Michelle Jones

My study examines the creation and professionalisation of a recognisable English couture industry in the mid-twentieth century and in particular the role designer collaboration played within this process. The focal point is the Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers, a design group established as a wartime measure in order to preserve and protect a number of London’s made-to-measure dress houses and to promote the creative aspirations of the wider British fashion industry. The focus on this specific design group and collaborative practice, rather than the individual couturiers, offers an exceptional case study of designers working in association and the impact this can have on design practice.

A number of central themes emerge that focus on the networks and mediated representations that supported this field of design. In dealing with these themes this study recognises that the Incorporated Society’s formation and operation did not occur in a vacuum but within a specific industrial, political, economic and social infrastructure. It therefore explores the formal and informal networks and narratives that were used to sustain its specific form of luxury fashion production throughout a particularly turbulent period.

Today London is acknowledged, alongside Paris, New York and Milan, as one of the world’s major fashion cities and this thesis offers a better understanding of the role couturier-collaboration played in the early development of this recognition.  Through the analysis of an extensive range of previously unconsidered primary material it questions whether and how, through the process of collaboration, the London couturiers established unprecedented and much needed cohesion for British design talent and the exact nature of their role within the construction and understanding of London as an internationally recognised fashion centre.

The period under consideration allows not only an exploration of the creation of a London couture industry but also the cultural politics of design practice throughout a difficult period of economic depression, war and post-war reconstruction. In so doing, it explores the wider significance of the Incorporated Society’s elite made-to-measure dressmakers both for and beyond the discipline of Design History.

Supervisor: Dr Victoria Kelley