contributes to debates about the expanded, and expanding, nature of crafts ... more ABSTRACT This article contributes to debates about the expanded, and expanding, nature of crafts by exploring the activist potential of amateur, domestic crafts and the quiet activism of everyday making. In contrast to much recent work on the resurgence of interest in DIY craft culture, it takes a historical perspective and argues for the emergence of a new, historically conscious, socially engaged amateur practice. The recently exhibited cross-stitch embroideries of Major Alexis Casdagli and my own memories of my grandmother provide a starting point for exploring the lived experience of home crafts in the first half of the twentieth century. Close analysis of home-craft features from 1930s women's magazines offer a framework for understanding how such marginalized spaces promote agency through new feminine imaginaries. Michel De Certeau's notion of la perruque suggests how such devalued activities as crochet and knitting can be envisaged as strategies or tactics that afford agency and shape distinctive social relations, while interviews with two contemporary practitioners provide insight into historical continuities and current responses.

Well-making: co-building pathways for empathy

This one day interactive workshop at the Wellcome Collection in London 2017 explored new research... more This one day interactive workshop at the Wellcome Collection in London 2017 explored new research on inclusive design and empathy with a particular focus on how maker spaces might be better understood as 'well-making spaces': spaces of empathy that promote health and wellbeing. The event included a keynote by Professor Lizbeth Goodman, Chair of

Talking Textiles, Making Value: Catalyzing Fashion, Dress, and Textiles Heritage in the Midlands

Journal of textile design, research and practice, Nov 11, 2019

Seeing the network for the trees of knowledge

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Les échanges gazeux dans les pommes Granny Smith

Fruits, 1955

The network of the documentalists: the new technological and sociological space of information before World War II

Van Acker, W. (2009). The network of the documentalists : the new technological and sociological ... more Van Acker, W. (2009). The network of the documentalists : the new technological and sociological space of information before World War II. In F. Hackney, J. Glynne, & V. Menton (Eds.), Networks of Design: proceedings of the 2008 Annual International Conference of the Design History Society (pp. 134–134). Presented at the 2008 Annual International Conference of the Design History Society : Networks of Design, Boca Raton: Universal Publishers. ... Van Acker W. The network of the documentalists : the new technological and sociological space of information ...

The affective economy and fast fashion: Materiality, embodied learning and developing a sensibility for sustainable clothing

Journal of Material Culture, Mar 28, 2022

Many commentators recognise the need to make clothing more sustainable due to its deleterious env... more Many commentators recognise the need to make clothing more sustainable due to its deleterious environmental and social ramifications. However, it is challenging to change the consumer behaviour that drives fast fashion markets because people have complex relationships with clothing. In this study, we illustrate how the relationships that people have with clothing can be shaped by workshops that immerse them in making, mending, and modifying garments. Such experiential learning can encourage adoption of more sustainable clothing choices, such as reducing consumption of new garments and prolonging the life of already owned items of clothing. We present findings on a strand of work from the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded S4S: Designing a Sensibility for Sustainable Clothing project, which explored the affective economy around clothing, and considered how emotive affects around garments operate as a conduit to self-sustain particular practices. Our significant contribution brings political analysis firmly into the debate about sustainable clothing by merging literatures on behaviour change and affect, through exploration of a novel longitudinal (9-months) qualitative data set. At the start of the project, participants generally thought of clothes as being low-cost (and therefore disposable) items. The workshops, in contrast, presented garments and the materials from which they are made as precious, complex and fluid – in a process of continual possibility. For pro-environmental behavioural change, we find that immersion in the materiality of clothing mobilised affective processes, enabling potentially transformative affective encounters. Further, we found that group learning environments need to do more than simply teach approved normative values and behaviours. Pro-environmental behaviour change initiatives need to provide people with the space to create and situate their own knowledges, enabling affect to be mobilised, activated and supported by appropriate cultural milieu.

Book Review: Alan Powers, Enid Marx: The Pleasures of Pattern

Interview with Angela Maddock

Journal of Applied Arts and Health, Dec 1, 2022

This interview with Angela Maddock explores well-making in the context of her own textile arts pr... more This interview with Angela Maddock explores well-making in the context of her own textile arts practice, teaching and research. Describing well-making as a potentially transformative act of making, both physically and psychologically, Maddock associates it with processes of contributing, building, attaching and connecting – enabling agencies and affects that bring people and things together. Projects range from the knitted performance piece Bloodline, which she co-made with her mother, and quilts made collaboratively with midwifery students from their own repurposed underwear. Maddock’s work ranges from public commissions to informal domestic pieces made for herself, friends and family, but she is always attuned to the memories and meanings embodied in the materiality of fabric. Knitting, trauma, family, feminism and subjectivity are themes that run throughout Maddock’s work which includes unmaking as much as making, disassembly and repurposing, in a process of remaking the self as much as the stuff of everyday life.

