Art History: Dress & Textile Histories [MLitt] postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

The coat that came into the dry cleaner's last spring had been relined at least twice. Under the torn rayon was an older silk lining, hand-stitched, and beneath that the original canvas interfacing with a tailor's label from a shop in Paisley. The owner wanted only a quick repair, but I spent my break looking at how three generations of hands had kept one garment in use. That habit of reading clothes for the decisions people made about them is what I want to develop through postgraduate study in dress and textile history.

My undergraduate degree was in History of Art, and although most of my courses dealt with painting and architecture, I gravitated towards objects that were bought, worn and thrown away. A second-year essay on depictions of dress in eighteenth-century Scottish portraiture taught me to distinguish what a sitter actually owned from what a painter flattered or invented, and it made me want to look at surviving garments rather than images of them. My dissertation examined advertisements for Scottish knitwear in British women's magazines of the 1950s. Working through bound volumes in my university library, I recorded how the advertisements presented Fair Isle and twinsets, noting where they stressed heritage, where they stressed modernity, and how often they did both at once. The project received a first-class mark. Its main limitation was that I could only discuss how garments were sold, not how they were made or worn, and that gap is part of why I want to move closer to objects and their makers.

Alongside my degree and since graduating, I have worked in a charity shop where I sort donated clothing. The job is practical: deciding what can be sold, what goes to rag merchants and what needs a wash or a button. It has given me a working familiarity with fibre content labels, care symbols and the changing construction of mass-produced clothes. I can now usually tell an older machine-knitted jumper from a recent one by the seams and the weight of the yarn. My shifts at the dry cleaner's add a different kind of knowledge, because customers explain why a garment matters to them, whether it is a wedding suit or a school blazer handed down to a cousin. I do not treat this as expertise, but it has made me attentive to wear, alteration and repair as historical evidence.

I knit, mostly socks and the occasional jumper, and teaching myself stranded colourwork has given me some respect for the skill behind the patterns I studied in my dissertation. I also visit my gran each Thursday to help with her shopping and paperwork. She worked in a hosiery factory as a young woman, and her offhand comments about piece rates and break times have made me curious about the labour behind textiles, a subject that rarely appeared in the advertisements I analysed. On Monday evenings I sing in a community choir, which has nothing to do with clothing, but has taught me to commit to a long rehearsal process and to prepare properly beforehand.

I have been reading to prepare for this next stage. Lou Taylor's The Study of Dress History helped me understand the debates between object-based and theoretical approaches, and persuaded me that the two need each other. I would like to develop the skills of close object analysis, archival research and careful writing that I could only begin to practise as an undergraduate. In the longer term I am interested in work in collections or heritage interpretation, particularly around everyday and working clothes, which are often underrepresented because they were worn until they fell apart.

I bring a sound grounding in art-historical method, a completed independent research project, and several years of handling ordinary clothing closely. I would now like to learn how to turn those observations into rigorous history.