Browsing by Subject "Material Culture"
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Item A Case Study on the Designer Hannah Troy, who Translated Couture into American Ready-To-Wear During the Mid-20th Century(2023-05) Martin, NancyThis study investigated how the American designer, Hannah Troy, adapted the aesthetic qualities of original couture creations to appeal to the American market. It used a historical-comparative and material culture methodology and compared apparel designs and garment artifacts presented by Hannah Troy between 1947 to 1955 to the work of contemporary American designers and Parisian couturiers. The study used ready-to-wear designer Hannah Troy as a case study into how American designers successfully translated the aesthetic dictated by top Parisian couturiers into a product that suited the expectations of American women. Two competitive but complementary clothing production systems, ready-to-wear and couture, were prevalent in the United States and Europe following World War II. The two methods of producing clothing differ. In couture, design and fit are individually customized in the commission, in conjunction with exclusive and often hand-made textiles. The couture garment is a unique and singular product. Couturiers have long maintained style authority to set trends and historically have been extolled as aesthetically and technically superior to ready-to-wear. The other method of apparel production is ready-to-wear, which depends on an agreed-upon sequence of construction supported by mechanization. Ready-to-wear relies upon replication- exact copying- as a process developed to ensure product quality in quantity. The research focuses on how Hannah Troy created her designs for the American market using these two systems.Item Material Culture Analysis of the Post-WWII Women's Corselet(2019-05) Gibson, LaureenDress through body modification is a primary way we construct our appearance, and convey our identity and gender. Modifying the body occurs through various means of compressing, lifting, combining and separating. Foundation garments are influential in creating one’s appearance and have been used by men and women for generations to construct their appearances and convey their identities. Previous research from various fields has focused heavily on the corset - one of the most controversial aspects of women’s dress - but has recently expanded to other periods and other products. Many view foundation garments as literal and symbolic forms of feminine oppression. However, some dress historians argue they can signify various levels of freedom within cultural constraints. In particular, Steele’s (2001) and Farrell-Beck and Gau’s (2002) research on the corset and brassiere, respectively, offer more diverse perspectives on the use of foundations to construct appearances. Post-World War II (WWII) foundation garments like the corselet, a descendent of the corset and bra, are generally interpreted as a material means of forcing women back into the domestic sphere after the war and containing them within traditional feminine ideals. This reflects some researchers’ second-wave feminist viewpoints and general assumptions that femininity has largely negative connotations. This fails to acknowledge the period’s feminine fashions were very quickly adopted and, thus, likely had positive connotations. Previous research often interrogates the same sources and rarely examines extant artifacts. This study focused on the corselet, a foundation garment popularized during the post-WWII era, and examined the design using material culture methods. Given the basic premise of material culture - objects are shaped by and reflect their culture - this research also considered the culture through these designed-objects. This research built on the exemplary work of the dress historians cited and was influenced by their approaches, which involved carefully examining extant artifacts in relation to other sources of data. A variety of sources were used, including the Minnesota Historical Society’s large Munsingwear Archive and collection of Hollywood Vassarette foundation garments. This research sought to explore and better articulate the functions and meanings of the corselet within the context of the post-World War II era. It provides a “history of [the corselet]” in order to “re-think wider narratives” from the post-WWII era (Riello, 2009, p. 36). Careful observation and analysis of the objects and external sources was used to establish the typical corselet design and its functions in relation to the wearer’s body: modifying and supporting the breasts while exposing the upper body, molding the torso while allowing it to move, creating a smooth line from breasts to hips, holding up stockings, and sexualizing the wearer’s body. Analysis of the objects and external sources also revealed the ways the corselet was intended to be used within postwar culture. I examined who wore the corselet, as well as how and why it was worn. By analyzing the corselet’s design, functions and use, I was able to interpret its meanings within the culture. Some have focused on singular interpretations of foundation garments, arguing the designs reflect literal and abstract instances of either freedom or control. However, I found that both binaries were simultaneously embodied by the corselet. Through my analysis and then interpretation, I identified several dualities: freedom and control, modesty and sexuality, natural and unnatural, seen and unseen. By considering how the corselet reflected each of these seemingly-opposing qualities I was able to position it within its postwar cultural context, as well as within the larger, ongoing practice of body modification.Item More than just a Drink: Tea Consumption, Material Culture, and ‘Sensory Turn’ in Early Modern China (1550-1700)(2019-12) Jiang, YuanxinOur contemporary way of tea drinking is deeply influenced by the late-Ming way. However, when examining the development of tea production and consumption within this period, we can find so many changes. This study examines tea consumption in China’s domestic market from the 1550s to the 1700s. During this period, some commodities rose to the top in the market, such as Longjing tea and Yixing teapot, while some of them declined and even disappeared from the market, such as Luojie tea. Some of them survived; however, consumers’ attitudes toward them became different, such as Songluo tea. Late-Ming scholar-official tea connoisseurs, for their part, played active roles in these transformations. They dominated the fashion of tea drinking through establishing a new set of aesthetic principles. These aesthetic principles and a new discourse of tea tasting emphasized the “true flavor” of tea. This dissertation argues that scholar-official tea connoisseurs played crucial roles in the formation of a new way of tea tasting, which significantly influenced the development of tea connoisseurship thereafter.Item "Tell me how you like the shoose?": gender, girlhood, and material self-fashioning in America, 1770-1850(2013-08) Goetz, Kathryn R.This dissertation considers the material choices of girls whose place, in social hierarchies, family structures, and even life course was liminal, and the ways that through those choices, young women defined their own identities, personal and public, in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century America. I argue that American young women, both consciously and unconsciously, used things - material both real and imagined - as an integral part of their adolescent self- fashioning. Historians of material culture emphasize the significance that things can have, particularly as modes of communicating identity. I suggest that young women, neither fully children nor fully adults, used their material worlds: the acquisition, approval or rejection of, admiration, longing for particular things, to define and redefine their developing adult self. This dissertation examines the ways that young women of the upper and middle classes in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America engaged objects to negotiate the transition from girlhood to adulthood as well as the ways that material things allowed them to articulate particular identities, to themselves and to their communities.