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CALL FOR PAPERS




CLOTHING CHILDHOOD, FASHIONING SOCIETY:

CHILDREN’S CLOTHING IN BRITAIN IN THE 20TH CENTURY



17-18 January 2008 at the Foundling Museum, London WC1



2008 PASOLD RESEARCH FUND CONFERENCE


In association with the Department of Anthropology,

University College London



With the London College of Fashion



Conference Organiser: Dr Kaori O’Connor, UCL

Email: k.o’[log in to unmask]



Pasold Organiser: Professor Pat Hudson, Director, Pasold Research Fund



The Pasold Research Fund owes its existence to the success of  
Ladybird, which, under the direction of Eric Pasold, became the  
largest children’s wear company in Britain and then Europe in the  
years after World War II. It is therefore particularly fitting that  
this should be the first conference devoted to British children’s  
clothing and textiles in the twentieth century.



Textiles and clothing are, of course, not just goods – they are also  
social values in material form, commodities produced and consumed at  
the intersection of commerce and culture. As such, they have unique  
potential as tools of combined social, economic and cultural analysis  
that has yet to be fully explored. This is especially true of  
children’s clothing. To date, studies of contemporary clothing and  
textiles have focussed on adults, ‘youth’ and the now-familiar  
distinctions and discourses of gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity,  
locality and class. By contrast, children and their clothes have  
remained largely invisible to scholarly study, despite the fact that  
the emergence of children’s consumer culture is a defining phenomenon  
of our times. What happens when the twentieth century – a period of  
unprecedented social, economic and technological change – is seen  
through the lens of children’s clothes and textiles, their changing  
styles, the industries and businesses that produced them, the  
childhoods they fashioned and the markets they created?



The conference is informed by recent work that uses material culture  
in the historical study of society and economy.  A pioneering work in  
the field is The Commodification of Childhood[i] by Professor Dan  
Cook, the conference’s keynote speaker, which focuses on the American  
children’s wear market in the twentieth century.  Cook shows how  
social values, culture change and commercial practice combined to  
facilitate the emergence of the child consumer in America, as seen  
through the production and consumption of children’s wear. The  
conference provides an opportunity to consider the British clothing  
industry, society and childhood in a similar way, and to establish  
parallels and points of difference between British and American  
processes, products and practices. It is also intended that the  
conference will lay the foundations for future work of this kind.   
Among possible topics of interest:



The effect of World Wars I and II on the production and consumption  
of children’s clothes.
Case studies of the British clothing and textile industries, and of  
particular British children’s wear companies and labels.
Fashions in children’s clothing.
The impact of synthetic/man-made fibres and fabrics on children’s wear.
Twentieth century dyes and the significance of colour in children’s  
wear.
  Social class as reflected in design, style, production and  
consumption.
Trade archives and the social and economic history of textiles and  
clothing.
The emergence of women and mothers as forces in consumer culture.
The rise of department stores and shops as cultural and commercial  
institutions with infants’ and  children’s wear departments.
The acceptance of ready-made garments for infants and young children  
as symbols of modernity and embodiments of rational scientific  
childcare.
The fabrics of childhood.
Exporting ‘the English look’.
The culture of home sewing, needlework and knitting for babies and  
children.
The development of child-focussed advertising and promotion of  
clothing using storybook characters, cartoons, comics and radio  
programmes.
Children’s clothing as agents of age segmentation and gender  
differentiation.
The emergence of the child as a commercial persona, marking a turning  
point in consumer culture and in culture generally.
The growing marketing emphasis on girls rather than boys, and the  
reconfiguration of girlhood through increasingly complex age grading,  
size ranges and aspirational merchandise.
The effects on production, consumption and society of the Baby Boom  
(1946-1964) that followed World War II and the emergence of teen and  
subteen girls as major figures in the post-war marketplace.
 From at least 1960 onwards, concern about ‘sexual precocity’ among  
subteen girls and about the blurring between chronological maturity,  
social maturity and the stylistic expression of maturity.
The phenomenon of competitive parenthood as seen in the conspicuous  
consumption of children’s clothes epitomised by celebrity children.


As always with Pasold Conferences, the aim is to facilitate critical  
dialogue across disciplinary boundaries and between academic and  
other practitioners, particularly those from archive, museum and  
conservation fields.



· The period of time covered by the conference is 1900-2000.

· ‘British’ refers to clothing and textiles made or worn in Britain  
during this period  and can include imports and exports.

· ‘Children’ includes babies, infants and young people up to the end  
of the teenage years but the focus of the conference will be  
primarily on pre-pubescent children.



Within these parameters, papers are welcomed from the fields of  
textile history, social and economic history, dress and fashion  
history, design history, sociology, anthropology, material culture,  
business history, conservation; and from archive and museum  
professionals as well as academics. This should include postgraduate  
students and new researchers who may be interested in giving a short  
presentation (10 mins), as well as established researchers with more  
developed work.



Please submit your 300-word abstract including a title, along with  
full contact details and brief cv or affiliation by email to Dr Kaori  
O’Connor, University College London (k.o’[log in to unmask]) by 12  
April 2007.



A book is one of the planned outcomes of the conference, and  
submitters should signify their willingness for their work to be  
included in the publication, if selected.



[1] Cook, Daniel Thomas 2004. The Commodification of Childhood: The  
Children’s Clothing Industry and the Rise of the Child Consumer.   
Durham and London, Duke University Press.





  
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