Join the Centre for Design History for another installment of our IOTA II seminar series. In this session, Dr Jo Lance and Dr Charlotte Nicklas will discuss mending and haberdashery in the early twentieth century.

27 March 2025, 4-5pm
Design Lab, Mithras House 111

Jo Lance and Charlotte Nicklas: The Materiality of Mending

Our work considers the ‘stuff’ of mending – the representation and use of haberdashery items in the U.K in the early twentieth century. Mending was a key everyday clothing practice by which people (nearly always represented as women) could extend the life of valuable clothing and accessories. While recent scholarship has embraced the idea of contemporary mending as a sustainable challenge to expendable ‘fast’ fashion, the materials of mending – the threads, pins, buttons and related consumable goods have been overlooked in dress studies. Haberdashery evokes nostalgia, smallness, thrift, detail, oddments, collecting, and care and as a subject is something of a miscellany – an area which lends itself to multiple threads of small, interconnected stories.
This study focuses on rayon stockings and mending threads in the period when rayon stockings, marketed as an alternative to silk, were one of the first mass-fashion items of the 20th century which were actually affordable and accessible to most. Rayon, from the French for ‘beam of light’ was marketed as a modern wonder, and rayon stockings became synonymous with modern femininity and democratic fashion, providing glamour for all. They were also fragile and needed care and near constant repair, and in answer to this need a vast range of rayon threads and portable mending kits were produced. Although made and marketed as utilitarian products, they can be shown to embody and reinforce cultural constructions of gender, sexuality and race, as our paper explores.

What is IOTA II?

IOTA II – IOTA stands for Image, Object, Text, Analysis, and was the title of a seminar series established by dear former colleagues Louise Purbrick and Jill Seddon. IOTA II aims to resurrect the inclusive nature of the original IOTA, bringing together students, colleagues and all interested parties from beyond the university to consider the visual and material world from a wide range of perspectives. It is a space for work-in-progress to be shared and nurtured, and for our research to be celebrated.