Worn waistcoats and hob-nailed boots: Clothes and communities on the Cut, 1880 - 1941

Millette, Holly-Gale (2014) Worn waistcoats and hob-nailed boots: Clothes and communities on the Cut, 1880 - 1941. International Conference, Bishopsgate Institute , City of London, United Kingdom. 12 - 13 Sep 2014.

Abstract

This paper addresses the clothes and accessories of British inland boatmen and their families from about the 1880’s to the 1940’s – a time when their costume began to betray a cycle of heritage links. Because canalboat communities existed solely on the water and on the commerce and the trade that water-transportation provided, they were perceived as a “race apart” – taking nothing from the state nor giving anything back. These mobile communities vacillated and transitioned within oppositional spatial boundaries and their communities existed in a netherworld where their otherness was perceived and performed, in a touristic way, as exotic, transitory, and earthy. Their costume responded to this coda. Colourful and heavily worked belts, braces, and crocheted accessories came to signal an indigenous heritage culture unique to England, long after they ceased to be worn and this unique handicraft persisted as a pastiche of identity performance well into the late Modern era.

In a boatman’s waterside “town centres”, clothes would be bought and mended – unique customised apparel, coded and woven with political and social signifiers. A boatman’s mobility and liminality (neither strictly urban, nor strictly rural) was referenced in their clothing and in the manner in which it was made. Drawing from the experience of locating these costume pieces in archives and in private – and often very rural stores –this paper considers the methodologies of how we recover and then utilise (and if we should utilise) indigenous costume in contemporary museum performances. How are these articles perceived as archived material? And how does that perception shift when the costume is inset as performance within the neoliberal, “charity + consumer = heritage”, business model?

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Contributors

Author: Holly-Gale Millette

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