Saturday 04 October 2025

Bath & County Club, Queen's Parade, Queen Square, Bath BA1 2NJ

Cally Blackman - Sartorial Shapshifting and Gendered Bodies

Cally’s lecture will explore the evolution of menswear with a focus on tailored clothing and how it has been used to signify and subvert gender over the centuries. Once almost exclusively made by men for men, since the late seventeenth century the tailored suit has been appropriated into the female wardrobe. More recently, men have increasingly adopted garments once only worn by women. From riding habits and power suits to Jean Paul Gaultier’s skirts for men, we will take a relaxed look at how tailored clothes have been used to signify and subvert gender.

Cally studied fashion design at St. Martin’s School of Art and gained an MA in History of Art (Dress) from the Courtauld Institute. She has taught fashion history at Central Saint Martins for over 20 years.

She has written several books including 100 Years of Fashion Illustration (2007), 100 Years of Menswear (2009), 100 Years of Fashion (2012) (all pub. by Laurence King), A Portrait of Fashion with Prof. Aileen Ribeiro (2015, published by the National Portrait Gallery), Fashion Central Saint Martins with Hywel Davies (2019, published by Thames & Hudson), and contributed a chapter to Les Couleurs de la Mode (2023, published by the Palais Galliera, Paris Musées). She has lectured widely including at the National Portrait Gallery, the V&A, Sotheby’s Institute, the Courtauld Institute, and the Royal Academy.

Her current research focuses mainly on the representation of fashion in the Lumière brothers’ early twentieth century autochrome colour photographic process. Her latest book, The Colour of Clothes: fashion and dress in autochromes 1907-1930, was published by Thames & Hudson in March 2025.

Dr Danielle Sprecher - Where would menswear be without Black British designers?

Danielle's talk will open up the question posed by i-D magazine in June 2020 about the importance of Black British designers to men’s fashion in the UK and internationally by exploring the longer historical influence of Black style on menswear. This includes the tailors who emigrated to Britain from the Caribbean to designers such as Joe Casely-Hayford, Charlie Allen, Ozwald Boateng and the new wave of younger designers and labels including Samuel Ross and A-Cold-Wall*, Wales Bonner, Martine Rose, Saul Nash, Labrum, Ahluwalia and Bianca Saunders.

Dr Danielle Sprecher is the curator of the Westminster Menswear Archive at the University of Westminster, London. Her PhD looked at men’s fashion and the Leeds tailoring industry. She is a historian whose research focuses on the history of British menswear and men’s fashion, exploring the industry from design to production and final consumption. As a curator, she has worked with several historical dress collections across the UK including Leeds Museums and Galleries, and Colchester and Ipswich Museum Service. Danielle has co-curated several notable exhibitions, including Invisible Men: An Anthology from the Westminster Menswear Archive (2019), Undercover (2021), and (i>Umbro 100: Sportswear x Fashion (2024). She is the co-author of the book Inside the Westminster Menswear Archive, published by Bloomsbury in 2024.

Guy Hills - Colour in menswear and the influence of sport on tailoring. Why wool makes the best sportswear and the rise of Dashing Tweeds

Fashion photographer Guy Hills launched British brand Dashing Tweeds in 2006 with the talented woven textiles designer Kirsty McDougall. Guy was looking to create a British high quality modern tweed that could be worn in the city. His passion was to combine traditional sportswear with new designs and technical yarns.

Guy and Kirsty set up their design studio in East London using the best mills in the country to produce their luxury woven designs.

With the cloth's instant success amongst Saville Row tailors, the Dashing Tweeds flagship store opened in 2014 in Mayfair and then moved to Marylebone in 2018.

Guy's talk will centre on his fascinating career.

Event Programme

09:30 Registration
10:10 Cally Blackman - Sartorial Shapeshifting
11:10 Coffee/Tea Break
11:40 Guy Hills - Colour in menswear and the influence of sport on tailoring and why wool makes the best sportswear, and the rise of his company Dashing Tweeds
12:40 Lunch Break
14:10 Raffle
14:25 Dr Danielle Sprecher - Where would menswear be without Black British designers?
15:35 Close

Price Per Person: Member £30.00, Non Member £40.00, Lunch £15.00