Material Strategies brings together scholars from different disciplines to explore what dress and textiles can tell us about gender history.

• Broad in scope – covers women, men, social groupings and nations from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.
• Rich in detail – incorporates illustrations that provide visual evidence for gendered strategies of dress.
• Combines perspectives from design and textile history, business history, cultural anthropology, social history, art history and cultural history.
• Considers 'material strategies' in relation to production and consumption, the public and the private, the body and sexuality, and national identity.
• Written in a jargon-free style, making it accessible to readers from a wide range of backgrounds.

Barbara Burman teaches at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, where she is Director of the Centre for the History of Textiles and Dress. Her research interests and publications focus on the cultural and social history of dress and textiles in the modern period. She edited The Culture of Sewing: Gender, Consumption and Home Dressmaking (Berg. 1999).

Carole Turbin is Professor Emeritus of History and Sociology at SUNY/Empire State College. She is author of Working Women of Collar City: Gender, Class and Community in Troy, New York, 1864-86 (University of Illinois, 1992) and numerous articles, including 'Collars and Consumers: Changing Images of American Manliss and Business', in Beauty and Business, ed. Phillip Scranton (Routledge, 2001.) She is also an artist who has exhibited in the NY area.