22. Beyond Utility: Pushing the Frontiers in Women’s Monthlies: Modern Woman 1943–51

Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Oct 27, 2020

<Author> Fiona Hackney <A> Introduction: active citizenship and feminist consciousness This chapt... more <Author> Fiona Hackney <A> Introduction: active citizenship and feminist consciousness This chapter examines a 'new consciousness' that emerged, albeit unevenly, in the women's 'service' monthly Modern Woman in the 1940s. Published by George Newnes, Modern Woman was a mid-range consumer magazine targeted at a readership of professional women and the wives of professionals that first appeared in the mid-1920s. Subject to rationing, magazines reduced in size, yet the women's press took on new importance as a conduit for Government and as a vital support for women dealing with wartime conditions. This chapter argues that the ethos of publications also changed as the home became central to public discourse. The new conditions opened a space to rethink women's social and political participation as 'active citizens' and discursive articles took on a new prominence in the magazine. Looking back on the woman's magazine industry in the early 1940s James Drawbell, then newly appointed Managing Editor of George Newnes' weekly Woman's Own, recalled those years as a unique time when editors could focus on meeting their readers' needs unhampered by commercial considerations. This was the great time, and it would last only a few years, when magazines would sell solely on their reader-value. It was a journalist's dream. We could plan our magazine as a magazine … It was the quality of the editorial, in fact, which in those early days caused the magazine revolution to happen … (Drawbell 1968: 125

Book Review C. Fowler The Modern Embroidery Movement

A book review of The Modern Embroidery Movement, Cynthia Fowler, (2018) London, New York: Bloomsb... more A book review of The Modern Embroidery Movement, Cynthia Fowler, (2018) London, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 259 pp., 16 colour and 75 b/w illustrations, ISBN: HB: 9781350033313This meticulously researched, well-illustrated and lucidly written book provides a detailed critical history of the work and lives of a group of American women artists who chose to work in embroidery in the first half of the twentieth century

Woman Appeal. A New Rhetoric of Consumption: Women’s Domestic Magazines in the 1920s and 1930s

Edinburgh University Press eBooks, 2018

women' with salaries of £250-£350 per year and £500 in exceptional circumstances (Aug 1932: 30). ... more women' with salaries of £250-£350 per year and £500 in exceptional circumstances (Aug 1932: 30). The American J. Walter Thompson (JWT) agency installed a Women's Editorial Department entirely staffed by female copywriters and W. S. Crawford launched their Women's Department run by Margaret Havinden (Scanlon 1994). Magazine historian Jennifer Scanlon highlighted the 'missionary spirit' and 'social service goals' of advertising at JWT where women advertisers believed that they could 'improve the position of women' (1994: 171). In Britain, women such as Ethel Wood, a Director of the British Samson Clarke agency and lifelong advocate for women, and the social reformer, author and magazine Agony Aunt, Leonora Eyles, agreed (Wood 1925: 180; Hackney 2016). Service magazines were characterised by closer ties between specialists and advertisers, and a light, informal tone influenced by advertising. Lightness of style, Crawshay assured, did not necessarily mean low standards, while 'rudimentary facts about housekeeping and other feminine matters,' were no longer sufficient; 'writing had to have "news value,"' another idea co-opted from advertising (1932: 27). The new style was designed to engage readers in an imagined conversation and participate in a cultural imaginary that referenced the aural-visual, commercial language of radio and cinema rather than literature and the written word. Even gossip was modernised. The 'modern gossip feature,' according to Peacocke, was a 'versatile, vital, stimulating, wholesome and healthy' branch of the journalist's craft, which imparted news about the 'phases of modern social life' in a 'chatty informative style' and 'friendly spirit' (1936: 28). Topics included: new houses and flats, original ideas in interior decoration, clothes and parties, celebrity babies, debutantes, trends in dinner-table talk, novel foods, witty sayings, comments of notable people on the affairs of the day and novel holiday plans. The 'heart-to-heart' talk with advice on 'problems and perplexities, emotional, philosophical, psychological, domestic, aesthetic

Second-hand Cultures

Journal of Design History, Jun 1, 2005

It is many years since Angela McRobbie&amp;amp;#x27;s Zoot Suits and Second-hand Dresses was ... more It is many years since Angela McRobbie&amp;amp;#x27;s Zoot Suits and Second-hand Dresses was published in 1989, and a thoroughgoing exploration of the intriguing world of the &amp;amp;#x27;second-hand&amp;amp;#x27;that she pointed to in that book has been a long time in coming. Gregson and Crewe&amp;amp;#x27;s Second-hand Cultures, nevertheless, has been worth the wait. Their methodology, a painstaking combination of quantitative large-scale survey work, intensive interviews and discursive, textual analysis, results in a publication that is both rigorous and entertaining to ...

