I am a dress historian with wide-spanning research interests, from clothing and gender at the Renaissance courts to 1960s fashion fabrics. Alongside lecturing at Central Saint Martins, I am currently a research fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Together with V&A curators, I am writing the first book to offer an overview of women’s changing roles as textile designers during the twentieth century. I was formerly a tutor in the History of Design programme held jointly at the V&A/Royal College of Art, where my teaching was often object-focused and drew on my interests in material culture and museology. My previous roles also include a research fellowship in the Humanities Department at the RCA and curatorial posts in the Performance, Textiles, Furniture and Fashion Department at the V&A and in the Print Room at the Ashmolean Museum.
My new book Street Style: Art and Dress in the Time of Caravaggio (Reaktion Books, 2025) focuses on the subjects of Italian genre scenes, from soldiers and servants to Romani fortune tellers, to reveal how the stories of everyday people can be preserved through their clothing and appearances in art. Previous publications include the edited volume A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion: The Renaissance (Bloomsbury, 2017), Fashion and Masculinity in Renaissance Florence (Bloomsbury, 2016) as well as articles for the academic journals Fashion Theory, Renaissance Studies and the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. I have contributed to a range of museum exhibition catalogues, for example Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear (V&A, 2022), Wealth and Beauty: Pier Francesco Foschi and Painting in Renaissance Florence (Georgia Museum of Art, 2023) and The Glamour of Italian Fashion (V&A, 2014).
I have participated in several international collaborative research networks, such as Connecting Collections, a research and teaching project driven by the early modern European art collections of the Universities of Manchester and Melbourne. I am joint series editor of Studies in Design and Material Culture at Manchester University Press.
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