Rachel Worth
BA (Hons)
History
University of Cambridge
MA History of Dress
Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London
Ph.D
Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London
Professor of Fashion History
Research Development Coordinator
Rachel’s research interests focus on the history of non-elite clothing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries including the history of ready-to wear and mass-produced clothing and retailing; the definition of methodologies for the study of dress history, and issues of representation in relation to the analysis and interpretation of visual and literary sources. She has lectured and published widely on representations of workingclass dress (the topic of her Ph.D) and related areas with articles in journals such as Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture; Costume: The Journal of the Costume Society and Textile History. In 2005, with the help of an AHRC award, she brought to fruition a book on the democratisation of fashion, Fashion for the People: A History of Clothing at Marks & Spencer (Oxford: Berg, 2007). In connection with this she was interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s ‘You and Yours’ and ‘Thinking Allowed’ with Laurie Taylor (January 2007). Rachel is now working on a single-authored book on the representation of working-class dress in the nineteenth century.
In 2007 she embarked on a new collaborative and interdisciplinary research project, ‘Sustainability or Consumption: a Twenty-first Century Challenge for the Fashion Industry’. To this end, Rachel was awarded TQEF funding to support an industrial secondment (2008-9) at New Look clothing retailers, Weymouth. Having secured support from New Look to co-fund a Ph.D studentship, she subsequently made a successful collaborative bid in association with the University of Bath’s Centre for Research in Strategic Purchasing and Supply (CRISPs) to Great Western Research (funded by HEFCE) to co-fund the studentship, entitled ‘Fashioning Sustainable Supply Chains’, and for which Rachel is co-supervisor.
Recent conference papers include: ‘Uniformity on the High Street?’ (Janet Arnold Costume Society Conference, The Forum, Bath, 2006); ‘Marks & Spencer and the Impact of Mass-produced Clothing on Notions of Fashion’ (European Social Science and History Conference (ESSHC), University of Lisbon (2008). She represents the Arts Institute at the HERDA South West Research Special Interest Group and the GuildHE Research Group.
Rachel Worth, Fashion for the People:
A History of Clothing at Marks & Spencer
(Oxford: Berg, 2007).
Cover image: Marks & Spencer’s
Oldham Street, Manchester store,
c. 1928, courtesy of the Marks & Spencer
Archive, University of Leeds.