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Dressed: The History of Fashion
Stitching Freedom: Embroidery and Incarceration with Isabella Rosner, Part I (Dressed Classic)
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- [00:02]
Isabella Rosner
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- [00:38]
Isabella Rosner
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- [01:00]
April Callahan
Please enjoy one of our favorite episodes from the Dressed archive of over 500 plus shows. The history of Fashion is a production of dressed media. With over 8 billion people in the world, we all have one thing in common. Every day we all get dressed.
- [01:20]
Cassidy Zachary
Welcome to Dressed the History of Fashion, a podcast where we explore the who, what, when of why we wear. We are fashion historians and your hosts April Callahan and Cassidy Zachary, Dress listeners.
- [01:34]
April Callahan
Incarceration is perhaps not the first thing that comes to mind when we think of the art form of embroidery. But that is exactly what we are here to talk about today. Because while we have certainly explored embroidery's significance as part of the artistic practices of a myriad of cultures around the globe and throughout history, we have never April explored it through this lens that we are going to discuss in detail today.
- [01:57]
Cassidy Zachary
Embroidery historian Isabella Rosner joins us for a fascinating two part conversation about the subject at the heart of her recently released book, or rather as we will discuss, Zine Stitching, Freedom, Embroidery and Incarceration, which explores the embroidery created by 12 individuals who are incarcerated in various ways, be it in prisons, concentration camps or mental health hospitals, and Cross quote unpicks 12 embroidered histories to discover what can be created when freedom is out of reach.
- [02:30]
April Callahan
End quote and address listeners. Obviously this is incredibly heavy subject matter that we are going to discuss this week, so I just want to give a little bit of a trigger warning about these stories because we are going to discuss things like suicide, violence, abuse and death. But these stories that Isabella is going to tell us are crazy, incredibly moving, they're incredibly powerful for what they teach us about the human condition. And each of these stories are testaments to the literal stories embroidered into the clothes and cloths we wear and use. Each piece speaks to both the triumphs and sorrows of the human spirit, as well as a remarkable ability and need to create art even within the most dire of circumstances. And Isabella, I have to say, is an incredibly gifted storyteller and we are very excited to share her work with you this week.
- [03:15]
Cassidy Zachary
Yes, she certainly is such a something exhibited throughout her work, which broadly focuses on historical embroidery stitched between 1500 and 1900 and what those extant objects can teach us by filling in gaps left in the historical record. Her work is reflected in her historic needlework podcast, Sew what? And that, of course, is Sew what? And her roles as both the curator of the Royal School of Needlework and research Associate at Whitney Antiques in London for where she cares for nearly 500 years of needlework. We are so excited to have Isabella on the show. Isabella, a warm welcome to Dressed.
- [03:54]
April Callahan
Isabella, welcome to Dressed. I am so excited to have you joining me today all the way from London.
- [04:00]
Isabella Rosner
Thank you so much. I am so thrilled to be here.
- [04:03]
April Callahan
So incarceration is certainly not the first thing people are going to think of when they think of embroidery, right? But Stitching Freedom is not exactly your typical fashion history text. Please tell us about the inspiration behind Stitching Freedom, Embroidery and Incarceration, as well as the reasoning behind its unique format.
- [04:24]
Isabella Rosner
Okay, so once this book was out in the world, this zine was out in the world, I was asked a lot, when did this idea come to me? And I don't remember because I think it was during COVID and a lot of my lockdown memories are gone. But I do remember my journey with these sorts of stories before that. And I learned about two of the makers in this book, Arthur Bispo del Rosario and Agnes Richter in a class in university in my senior year. And I think during COVID I was giving a lot of thought to isolation and my own understanding of embroidery was expanding a lot as I was just spending all day avoiding my PhD by looking at objects on museum catalogs online. And I was seeing so many types of embroidery that didn't align with what was admittedly at that point like a very narrow understanding of what stitch was. And I came across Annie Parker who embroidered with her hair. And I think that was kind of the turning point. I remember thinking about Annie Parker and seeing her work and seeing how incredibly poignant and painful it was and thinking like, wow, My own love of and interest in embroidery has been extremely limited thus far. I have experienced and learned about little bits of embroidery that breaks that mold, things like Agnes Richter and Arthur Bisbo del Rosario's work. But I wanted to lean more into it and understand, I don't know what was embroidery when it wasn't embroidering beautiful objects for leisure. And that is how this story was born. I was really interested in helping people go on the journey that I went on. When it came to breaking my own stereotypes around embroidery and the importance of it in the world. I wanted people to understand that embroidery, yeah, a central part of embroidery is rich women embroidering for pleasure over time. But it is much more than just that. That work is valuable, but it's one part of a much larger puzzle. And I wanted to create a short, accessible, easy to read text to introduce people to these ideas that they might not have come across elsewhere. Because it's not like embroidery is oftentimes on display in museums. I felt that this would be a good opportunity to get people thinking about where they seen embroidery before and the potential of embroidery to tell really impactful stories. And I wanted it to be with Common Threads Press, because Common Threads Press publishes radical histories of craft. I was like, well, this is a radical history of craft and I like that it's illustrations by artists who are interpreting the art of other people. I like that network of makers, oftentimes specifically women being inspired by each other. So it felt like the perfect fit.
