Katie (Dean) Irani

This dissertation examines the uniforms worn by infantrymen in the Indian Army ('sepoys') during the First World War. Split across two chapters, the first explores the intention behind the design of the 1914 sepoy service uniform; the second examines how this uniform was worn in practice and asks whether these practices of dressing disrupted the original intentions behind its design. These questions are not currently addressed in the existing literature: in part, this dissertation suggests, because dress historians to date have not developed the correct methodologies with which to do so. This research seeks to remedy this gap in the scholarship on military dress by adopting an object-focused, design history approach across a range of primary materials, including surviving uniform specimens, photographs, newspaper articles, diaries and letters, governmental and charitable records and correspondence, recruitment handbooks, Army Clothing Department reports, oral history interviews, private company records, and recruitment posters.