Fitting into Fashion: Sizing, Bodies, and Modernity in Britain 1870–1930

This thesis explores an expanding market of middle-class women consumers’ experiences of fitting into the standardisation and sizing of the British fashion industry from 1870–1930. It addresses two interdependent gaps in fashion history: the evolving supply of fashionable ‘tailor-made’ production en masse and its physical, psychological, and socio-cultural demands on consumers—both of which continue to shape the fashion industry, body, and society. It asks: how did standardisation and sizing progress across the fashion lifecycle and (re)shape middle-class women’s bodily and embodied experiences of fitting into fashion? In answer, it draws on objects from across fashion’s supply chain and consumption—including manufacturers’ pattern cutting systems, retailers’ catalogues, and consumers’ wardrobes of altered garments—to show how each stage and stakeholder (re)fashioned industrial production and individual experiences of fitting in. These respective case studies (in)form distinctive methodologies: from reflections on remaking a disciplinary pattern; through multimodal analysis of catalogues’ sizing and body projects; to conservation-inspired reconstructions of everyday fashion-body biographies through altered garments in wardrobes. Collectively, these methods integrate approaches from creative practice, museums, and scholarship on the body, embodying theory through practice. This research reveals not only that the standardisation and sizing of women’s fashion considerably predates received histories, but also its flexibility, not fixity: manufacturers, retailers, and consumers all negotiated these new systems and their systematisation of the body. By exposing this complexity of fashion production and consumer experiences, this thesis reframes scholarly frameworks oversimplifying these processes. Altogether, this multimedia, multidimensional, and interdisciplinary study reveals previously concealed relationships between fashion, the body, and modernity. To disciplines concerned with these areas, it contributes newly object-led histories, methodologies, and theories that challenge ‘one-size-fits-all’ approaches and address fashion’s agency in shaping modern subjectivity. Beyond academia, it proposes new insights into bodily diversity in library, archive, and museum collections, and the legacy of a fashion history that structures contemporary industry cultures of size exclusivity.