Dr Serena Dyer

Dr Serena Dyer FRHistS AFHEA is a historian, broadcaster, and curator, specializing in the history of fashion, shopping, and material culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her prize-winning first book, Material Lives: Women Makers and Consumer Culture in the 18th Century, was published by Bloomsbury in 2021. She also edited Shopping and the Senses (Palgrave, 2022), Disseminating Dress (Bloomsbury, 2022), and Material Literacy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Bloomsbury, 2020). Her current research projects include work on the performance of British patriotism through dress, the history of buying British, historicism and sartorial temporality, and recreation and remaking dress as a historical methodology.

​Serena is Lecturer in History of Design and Material Culture at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. She completed her ESRC-funded PhD at the University of Warwick in 2016, and she also has previously taught at the University of Hertfordshire and the University of York. Before returning to academia, Serena was Curator of the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture and Assistant Curator at the National Portrait Gallery. She is the presenter of English Heritage/Immediate Media's Fashion Through History, and she regularly appears on BBC radio. She currently leads the AHRC-funded Making Historical Dress: Hands, Bodies and Methods Network (Co-I, Dr Sarah Bendall ACU).

Institute of History, Institute of Art and Design

Material Culture, Dress History, Consumption, Shopping, Retail, Nationhood and Britishness, Women's History

Fashion History, Material Culture, Women's History, History of Consumption

PhD: History, University of Warwick, 2012-2016
MA: Eighteenth Century Studies, University of York, 2011-2012
BA (Hons): History and History of Art, University of York, 2008-2011

Design Cultures, MA History

Textile History, 2018-Present, Exhibition Reviews Editor.
William Morris Society, 2017-2018, Trustee.
British Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2016-2017, Fine Art Reviews Editor, Criticks.
Association of Art Historians Postgraduate and Early Career Committee, 2013-2015, Treasurer.

FRHistS

AFHEA

FRSA

Material Lives: Women Makers and Consumer Culture in the Eighteenth Century

Structured around the material archives left by four genteel women, my first monograph (published by Bloomsbury in 2021), Material Lives, reveals the strategies employed by consumers to manage and express their lives through material culture. The volume focuses on four material biographies: Barbara Johnson’s album of fabric samples, Ann Frankland Lewis’s ‘dress of the year’ watercolours, Laetitia Powell’s doll-sized versions of her own garments, and Sabine Winn’s adorned prints. Approached as forms of life-writing, the material narratives constructed by these women reveal the gendered material strategies used to negotiate and record their interactions with the increasingly sophisticated world of goods. These women engaged with the material culture of making as a means of recording and navigating their lives, articulating their own biographical narratives through material ego-documents.

Labour of the Stitch: Making and Remaking Women’s Fashionable Dress in Georgian England

The making of fashionable women’s dress in Georgian England necessitated an inordinate amount of manual labour. From the mantua-makers and seamstresses who wrought lengths of silk and linen into garments, to the artists and engravers who disseminated and immortalised the resulting outfits in print and on paper, Georgian garments were the products of many busy hands. The Labour of the Stitch centres the sartorial hand as a point of connection across the industries which generated fashionable dress in the eighteenth century. In doing so, this volume considers the symbiotic linkages between paper and textiles in the generation of cultures of fashionable dress, as elucidated by the manual labour of the hand.

Central to retrieving histories of manual labour are recreation methodologies. The embodied turn often positions finished garments on the body. Scholars in this field have focussed on the shaping of the torso or the holistic wearing of dress. The Labour of the Stitch brings together contemporary discussions of manual labour with recreation methodologies to explore how hands enacted the creation of dress. This process of recreation illuminates the depth of material literacy and skill required of garment makers, as well as the efficiency, competence, and productivity of the sewing hand.

 Crucially, this volume interrogates the ways in which we think about dress within eighteenth-century studies and suggests that the practice-based approaches found in recreation methodologies can enrich the already interdisciplinary nature of the field. The labour of stitching, along with the labour of writing, printmaking, drawing, and painting, composed a holistic culture of making and manual labour which constructed eighteenth-century cultures of dress.

2023

‘Fashionable 1760s Dress’, invited roundtable contribution, Historical Fragments: Making, Breaking, and Remaking, University of Edinburgh (19th May 2023).

2022

‘Sartorial Timekeeping: Fashion Chronologies and the Making of Dress Histories’, invited paper given at the History Seminar Series, De Montfort University (26th January 2022).

‘The Making, Meaning and Materiality of the Dressed Print in Europe, 1750-1820’, invited paper given at Gestes d'images online seminar series at the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, Paris, France (20th January 2022).

2021

‘Sartorial Chronology and Fashionable Anachronism: Historicism, Temporality and the Making of Dress Histories’, paper given at the Sartorial Society Series (29th July 2021).

‘Making and Women’s Material Life Writing’, invited talk given at the Gender and Women’s History Research Centre, Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, Australia (14th July 2021).

‘“Well regulate your Cash; to Trade attend”: The consumer as the arbiter of the moral economy’, invited paper given at Economic Justice in Early Modern Europe (1450-1850): Commemorating Fifty Years of E. P. Thompson’s ‘Moral Economy’, University of Warwick (20th May 2021).

