Clothes tell stories; wardrobes house our memories.

 

Social historian Carol Dyhouse (a long-term member of the Friends of St Michaels and local resident) will talk about her new book, Appearances: Memory, History, Clothes (Unicorn Publishing, 2025). She draws upon photographs and the memories of four generations of women in her own family, as well as a love of vintage clothes, perfume, makeup and jewellery to explore women’s changing attitudes to their appearances since the Second World War.

 

From the ladylike restraint and elegance of the 1950s through the ‘dollybird’, ‘flower-power’ and Unisex looks of the 1960s and 1970s, fashion moved on both to punk, and to the shoulder-padded, power-suited assertiveness of the 1980s. Were women passive consumers of these trends or did we fashion our own identity?

 

Carol is an Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Sussex and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She writes on the social history of women, education and popular culture. Her books include Glamour: Women, History, Feminism (2011), Girl Trouble: Panic and Progress in the History of Young Women (2013), Heartthrobs: A History of Women and Desire (2017), and Love Lives, From Cinderella to Frozen (2021).