Crafting with a purpose: How the ‘work’ of the workshop makes, promotes and embodies well-being

Journal of Applied Arts and Health, Dec 1, 2022

This article examines two community arts textile projects to consider the relationship between wo... more This article examines two community arts textile projects to consider the relationship between workshops, as method (and methodology), and the research/knowledge that emerges from and through them. The ‘workshop’ is understood as the structural relationship between people, processes, materials and place, while ‘work’ is the knowledge/research that emerges from these interactions. While different in intent and structure, both projects share concerns about making, health and well-being. Craftivist Garden #wellMAKING worked with a network of local amateur craft groups across the United Kingdom to think critically about health and well-being, while Kotha and Kantha examined how stitch serves as an alternative well-making strategy for a group of Bangladeshi-born women living in Manchester, United Kingdom. The article argues that thinking about the workshop as a ‘holding form’ and/or ‘bloom space’ and paying attention to the stories told and artefacts (knowledge objects) made in workshops is vital to understanding their value.

The Parlour and the Suburb: Domestic Identities, Class, Femininity and Modernity

Journal of Design History, 2006

In a concise but rich study of women's experiences of modernization during the first half of the ... more In a concise but rich study of women's experiences of modernization during the first half of the twentieth century, Judy Giles argues that scholars have tended to see modernity, modernism, and modernization in terms that exclude what she terms ''women's subjectivities.'' Indeed, modernity has been understood as the opposite of many qualities associated with women's lives-the traditional, the emotional, and, most importantly here, the domestic. Giles, professor of Gender and Cultural Criticism at York St. John College in York, England, argues that women's experiences of domesticity underwent significant changes during the first half of the twentieth century. Using methods of cultural studies, Giles does not focus on technological changes to the domestic environment. Rather, she looks for changes in women's experiences of themselves, or their subjectivities. Using a broad range of sources including novels, oral histories, sociological studies, and secondary material by historians, literary scholars, and philosophers, she finds change in three specific areas around which she organizes the main chapters of her book: class identification, interclass relationships, and the development of the consumer identity. In ''Something that Little Bit Better,'' Giles rejects the usual academic reading of the suburbs as a place of sterile conformity. For many women, she argues, the suburbs represented personal fulfillment and modernization, not the limitation of options. The growth of suburbs in the postwar era allowed many working-class women, through marriage, to achieve a level of material comfort unknown to their mothers. Not to understand this as modernity, Giles argues, is to miss the full complexity of the experience of modernization. ''Help for Housewives'' offers a fascinating exploration of how the decline in domestic service during and after the war changed the ways in which both working-class and middle-class women experienced their domestic identities. Giles suggests that the increase in opportunities for women during and after the war freed working-class women from the necessity of taking care of other women's homes and simultaneously destabilized middle-class women's sense of themselves as managers rather than workers in the home. In this way, she reminds readers that modernity is as much a matter of cultural subtraction as well as addition.

Use Your Hands for Happiness':: Home Craft and Make-do-and-Mend in British Women's Magazines in the 1920s and 1930s

Journal of Design History, 2006

With their kits, transfers, patterns, coupons, colourfully visualized transformation tips and ste... more With their kits, transfers, patterns, coupons, colourfully visualized transformation tips and step-by-step instructions, home craft features were a prominent and popular component of women&amp;amp;#x27;s consumer magazines in the 1920s and 1930s. More recently, this form of consumer craft has been accused of limiting and even suppressing women&amp;amp;#x27;s creativity. In contrast, this article will argue that home craft, as a component of a new commercial culture of home-making in the period, offered women opportunities for self-expression, agency and self-determination. It ...

Publication Review

Craft research, Mar 1, 2015

Reimagining Homes, Housewives, and Domesticity: Introduction

Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Dec 25, 2017

A HOME OF ONE’S own, one of the most compelling dreams of the period, was becoming a reality for ... more A HOME OF ONE’S own, one of the most compelling dreams of the period, was becoming a reality for increasing numbers of people in the interwar years. The interwar generation, social historian John Burnett observed, ‘was perhaps the most family-oriented and home-centred one in history’ (1978: 265). Over four million new houses, an unprecedented expansion in the state and private sectors, coupled with cheap mortgages, easy credit, and the mass manufacture of household consumer goods, underpinned the domestic focus of magazines aimed at women across a wide range of sectors including the commercial, political, religious, and literary magazines, and women’s pages in newspapers examined here. The essays in ...

