The Dress Diary of Mrs Anne Sykes

by Kate Strasdin

Synopsis:

In 1838, a young woman was given a diary on her wedding day. Collecting snippets of fabric from a range of garments - some her own, others donated by family and friends - she carefully annotated each one, creating a unique record of their lives. Her name was Mrs Anne Sykes.

Nearly two hundred years later, the diary fell into the hands of Kate Strasdin, a fashion historian and museum curator. Using her expertise, Strasdin spent the next six years unravelling the secrets contained within the album's pages.

Her findings are remarkable. Piece by piece, she charts Anne's journey from the mills of Lancashire to the port of Singapore before tracing her return to England in later years. Fragments of cloth become windows into Victorian life: Pirates in Borneo, the complicated etiquette of mourning, poisonous dyes, the British Empire in full swing, rioting over working conditions and the terrible human cost of Britain's cotton industry.

This is life writing that celebrates ordinary people: not the grandees of traditional written histories, but the hidden figures, the participants in everyday life. Through the evidence of waistcoats, ball gowns and mourning outfits, Strasdin lays bare the whole of human experience in the most intimate of mediums: the clothes we choose to wear.

Kate Strasdin’s The Dress Diary of Mrs Anne Sykes takes a real object as her starting point in order to unravel the life of the original owner of the object, and through that, a picture of the world she lived in, the experiences she was likely to have had, and the things that shaped the lives of the average woman in her position. Strasdin came into the possession of a rare item: a journal in which the owner pasted scraps of cloth, representing the clothes of various of her loved ones and acquaintances, men and women alike (though mostly women).

She did a lot of research to find out who the owner of this book might be, pinning it down to a Mrs Anne Sykes, and discovering her origins and who her family were. Each chapter discusses the clothes both in the context of Anne Sykes’ life, but also the lives of other people at the time — even servants, as one rare item included is a scrap from Anne’s cook’s Sunday best.

I find this kind of thing fascinating, and Anne luckily had a quite interesting life, travelling with her merchant husband and seeing more of the world than many of her period. She lived in Singapore and Shanghai, as well as in the UK, and the scraps of her clothes show us how little she assimilated, though there is the intriguing inclusion of a scrap of a pirate flag.

It’s a little slow at times, but I think worthwhile; there are some full colour plates to give you a better idea of the scraps included, and of Anne’s careful labelling. It works well to give a picture of the life of a young woman married in 1838, whose apparently adoring husband gave her this journal to begin to memorialise their lives together in.

Rating: 4/5