Stitches in Time: The Story of the Clothes We Wear

by Lucy Adlington

Riffling through the wardrobes of years gone by, costume historian Lucy Adlington reveals the rich stories underlying the clothes we wear in this stylish tour of the most important developments in the history of fashion, from ancient times to the present day. Starting with underwear – did you know Elizabeth I owned just one pair of drawers, worn only after her death? – she moves garment by garment through Western attire, exploring both the items we still wear every day and those that have gone the way of the dodo (sugared petticoats, farthingales and spatterdashers to name but a few).

Beautifully illustrated throughout, and crammed with fascinating and eminently quotable facts, Stitches in Time shows how the way we dress is inextricably bound up with considerations of aesthetics, sex, gender, class and lifestyle – and offers us the chance to truly appreciate the extraordinary qualities of these, our most ordinary possessions.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Fashion, Womens

464 pages, Hardcover

First published September 24, 2015

About the author

I am fascinated by the stories clothes can tell about the people who made, sold and wore them.
My latest non-fiction book is 'The Dressmakers of Auschwitz', revealing the lives and fates of a remarkable group of mainly Jewish women who sewed to survive in a fashion salon established by the camp commandant's wife. It has been a privilege to bring these stories into the light.
'Women's Lives & Clothes in WW2' is a global overview of the 1940s, drawing on interviews with veterans and items from my vintage collection.
History is also the inspiration for my YA novels, including 'The Red Ribbon', 'Sunmerland', 'The Burning Mountain' and 'The Glittering Eye'
In between all this writing I give presentations on costume history - such a fabulous job: www.historywardrobe.com @historywardrobe
I love switching off with crime thrillers (Lee Child, Agatha Christie...) or with biographies

Reviews

[Eva · Rating 5 out of 5]

How can I not love a book that uses Granny Weatherwax as one of its fashion examples...

Warmly recommended as a necessarily brief but still highly informative and competently structured overview of clothing history. The prose is the perfect compromise between being academically inaccessible and that patronising tone some popular science books slip into, and I particularly applaud the frequent debunking of common myths and continual refusal to sell stories on sensational details. It also brilliantly navigates the stormy waters of such a complicated subject as the social significance of clothing across gender, class and race, all with remarkable eloquence and style.

[Lydia · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a really interesting look about the history and development of western clothing. Adlington has a really engaging writing style that keeps you interested throughout and enough humour to keep you entertained as well. I learned things and enjoyed myself.

[Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Adlington outlines the history of the base categories of European clothing using a variety of primary historical sources. These include the diary entry of an 18th century gentleman who had to dress hurriedly after a night with a new lady friend lest she discover he stuffed the calves of his stockings, those most masculine of garments.

Read this book if you want proof that gender and class norms are fluid (lacy dresses are proper garments for boys, Victorians allowed displays of cleavage at dinner) and that beauty is subjective to its era (corsets have been used to push up or flatten breasts depending on what was in fashion that decade). It is still very much written from the author's perspective as a white British woman and seems to write with the idea that her readers are as well. This is particularly noticeable in discussions of clothing items no longer commonly used. Her inclusion that sleeping caps and parasols are the stuff of antiquity suggests to me that she isn't aware of the routines of many people with textured hair or from cultures that don't covet sun tans.

[Nicky · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reviewed for The Bibliophibian.

Stitches in Time is a delightful look at the clothes we wear and how they’ve developed over time, from the general fit of women’s clothes down to the specifics of fashion. A lot of it I knew already, partly from the BBC’s Great British Sewing Bee (I cannot wait for a new season of that! and oh hey, it starts tonight!) and partly from other books, but it was still a charming read and a nice break from the awful things that happen in fiction. Adlington writes clearly and sometimes wittily, and it’s a good tour through history in general as well at times, contextualising what exactly drove fashion.

[Deirdre · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty good for the most part, offers titbits about a variety of clothes but sometimes forgets that there are still people who do things differently. Managed to ruffle my feathers by misquoting the much maligned J. M. Synge which is lazy. Which would make me question some of the rest of the scholarship. Extensively bibliographed though and the illustrations are quite good.

Worth a read for some bits and pieces of information and the research rabbit holes it generates.

[Violette Malan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant. Written with the historian's eye for detail, and the storyteller's flare for narrative. Only complaint I'd have is that Adlington kept referring to photos and paintings that illustrated her points, without reproducing them.

