Speaking

In 1863 Charles Baudelaire, wrote about the 'Painter of Modern Life' depicting the uniformity of male dress codes with its black suits, top hats and patent leather boots as having created 'a cortege of undertakers'. Whereas women's dress was constantly moving with the seasons and responding to passing styles, men's dress appeared remarkably static and unadorned. Drawing on the writings of Charles Baudelaire and Mallarmé and on the paintings of Constantin Guys and Edouard Manet, the lecture will examine the visual representation and cultural meanings of the habit noir. It will also consider the related British male types of the dandy and the swell. Were men in the nineteenth century really just a neutral backdrop to the ebb and flow of female fashion, or did men also engage in and explore sartorial style? The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/le-habit-noir-men-in-black Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 1,500 lectures free to access or download from the website. Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege

In January 1949 the weekly illustrated magazine Picture Post published a six-page photo story on everyday life in the Elephant and Castle, a poor and bomb-damaged neighborhood of South London. With words by the journalist Albert Lloyd and original photographs by the Post’s Chief Photographer, Bert Hardy, the article powerfully captures the look and feel of life in the run-down terraced streets and homes of postwar Britain. Hardy’s images have an immense depth, both materially and symbolically, which convey the layers of time and accumulated meanings of this moment and the qualities of postwar press photography and its ability to capture a particular historic atmosphere embodied in the faces, clothes, shops, and streets of Britain. What exactly constitutes the atmosphere, which is almost tangible on these pages? It is, of course, to do with page design, but above all is in the photographs; in the figures with their sturdy overcoats and sensible hats, queuing for warm eels. This is the distinctive world of postwar austerity, in which Britishness has been condensed to Englishness and refined in the figure of the resolute Cockney enjoying the first benefits of the new welfare system and enduring ongoing shortages and rationing. The history of twentieth-century press photography is conventionally told through the revolution in camera technology, but the look of Picture Post owes even more to the etchers and printers who translated the photographic image into layers of ink and who, along with photographers, created the pictorial atmosphere of the nation in the postwar years. It is through an understanding of the materiality of the photographs in Picture Post that we grasp the empathy between form and subject and the ways in which national identity is defined pictorially in a moment of historical transformation. Paper presented as part of the "Photography and Britishness" conference held at the Yale Center for British Art, 4–5 November 2016. This conference was co-organized by the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven; the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London; and The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino.

The middle of the nineteenth century was the great age of the crinoline. Lynda Nead examines what this unique fashion meant to women, how it empowered and constrained: http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/the-crinoline-cage The middle of the nineteenth century was the great age of the crinoline. Dresses became bigger and more ornate; skirts grew wider and wider, devouring metres of fabric and decorated with flounces, fringes and ribbons. The style was facilitated by the development of the sewing machine and technological developments in textile production that introduced new machine-made light, gauzy fabrics, which supplemented the more established and expensive silks and taffetas and were suited to the purses of the middling classes. The key to this fashion, the frame for this confection of fabrics and ornament, was the hooped cage crinoline. Historians have been divided on whether the crinoline turned women into 'exquisite slaves' or was a sign of female assertiveness and subversion. This lecture will examine the rich visual images from the nineteenth century, analysing cartoons from Punch, extracts from Dickens, letters from Victorian women and paintings by artists such as Franz Winterhalter, the painter of the Royal and Imperial Courts of Europe. The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/the-crinoline-cage Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 1,500 lectures free to access or download from the website. Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege

The final lecture by Professor Nead covers the quintessential traits of a fashionable young woman in the 19th Century: http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/fashion-and-visual-culture-in-the-19th-century-the-girl-of-the-period By the second half of the nineteenth century it was believed that respectable young women of the middle classes were imitating the styles and manners of the demi-monde and were thus blurring the necessary visual distinctions between the pure and the fallen. Respectable women had been seduced by the discourse around fashion and had lost their subtle purity and become brash and vulgar. In France, James Tissot painted a series of pictures entitled The Women of Paris, depicting fashionable women in a number of different locations and settings and in England the worrying habits of 'The Girl of the Period' became one of the most pressing issues for social columnists and correspondence in the press. This lecture will examine the representation of these new types of fashionable women and the social implications of the visual confusion of respectable and non-respectable women in the public spaces of Paris and London. The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/fashion-and-visual-culture-in-the-19th-century-the-girl-of-the-period Gresham College has offered free public lectures for over 400 years, thanks to the generosity of our supporters. There are currently over 2,500 lectures free to access. We believe that everyone should have the opportunity to learn from some of the greatest minds. To support Gresham's mission, please consider making a donation: https://gresham.ac.uk/support/

An examination of how fashion was used as a short hand for morality in the Victorian era: http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/women-in-red Fashionable dress in the nineteenth century had a moral dimension. Introducing the theme of the morality and modernity of fashion, this lecture considers the visual representation of the fallen women, courtesan and prostitute in the arts of the period. It examines the symbolic language of clothes and the way that it was used to register a woman's fall from respectability to deviancy. Social and moral identities were of great importance in the new public spaces of the nineteenth-century city along with a need to be able to register identities immediately through visual signs. In this context visual images of women's dress and appearance were of great significance in embedding this moral language of clothing. This lecture will draw on medical and religious texts, on literature and on paintings and engravings to set out the relationship between fashion, modernity, art and morality. The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/women-in-red Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 1,500 lectures free to access or download from the website. Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege

Little is known about the unmarried mothers who had their babies taken in by London’s Foundling Hospital in the nineteenth century. This short film explores the predicament of these ‘blank mothers’, drawing on documents and images from ‘The Fallen Woman’, a recent exhibition at the Foundling Museum curated by Birkbeck’s Professor Lynda Nead. Using views of the historic interiors of the museum, contemporary accounts and the words of the mothers that were recorded by the Hospital committee, it seeks to reimagine the experience of these women. The film was made by Lily Ford during an AHRC Cultural Engagement Fellowship at Birkbeck. For more information: Birkbeck History of Art department - http://www.bbk.ac.uk/art-history Derek Jarman Lab at Birkbeck - http://www.jarmanlab.org .