Costume

A Volume for the London Olympics

The Costume Society, John Hughson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000158434
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Fashion Design

This volume, consisting of papers originally delivered at the Sport and Fashion symposium in 2011, celebrates the connection between sport and the clothes and fashion which are associated with certain sporting activities. Articles include a study of Olympic swimming costumes, women's sport during the inter-war period, the use of sportsmen by clothing industries for brand marketing, and the aesthetic significance of certain items of clothing, specifically the shirt worn by Maradona during the 1986 Argentina-England World Cup quarter final. For more information, visit: www.maney.co.uk/journals/cos

Editorial (1)

The staging of the Olympic Games in the UK this year gives us the opportunity to think about the clothes and appearance of those who take part in sporting activities. You may not be a great fan of sport yourself but you will see from the Costume archive just how much interest there has been over the years in dress for sports of all kinds and across many periods. Pat Poppy has compiled a checklist from the Journal's back numbers of articles about sports clothing and we present this to our readers on page 235 of this themed issue.

As the first of our special issues devoted to one subject, we have looked beyond the strict confines of dress history scholarship and embraced contributions from the fields of social sciences and sports studies. Costume readers will be aware that this is not our usual fare. The Editors feel it is important to give other voices a chance to talk about dress, and an opportunity arose to collaborate with Professor John Hughson following a workshop organized by him and devoted to sports dress held at the University of Central Lancashire in the autumn of 2011. In this Olympic year, we decided to give over the June issue to some of the papers presented at that workshop and we trust that scholars and curators from different disciplines will find things to learn from each other. It has been a pleasure working with Professor Hughson, who introduces the essays in more detail overleaf.

In addition to the essays and the archival list, we are also able to offer a selection of images, new to most of our readers, of extant sports garments and photographs from UK collections. An actual garment often speaks volumes, and these photographs will surely stimulate questions and make us reflect on the experience of wearing such clothes and the effect they might produce.

We are very pleased to welcome Anna Buruma as our compiler of the New and Recent Books List. She takes over from James Snowden and has done sterling work with a very short deadline. Christine Stevens, our Reviews Editor, has likewise come up with a good number of book reviews in a short interval as we move over to two issues a year.

We include an obituary of Monsignor Richard Rutt CBE (affectionately known to some readers as the 'Knitting Bishop') who, in a small but significant way, made a contribution to the history of sportswear in the pages of this Journal. It is also with great regret that we report the death of Katrina Honeyman (1950-2011), Professor of Social and Economic History at the University of Leeds, whose innovative studies of the Leeds tailoring industries will be well known to our readers. She supported the Pasold Research Fund (which promotes research into the economic and social history of textiles) for many years and in several ways, publishing two books in the Pasold series and serving as a distinguished editor of the journal Textile History.

PENELOPE BYRDE AND VERITY WILSON

Editorial (2)

In the year of London hosting the Games of the XXXth Olympiad, it is appropriate that this special issue of Costume dealing with sports-related clothing commences with an Olympic-related paper. Jean Williams presents a study of Olympic swimming costumes, specifically the racing swimsuit worn by Britain's first women's medal-winning swimmer, Jennie Fletcher, at the 1912 Games. Fletcher's costume, revealing for the time, represented a radical departure from the normal modesty constrictions applicable to women's swimwear. Thus, Williams contends, technology, servicing sport performance as an almost scientific pursuit, prevailed over the customary social nervousness associated with women exposing their flesh in public. Fletcher's working-class and Leicester background is made relevant to the analysis.

In the following paper, Fiona Skillen examines the contradictory discourses surrounding women's sport during the inter-war period in Britain and reports on how these discourses impacted upon the choices that women made about their sporting apparel. Sporting women faced mixed messages and resultant pressures, such as an expectation to combine their physical activity with a feminine appearance and demeanour. Covering a range of sports, Skillen indicates that there was no particular pattern of response to this pressure. However, in one way or another, women were active in making sports clothing choices, and their increasing participation in sport during the years 1919-1939 made this a landmark period for women's sportswear.

Ann Bailey's paper looks at how the popularity of football and its players was used by the clothing industries to market their leisurewear on Britain's high streets. In his classic text, On Human Finery, Quentin Bell recognized the potential popularity of some sports apparel as leisurewear. However, Bell explicitly stated that this did not include football. He might then have been surprised by Bailey's research focused on the 1950s through to the mid-1970s, which reveals how footballers were modelled by clothing companies as fashion icons. The so-called 'affluent society' broadened the market for smart attire and football players took on a new and evolving role from this time on.

Geoffery Kohe draws our attention to the provocative sport-spectator practice known as 'streaking'. Streakers, much like their clothed contemporaries, are fashioned entities whose energetic efforts to disrobe and dash are imbued with historical, socio-cultural, political, and arguably aesthetic, significance. Giving regard to this range of possible meanings, Kohe contends that streakers may best be regarded not as opportunistic deviants, but rather as valid contributors to the performance spectacle. Streaking may continue to be proscribed from sports arenas, yet opportunities remain for daring experimenters to fashion new forms of sport-spectator related nudity. Accordingly, Kohe interestingly questions whether the streaking performance presents a novel and unexpected type of costume.

In the final paper of the issue I am joined by Kevin Moore, Director of the National Football Museum, for a discussion of the symbolic significance of the shirt worn by Diego Maradona during the well-remembered quarter-final match between Argentina and England at the 1986 World Cup Finals. It was in this game that Maradona scored two of the most famous goals in the history of football, known respectively as the 'Hand of God' goal and the 'Goal of the Century'. Gur paper considers the variety of meanings that the shirt may hold for different observers, but also makes a case for the shirt possessing a special aesthetic significance in its material presence as a reminder of the undisputed footballing artistry of Maradona.

