This presentation addresses Cally Blackman's book (due early 2024) which will examine fashion between 1907-1930 through the medium of the autochrome as a robust register of colour. A technological advance, the autochrome links photography with fashion, often upheld as a metaphor for modernity, and both were integral in mediating the influence of colour on commerce and consumer culture at this period.
Cally Blackman is a fashion historian with over twenty years experience of teaching and writing, having published several books on the subject: 100 Years of Fashion Illustration 2007, 100 Years of Menswear 2009, 100 Years of Fashion 2012, A Portrait of Fashion 2015 and Fashion Central 2019. She has been researching the representation of fashion and clothing through autochromes for much of this time, its importance to the field being that this process affords a unique and robust register of colour during the period it was in use that is more reliable than other types of visual media, including printed material and even painting, and therefore is extremely useful as evidence of the colour of clothes in high fashion and the everyday dress of ordinary people. She has given several presentations on this topic at international conferences, including: in 2014 Mode et Guerre Europe 1914-18: fashion, dress and society during World War 1 at L'Institute Francais de la Mode, Paris; in 2015 Fashion at 84th Anglo-American Conference of Historians, Institute of Historical Research, University of London; in 2018 Der Wereld in Kleur: kleurenfotographie voor 1918, Allard Pierson Museum Amsterdam; in 2021 Colour Fever, V&A, London.
Her forthcoming book is the first to use the autochrome as a medium for viewing the history of fashion and will include approx. 350 examples of autochromes and complimentary images, and 40,000 words of text and captions. The autochromes, some of which have not been published before, have been sourced from museum, archive and private collections all over the world. In addition, Cally is acting as co-curator and consultant on a forthcoming exhibition, Les Couleurs de la Mode, at the Palais Galliera, Paris, of autochromes from the Salon du Gout Francais archive from June 2023-March 2024.
Illuminating Fashion: the colour of clothes in Autochromes 1907-1930
Tuesday, March 21, 2023 4:00 pm to 5:30 pm CET (1500-1630 UTC)
Presenter: Cally Blackman (Senior Lecturer, Central Saint Martins, UAL, London)
To attend the talk & have access to the reading material (see below), please the join by clicking here: https://www.chstm.org/content/color-photography-19th-century-and-early-20th-century-sciences-technologies-empires
Part of the talks at the CHSTM working group: "Color Photography in the 19th Century and Early 20th Century: Sciences, Technologies, Empires"
