Academic Publications
“Looking for Maternity: Dress Collections and Embodied Knowledge,” Fashion Theory, 23, no. 2 (2019): 401-439.
Childbearing accounted for a large proportion of women’s lives in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, yet the questions of what they wore and how they balanced bodily change and the dictates of fashion have been generally under-explored. This is especially true of object- and collections-based research where scarcity of surviving examples limited the range of material culture analysis of maternal dress and bodies in those centuries. This article complicates that seeming absence by critically considering the process of looking for maternity in dress collections. Working with evidence drawn from a database of approximately 300 garments associated with maternity studied between 2015 and 2017, this article reflects on the modes of encountering maternity therein. The object biographies of maternity-associated garments in such collections reveal the disjointed nature of the material record of pregnancy and how historical practices of reuse, storage and recording can obfuscate that record. Current perspectives on materialism and material culture in fashion studies are mobilized here to consider how a methodological combination of object-based study and recognition of the connection between material and wearer informs new narratives of embodiment contained in existing dress collections.
“Maternity Dress.” Scholl L. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women's Writing
Clothing designed, altered, or adapted for wear by expectant mothers makes rare and tantalizing appearances in Victorian women’s writing. Literature draws a veil of secrecy over pregnant bodies, while advice guides impress upon the reader the dangers of corsets and tight lacing to the health of mothers and infants. However, women’s designs, commercial writing, and personal letters and diaries include information about how women approached their wardrobe during pregnancy in an attempt to be healthily and appropriately dressed.
“Exhibition Review: Costumes from the Golden Age of Hollywood,” Textile History, 47, no. 1 (2016): 120-124.
“Exhibition Review: Step into Paradise: Jenny Kee and Linda Jackson,” History Australia (2020).
Museum Publications
Connecting Threads: Tracing Fashion, Fabric and Everyday Life at Newstead House.
2016.
A research catalogue to accompany the exhibition Connecting Threads. The catalogue explores the fashion and textiles collection at the house through five main themes: Newstead House connections; craft, decoration and domesticity; materials of childhood; the Hinckley collection; pride and presentation in Victorian and Edwardian dress.
The catalogue features 300+ never-before-photographed objects over 168 colour pages.
Reviews for Connecting Threads
“Connecting Threads announces Fisk as a confident and sensitive new voice in dress history, with serious smarts both is textual historical research and the material interpretation of dress”
“a work that breaks away from a parochialism of outlook to offer wide-ranging insights on the role of dress and textiles in the history of migration, settler colonialism, the production of ‘home,’ and everyday life.”
Dr Melissa Bellanta. “Review: Catriona Fisk, Connecting Threads: Tracing Fashion, Fabric and Everyday Life at Newstead House,” Fashion Theory, 22, no. 3 (2017): 375-377. https://doi.org/10.1080/1362704X.2017.1358906
“provides not only a meticulous investigation of objects in the collection but also painstaking detective work in piecing together provenance and ownership and linking these elements into telling the lived experience of garments and the people who wore them.”
Professor Jennifer Craik, “Fashioning Australian: Recent Reflections on the Australian Style in Contemporary Fashion,” Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture, 21, no. 1(2017): 30-52. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jasiapacipopcult.2.1.0030
The Bride Wore White: 200 Yeards of Bridal Fashion at Miegunyah House Museum.
2013.
A catalogue of the wedding fashion in the collection of Miegunyah House Museum and the Queensland Women’s Historical Society. This catalogue combines beautiful wedding garments with detailed family history to explore this aspect of Queensland’s social history.
Blogs and Other Writing
A pregnant pause? Filling in the history of pregnancy and dress.
Australian Women’s History Network Blog. Most Viewed Blog of 2018.
A decent woman? The breastfeeding and visibility debate is nothing new.
The Conversation
‘An Australian Researchers’ Stop at the CHS,’ Making History. Connecticut Historical Society Museum & Library, Fall 2016, 6.
Conference Papers
Secret Stitches, Supporting Seams, and the Ties and Laces of Everyday Life: Transformation and Domesticity in Nineteenth Century American Clothing
American Everyday: Resistance, Revolution & Transformation. Columbia College Chicago. Feb 2020.