Finally, I would like to thank the Editors of Costume, Verity Wilson and Penelope Byrde, for giving me the opportunity to work with them on this special issue. It has been my pleasure and I hope the issue proves of interest to the Journal's readership.

JOHN HUGHSON University of Central Lancashire

Aquadynamics and the Athletocracy: Jennie Fletcher and the British Women's 4 x 100 metre Freestyle Relay Team at the 1912 Stockholm Olympic Games

By JEAN WILLIAMS

This article considers the part played by aquadynamics, or a concern for the technical properties of swimming costumes, in the career of Jennie Fletcher (1890-1968) who won Britain's first individual Olympic female swimming medal (bronze) at the Stockholm Olympic Games in 1912 and contributed to the first women's team gold in the 4 x 100 metre Freestyle Relay. Her light silk one-piece racing swimsuit represented a new kind of modernity: the revealed sporting body enabled competitive principles, rather than modesty, to define the appearance of the female swimmer. The article also examines the place of the working-class competitor in our understanding of the early Games, an 'athletocracy' where performance, not background, enabled individuals to compete. The work therefore also explores the relevance of Fletcher's birthplace, Leicester, in the development of amateur and professional swimming and in the production of swmming costumes for both sport and leisure.

KEYWORDS: swimsuits, bathing costumes, sports dress, Olympic Games, swimming, Leicester

An amateur is one who has never competed for a money prize, declared wager, or staked bet; who has never taught, pursued or assisted in the practices of swimming, or any other athletic exercise, as a means of pecuniary gain; and who has not, knowingly, or without protest, taken part in any competitions with anyone who is not an amateur.¹

INTRODUCTION

SINCE THE PUBLICATION of Peter Bailey's seminal work on leisure in the lives of ordinary people, it has been increasingly accepted by historians that the way people chose to spend their time, when they had the freedom to do so, is as telling as how they fulfilled their obligations in life.² The award of the 2012 Olympic Games to London in 2005 prompted my interest in compiling a collective biography of Britain's female competitors.³ Most British Olympic representatives competed as amateurs, at least officially, until the mid-1980s. Athletes of all kinds therefore spent a considerable amount of their free time preparing and training for their chosen discipline.⁴ Though that research is ongoing, this article focuses on one of those women: the working-class amateur swimmer Jennie Fletcher (1890-1968) and her colleagues in the British Women's 4 X 100 metre Freestyle Relay team at the 1912 Stockholm Olympic Games (Figure I). The individual 100 metre Freestyle competition and the the 4 x 100 metre Freestyle Relay were the inaugural two Olympic swimming events for women, while female diving had a single class (a 10 m platform dive, in which Isabella 'Belle' White of Britain won bronze).⁵ Jennie Fletcher was consequently Britain's first individual female swimming medallist (a bronze) and she contributed to the first women's team gold (in the relay). Win Hayes is therefore not quite correct in saying that Lucy Morton (1898-1980) became the first British female swimming gold medallist in 1924.⁶ Few of the British public will know of Jennie Fletcher, however.

FIGURE I. Isabella 'Belle' Moore, Jennie Fletcher, Annie Speirs and Irene Steer of the gold-medal winning British 4 x 100 metre Freestyle Relay team at the Olympic Games, Stockholm, 1912. The chaperone is thought to be Clara Jarvis, but a Mrs Holmes is also referred to in the official report. The cloaks that women over fourteen were required to wear by ASA rules when not swimming are evident in the bottom right of the picture © British Swimming, Loughborough: The British Olympic Association, London

This paper is concerned with Fletcher's swimming career and so it is first of all necessary to outline the sporting context of her achievements. One commentator has suggested that, during the second half of the nineteenth century, 'Britain experienced an almost revolutionary transformation in the scale and nature of its sporting culture'.⁷ The modern Olympics developed out of this, re-visioning the ancient Greek Games to suit the tastes of Anglophile French aristocrat, Pierre de Fredy, Baron de Coubertin (1863-1937). First held in Athens in 1896, the inaugural Games included British men but no women.⁸ Victorian and Edwardian dress history also requires some consideration before Jennie Fletcher's life is examined in more detail: Lynda Nead has contextualized the 1900 Paris Olympic Games, in which women did participate, in the terms of wider developments in 'muscular looking'.⁹ Nead includes the spectacle of the Olympics as part of a wider cultural paradigm-shift in which the gaze of the spectator was an active part in constructing the event: new forms of movement enabled novel perspectives in seeing and being seen.¹⁰ The preliminary analysis of wider industry forces is therefore followed by a section on Jennie Fletcher's swimming career and the representation of her victories in 1912.

A starting point for the argument is that sporting spectacle in the Olympic Games owed much ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Editorial (1)
• Editorial (2)
• Aquadynamics and the Athletocracy: Jennie Fletcher and the British Women's 4 × 100 metre Freestyle Relay Team at the 1912 Stockholm Olympic Games
• 'It's possible to play the game marvellously and at the same time look pretty and be perfectly fit': Sport, Women and Fashion in Inter-war Britain
• The Clothing and Footwear Industries and Professional Football Clubs in England, 1950-1975
• Decorative Dashes: Disrobing the Practice of Streaking
• 'Hand of God', Shirt of the Man: The Materiality of Diego Maradona
• Dressed for Sport: A Photographic Miscellany
• Retrospective List of Articles on Sportswear Published in Costume 1968-2008
• New and Recent Books
• Book Reviews
• Obituary
• The Costume Society Awards