Ever since I discovered the dress history section in my parents’ three-volume encyclopaedia, I have been making, studying, talking about or working in some way or other in the fields of fashion, dress history, design and art, mostly in museums and art colleges.
I studied fashion design in Germany and the History of Dress at the Courtauld Institute in London, before becoming curatorial assistant at Kensington Palace. During two stints at what is now Historic Royal Palaces, I curated and co-curated exhibitions on royal clothes.
Since 2007, I have been Senior Curator of Fashion & Decorative Arts at London Museum (formerly Museum of London). In between and parallel to my museum jobs I have been teaching fashion and design history since 1995, on the BA Fashion History and Theory Pathway since 2002. Between 2018 and 2022 I was one half of the Bande à Part podcast, a weekly conversation about fashion and film with Rebecca Arnold.
My main interest is people, and why they wear what they do. I love the detective work involved in finding traces of sartorial lives that have so far remain untold, and to make objects speak. The subjects of my articles and book chapters include royalty and London couture clients, as well as subcultures, cosmetics, and the display of clothes in museums. The common threads are individual style and the relationship of clothes to locations, what I like to call sartorial geography.