There are many "unsolved" mysteries, as there is only so much research one can do into an "ordinary" person - but with more historical archives becoming available all the time, perhaps some of these will be unravelled. I would have loved to have seen photos of the glorious fabrics described throughout, but perhaps that will be present in other versions of the book… for now, I will rely on the delightful descriptions, and would recommend this book to anyone interested in this period of history, or the history of fashion.

One of the other reasons why it has taken me so long to read the book is because apart from Sykes's time in Singapore and then China, her home and her birthplace were in Lancashire, which is where I live. The first part of the book covers the birth of the cotton industry which brought about the start of the Industrial revolution. I live in Oldham where at the height of the cotton industry there were around 400 cotton mills built here. Both my maternal grandparents worked in cotton mills which made this book all the more interesting. Years before ready to wear became the norm, most richer ladies would plan their wardrobe well in advance according to the seasonal calendar of nature, heat meant cool cotton or muslin, and woollen garments for the winter, and the social events of Balls and exhibitions, various reading events and charity functions. Changing clothes two or three times a day, creates much work for a dressmaker, designs and fittings were planned well in advance, a good dressmaker was privy to delicate information about the body of her client and confidences about the state of a marriage and pregnancy for example, made her indispensable. Bolts of cloth were taken to a dressmaker, a pattern was decided upon and therefore there were cutoffs to be pasted into a dress diary. My thanks to Netgalley and Random House UK/ Vintage publishers for my advance digital copy given in exchange for my honest review. It has been an absolute delight and pleasure to read this novel.

Retailers:

The colour plates of the material fragments are a revelation - over a century and a half later their gleaming colours and patterns shine out like jewels. It's so easy to think of the Victorians as drab and grey, or, worse still, sepia. These bright and often beautiful materials make me realise that they loved fashionable colours and patterns every bit as much as we do now. There was no immediate indication of who might have created this amazing dress diary, as I called it—of who had spent so much time carefully arranging the pieces of wool, silk, cotton, and lace into a document of lives in cloth. While there was much I was uncertain of, however, one thing I knew for sure from the careful handwriting that arched over each piece of cloth: this was the work of one woman. I just didn’t know who she was. Anne Sykes grew up in Lancashire, the daughter of a cloth merchant in a part of England focused at the time on the cloth industry. She married a cloth merchant from a family of fabric printers, so needless to say Anne understood the importance of fabric in daily life- both as fashion, gifts, and probably the basis for family economics. Anne and her husband Adam traveled to Singapore for his work and lived there (and briefly Shanghai) for nearly ten years before returning to England. Strasdin scoured records, newspapers, ship's logs and more for hints of the Sykes and other names that appear in Anne's diary, often with surprising success. While no letters have been found from Anne, Strasdin helps us discover what her life in Singapore might have been like through letters of other women who lived there at the time, and who knew Anne and donated fabric to her album. This results in a book that gathers so much information about the textile industry & clothing in one place – the history of cotton, wool and silk, the changes and developments in dyeing and printing techniques as well as glimpses into the trade of the time. For instance we have a whole chapter devoted to lace, which explains how the traditional handmade bobbin lace of Honiton & the surrounding Devon villages became virtually obsolete due to the invention of machine made net that was so much cheaper to produce, but then saved by Queen Victoria who used handmade Honiton lace on her wedding dress. Honiton lace is now a luxury product, still made in the traditional way by hand. The book contains a bibliography and colour photos of the fabric swatches discussed - I had an electronic copy of the book & would be interested to see these photographs in the print version!

In May 1848 merchant’s wife Anne Sykes rustled on to the dancefloor in a dress made of pink and purple silk taffeta. Her husband, Adam, was quite possibly in the cream velvet pile waistcoat that he had got for his birthday. Or perhaps he had opted for the bright silk tartan one. Either way, the young couple must have shimmered as they waltzed, giving the lie to the idea that the early Victorians mostly preferred to look as if they were off to a funeral. The Dress Diary of Anne Sykes and Kate Strasdin proves beyond a doubt that fashion history stands as a part of the social history of any time period that must be considered when we truly try to know a time and place. Women were hugely influential in the choices connected to fashion, letting us find some of their stories within the shadows of "important" history as so often focused on by men, but Strasdin reminds us in this book of the huge web of social and global economic influences a phrase like "fashion history" truly means. Not something to be scoffed at, it is a growing field of study that should be both celebrated and encouraged. The Dress Diary: Secrets From a Victorian Woman’s Wardrobe by Dr. Kate Strasdin is a wonderful nonfiction and history book that gives us a never before experience into the lives of Victorian women through one woman’s unique journalistic account. Anne Burton was the daughter of a Mill owner in Clitheroe in Lancashire, she would have been influenced by the latest designs of material straight from the loom. She married Adam Sykes in 1838. His father designed patterns for printed cloth, a very fortuitous partnership!!Oh, how I enjoyed this book! Not only is it a great read, but it's quite informative and very well-written, too. Kate Strasdin wanted to know more & set out on a quest to find out as much as she could about the woman behind the book, and this is the result of several years of research. At times the author gets somewhat effusive in her descriptions and overly speculative about the could-have-beens. Readers don’t have to be reminded time and again that the historical record is sparse. And I wish that Anne’s actual (unreadable) captions had been replaced by a modern font. There's a chapter on Victorian mourning customs (as there are several swatches in the diary captioned for the mourning attire of various people Anne Sykes knew), with fascinating information about how the sartorial expectations of "proper" mourning were codified, marketed, and observed by people at varying levels depending on gender, class, geographic location, etc.

In a sense, Anne’s album is a form of life writing—taking in ordinary folk, not the grandees of traditional written histories but the bystanders, the participants in everyday life, their loves and losses, joys and sorrows. It is a fragmentary story of life experienced at home and abroad, in a domestic world and an international one, of courage in unfamiliar lands and of building a community of friends. Through small and seemingly inconsequential wisps of fabric, Anne Sykes’s diary lays bare the whole of human experience in that most intimate of mediums: the clothes that we choose to wear. Intriguing and engaging... A fascinating and creative unravelling of Anne's life and times Clare Hunter, author of THREADS OF LIFE

Featured Reviews

This was a fascinating story, or groups of stories, giving insights into time, place, and lives of mostly the industrialist class as it develops in England. What the author was able to learn about Anne, her family, and their social milieu was fascinating. The book is written in a very readable way, though it is a research project report.