CDH member Professor Emerita Lou Taylor will be speaking at an online event series running in autumn 2020 entitled Picturing Jewish Dress: Researching Belonging and Identification through Historical Visual Resources. Jointly organised by scholars  Dr Svenja Bethke (Hebrew University of Jerusalem/University of Leicester) and Dr Gil Pasternak (De Montfort University Leicester), the series focuses on visual representations of Jewish dress and the visual creation of notions of ‘Jewishness’, especially in relation to images, objects, bodies and appearances. It grows out of Bethke‘s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship and Horizon 2020 funded research on Clothing, Fashion and Nation Building in the ‘Land of Israel’.

Lou has a longstanding interest in Jewish dress history, fostered first through her mother’s family line and developed across many of her publications including, most recently, in her 2020 co-edited book for Bloomsbury Academic Press with Dr Marie McLoughlin, entitled Paris Fashion and World War Two: Global Diffusion and Nazi Control. Lou’s paper for the conference, entitled ‘Traces of Jewish Fashion makers from the Holocaust’, presents case studies on Jewish fashion designer/makers and their dramatic and often tragic fates during the Second World War: Odette Bernstein, a young and talented Paris couture milliner and Hedwig Strnad, a fashion-designer/maker from Prague; Jacques Heim, a Paris haute couturier; The House of Wallach, a fashionable, Munich-based dirndl manufacturing company owned by the German brothers, Julius, Moritz and Max Wallach; and a glove maker, Cornelia James.

Lou’s talk takes place online at 5pm GMT, on 11 November 2020. To register to attend via Zoom, please follow this link.

http://picturingjewishdress.com/

Image credit:
from http://picturingjewishdress.com/ Home Page photograph: HaShomer, around 1913. Archives of the Pinchas Lavon Institute, Avraham Soskin Photo Collection. Sign. P -51055.