Jihane Dyer

With fashion history exhibitions now attracting generous visitor numbers at national institutions, a considerable body of scholarship has come to consider the ways in which the history of fashion has been represented within such public-facing contexts. Yet television fashion history documentaries constitute a so far unexplored area of public design mediation, despite their increasing frequency and popularity in recent years. Multi-part series often aim to deliver wide-ranging surveys of fashion and its broader relationships to society and culture across the decades.

This dissertation analyses five multi-part BBC fashion history documentary series produced and broadcast between 1989-2014, focusing in particular upon the interactions between their textual, visual and temporal qualities. It is asserted that such programming has exhibited a unique potential to engage viewers across Britain with the cultural memory of the nation. They are furthermore understood to have posited ideas about contemporary Britain, and its fashion culture, as inherently modern.

However, discourses around Black and Asian British contributions to fashion in Britain have commonly been lacking, or relegated to specific moments of history. This thesis therefore additionally explores the impact of documentary design upon notions of who is and who is not deemed a part of modern Britain and its fashion culture.