- [07:24]
April Callahan
And can you tell us a little bit more about the format? Because you mentioned zine, which, as I said, it's not your typical fashion history book. It's comprised of 12 short stories, essentially where you introduce us to the maker, accompanied by illustrations, but it's also in this zine format. What is a zine for people who don't know? And why is this a zine?
- [07:44]
Isabella Rosner
A zine is short for magazine and it's essentially a DIY of short form publication that is like a magazine in terms of using text and image, using very accessible language. And this is not book length either. It's published a little like a little book. I'm just holding it up to the camera. Nobody can see it but you and me. But it. I think it kind of sits in the middle between a zine and a book in that it's published like a book. It's 72 pages long, so it's definitely not book length, but it has some book content. I wanted this to be something that a person could read in an hour or a few hours or a day, or they could savor it for longer periods of time. I liked this idea of short stories because when I proposed this back in 2022, I wasn't ready to do, like, a long book about this subject. But what I wanted to do was an introduction. I wanted people to pick up this small scale book and read between 500 and 1000 words about these 12 makers and to get a little snippet of information so that they could do their own research and they can make further connections and they could think about other artists who embroidered while incarceration that I didn't include here. And I wanted it to be very full of illustrations because the power of embroidery is oftentimes in its visual impact. But I felt that illustrations were a good way of going about it. Not only because photographic material is extremely expensive and would make this book so much more expensive than it is, but also because I felt that having an artist, and in this case Takako Copeland, interpret these pieces would allow us to see what was really important, what was really impactful. What does an artist see in another artist's world work? I liked that extra layer of interpretation and creativity.
- [09:37]
April Callahan
And congratulations, because this is really, really an exceptional and special book in so many ways, but not typical of fashion history texts. I will say, and this is something you emphasize. This is not a happy book. This is not a happy collection of stories. And as you write, it's quote, less a celebration and more a memorial. Here we remember not the gentle, leisured, affluent embroiderer, but the truly desperate one or several as represented by the 12 sections of this book. So you've mentioned a couple different people that are featured in the book, and we're going to dive into their stories in a little bit. But first I just wanted to talk about the themes that emerge, because there's several themes that emerge by reading these stories, by looking at these embroidered works in conversation with one another through this specific lens. Can you just talk about some of the themes? I'm especially fascinated by the materials they use. Can you just talk a little bit more about that?
- [10:31]
Isabella Rosner
Definitely. One of the things I did not expect to come across so often, like, because as I was making this list and figuring out which 12 I would be including, I wasn't thinking thematically. I was thinking more about inclusion and how do you capture all the different types of people and these periods and these places? So I wasn't thinking about themes until I got into it. But once I started writing these stories, I was like, wow, the theme of unraveling socks comes up several times. And unraveling clothing, generally unraveling uniforms and bedding and this kind of textile reuse and remaking. I really liked thinking about that. In a time when I am so focused all the time on over consumption and how to use textiles for as long as possible. I think I'm just constantly a bit horrified by fast fashion. And I'm just now very, very conscious about reuse and darning, invisible mending and what it means to preserve objects. So thinking about people unraveling and remaking and breathing new life into these objects, I found really relatable and creative. And the other side of that, these, a lot of these themes are based on the textiles themselves, the materiality. So it's about this unraveling and rebuilding, but it's also about protection and comfort. So this theme of outerwear, I didn't really expect it, but between Agnes Richter's jacket and Merlin's coat and Arthur Bismo del Rosario's annunciation mantle, all of these big kind of jackets and coats and poncho shapes made me think about what it meant to wear outerwear. And it's about warmth and protection and armor and self presentation and performance. What are you putting out into the world? What are you showing people with your essentially outermost layer, your exoskeleton? So there were these kind of material based themes that come up, but there are also the emotional ones. You can't talk about embroidery and incarceration without bringing up anger. But you have several makers who are so angry and some of them are obvious, like Lorena Bulwer is basically writing a Facebook tirade about how mad she is about being in the workhouse. But then you have Mary Queen of Scots, who clearly is so angry, but is portraying that anger and depicting that anger in a more subtle, coded way.
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- [14:06]
Isabella Rosner
Speaking of codes, another theme, this idea of speaking a language that not everybody can understand, but those who are involved in a specific community can totally relate to and can. Can read what is being written. And then there's the theme that I wanted to end with and that I hope came through a little bit, which is hope that these stories are largely stories of devastation and of a real loss of freedom and what it means to try to regain freedom in spaces where there isn't a lot of freedom to be had. But there are stories like at Castogli and Ray Matterson, who I'm sure we'll talk about both later, where these are people who built lives after incarceration and centered their lives around embroidery, that they were using images of, I don't know, symbols of hope, butterflies, and depictions of themselves in the woods. That embroidery offers not only a way to reflect on extremely devastating and brutal circumstances, but also is a way of getting out of that, whether that be emotionally, physically, spiritually, mentally, any and all of those things.
