The Dress Diary of Mrs Anne Sykes: Secrets from a Victorian Woman’s Wardrobe

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Collecting snippets of fabric from a range of garments she carefully annotated each one, creating a unique record of her life and times. Her name was Mrs Anne Sykes. Nearly two hundred years later, the diary fell into the hands of Kate Strasdin, a fashion historian and museum curator. This was a book I was excited to read since I first heard about it through social media. Author and fashion historian Kate Strasdin was given an album, a 'dress diary' in 2016. The album consisted of swatches of fabrics from the 1830s through about the 1870s and, with the exception of brief captions identifying the fabric in a way only the album's creator would have recognized, there was no writing. Strasdin spent years researching the people named in the captions and the stories she could connect to them and their fabrics. The result is the fascinating book The Dress Diary of Mrs Anne Sykes: Secrets from a Victorian Woman's Wardrobe (called The Dress Diary: Secrets from a Victorian Woman's Wardrobe in the US). Finally, into the book, the author discovers that it belonged to Anne Sykes, which allows her to not only trace her life through the fabrics, but some of the others mentioned throughout.

My thanks to Netgalley and Random House UK/ Vintage publishers for my advance digital copy given in exchange for my honest review. It has been an absolute delight and pleasure to read this novel. In this engaging book, Strasdin proves triumphantly that the study of fashion is not a frothy sideshow but can provide a textured account of history... [a] compelling account of 19th-century life seen through women's eyes Daily Mirror British fashion historian Kate Strasdin took a lace-making class, partly from professional interest in women's home-work and handwork (before industrialization lace was made by hand, of course), but also because she enjoyed the other participants. In 2016 an older woman in the class gave her an extraordinary gift: Anne Sykes' scrapbook. Anne's husband Adam gave it to her on their wedding day in 1838 and for more than 40 years Anne pasted scraps of fabric from women's dresses--hers and her friends and acquaintances, documenting each in a fine copperplate hand. Strasdin spend the next six years finding out more about Anne and Adam, both of whom came from textile-manufacturing families in Lancashire. They spent seven years in the British colony in Singapore and several in Shanghai before returning to England. Anne Sykes grew up in Lancashire, the daughter of a cloth merchant in a part of England focused at the time on the cloth industry. She married a cloth merchant from a family of fabric printers, so needless to say Anne understood the importance of fabric in daily life- both as fashion, gifts, and probably the basis for family economics. Anne and her husband Adam traveled to Singapore for his work and lived there (and briefly Shanghai) for nearly ten years before returning to England. Strasdin scoured records, newspapers, ship's logs and more for hints of the Sykes and other names that appear in Anne's diary, often with surprising success. While no letters have been found from Anne, Strasdin helps us discover what her life in Singapore might have been like through letters of other women who lived there at the time, and who knew Anne and donated fabric to her album.I loved this book!! I have already planned to buy a copy for a dressmaking friend for her birthday later this year, I can’t wait to see all the fashion plates in colour something my reading device wouldn’t let me do. I think this would be a very welcome addition to any centres that teach Arts and Crafts, and for Social historians.

In 1838, a young woman was given a diary on her wedding day. Collecting snippets of fabric from a range of garments - some her own, others donated by family and friends - she carefully annotated each one, creating a unique record of their lives. Her name was Mrs Anne Sykes. Dr. Kate Strasdin is a fashion historian, museum curator and lecturer at Falmouth University, where she teaches the history of fashion design, marketing, and photography. This results in a book that gathers so much information about the textile industry & clothing in one place – the history of cotton, wool and silk, the changes and developments in dyeing and printing techniques as well as glimpses into the trade of the time. For instance we have a whole chapter devoted to lace, which explains how the traditional handmade bobbin lace of Honiton & the surrounding Devon villages became virtually obsolete due to the invention of machine made net that was so much cheaper to produce, but then saved by Queen Victoria who used handmade Honiton lace on her wedding dress. Honiton lace is now a luxury product, still made in the traditional way by hand.The author received a book that held many samples of fabric, annoted with the names and dates of those who wore those fabrics. Eventually the creator of the sample book was revealed as a "Mrs Ann Sykes" - by a single mention of her name. The author has researched extensively into the life and times of Mrs Sykes, and discovered many interesting facts, which she has woven into a fascinating picture. The Dress Diary: Secrets from a Victorian Woman’s Wardrobe (Penguin, 2023) by Dr. Kate Strasdin presents the hidden fabric of a Victorian woman's life - from family and friends to industry and Empire - told through her unique textile scrapbook. In a sense, Anne’s album is a form of life writing—taking in ordinary folk, not the grandees of traditional written histories but the bystanders, the participants in everyday life, their loves and losses, joys and sorrows. It is a fragmentary story of life experienced at home and abroad, in a domestic world and an international one, of courage in unfamiliar lands and of building a community of friends. Through small and seemingly inconsequential wisps of fabric, Anne Sykes’s diary lays bare the whole of human experience in that most intimate of mediums: the clothes that we choose to wear. The structure of the album, the names, and the cloths themselves all suggested that this was not a volume compiled in the rarefied spaces of the aristocracy but something more quotidian: the creator being a woman of some means, but inhabiting the world of the well-to-do middle classes. This woman and others—women whose lives would otherwise go unrecorded, hidden in the shadows of history—found themselves unwittingly front and center in this story.

