Miriam Phelan

This thesis analyses the commemoration of the Revolutionary Period (1912 -1923) in Ireland during the current Decade of Centenaries from 2012 to 2023 by exploring the embodiment of memory through dress. It addresses the impact of remembrance culture on constructions of masculine and national identity and questions how dress contributes to changing attitudes towards the Revolutionary Period and how it is remembered. This thesis also addresses how material and visual culture of memory and commemoration of this period can aid in contextualising historic conflict within the context of current global conflict and commemorations. These questions are concerned with the materialisation of national memory and the continual reshaping of material culture as commemoration. 

 The Revolutionary Period saw a series of violent conflicts and political crises erupt across Ireland that led to the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922, and eventually the Republic of Ireland in 1949.  As of 2012, Ireland has entered a period of centenary commemorations that enables a re-examination of both the performance of memory and the re-enactment of this period of Irish history.  Recent research into the commemoration of the Revolutionary Period has focussed on the 1916 Rising while failing to question more challenging remembrance of events such as the Civil War. This research will reconcile the history of the Revolutionary Period with the history of commemoration, with a particular focus on how Irish masculinity and nationhood are articulated in history making and the relationship between embodied memory and the materials of dress.

 By utilising an interdisciplinary methodological framework, this thesis will use dress as an embodiment of history and memory to analyse how the Revolutionary Period has and is being commemorated in museum exhibitions, theatre and performance and digital media. The research will use the materiality of dress as embodied memory to complicate the idea of Irish cultural memory, demonstrating the significance of the materials of war, conflict, and crisis in the process of commemoration and in cultivating a national or collective memory. This thesis, thus, is concerned with the role of design and dress in commemoration, how it shapes our memory of historical conflict and crisis and how it informs our understanding of the lived experience of that history.

Conflict, as a powerful agent of change, has shaped countries, cities and the lives of the people who experience it. However within the atmosphere of conflict, there is resistance, and it is resistance during conflict that frames my examination of masculinity and male dress in Britain and Ireland from 1914 to 1918. My dissertation explores civilian dress in opposition to military uniform and its role shaping perceptions of wartime masculinity. When Britain declared war in 1914, the khaki uniform became the new outward expression of manliness and as a result civilian dress came to symbolise antithesis of masculinity. However, civilian men’s dress has largely been omitted from the history of men’s dress in the early twentieth century. My dissertation argues that civilian dress played a central role in the manifestation and execution of resistance during WW1 in Britain and the nationalist uprising in Ireland in 1916. Conscientious Objectors in Britain resisted the destruction of war and maintained their pacifist principles by wearing civilian dress. Male civilian dress during the nationalist rebellion in Dublin in 1916 brought to light the power of visibility in urban conflict. I have therefore aimed to reassesses the narratives of WW1 and the 1916 Rising by looking at the everyday objects of civilian men’s dress. I have begun to expose the power of resistance in conflict as a device that shaped wartime masculinity as seen through men’s dress.