- [15:16]
April Callahan
Yeah. And the humanity of these embroidered objects is just exceptional. And you just spoke to it a little bit, but the embroidered words, I was just not expecting to come into contact with so much embroidered words. I mean, thousands. We'll talk about it more with Arena Bulwer, but it's thousands of words that she's writing. These are essentially diaries when they didn't have pen and paper, which is just extraordinary. Another theme that came across, too was just the little power that women had during these times. Right. Because you have women, their brothers are sending them to workhouses and paying to keep them in workhouses, or women that are just being incarcerated time and time again. And this is not, of course, exclusive to women at that time, but that was an interesting thing. And then how they. How they're creating in these circumstances is remarkable.
- [16:06]
Isabella Rosner
I think that's such a good point, especially when we're thinking about these 19th century Victorian women. There's a trio of them, they're all embroidering around the same time. And it is so about the gendered dynamics there, about your brother sending you to a workhouse and these men writing newspaper articles about you that are so totally sensationalizing you. And your male doctor is writing notes about your mental health. It's. It is very gendered. It's tricky. Obviously, embroidery is incredibly bound up in gender and womanhood for much of its history. And that's something I wanted to touch on a little bit in here. But I also was very keen to move beyond it because I think that embroidery's relationship to femininity and has been used and reused and weaponized in both constructive and really destructive ways. And all I do is think about embroidery and gender in my life, and it's. It's. I was gonna say a pleasure. That's. It's oftentimes, often very frustrating as well. It's a joy and a curse. But I wanted to think with this. I wanted to think beyond gender because I wanted to think about how universal stuff stitch is in trying circumstances. But I think that that trio of Victorian ladies show so clearly that even when you try to move beyond embroidery's relationship to gender, you actually can't. Those two things are always stitched together.
- [17:32]
April Callahan
Yeah. And this is something we'll talk about a little later on, but definitely one of the themes that I noticed, too, is you are showing us how gender is constructed. And, of course, there's Rosika Parker's famous book, the Subversive Stitch, that shows you how embroidery became a feminine craft, like so many things, through societal intervention and storytelling, essentially. But you do show us how gender is a construct, and we're going to talk about that a little bit later on. But first, let's just dive right into your first subject. So we've talked about how this is not a traditional text. So instead of using traditional chapters and chapter headings, each section is separated with a title page that uses a small quote that you've taken from the respective subject's work, as is the case with the very first section of the book, which is entitled Virtue Flourishes by Wounding. So tell us about your first subject, who you write started a queen and ended a prisoner.
- [18:28]
Isabella Rosner
Oh, yes. So this is Mary, Queen of Scots. And I started with Mary, Queen of Scots because she's the earliest example that we know of, at least in Europe and Britain, specifically of embroidery as tied to incarceration. So Mary, Queen of Scots, she is the Queen of Scotland, as you can guess from her name. And she gets exiled and she goes to England because she thinks her cousin, Queen Elizabeth the First, is going to welcome her with open arms. Because it's her cousin. Right. But she's wrong, unfortunately. Queen Elizabeth is feeling very threatened by Mary. She says, oh, Mary's a Catholic. That's not great. Mary has a child. That's not great. All of these things freak Elizabeth out because she was worried that Mary would steal her crown and that Elizabeth would lose all of her power. So Elizabeth puts Mary in jail, basically. Not in a typical jail, but for 15 years. She's under the very watchful eye of the Earl of Shrewsbury and his wife Elizabeth, who's known as Bess of Hardwick. And while in their various homes, Mary is basically under house arrest. She's able to do things like go on walks. And she still has a lot of very fine textiles imported for her. And she has a household staff, so her incarceration is a lot nicer than a lot of the other incarcerations in this book. But in comparison to being a literal queen, she's having a rough time, and all of her letters are read and monitored. So she turns to embroidery, which she had loved throughout her entire life, to relay these messages that she couldn't get across with a pen and paper. And oftentimes, Bess of Hardwick would join her. Bess of Hardwick was also a keen embroiderer, so the two would stitch alongside members of their household staff and, like, people who were just living in the house. And I start with Mary, Queen of Scots, not only because she's the earliest, but also because I think she's a really good gateway into totally turning on its head our understanding of embroidery. Again, like, I think most people in the world, when I started studying embroidery, I was like, yes, rich white ladies in the home, queens, princesses, people who had time on their hands and resources and a desire to beautify. And she matches that, being a literal queen. But then we watch as she goes from this person who has all of this power to a person who's imprisoned, who has lost