This is a fascinating read if you - like me - are a lover of textiles, and textile history. As someone whose ancestors worked in the textile industry, I am always drawn to books that can bring their history to life. Only seventy fragments were associated with male garments, and only seventeen of the names recorded were those of men. It seemed that at a time when so much of literature and the arts was focused on the endeavors of men, this was a book dedicated to the world of women. I decided to try to piece together the lives of some of these women through the clues that were left behind, scant though they often were. Using what felt like a forensic approach in its detail, I focused on fragments of cloth to illuminate the world these women inhabited, enabling a wider context to emerge. What began to appear were the tales of an era, placing these lives into the industrial maelstrom of the nineteenth century, with all its noise, color, and innovation. The hidden fabric of a Victorian woman's life - from family and friends to industry and Empire - told through her unique textile scrapbook.

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Anne Burton was the daughter of a Mill owner in Clitheroe in Lancashire, she would have been influenced by the latest designs of material straight from the loom. She married Adam Sykes in 1838. His father designed patterns for printed cloth, a very fortuitous partnership!! I've been waiting for this book to come out ever since I learned about it from an interview with the author on the Dress: Fancy podcast. This is a fascinating and beyond amazing look into the life, culture, society, and everyday adventures of a woman in the Victorian era. Through this journey, through this seemingly “normal” scrapbook of materials, swatches, and samples, we learn so much more of the woman behind the artistry, Anne Sykes, and the lives of not only herself and her family, but her friends, acquaintances, neighbors, and society as a whole. A whole world pf women, their respective voices and lives are brought to life, a multitude of windows that allow us to gaze into the hopes, dreams, loves, losses, and souls of so many women that had been looked over and forgotten.

How serendipitous that a diary dating from 1838 and containing hundreds of snippets of fabric should fall into fashion historian Kate Strasdin's capable hands. Basically, the author was given an old scrapbook of textile swatches, kept and collected by a random ordinary merchant-class British woman throughout her life, that was ultimately found in a stall in Camden Market. I suppose it's actually a book about material culture and what this artifact of a 19th century life can illuminate and obfuscate.The section on laundering and caring for clothes was a reminder that in the days before washing machines & tumble driers, laundry was a lengthy & laborious process. People had far fewer clothes than we have today, with fabric bought in bolts and made to measure by a tailor/seamstress. Outer clothes were spot cleaned but washed infrequently, with detachable collars & cuffs, petticoat flounces & shifts used to catch as much dirt as possible to reduce the need for everything to be laundered after each wear – I think Anne and her circle of friends would be both fascinated and horrified by our modern approach to clothing, both in terms of the concept of ready-to-wear items and our obsession with washing fabric so often! An evocative and often touching exercise in re-imagining these fragments of fabric into historical life... it is delightful Prospect Anne’s identity radiated out in myriad hues and materials, connecting her to her world and allowing us to join her. Discovering that Anne Sykes was the hitherto unknown creator of the book that I had been meticulously transcribing was at once both exciting and perplexing. I felt certain that she had to be a dressmaker, a woman whose role in life was to clothe her clients, taking a keen interest in shape and style, keeping the secrets of bodies. In that moment I could never have anticipated just how much I would be able to uncover. Thanks to Strasdin's forensic research...this book opens into a vivid history of expansion and empire. And all wrapped up in 2,184 pieces of cloth BBC History Magazine