In the Shadow of the Georgians - From the Jacobite Rising to Waterloo

The Costume Society’s Annual Conference 2025 focuses aspects of dress from what we know in Britain as the Georgian period of 1714 to 1815.

Our international speakers will consider clothing of the period from around the world and also explore how the styles of the time have influenced later wearers.

The conference presentations cover themes:

• Making, marketing and retailing of fashion and dress across the world

• The impact of social, political and technological revolutions

• The wardrobe choices of individuals during the period

• The impact of colonialism, discovery, world trade and cultural exchange

• Revivals of styles from 1714-1815 in later fashion choices

• Recreating garments based on those of the period

The Conference will be held on-line in four sessions.

Session 1

18th October 14.00 BST

Highlight Speaker: Hilary Davidson

Global Fashion in the Age of Jane Austen: Communities and Colonies

Summer Lee

Founding Fashions: The Revolutionary Wardrobes of Washington, Adams, and Jefferson

Fatima Giordano

Queens in the Mirror: Fashion and Image Choices between Maria Carolina and Maria Clementina in The Kingdom of Naples

Gabriela Juranek

"It’s not that we approve of those belts placed so high that they make the waist disappear..." Social discourses surrounding fashion à l’antique in late 1790s Paris.

Session 2

22nd October 19.00 BST

Michelle Barker

‘What Lies Beneath’ - The Study of the Inner Workings of a Court Pair of Stays and How They Might Relate to the Court Mantua

Serena Dyer

The Makers’ Hand: Recreating the Practices of the Eighteenth-Century Mantua-Maker

Dr. Anne Bissonnette

ALCTC Pattern Project: Mapping Changes in Cut, Construction and Embodied Practices

Session 3

25th October 14.00 BST

Guest Speaker: Amy Wilson

Healthy, Virtuous and Fertile: Natural Mothers and Elite Dress in late Eighteenth-Century England

Joanna Jarvis

The Regency Crisis of 1788: Dress as a visual marker of allegiance

Sally Tuckett

‘Simplicity and Extravagance’? Scottish Dress Through the Eyes of Paul Sandby in the Wake of the ‘45

Javier Gimeno Martínez 

Queenship and Fashion Magazines: Queen Maria Luisa de Parma’s Dress in Goya’s ‘Charles IV of Spain and His Family’ (1800)

Claire Batt

Fragment, Part, Portion - The Value of Unpicked Gowns in Museum Collections

Session 4

29th October 19.00 BST

Jennifer Parker

Reimagining Rococo: The revival of Georgian styles in the Lolita fashion subculture as performative protest

Virginia Hill

The Reluctant Fashion Editor: Carolina Arienti Lattanzi, the ‘Corriere delle Dame’ and fashion in Napoleon’s Milan

Carter King

Indigenizing European Fashions in the Georgian Period: How Historic Haudenosaunee Dress Expands Georgian Fashion through Interventions in Identity and Material