almost all of her agency. And I think that in my head, I wanted it to be a way for people to walk into the story being like, oh, yeah, I know this story. I know the queen who's stitching. And then to be like, oh, psych. And then watch as she goes on a very different and very sad journey. But I like her story. Oh, I just love her story. And I feel very. I just feel a lot for her. Even though we're separated by 500 years, 450 years, she is doing so much with her embroidery, and there's a lot to talk about, but I'm gonna. I'm gonna keep it succinct. I love that through her embroidery, she is both being coded and personal. So she has this embroidery of a dog that looks a little bit like a cow because it's spotted and it's Jupiter and it's her dog. And I think that's the coolest thing that in all of these really hard times. She's not enjoying her time. Right. She's having a rough time. She's under house arrest. She is physically going through a lot of pain and injury and illness, but she is stitching these really beautifully intimate details of her life. And I like that she does both. This small, personal thing, these little, tiny details, but also these much bigger picture, powerful political statements. This idea of virtue flourishes by wounding is taken. It's the Latin translation of this panel where it's a hand that's coming down from the heavens holding a pruning knife, and it's about to cut a bunch of grapes from a grapevine. And what she is saying here is, wow, it's such a shame that Elizabeth isn't fertile and has no children. Look at me with my child and my husband's, huh? Wouldn't it be convenient if we had a fertile queen? That sort of thing. These kind of really bold political statements. But if you didn't know what you were looking at, you'd say, oh, that's an interesting hand descending from the heavens holding a knife. You have this. Oh, it's my favorite. And I think it's a lot of people's favorites. This panel that's labeled a cat. And it's a cat. It's a ginger cat, and it's a cat that's taken from an emblem book by Conrad Gessner. And first of all, that's exciting because it shows that she is learned. She has access to all of these books and to this literary culture, but she's making it her own, because she has turned this black and white cat because it's printed into color by coloring it orange. The cat has a crown, and the cat is next to a little mouse. And you could put all of these hints together to realize, oh, it's not just a cat. It is Queen Elizabeth as the crowned, powerful cat and sad Mary, Queen of Scots as the little poor gray mouse. It's a scene about power, about family and connections and just really brutal power dynamics. And I think that. Oh, I just think that the materiality is so rich on top of all of this very rich and dynamic kind of subject matter. Her stitching is not perfect, so all of her cross stitches are going in different directions sometimes. Her tent stitches are going in different directions sometimes she's, like, skipping over a warp and weft, and she's kind of doing a little bit of whatever. And I think that's interesting because it makes you wonder, okay, were women in the 16th century just not that bothered by Having perfect stitches or was this an actual emotional thing? Was she, like, I am stabbing this piece of canvas thousands of times and that is what matters. I am making an image and that is what matters. Rather than getting every stitch perfectly correct. When I look at her pieces, I feel her emotions. I feel the fact that she's frustrated and angry and that her focus is not on perfection. Her focus is on getting those emotions out. So, yeah, I have a lot to say about Mary Queen of Scots, clearly.
- [24:49]
April Callahan
No, I love it. I love it. And I also love, too, that I think, moving outside of, like, a rigid academic text format for you as an embroidery historian. And you can correct me if I'm wrong, but to me, it. It gives you a little more freedom to interpret these objects and to speak more to the emotive qualities that within academia, et cetera, and that kind of formatting you're not necessarily allowed to do. So I really appreciated that we get that perspective from you in this book as well.
- [25:20]
Isabella Rosner
Oh, thanks. I mean, I really like that. Freedom. Freedom as well, because I. One of the reasons I love embroidery so much is because it is so human and it is so in. In every stitch, you can really see the human experience and frustration and joy and everything in between. And I wanted a chance to talk about the emotions because you're right, academia doesn't really welcome that unless there is actual evidence. And I feel like there's evidence because I'm reading these embroideries like books. But really, a lot of it is my, I don't know, good guess at what it meant to be human for all of these people. Coming from me as a person who's also trying to figure out what it means to be human.
- [26:02]
April Callahan
That's really, really incredible. So very appreciated perspective.
- [26:06]
Isabella Rosner
Thank you.
- [26:06]
April Callahan
You write, quote, in its best moments, embroidery has offered those in prisons and asylums a mental and physical escape, a sense of control and calm and even agency. It has also given them a chance to express and make a permanent mark of their desperation, as was the case with Annie Parker, who you've spoken to, who's the subject of your second section, and then also when Lorena Bull were the subject of your third. Can you tell us a little bit more about each of these two women and what their surviving works tell us about expression, embroidery and imprisonment?
