The Glove Network

The overall aims of the network are to:

• Explore how to promote better understanding of the history, design and manufacture of gloves
• Explore the national significance of the collections and accessibility to a variety of audiences including museum visitors, garment designers, cultural historians, and the wider community
• Raise awareness of the declining English glove industry
• Explore new and longer-term research goals

There are three key areas where this network can lead to significant impact:

• Museums - supporting strategies for collection management and approaches to the conservation of glove collections.
• Museum audiences - engagement of new and existing audiences with the heritage of glove-making
• Industry and designers - glove and accessory design and manufacture

We anticipate the network will be of interest to academics working in areas such as:

• Social historians – interested in histories of manufacturing, trade and marketing, cultures of everyday objects, local history and relationships with their communities
• Historians of gender, power and materiality
• Fashion and design historians
• Art historians – interested in the depiction of textiles, gloves and accessories
• Researchers and design practitioners interested in sustainability, craft and artisan skills, as well as those interested in embroidery, lace, beading and other embellishment techniques
• Marketing – researchers interested in economies of "slow-fashion", marketing of artisan products
• Conservation researchers – particularly of leather but also of other varied materials included in historical gloves as well as tools and industrial equipment
• Museum practice – collections management, display, interpretation and outreach.

The Glove Network is funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council Networking grant.

Frances is Principle Investigator and manager of The Glove Network project. She is also a textile and fashion designer, researcher and Senior Lecturer in Marketing and Entrepreneurial Skills for Fashion and Textiles at Bath Spa University.

Frances has worked with international manufacturers to develop bespoke product ranges of clothing and accessories for global markets.

Recent articles include:

• A Quintessentially English Glove Legacy
• The Defiant English Glove Revival
• An English Eccentric: Lady Ottoline Morrell and the self-styled wardrobe.

Davis is Curator of Social History at Museums Worcestershire.

Susan is Curator of Fashion, 1550-1800 at the V&A Museum.

She co-curated Style and Splendour: Queen Maud of Norway’s Wardrobe in 2005 and Splendour of the Tsars in 2008.

Susan is the author of 18th-Century Fashion in Detail (2018) and has co-authored several other V&A publications relating to early modern dress, including 17th-Century Women’s Dress Patterns, Book One (2011), 17th-Century Women’s Dress Patterns, Book Two (2012) and 17th-Century Men’s Dress Patterns, 1600-1630 (2016) as well as a wide range of articles.

She is currently supervising two collaborative PhDs on early modern dress.

Victoria is Curator of the National Leather Collection at The Museum of Leathercraft, which holds a collection of around 200 pairs of leather gloves dating from the early sixteenth century through to the present.

The collection chronicles the history of the gloving industry and the role of the fashion gloves throughout this period, with a number having royal or celebrity associations.

The museum also holds a collection of objects and documents associated with glove-making, including tools, patterns, accessories, recipe books for gloving leather and depictions of gloves or glove-making.

The Museum of Leathercraft is one of the only museums dedicated to leather-crafting in all of its forms. It tells the world story of leather from prehistory to the present day through its 10,000 objects. The museum’s archaeological collection begins the tale in 40,000 BC, travelling via neolithic Britain, ancient Egypt and Rome, through the Middle Ages to the Civil War era, the Georgians, and beyond.

Most popular with visitors are:

• George III’s travelling commode, which is covered with leather and proudly bears the royal monogram;
• fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls;
• a rare ninth century Qur’an;
• the largest collection of trunks belonging to European monarchy outside of the Palaces.

In addition to its object collection, the museum has an archive of approximately 30,000 documents which include correspondence, periodicals, photographs, notebooks, individual company records and histories. Some of these documents are associated with the museum itself, or with accessioned objects in the museum collection, and others more broadly with leathercraft or the leather industry in Northamptonshire and beyond.

Rebecca is Director of the Leather Conservation Centre.

Mike is Trustee of Leather Conservation Centre, Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Glovers' of London, and Visiting Professor – Leather Advisory Industry, at the University of Northampton.

Curator, The National Motor Museum, Beaulieu.

Director of Marketing at Pittards.

James is Professor of Early Modern British History and Associate Dean of Research at the University of Plymouth. He is also Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

He has produced several books including:

• Tudor Women Letter-Writers (Oxford University Press, 2006; paperback 2018)
• Women and Politics in Early Modern England (2004)
• The Material Letter (2012)
• Gender and Political Culture (2016)
• Cultures of Correspondence (2016).

He is also series editor of two book series: Material Readings of Early Modern Culture and Gendering the Medieval and Early Modern Worlds.

James has also written more than 35 articles and essays on topics ranging from Renaissance letter-writing, Elizabethan politics, and secret codes, to the family, archives and the cultural history of gloves.

He is Director of the AHRC-funded project ‘Gender, Power and Materiality in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800’ in collaboration with the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Director of the British Academy/Leverhulme-funded ‘Women’s Early Modern Letters Online’ in collaboration with the University of Oxford and the Bodleian Library.

James has appeared on numerous historical documentaries.

Alison is Past Master of the Worshipful Company of Glovers of London.

Whilst her professional background is as a solicitor in the City of London, she has become an interested amateur in gloving matters. She used her year as Master to engage with the gloving businesses and wider international trade links. She also visited the All-Africa Leather Fair in Ethiopia and the All-China equivalent in Shanghai.

As an Alderman of the City of London, Alsion has been keen to promote the wearing and use of gloves for ceremonial as well as practical purposes.

Gail is Curator at The National Motor Museum, Beaulieu.

Rebecca is a Research Assistant at Birmingham Museums Trust, where she works with their collection of Decorative Art.

She obtained her PhD from Queen Mary University of London and the V&A in 2018, with a thesis on the circulation of news about men’s fashion in early modern Europe.

She has researched the production and fashionability of gloves in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, their exchange and movement across Britain and Europe, and their relationship to news.

Rodney Jagelman is a Trustee and Chairman of the Glove Collection Trust and was treasurer until November 2015. He is an actuary by profession and is now retired, having worked in the latter part of his career as a professional pension trustee. He was Master of the Glovers' Company 2018-18 and currently serves on their Glove Trade and Membership Committees.

Susan is Professor of History at the University of Western Australia.