with Sarah Geissler: emotional quilts, dress detectives, and naughty steps.

First broadcast 25 February 2021

Sarah Geissler is a fashion historian and writer. She researches costume, homemade clothing, and communities of dress, including cosplay and historical costuming. She also makes her own clothes and has worked as a costume volunteer at Beamish Museum. She researched and co-curated the exhibition ‘Dressing the Decades: 85 years of Visitor Clothing’ at Preston Manor, Brighton. She has previously been a copywriter in luxury fashion, a catwalk video archive annotator, and old style photographer. In Summer 2020 Sarah was one of the volunteers who engaged in a mammoth effort to sew scrubs for the NHS. Her unfinished project is a quilt made from the offcuts. We talk about how it was useful to have something to do with your hands, about why quilts are particularly emotional objects, and about when you should put projects on the naughty step. Sarah also has fascinating things to say about what you can find out about people just by looking at their clothes…

Links of interest

Sarah can be found on Instagram at @sarahmary.gee, or on LinkedIn at Sarah-Mary Geissler: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-mary-geissler-866431108/