- [26:38]
Isabella Rosner
Yes. I'm glad that you have brought in Annie Parker and Lorena Boeber together, because they are almost stitching at the same time. They're near contemporaries, and I think that their embroidery, even though it takes very different forms, has A lot of overlap and a lot to say connecting the two. So Annie Parker was Southeast London legend at this point in London's history is actually Kent, but she lived in Deptford and Greenwich and the area within that region. And Annie, unfortunately died at 38 years old of consumption. And so she had quite a short life, but she filled it. And she was legendary because she was arrested more than 400 times for drunkenness. And it meant that she spent many, many years of her life in jail. And while she was in jail, she embroidered, and that is exceptional on its own. Being incarcerated, being arrested 400 times. At one point, she spent 300 out of 365 days in a year in jail. Those are all exceptional facts, as is the fact that she embroidered in prison. But the most exceptional fact of all is that while in prison, she embroidered using her own hair. And she embroidered these incredibly poignant samplers. I guess I would call them samplers because they're largely text based. And there's one pin cushion that survives that we know of. And there are nine objects from her that I know of now, but I think there are more out there in the world. And they are stunning and incredibly painful objects because we don't know what Annie looked like. We know very little of her life, but we have a piece of her. Stunning still. She was written about constantly in newspapers because she was. I don't know, the numbers of her arrests meant that people were obsessed with sensationalizing her. But her story is so much deeper than that. I really wanted to include her because not only am I truly obsessed with her needlework, but also because I was so keen to try to remember that she was a full person. She wasn't just the person who got arrested and the person who was a victim of a society that did not know how to help her in her illness. We see her in the workhouse records and she's listed as having no friends, no home, and no occupation. It's so incredibly sad. And one thing that I only found out, I only realized after I wrote the zine, is that the earliest dated sampler from her says at the bottom, in memory of Thomas Parker. And I was like, who's Thomas Parker? So I did all this research, and it turns out Thomas Parker was her abusive, drunk husband. And he's list, he's in newspapers as well, for being an absolute terror. She actually had four children by him and she gave birth to all of them in prison and they all died. Such incredibly sad stuff. In the midst of what a Sad series of 12 sad stories. This one is especially grim. But she. Based on what survives now it seems that. And I don't know if this is true or not, but based on what is around. She started embroidering with her hair after he died. And it feels like this self flagellation, like this. This pain that you can't even deal with other than plucking out your own hair. Because I think it's more hair than would come out naturally in a day, more hair than you would combine out. It's about stitching yourself better. I think I say that in the zine about being so pious and repentant and wishing for a life in heaven that is better than life on earth. I think that's so incredibly sad. And I find her story really interesting in comparison to Lorena Bulwer, because Annie Parker is devastated. She is so repentant and pious and almost hopeful for the afterlife and such
- [30:35]
April Callahan
an incredibly sad story. Heartbreakingly beautiful in many ways because as you said, we were left with these remnants of this woman. I did look up her work, as I'm sure many of our listeners will as well. And one of the samplers I found was the one that you start this book chapter with the title that you took from In Lonely Grief I sigh. So it's this heroic work sampler of linen with crochet inserts done by Annie, age 31, in 1879. And just an excerpt from this. And this is just a small excerpt because the. There's much more in this embroidered piece. What though in lonely grief I sigh for friends beloved no longer nigh submissive would still reply Thy will be done. Renew my will from day to day Blend it with thine and take away all that now makes it hard to say Thy will be done. Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden and I will give rest. This is just an heartbreakingly beautiful. That survives and that you yourself can look at and read the whole excerpt. But I just wanted to share that because it's just so sad.
- [31:40]
Isabella Rosner
Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. It's. And that verse she writes, she uses it several times across multiple samplers. And it's. It's a hymn. And her use of that hymn, there's so much to say about it. The fact that she has memorized this hymn in multiple hymns speaks to her piety. The fact that she's plucking out her hair and spending this. All of this time embroidering because it's a very, very slow art form. She's thinking about all of these words and that verse when friend is beloved no longer nigh I think about all the time because in several newspaper articles about her it says Annie Parker leaves prison and is immediately met with friends who ply her with alcohol. She she leaves and is immediately back in because her friends are feeding her illness, are banking on her addiction. And I think that the phrase friends beloved no longer nigh speaks to the fact that they probably weren't her real friends, that she found herself in a cycle of abuse and being taken advantage of and never she just never caught a break ever. And I think that I really understand why she was so looking forward to a life beyond this planet because she was dealt such such a hard and brutal hand in life.
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- [34:05]
April Callahan
and then you have the quote unquote all cap rants of British needleworker Lorena Bulwer, who you write embroiders with fury, with frustration. She was furious. She was in the workhouse and she wanted you to know. And these are remarkable pieces. 12 to 16ft long. Some of them mentions over 70 people. Can you tell us about who is Lorena Bulworth and tell us about her work?
