Getting started with Bikes and Bloomers

Hardcore Victorian velocipedestriennes. Source: http://sixday.org.uk/html/early_photos.html

I’m now a couple of days into joining the Bikes and Bloomers team at Goldsmiths College in their highly infectious quest to investigate the designs Victorian women developed in order to adapt very proper attire so it was functional – and still proper – whilst riding bicycles.

We’re talking the 1890s here: skirts were full length, corsets de rigueur and heaven forbid a limb should be identifiable.

Sociologist Kat Jungnickel and the team have been digging around in patent archives and have selected some interesting designs that they’re now starting to reconstruct from the descriptions and diagrams given.

One of the patents we’re focusing in on: an improved skirt available also as a cape for lady cyclists

It’s a wonderfully interdisciplinary project and the office table seems to mostly look something like this:

Technical drawings, fabric swatches, sticky notes, paper-clip-and-string proto-mechanisms, notebooks and yes, ahem, maybe the occasional snack. What’s not to like?

Whilst the others keep busy with adapting sewing pattern blocks, automating a 5’8″ wooden mannequin, lusting over reflective tweeds and figuring out what it all means with respect to mobilities and gendered bodies, I’ve been given the mission of developing a guided tour style cycle ride that incorporates relevant locations around central London and weaves together key themes from the research.

Yum.

Kat already has some nice ideas involving pocketses and my early research has brought up a lovely link to a professional cyclist sister-in-law to one of the patentees – it’s clear this is going to have to be an exercise in self-restraint as much as anything else.

We’re optimistic we can rein in our curiosity and excitements though: keep an eye out for a date for the ride sometime in April.