Biography
Lou Taylor is a dress historian who has played a vital developmental role in establishing the discipline and has been with the University of Brighton for many decades. Her academic career has focused on the development of critical approaches to the discussion of the objects of clothing in their historical, material culture and museology settings, through teaching, publishing, exhibition curating and PhD supervision.
Taylor's application of material culture and consumption studies has positively transformed dress history. She is driven by the conviction that transdisciplinary approaches to the construction of history, including working with surviving garments, offers a fresh, close understanding of the cultural "eye" of a specific period or community.
She is the author of Mourning Dress: A Costume and Social History, Allen and Unwin, 1983; The Study of Dress History and Establishing Dress History, Manchester University Press, 2002 and 2004; She has co-written with Amy de la Haye and Eleanor Thompson, Fancy and Fancy Dress: The Messel Dress Collection, 1870-2005, Philip Wilson and the Museum of Brighton, 2005; and co-edited with Marie Mcloughlin, the forthcoming, Paris Fashion and World War Two: Global Diffusion and Nazi Control, Bloomsbury Press, 2019.
Keynote Presentation (2019) | Haute Couture in Occupied Paris and Beyond, in World War Two: Issues of Nazi Cultural and Economic Control and the Diffusion and Consumption of Luxury Paris Fashion in War Time