- [34:32]
Isabella Rosner
I have to say shout out to Ruth Battersby, who's the senior curator of dress and textiles at the Norfolk County Museums. Lorena Bulwer is essentially Ruth's baby. She's doing loads and loads of work on her. And so my understanding of Lorena is changing all of the time. So Lorena Bulwer was a woman who lived in Great Yarmouth in Norfolk in England. And she was part of a middle class family. They owned a few grocery stores and she cared for her parents, she lived with them. And when her mother died, she was the second parent to die. Larina eventually gets sent to a workhouse, to the Great Yarmouth workhouse in the 1890s. Lorena's work is so powerful because of the scale. So you're right there, like these massive, massive scrolls. They are scrolls. You roll them up and they are still huge. And they are absolutely covered in text. They're all caps text. There's no punctuation. It's stream of consciousness. But that's a crazy concept because of how long embroidery takes. It's not stream of consciousness like you're writing. Embroidery take so long. And it's all about documentation behind how much she feels that she should not be in that workhouse. She is laying out all of the receipts, all of the dirty laundry. She does not want to be there. And this is how she's proving why she shouldn't be there. She is writing these letters because they are embroidered letters to various people in Norfolk and beyond trying to get out. She is absolutely railing on her sister and all of these kind of people, her sister in law, all these people around, and she never lets up. And I cannot overemphasize how much labor goes into these pieces. And I didn't even know until I saw them and until Ruth showed me these objects that it's not just one simple piece of fabric pieced together, it's quilted. So she quilts the entire ground and then she stitches on top of it. And there's clearly like a lot of math and skill there because she like, how do you calculate how big your text needs to be legible? How many words can you fit in on the line? How big does your block need to be to fit as many lines? There's a huge amount of math involved here. It's truly stunning. And I think that Lorena is important for so many reasons. But in this series of 12, I think she's extra important for how front and center her anger is, because there's anger that runs throughout all of these pieces. But with her, she is screaming it, she mentions it all the time. She is using choice language to describe people. Her needle is her voice and what I like. So Much about you pairing together Annie Parker and Lorena Bulwer is that it is clear from the embroidery that is happening here in the needlework, generally between these two women that they were both very thoroughly educated in needlework. That Annie Parker, she was crocheting, okay. Yeah. But she was also stitching with her hair, which is like a really hard material to stitch with. She stitches very beautiful letters. And you can tell that she probably went to school at a charity school or an orphanage school, probably a charity school, because we know that she had at least a mother, according to newspaper entries. But we know, we can tell from her embroidery that she was really, really educated in stitch. And we can see in Lorena's work the same that she was not only stitching loads and loads of text, but she was quilting every single section. I think that people forget with embroidery how incredibly long it takes and how much skill is involved. It's accessible in that all you need is a needle, thread and a piece of fabric. But if you are going to be writing thousands and thousands of words, which is what Lorena Bloomer is doing, you do need a lot of skill to do that effectively and efficiently.
- [38:14]
April Callahan
Yeah. And just to give you an idea of what she's writing, you took a quote. You took a piece of this quote for the title section. But I have wasted 10 years in this damnation, hell, trap den of old women, old bags.
- [38:27]
Isabella Rosner
I think about old women, old bags all the time, to be honest, because she genuinely has a way with words as well.
- [38:33]
April Callahan
Yes, she does.
- [38:34]
Isabella Rosner
I mean, I said this in the zine, and I really feel it like she's so angry and she really, really wants you to know she's angry. And. And I think that is so good and necessary in this world that I perceive, which is Victorian England. Very buttoned up, very polite, you know, lots of rules, lots of, like, the relationship between femininity and domesticity and submission. She is getting rid of all of that and telling you exactly what it is that she's going through.
- [39:01]
April Callahan
And it's super fascinating, too, I think, with Lorena specifically as her materials. Well, one there, it's multi. Tiered. But so what's fascinating is that. And you write about this is that the. The workhouse let her do this, and they. They're fully aware of this and they're almost encouraging it. And then also another thing that's fascinating about this, she's working all day and then coming and doing these embroideries as well. And then her materials, Right. The. The piece that I'm Looking at right now, it's various scraps of fabric, but there's a paisley red material, there's a pink material, there's almost like a ribbon embroidery. She acquiring this. These pieces. And why are they letting her do this? I mean, it's fascinating.
- [39:45]
Isabella Rosner
It's so fascinating. Ruth Battersby's work has revealed that Great Yarmouth Workhouse was part of this scheme where people would donate fabrics. But it's this relationship between flouting the rules and being allowed to do this that I find mysterious. Kind of throughout these 12 stories, people are always like, how are people allowed to do it? I, like, have posted on TikTok occasionally a video about one of these stories, and people will be like, wow, when I was in a psychiatric hospital, I was not even allowed a needle. And people want to understand how these things were allowed and were there rules about this across the board? And it seems that every situation was entirely unique. People had different amounts of leeway. Arthur Bispo d' Rosario took over loads and loads of rooms and created a large studio. It seems that Lorena Bulwer was absolutely able to do this with no problem. But other people throughout this zine are doing this in secret, are doing it out of desperation, are doing Unraveling Socks, for example. I still struggle to access information about how people were getting these materials and who ran into a nice security guard and who was a. And who walked in with a needle and who was part of a formal creative art program in these spaces. It's really hard to tell.
- [41:02]
April Callahan
Yeah. Can you expand a little bit? When you said it's a scheme where people donated fabric, what does that mean?
- [41:08]
Isabella Rosner
Yes, I, like, barely. I can't even remember the name. She would know. I'm sorry, I feel like a bad historian here, but this was the time of Victorian charity. Right.