Domestic garments provide, in their design, alteration and adaption, fascinating insights into the interaction between fashion and everyday life. This is particularly true for women’s dress in the nineteenth century, even more so for those garments commonly worn by reproductive age women. Using this particular facet of everyday life as a lens, this paper explores how domestic clothing tested and negotiated bodily need against the fashionable image. Drawing on the author’s recently completed doctoral work, three aspects of the transformative domestic mode will be discussed; expansion laces, abdominal supports, and nursing modifications. These features are then traced through subsequent developments of explicit or ready-to-wear versions of the same, suggesting a process by which women’s ‘unofficial’ embodied domestic practice leaks out into later fashion developments. This paper consequently draws on a growing body of scholarly work that positions non-elite and less-formal fashion (and surviving examples of the same) as arenas of identity formation, challenging of gender ideologies, and technical or stylistic development. Such work counters previous perceptions of domestic, interior and informal garments as ‘lagging behind’ in fashion terms, and any tendency to consider the numerous extant nineteenth century everyday garments only as evidence of a limiting gendered and domestic sphere. In so doing I argue for the centrality of domestic and everyday fashions to histories of dress and female reproductive bodies in the period, and recast them as crucial sites of experimentation and transformation.
Fashion's Maternal Bodies: Historical Perspectives on the Division between Maternity and Everyday Style
AAANZ Conference. University of Auckland. Dec 2019.
A curious arrival on the fashion catwalk of the twenty-first century is the actively maternal body. Gravid figures, lactating figures, concealed and exposed maternal bodies, labouring bodies and on occasion accompanying infants have all made forays into a space once presented as separate from the “messy” corporeality of maternity. Indeed, where maternity fashion was conceived as an entirely separated mode of dress the boundaries between bodily reproduction and fashionability are now being challenged. At the same time the very concept of needing distinct and exclusive maternity dress has been eroded by the rise of modern stretch and technical fabrics. However, questions of appropriateness, sexual propriety, bodily modesty, race, and class in relation to high fashion are continually contested in fashion itself, as well as in public and media discourse around the pregnant fashion model. This paper provides historical perspectives on these divisions and contestations by examining the before-and-after of maternity wear. Drawing on surviving garments, pictorial advertising and personal writings, the discussion demonstrates that before the invention of maternity dress as a distinct commodity in the early twentieth century, women performed a complex negotiation between maternal and everyday fashions. The creation of maternity wear is revealed not as the first instance in which fashion engaged with the maternal body, but rather a new commercial manifestation of that relationship. In this light, contemporary appearances of maternity within everyday and high fashion emerge as the latest in a series of re-imaginings of the fashioned maternal body.
Royal, Pregnant and Fashionable? Tracing the Dress and Activity of Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Expectant Mothers at the British Court
Kings and Queens 7. Ruling Sexualities: Sexuality, Gender, and the Crown. University of Winchester. July 2018.
The childbearing role of royal and aristocratic women in history was once only studied for its dynastic and political consequences, or through the lens of medical practice and obstetric developments. Narratives of reproduction at court told either of the intrigue produced by the ‘unreadability’ of women’s reproductive bodies, or the life-and-death drama of the birthing chamber, leaving unexplored the embodied experience of pregnancy to focus on questions of conception of parturition. More recent studies, enlightened by histories of gender and the body, recognise that motherhood was also a vehicle for royal women to exercise power and authority. Concurrently the development of dress history as an academic field has produced in-depth studies of royal and aristocratic dress that reveal the complicated language of fashion, consumption, power and individual expression these women used to shape their image (e.g. Strasdin, 2017). This paper positions itself at the overlap of these developments to explore the relationship between dress and pregnancy for royal and court women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although none of what contemporary dress parlance recognises as ‘maternity wear’ survives for royal women from these two centuries, adopting an object-based methodology allows us to trace their garments and activities. Drawing on the tangible and popular nature of dress, such an exploration has the potential to illuminate public understandings of the experience of pregnancy in the past. Ultimately, this paper aims to explore how dress in pregnancy allowed royal and aristocratic women to use one of their most powerful resources, their image, to negotiate the less certain world of their reproductive experience.
Material Culture and the Maternal Body: Dress Objects as a Window on Embodied Lives
The Material Body 1500-1900. University of Birmingham. July 2018.
Sexual Restraint and Reproductive Excess: Dressing for Pregnancy 1750-1900
Costume Colloquium V: Restraint and Excess in Fashion and Dress. Florence. Nov 2017.
‘Trickle-down’ Fashion Museology: Negotiating Fashion Exhibitions, Material Culture Research and Public Interest in Historic House Museums
Fashioning Museums Conference. Australian National University. Feb 2016.