[Lisa Wynne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a delightfully dense inventory of Western/European clothing and its histories and I really enjoyed reading it. It languished in my to-read pile for longer than it should, as I think I expected it to be drier than it was, and to provide many of the same facts and characterisations as a lot of other costume history books I have read.
While not, of course, exhaustive, the chapter-by-chapter analysis of garment types and their evolution was thorough and widely researched, covering fibres and construction as well as usage and cultural commentary. My favourite aspect of the book was the regular occurrence of anecdotes and snippets from contemporary primary sources, such as personal letters and newspaper articles, as well as mentions of a garment in literature of its time. I felt convinced of, and privileged to access, the expertise and encyclopaedic knowledge of the author on this subject, which is something I cherish from non-fiction, particularly on a topic I'm already well into.

[Elentarri · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stitches in Time provides an interesting, factoid rich, but somewhat repetitive and superficial, look at the history and evolution of western clothing:  i.e. mostly British, with some USA and Parisian examples.  I'm rather curious now what the rest of Europe, never mind the rest of the world, was wearing in comparative time periods.  Clothing items covered include socks & stockings, corsets, dresses, shirts, trousers, coats, suits, shoes, hats and pajamas.  While there are some illustrations and photographs, it would have been more useful if additional illustrations had been provided for the more archaic and strange looking items, or even just comparison/development illustrations.  Otherwise, a nice writing style and overview of the development of "western" fashions.

[Tracey Keir · Rating 4 out of 5]

So this did take me a while but it wasn't because it was hard work, just that it was full of so many facts!

Loads of explanations on the original of phrases we still use today. Now I know that 'a stitch in time saves nine' is all about checking and mending your stockings in a timely manner.

However my personal favourite was the origin of 'in the buff' ... Taken from the time when gents started wearing buff coloured riding trousers which were considered a bit racy at the time on the basis that it looked like they had no trousers on at all!

[Anne Wellman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well written but lightweight account of the history of clothing. The author seems to assume that readers have little or no general knowledge, as when she puts the word 'crinoline' in italics as though we would never have heard of it before. When she explained that in Jane Austen's 'Sense and Sensibility' there wasn't actually any nudity and that the recent TV series had introduced a topless Mr Darcy in order to make an impact on a 20th century audience, well, you could have knocked me over with a feather. Gave up reading at this point.

[Warren Gossett · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a charming and well researched book. It is full of humorous asides and surprises in the history of Western clothing up to contemporary times. I found out that the small pocket at the front right of my five-pocket denim Levi jeans is a vestigial watch pocket. I had only tried using it to hold emergency money.

[Louise · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book - the author delivers a lot of information in few words and with a sense of humour. It's best understood as a broad history of clothes in the past 200 years - anyone seeking detailed information on specific types of garment probably won't find it here. Nonetheless it's an entertaining and informative read.

[Reader · Rating 4 out of 5]

比较让我触动的部分基本都是女性服饰的变革，当看到当时的女性被排除在公共场域之外，服装变成了限制她们的工具，穿着束缚重重的衣服无法进行的活动就会被认为是不适合女性的，而不是以功能性优先。会觉得很悲哀，但还是有些振奋，女性们团结起来终于得到了穿着裤子等等服饰的权利，争取到了真正的穿衣自由伴随着在公共事务上的自由。然而时至今日，很多人口口声声的穿衣自由是努力减肥挤进不合适的尺码，功能性放在美观之后，这一点看来反而倒退了。另一点就是对于奥斯汀那个时代的女性，也有了更多了解，既然无法在更大的世界里生活，她们的世界只能被这些琐碎看似不重要的事务填满，关注对方的衣服饰品等等，也是在被压缩生活空间内的小小喘息

[Sophia · Rating 3 out of 5]

三星半，挺好玩的服饰发展史小百科，但没有我预期中的那么深入，广度高于深度吧。作者分门别类地介绍了今天的日常（和一些已经不再那么日常）服饰是如何演变的——内裤拖鞋、大衣帽子、女性为了穿裤子的权利做出的斗争、两次大战对服饰演变的影响、服装作为区别社会等级的工作等等等等，有种维基百科大综合的感觉。一些品牌和人名翻译不太准确。

[Mills College Library]

391.009 A2379 2015

[Mentatreader · Rating 3 out of 5]

First, the edition I used was the Kindle one and electronic versions are still deficient regardless of the technology available. There were numerous typographical errors and basic layout problems, like captions not displaying with their illustrations, that any novice on a word processor could have fixed.

I also found three errors that a good editor would have caught: Lewis Carroll never refers to a "mad hatter". The US does not inaugurate First Ladies. Sherlock Holmes kept tobacco in the Persian slipper, tobacco is not a narcotic, it is its opposite, a stimulant.

I also found some of the background history more story than historical fact especially applying broad lazy zeitgeist characteristics to historical periods.

Other than that, its gives what I look for in social history, good documented details of everyday life. It also has, to my future cost, a good bibliography.

If you are interested in learning details of living in past times then I would suggest this book as a good read.

[Piisa]

Well researched, packed with interesting information and trivia. A bit exhausting.