Substack Live with Meg Pirie of Fashion Roundtable
Fashion Roundtable Live: Charlotte Brontë and Dress as Evidence
Last Tuesday I joined Meg Pirie of Fashion Roundtable for a Substack Live conversation about Charlotte Brontë, dress history, and what it means to read clothing as evidence.
We explored dress not only as decoration or background detail, but as evidence of a life lived — shaped by geography, industry, trade, and daily life. Clothing is so ordinary it can seem invisible, and yet it carries the conditions in which it is made, worn, and understood. It is not separate from history, rather it is one of the ways history becomes legible.
In Charlotte Brontë’s case, this means reading garments closely: their construction, their materials, their origins — and asking what they reveal about her life, her work, and the world around her. Clothing becomes a way of understanding how identity is formed through place and industrial change, as well as the social, economic, and technological worlds she moved within. Dress in her writing is not simply descriptive detail, but part of the same material world that shapes her imagination.
How easily clothing is dismissed as secondary, and as feminine or frivolous, despite being one of the most constant material conditions of life. And how much of Britain’s nineteenth-century wealth was tied to textiles and fashion — an economic legacy that continues today on a global scale.
Meg Pirie spoke about the work Fashion Roundtable does in bringing fashion into policy-making and public debate. As an organisation, Fashion Roundtable works to ensure fashion is part of wider cultural and economic conversations rather than pushed to the margins. It focuses on making the sector visible within decision-making spaces where it is often overlooked, despite its centrality to culture, creativity, and the economy.
What stayed with me is how easily these conversations move between literature, dress history, and policy — and how clothing sits confidently at the centre of them all.
