The conference, ‘Crafting Fashion in the Longue Durée / Les savoir-faire de la mode: matérialité et temporalité dans la longue durée’ took place from 28-30 November 2024 at the Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle in Paris. The conference was part of a research project by Ariane Fennetaux (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle) and Emilie Hammen (Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne) on Savoir-Faire. This session thematised time: the time involved in the process of making and making across time. Thanks to a generous grant from the German History Society, I was able to attend in person and speak about my research.
The programme was interdisciplinary. Speakers included conservators, heritage researchers from couture ateliers, and museum curators, as well as researchers from material culture studies, anthropology, history of art, dress history, and economic history. Presentations were in both French and English and the subject matter spanned five hundred years, emphasising craft patrimony and the duration of craft skills over time.
Keynotes included a discussion by Anne Monjaret (LAP- CNRS/EHESS) on ethnological approaches to savoir-faire in recent French history, Tiphaine Samoyault (EHESS) on silk and her relationship to the work of Louise Bourgeois, John Styles (University of Hertfordshire/V&A) on technological transmission between early modern English hand spinners, and Hilary Davidson (FIT) on digitally reanimated dress. Additionally, there was a workshop on featherworking by Marie Colas des Francs (INHA) and a demonstration by artisanal fabric pleaters from Maison Lemarié, a workshop supplying fabrics and accessories for couture houses.
The roundtable on the evening of the second day with Fennetaux, Hammen, Emanuelle Garcin, Stéphanie Wahli, and Antoine Perret was particularly thought-provoking. The speakers each discussed a textile object chosen from the collections of the Musée des Arts Decoratifs with respect to their perspectives on craft, dress and material culture theory while Garcin, a conservator, showed the objects in detail from several angles on screens around the room. The conversation moved through topics including ‚repetition patrimoniale‘, or the chain of knowledge passed down within couture ateliers over time; mending as a case of using materials to the best of their affordances; and the study of history through objects as a ‚sobering but crucial‘ act for historians.
On all three days, Joséphine Basso-Lacroix (Université Jean Monnet), worked on a bobbin lace doily in the room. Her work was shown live on two screens during all panels, and she incarnated the theme of duration in making as we watched how her hands, though deft, quick, and in constant motion, made lace at the pace of about ten square centimetres per twelve-hour day.
As part of a panel on ‘Timeless Crafts?‘ I presented on one aspect of my PhD research on the diplomatic and political uses of liveries in courts of the Holy Roman Empire in the early sixteenth century. This talk focussed on liveries from Bavaria and compared two methods of understanding the livery planning and making process: a verbal reconstruction using written and physical evidence and my plans for a physical, experimental reconstruction in cloth based on surviving illustrations. This concept was important for me to workshop because the methodologies involved are somewhat experimental. The attendees of this conference were specialists in dress history, craft and reconstruction, and were able to provide useful specialised feedback, for example on choice of materials and framing.
While in Paris, I was also able to work in the library of the Institute national d’histoire de l’art and to visit the Petit Palais and the Louvre. Although the Renaissance rooms in the Petit Palais were closed and I was only able to catch a sideways glimpse of the Bernard Palissy ceramics I’d come to inspect, there were beautiful examples of Gothic ivories and enamel on display. (photo) In the Louvre, I visited the wing for Northern European Paintings 1400-1650 and saw works I have researched but had never before seen in person, including Jan van Eyck’s bewitching Madonna of Chancellor Rolin (c. 1435) and Marinus van Reymerswaele’s The Tax Collectors (c. 1535).
Participation in ‘Crafting Fashion in the Longue Durée’ was particularly important for me because I work on German history but had only spoken at British and American conferences, and never to a group of other continental historians. I also met several other scholars who work on material adjacent to my research, and the fruitful discussions we had were very helpful to my current research and hopefully to theirs, as well. I am very grateful to the German History Society for enabling me to attend the conference.
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Sophia Feist is a PhD Candidate in Early Modern German History at the University of Cambridge supervised by Professor Ulinka Rublack and funded by the Cambridge Trust. Her dissertation explores how courts in the Holy Roman Empire between 1470 and 1550 used dress to craft and enact political programmes, and looks in particular at the contributions of court tailors.