The Fashion Memoir

The History of Women's Pockets

For about two hundred and fifty years, women had the bigger pockets. An eighteenth-century tie-on pocket was the size of a modern tablet, tied round the waist under the s

Lee Miller: From Vogue Cover to War Correspondent

Lee Miller was on the cover of American Vogue in March 1927, as a drawing by the illustrator Georges Lepape. Eighteen years later she was photographing the liberation of

Annette Kellerman: The Swimmer Who Popularised the One-Piece

Annette Kellerman was an Australian champion swimmer who swam the Thames for a newspaper, tried to swim the English Channel at least three times, performed underwater bal

Anna May Wong, Part Two: The Dragon Dress

"I'm afraid that I'm a woman without a country." Anna May Wong, 1938, on taking her American clothes to China and finding she was foreign there too. Part Two of two, cov

Anna May Wong, Part 1: The Certificate of Identity

Anna May Wong was born in Los Angeles in 1905 and spent her life carrying a card that certified she had been admitted to her own country as a native, on a doctor's word.

Patrick Kelly: The First American in Paris Ready-to-Wear

Patrick Kelly was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi on 24 September 1954 and died in Paris on New Year's Day 1990, aged 35. In between he sold hand-sewn dresses on the stree

Bob Mackie: The Costume Designer Who Dressed Cher and Carol Burnett

Bob Mackie died on 14 September 2026, aged 87. At 23 he drew the sketch for the most famous dress of the twentieth century, the one Marilyn Monroe wore to sing "Happy Bir

Elizabeth Keckley: The Dressmaker Who Bought Her Own Freedom

Elizabeth Keckley was born into slavery in Virginia in 1818 and taught to sew by her mother. In November 1855 she paid twelve hundred dollars for her own freedom and her

Beau Brummell: The Regency Dandy Who Changed Menswear

George "Beau" Brummell had no title, no business and no trade. He never designed or made a single garment. For about sixteen years in Regency London he was nevertheless t

Paris in Wartime, Part Two: The Ledger

Last week covered how Paris couture survived four years of Nazi occupation. This week covers what it cost: Coco Chanel's wartime relationship with a German intelligence

Paris in Wartime, Part One: The Industry That Stayed Open

French couture industry to Berlin and Vienna. It didn't happen, because one middle-aged couturier spent four years talking them out of it, meeting by meeting. Part One

Virginia Oldoini, Countess of Castiglione: The Most Photographed Woman of the 19th Century

Virginia Oldoini, Countess of Castiglione, was sent to Paris in 1855 by her cousin, the future architect of Italian unification, with one unofficial job: win over Napoleo

Hardy Amies: The Queen’s Dressmaker Who Ran a Spy Network

Hardy Amies spent the Second World War running covert sabotage operations behind enemy lines in occupied Belgium for Britain’s Special Operations Executive, rising to lie

Herminie Cadolle: The Corsetmaker Who Invented the Bra

Herminie Cadolle spent her twenties on the barricades of the Paris Commune and did time in a Versailles prison for it. Sixteen years later, working out of a lingerie shop

Empress Dowager Cixi: China's Most Misunderstood Ruler

Empress Dowager Cixi ruled China for almost fifty years from behind a literal curtain, without ever officially being allowed to rule anything. She staged a coup in her tw

Ann Lowe: Society's Best Kept Secret

Ann Lowe spent nearly forty years dressing America's oldest, richest families, the Auchinclosses, the du Ponts, the Rockefellers, including designing Jacqueline Bouvier's

Rose Bertin: The Minister of Fashion Nobody Elected

Rose Bertin was a milliner's daughter from a cloth town in northern France who ended up dressing Marie Antoinette twice a week in private, and built what might be the fir

Mary Quant: The Woman Who Dressed the Sixties

Mary Quant taught herself to cut patterns at night so she could stock a King's Road boutique that opened with almost no money in 1955, and built an empire that put her na