Japan's Plant-based Leathers


Exploring Japan's history of making 'leather' from paper, and how this became an object of modernity within the domestic interiors of Victorian Britain.
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Material Culture, Modern, Europe, Asia, Applied Arts, Technologies, Interior Space, Natural Objects

Victoria Bennett






Ballet: Staging Britishness


This research explores how ‘Britishness’ was presented in Sadler’s Wells’ Sleeping Beauty (1946) through the notions of ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ and ‘nostalgia’.
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Performance, Modern, Europe, Media, Textiles, Methods of Documentation, Lived Experience, Conservation, Memory Studies

Xinghe Chen







Fashion and Film in 1960s London


This research synthesises multiple disciplines into a design history framework to elucidate the overlap of costume and fashion when designing for contemporary narratives.
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Material Culture, Modern, Europe, Americas, Media, Textiles, Oral Histories, Lived Experience, Gender Studies


Phoebe Evans







Hidden Japanese Men’s Dress


Looking under the plain outer layers of Japanese men's dress to study the spectacular and symbolic imagery that lines beneath.
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Material Culture, Early-Modern, Modern, Asia, Textiles, Applied Arts, Decolonisation, Lived Experience, Prints

Euphemia Franklin






Exotic Skins Victorian England


This research traces the history of exotic cats as living creature to designed object, to question the human allurement of embodying a second skin.
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Material Culture, Europe, Textiles, Technologies, Methods of Documentation, Untold / Marginalised Narratives, Lived Experiences, Natural Objects

Megan Graham


©2022 by V&A/RCA History of Design MA