- [41:18]
April Callahan
Okay.
- [41:19]
Isabella Rosner
I'm. When. Because it's. She gets in there in the 1890s and everybody's obsessed with the. With helping the poor and helping them rise from their. Their. Their lowly stations in life. And it was. I can't remember what it was. It was a scheme by which clothing textiles were donated and objects were made from them. So I think there's at least one quilt that survives that was made by the worker, like the members of the Great Yarmouth Workhouse. I can't even remember what else there is because this is not my area of expertise. I think Ruth is theorizing that Larina is getting these materials from there, but something she and I were talking about because we recently went to Great Yarmouth and talked about Lorena and saw all the sites and stuff, and we were talking about the scale of her embroideries, and we were thinking, did she quilt it all herself? She was on a lunatic ward where there were other people in that space. Did she commission. And when I say lunatic ward, this is not my own wording. I should say this is the wording of.
- [42:17]
April Callahan
Yes, thank you for clarifying.
- [42:19]
Isabella Rosner
Sure. That would be so bold of me to call it that by myself. Did she get other people in that ward to quilt for her? Was this a solo task? Was she hiding it? Where was she putting these things? They're massive when you are. When she's not quite done with the squirrel, but she's almost done. These are when they're rolled really huge. Is she hiding that? Is it out on display? How did she keep it safe? There are all of these questions that I have about stitching, generally embroidery, generally in the past, how were people, for example, in the 17th century, how were schoolgirls embroidering in houses that had imperfect glass windows? And you don't have any artificial light, so in winter you have very little daylight working hours. I have all of these same questions for these incarcerated stitchers, but I also have more questions about protecting of these objects and were they allowed to do it and who was doing it in secret and what does it all mean? I have talked a lot about all of these 12 stories, but they are so disparate. They're. They all are part of something because of the circumstances in which these objects were made, in which these people lived. But other than that, there are very few similarities. There are themes that come up again and again, but it's not like all of these stories have the same relationship between people, incarceration and the freedom to embroider.
- [43:41]
April Callahan
So the next three subjects I would like to talk about, one you have mentioned repeatedly at this point point, because he is so fascinating. I'd like to talk about Arthur Bisbo di Rosario, Agnes Richter and Merlin, of whom you write, quote, wore both their heart and art on their sleeves. What do you mean by that? Who were these individuals?
- [44:02]
Isabella Rosner
So these are the three individuals in this book zine that embroidered outerwear. So I put them together as a trio because of that very basic fact that they are all embroidering the same type of object. But I think it's really interesting how they're using that same relationship between themselves and this object to create very, very different works that, say, speak totally differently to what it means to be in places like mental health hospitals and prisons. So Agnes Richter was a German woman who at the same time, approximately as Annie Parker and Lorena Bulwer, was diagnosed with. The precursor at that point was not called schizophrenia, but it is called schizophrenia now. She was diagnosed with that condition and put into the Hubertisburg Asylum. And while there, she embroidered a lot of her clothes. She was a seamstress. And we have all of this evidence of all these other objects that she embroidered. But what survives is her jacket. And it's this very well tailored, very fitted jacket. You can see that she was extremely small and that she had a physical disability. And you can see her need to embroider because she, at some point, she covered all of the surface of this jacket with embroidery in text. It's called Deutsche Schrift and it's this kind of ye olde German script, but it's really hard to read a lot of it because it's so layered, so there's so much text. Then when she didn't have any more room, she unpicked all of the seams and then restitched the bodice, the jacket backwards. So what survives now is this jacket that looks wild because all of the arms are backwards and stuff. And it's because she needed to create another surface for her embroidery. And we can see little snippets of text, so we can see that she says things like, I wish to read Brother Freedom, no cherries, her patient number, over and over again. And my favorite quote, because I think it's the most evocative of all, I plunge headlong into disaster. And I think that has an interesting parallel with Merlin, who I'll bring up in a second, but I think that phrase and some of these other ones are, there's a sense of longing, not plunging headlong into disaster, but there's almost a romance about it. There's almost a grace and a poetry to that. I think she's very introspective and she is giving us snippets of what she has available to her, what she doesn't, what she longs for, what she wishes she had. While Laurena is angry, Agnes is introspective, I feel, but I find it interesting that she's introspective on an outward facing garment. So, Merlin, I want to bring her up next because speaking of plunging headlong into disaster, there is this jacket by a woman who we only know her kind of pseudonym, Merlin. And she was a woman in Tennessee who was in a mental health Hospital between 1948 and 1953. And she also embroidered all of these garments but what survives is a scarf and this jacket that's entirely covered in embroidery. And a lot of the embroidery is text, nonsensical text and images from things like magazines and postcards. But then there are these really personal images. It seems like they're really personal. And one of them is a figure falling through the air. And it is this plunging headlong into disaster feeling. You have a woman in court. Is that her? With her court hearing, we don't know. But with Merlin, in a series of sad stories. Here's another sad story. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia and she was given medication that I call a chemical straight jacket. Because it got to the point where not only did she not sew and not embroider, but she did not even know that the embroidery she had made was hers. And I think that's so sad that to calm the voices in her head, she loses her creative output as well. And so time wise. In between Agnes Richter and Merlin, we have Arthur Bispo de Rosario, who is a Brazilian man who has a vision where God comes down and tells him that he is. He is God and it is his job to replicate the universe in. In preparation for the Last Judgment. And so Arthur Biswater Rosario is also diagnosed with schizophrenia and spends his life in a Brazilian mental health hospital. With the exception of the time where he runs away and then he gets put back in and he stitches primarily embroiders, let's be real, I guess he makes generally. But the emphasis is on embroidery. A thousand objects approximately. And they are his cataloging of the world, of his understanding of the world. He has these maps and flags and battles and lists of names. And they are this amazing way to understand one person's life and the way they see the world. Merlin, we have a lot of mystery around her. We don't know who she was. But with Arthur Bisvo de Rosario, he gives us everything. His masterpiece, it's considered his masterpiece, is this annunciation garment. And on the outside he embroiders it with all of these kind of daily scenes of daily life. Ping pong tables, railroad tracks, bicycles. And on the inside, he lists the names of every woman he knows, the first name of every woman he knows. And that contrast between Merlin and Arthur is they just couldn't be more different. This anonymity of Merlin and this kind of giving us all of this information, these intimate details from Arthur Bisvo de Rosario find it fascinating. And I think that this mixture for all three of these people, of protection, of outerwear, of armor in the face of a loss of control in the face of changing circumstances, everybody, it seems that all three of these people had a very different, lots of different feelings about being in institutionalized. Agnes was not happy about it. She was very, very paranoid. Merlin, we don't know. And Arthur Bizzo d' Or, Rosario seems it's too simplifying to just give these people one or two words. But he spent his life there and he was incredibly productive and had with a lot of resources. And it seems that was not the case for everybody. But the fact that they all chose to embroider this outward facing garment, this garment that keeps you warm and is your ultimate layer between yourself and the outside world seems really, yeah, really telling. And I like this idea of wearing your heart on your sleeve because that's a typical saying. But with all three of these people, they're doing so much more than that. They are telling us about how they feel and their pasts and their presence through their interesting mix of text primarily and these occasional images that we get to understand how they are seeing the world rather than how they're writing about the world.
- [51:13]
April Callahan
So on that note, Isabella, dress listeners, we are concluding part one of this two part conversation. We're gonna be back on Friday to continue exploring Isabella's incredible book and meet several more people that are part of Stitching Freedom. Isabella, thank you so much for joining us and we will talk to you again soon.
- [51:32]
Cassidy Zachary
Isabella, thank you so much for joining us today. I cannot wait to hear the embroidered stories you have in store for us in part two, which is coming this Friday. And dress listeners, you do not have to wait until Friday to continue your own deep dive into the history of embroidery because I mentioned in the intro, Isabella has her very own podcast dedicated to that very topic. And you will find a link to her podcast so what in our show
- [51:59]
April Callahan
Notes, which is where you will also find a link to one of my all time favorite Instagrams, which just also happens to belong to Isabella. And I'm of course talking about historic embroidery is the handle. And almost every day, and I have to say that also is her TikTok handle, every day she's posting and providing insights into some of the most remarkable embroidered pieces in the history of fashion that are just going to blow your mind. It really is a treasure trove of information thanks to Isabella's encyclopedic knowledge of this subject.
- [52:28]
Cassidy Zachary
Yes, please head to restpodcast on Instagram or Rest Podcast without the underscore on Facebook to check out the visual content associated with each week's episodes.
- [52:41]
April Callahan
And remember, we always love hearing from you. So if you'd like to write to us you can do so@hellorusthitchhistory.com DressedHistory.com is also our website where you can sign up for our monthly newsletter, our in person tours and online fashion history courses. And you can check out whatever else we have up our finely tailored sleeves.
- [52:59]
Cassidy Zachary
We get so many questions from you all about our recommendations for fashion history books, so if you are interested you can always find a link in our show Notes to our Bookshop bookshelf. So that address is bookshop
- [53:16]
Isabella Rosner
and there
- [53:16]
Cassidy Zachary
you can find over 150 of our favorite fashion history titles.
- [53:20]
April Callahan
And do you love Dressed but want to skip the ads? You can now sign up for Ad free listening with any tier on our Dressed History Patreon.
- [53:28]
Cassidy Zachary
We are also excited to now be part of the Airwave Network and their premium ad free history subscription Airwave History plus available on Apple Podcast. The subscription brings dressed and also 27 other popular history podcasts ad free for just $5.99 per month. More information on Patreon and Airwave is available at the link in our bio.
- [53:52]
April Callahan
Thank you as always for tuning in and more Dressed coming your way very soon. The History of Fashion is a production of Dressed Media.
- [54:05]
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- [54:33]
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Isabella Rosner
How quick?
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