‘Dress of the Year: Ann Frankland Lewis’s Sartorial Timekeeping’, invited paper given at From Fibre to Frock, Southern Counties Costume Society AGM (27th February 2021).

‘“Be-Nelsoned all over”: Patriotic Fashion, Anchor Accessories, and the Commemoration of the Battle of the Nile’, paper given at the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference (6th January 2021).

2020

‘Fashions in Miniature: Laetitia Powell’s Dolls and Material Life-Writing’, invited paper given at Digital Materialities online seminar series at the University of Paris (14th December 2020).

‘Mr Calico and Mr Fribble: Queering the Man-Milliner, 1770-1820’, paper given at New Directions in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Art online seminar (19th October 2020).

Keynote Speaker at Fast x Slow Fashion: Experiences of Fashionable Consumption, 1720-2020, Leeds City Museum and the University of Leeds (13th March 2020).

Jordan Mitchell-King, Undress: Informal Women’s Clothing in Eighteenth-Century Britain, 2021-Present, first supervisor with Dr Kate Smith, University of Birmingham (M4C/AHRC full scholarship).

Catarina Ferriera, The Mass-Production of the Corset in the 19^th Century, first supervisor with Prof. Elizabeth Lambourn (DMU Full Scholarship).

Sharon Howe, Lace Revivals: From occupation to pastime, 1890-1980, first supervisor, 2022-Present.

Alice Payne, ‘[M]ost certainly not waiting’: Reconstructing Circe and Penelope in Female-Authored Adaptations of Homer’s The Odyssey, 2019-Present, second supervisor with Professor Deborah Cartmell (DMU Full Scholarship).

Diya Wang, Hybridity and Transformation in Dress and Fashion between China and the West, 1840-1930, 2021-Present, second supervisor with Dr Emily Baines.

- AHRC, Networking Grant, awarded for Making Historical Dress: Hands, Bodies and Methods, PI (Co-I Dr Sarah Bendall, Australian Catholic University), £44,835.

- AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker, shortlisted.

- Future Research Leader, DMU, £1,500.

- Pasold Research Fund, Major Project Grant, awarded for the Sartorial Society Series online research seminars, Co-I with Dr Bethan Bide, Dr Elisabeth Gernerd, Dr Liz Tregenza and Dr Lucie Whitmore, £1,648.

- Pasold Research Fund, Publication Award, £900.

- Patterns of British Manufacture: Nationhood and Textiles in Rudolph Ackermann’s Repository of Arts, 1809-1829, Pasold Research Fund Research Activity Grant, 2018-2019, £500, PI.

- Material Lives: Women Makers and Consumer Culture in the Eighteenth Century, Postdoctoral Fellowship, Paul Mellon Centre, £8000, 2018-2019, PI.

- Trained to Consume: Dress and the Female Consumer, 1720-1820, British Federation of Women Graduates, Marjorie Shaw Scholarship, £2,000, 2015-2016 PI.

- Trained to Consume: Dress and the Female Consumer, 1720-1820, ESRC, PhD Scholarship, £55,000, 2012-2015.

Exhibitions                                                           

2022  Guest Curator, ‘Fashion’ in Take This Token, online exhibition, Foundling Museum.

2022  Specialist Consultant, Crown to Couture, exhibition at Kensington Palace, Historic Royal Palaces.

2020  Specialist Consultant, Miniature Worlds, exhibition at Nostell Priory, National Trust.

2018  Curator, Katagami in the Art School, exhibition at Seika University, Japan (August 2018) and Asia House, London (April 2018).

2011  Assistant Curator, Revolutionary Fashion, 1790-1820, exhibition at Fairfax House, York.

Podcasts, Media and TV Presenting, Appearances, and Advisory Work

2023  Guest on BBC Radio 3, Free Thinking, ‘Tin cans, cutlery and sewing’, 28^th February 2023.

2023  Guest on NPR (US public radio), 13^th February 2023, discussion of maternity wear.

2022  Presenter, Fashion Through History, 3-part series (Immediate Media/English Heritage).

2022  Historical Advisor, There Exists (BFI/Studio ANRK).

2022  Guest on BBC Radio Berkshire, 19^th March 2022, discussion of suits.

2022  Guest on BBC Radio Berkshire, 6^th March 2022, discussion of handbags.

2021  Guest on BBC Radio CWR, 16th April 2021, discussion of royal mourning fashions.

2021  Presenter, Travelling Sisterhood of Art Historians podcast, series 1.

2021  Guest on Coping in Confinement podcast, series 1, episode 2.

2021  Guest on BBC Radio Essex, 8th February 2021, discussion of corsets in Netflix series Bridgerton.

2021  Guest on BBC Radio Solent, 8th February 2021, discussion of buying British.

2020  Guest on BBC Radio Leicester, 4th October 2020, discussion of lockdown fashion.

2020  Guest on Sew What? podcast, series 1, episode 14.

2020  Guest on History Hack podcast, episode 193.

2020  On screen expert on Miniature Worlds, National Trust.

2019  On screen expert on An American Aristocrat’s Guide to Great Houses, Nutshell TV/Smithsonian.

2013  Podcasts for the Early Modern Forum, 1450-1850, University of Warwick.

2010  Historical Consultant, Turn Back Time: The High Street, BBC/Wall to Wall.