Main image: ©English Heritage
University of Huddersfield lecturer Dr Jade Halbert's Radio 3 essay about renowned fashion designer Jean Muir has been selected for a new audiobook showcasing some of the country's leading early career researchers.
Jade was named as one of 10 New Generation Thinkers chosen by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in 2019, and her essay 'Not Quite Jean Muir' was first broadcast on The Essay on Radio 3 in 2020.
It is one of 100 radio pieces brought together by Penguin for the audiobook 'Instant Expert', marking a decade of the BBC and the AHRC encouraging some of the UK's brightest young academics to bring their knowledge to a wider audience.
Jade lectures in Fashion Business and Cultural Studies at the University's Department of Fashion and Textiles but by her own admission had never sewn anything in her life. Her decision to try to make something from a Muir design forms the basis of 'Not Quite Jean Muir'. Such is Muir's lasting impact that a blue plaque at the house where she spent the last 30 years of her life in London was unveiled by Joanna Lumley, her friend and model in the 1960s, in June 2021.
Joanna Lumley on Jean Muir
"She was one of the great British fashion designers of the post-war period," says Dr Halbert. "She had an international reputation, and was respected and revered by her customers, the fashion industry and the fashion press.
'Muir saw fashion as a verb'
"One of the memorable things about her is that not only was she a very talented designer, but she was also a powerful advocate for British manufacturing in fashion and textiles.
"She saw what was coming with the decline in sewing skills and technical skills - she saw the word fashion as a verb. She worked very closely with her cutters, her seamstresses, her finishers - she respected their points of view and she saw them as on a par with her in terms of expertise."
Skills gap in fashion industry predicted by Muir
Dr Halbert's respect for Muir shines through her essay, particularly Muir's involvement in the whole process and her respect for everyone involved in manufacturing clothes. It was an issue that drove Muir even late in her life, when she laid out her vision in her Manifesto for Real Design in the Sunday Times in 1994.
She also asked the government for more investment in British fashion production shortly before her death in 1995, but over a quarter of a century later she is still one of UK fashion's most celebrated figures.
Respect for entire manufacturing process
"Now we are in a situation where very few people know how to make clothes and because they don't understand the production of clothing, they have less respect for the finished article," Jade adds. "That means it is easier for us to accept that clothes are disposable things.
"Jean Muir was interested in respect for the object and respect for the process and the maker. That is what makes her really special in my eyes."
You don't go about being in fashion in Jean Muir, you go about being in Jean Muir, which is kind of beyond fashion - Joanna Lumley
Jade's other radio work includes 'The Endless Demise of the High Street' and 'The Joy of Sewing', while much of Jean Muir's work can be seen in the collection she bequeathed to the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.
Dr Halbert adds that, "Everybody who wore Jean Muir clothes talked about how it felt. How they were made and what they felt like on the body were central to the design, it was a corporeal experience as well as an aesthetic one."