Publication Reviews

Craft research, Mar 1, 2019

A Cottage Of One’s Own: Making Modern Women Through Word and Image in Interwar Women’s Homemaking Magazines

Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, Jun 1, 2022

A home with all modern conveniences became a reality for an increasing number of people, includin... more A home with all modern conveniences became a reality for an increasing number of people, including aspirational lower middle-and working-class families, in the interwar years. Magazines such as Modern Home and Weldon's Ladies' Journal helped forge a burgeoning home consumer culture and were an important factor shaping dreams of home ownership. This article examines the ideal modern home-its pleasures, discontents, and potential meaning for women-as it was constructed in and disseminated through domestic women's magazines. Conceptualizing periodicals as hybrid, composite texts, it argues that the multiple ways in which they framed, positioned, and reproduced word and image set up tensions and connections, opening a space for more diverse readers to engage with magazines in new ways. The metaphor of the magazine as both a "window" and "mirror" helps show how editors strove to balance appealing visions of modern living with advice that reflected readers' real circumstances. A focus on the dominant ideal of the modern cottage/suburban home helps unpack the complex relationship between rural and modern, the past and the present, conventional femininity and modern womanhood, and private and national life that operated in the pages of these popular magazines.

Quiet Activism and the New Amateur

Design and Culture, Jul 1, 2013

ABSTRACT This article contributes to debates about the expanded, and expanding, nature of crafts ... more ABSTRACT This article contributes to debates about the expanded, and expanding, nature of crafts by exploring the activist potential of amateur, domestic crafts and the quiet activism of everyday making. In contrast to much recent work on the resurgence of interest in DIY craft culture, it takes a historical perspective and argues for the emergence of a new, historically conscious, socially engaged amateur practice. The recently exhibited cross-stitch embroideries of Major Alexis Casdagli and my own memories of my grandmother provide a starting point for exploring the lived experience of home crafts in the first half of the twentieth century. Close analysis of home-craft features from 1930s women's magazines offer a framework for understanding how such marginalized spaces promote agency through new feminine imaginaries. Michel De Certeau's notion of la perruque suggests how such devalued activities as crochet and knitting can be envisaged as strategies or tactics that afford agency and shape distinctive social relations, while interviews with two contemporary practitioners provide insight into historical continuities and current responses.

Well-making: co-building pathways for empathy

This one day interactive workshop at the Wellcome Collection in London 2017 explored new research... more This one day interactive workshop at the Wellcome Collection in London 2017 explored new research on inclusive design and empathy with a particular focus on how maker spaces might be better understood as 'well-making spaces': spaces of empathy that promote health and wellbeing. The event included a keynote by Professor Lizbeth Goodman, Chair of

Talking Textiles, Making Value: Catalyzing Fashion, Dress, and Textiles Heritage in the Midlands

Journal of textile design, research and practice, Nov 11, 2019

Seeing the network for the trees of knowledge

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Les échanges gazeux dans les pommes Granny Smith

Fruits, 1955

The network of the documentalists: the new technological and sociological space of information before World War II

Van Acker, W. (2009). The network of the documentalists : the new technological and sociological ... more Van Acker, W. (2009). The network of the documentalists : the new technological and sociological space of information before World War II. In F. Hackney, J. Glynne, & V. Menton (Eds.), Networks of Design: proceedings of the 2008 Annual International Conference of the Design History Society (pp. 134–134). Presented at the 2008 Annual International Conference of the Design History Society : Networks of Design, Boca Raton: Universal Publishers. ... Van Acker W. The network of the documentalists : the new technological and sociological space of information ...

The affective economy and fast fashion: Materiality, embodied learning and developing a sensibility for sustainable clothing

Journal of Material Culture, Mar 28, 2022

Many commentators recognise the need to make clothing more sustainable due to its deleterious env... more Many commentators recognise the need to make clothing more sustainable due to its deleterious environmental and social ramifications. However, it is challenging to change the consumer behaviour that drives fast fashion markets because people have complex relationships with clothing. In this study, we illustrate how the relationships that people have with clothing can be shaped by workshops that immerse them in making, mending, and modifying garments. Such experiential learning can encourage adoption of more sustainable clothing choices, such as reducing consumption of new garments and prolonging the life of already owned items of clothing. We present findings on a strand of work from the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded S4S: Designing a Sensibility for Sustainable Clothing project, which explored the affective economy around clothing, and considered how emotive affects around garments operate as a conduit to self-sustain particular practices. Our significant contribution brings political analysis firmly into the debate about sustainable clothing by merging literatures on behaviour change and affect, through exploration of a novel longitudinal (9-months) qualitative data set. At the start of the project, participants generally thought of clothes as being low-cost (and therefore disposable) items. The workshops, in contrast, presented garments and the materials from which they are made as precious, complex and fluid – in a process of continual possibility. For pro-environmental behavioural change, we find that immersion in the materiality of clothing mobilised affective processes, enabling potentially transformative affective encounters. Further, we found that group learning environments need to do more than simply teach approved normative values and behaviours. Pro-environmental behaviour change initiatives need to provide people with the space to create and situate their own knowledges, enabling affect to be mobilised, activated and supported by appropriate cultural milieu.