An Evening with Kate Strasdin at The Octagon

An Evening at the Grassington Octagon Theatre with author Kate Strasdin

Kate Strasdin is the brilliant author of The Dress Diary of Mrs Anne Sykes, a fantastically researched work about the travels of one woman in the 1800s through the life of her clothes. 

Order your copy here if you do not wish to buy a ticket for our event.

The Dress Diary of Mrs Anne Sykes

1838, a young woman was given a diary on her wedding day.    Collecting snippets of fabric from a range of garments she carefully  annotated each one, creating a unique record of her life and times. Her  name was Mrs Anne Sykes.   Nearly two hundred years later, the diary  fell into the hands of Kate Strasdin, a fashion historian and museum  curator.   Strasdin spent the next six years unravelling the  secrets contained within the album's pages.   Piece by piece, she charts  Anne's journey from the mills of Lancashire to the port of Singapore  before tracing her return to England in later years. Fragments of cloth  become windows into Victorian life: pirates in Borneo, the complicated  etiquette of mourning, poisonous dyes, the British Empire in full swing,  rioting over working conditions and the terrible human cost of  Britain's cotton industry.   This is life writing that  celebrates ordinary people: the hidden figures, the participants in  everyday life. Through the evidence of waistcoats, ball gowns and  mourning outfits, Strasdin lays bare the whole of human experience in  the most intimate of mediums: the clothes we choose to wear.