Nametape is about prescribed dress: the uniforms of work, institutions and faith. Clothes people are issued rather than clothes people choose.
It reads a uniform the way a designer reads any garment — cut, cloth, construction, why the pocket is there — and then asks the second question a uniform always raises and ordinary clothing does not: what was this made to make a person into? A nurse's cape and a prison shirt are both answers to a design brief. The brief was written by an institution, about a person, without that person in the room.
What this is not
Not a militaria site. Insignia lineage, campaign history and unit numbering are somebody else's subject; the interest here is the garment as design work.
Not costume nostalgia. There is no golden age of tailoring in these pages and no lament for one.
Not a fashion blog with a uniform hook. Runway utility trends appear only where a real issued garment is the source, and then the issued garment is the subject.
A name tape is the smallest possible negotiation between an institution and a person. The institution supplies the garment; the person gets four inches of it.
Who writes it
Hedda Maartens. An MA in fashion design, then eleven years in industry designing for people who had no say in what they wore.
That second part is why this publication can hold three registers at once. The technical register needs somebody who has specified a garment and knows what a seam allowance costs. The critical register needs somebody who has been on the issuing side of the transaction. A journalist could write one and a designer could write the other; this needs both in the same voice.
How this site works
Every image is credited, and here is the format
Each plate carries three things: what is in frame, why this particular image is here, and where it came from — collection, object or accession number, date, creator and rights statement, with a link to the record. The middle part is the one that is easy to skip and is the reason the site is worth reading. A caption whose middle section could be moved to any other plate has not been written.
Where the images come from
Open collections that publish under permissive licences: Wikimedia Commons, Wellcome Collection, the Smithsonian, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. Every plate is checked against a positive list of licences that permit commercial reuse — an unrecognised rights statement is rejected rather than assumed. Some excellent collections are excluded because their terms are non-commercial, and a demo site for a paid product is a commercial context whatever else it is.
Which institutions get named
Countries and their real uniforms, public bodies — hospitals, prisons, schools, transit systems, armed forces — and religious institutions are named accurately, and written about critically where the evidence supports it. Private companies are always invented. Where a real institution is named, the claim is one the credited source actually supports: if the catalogue record does not say it, neither does the article.
What gets left out
Material can be perfectly licensed, perfectly on-subject and still not publishable here. A fire-service search returned a run of nineteenth-century American lithographs that are period-accurate, public domain, and racial caricature. Every mechanical test passed them. They are not on this site. Selection is done by looking, and that is the reason.
Corrections
Catalogue records are sometimes wrong, and so is the writing. Where a correction affects a claim in an article, the article is amended and the change is stated in it rather than made quietly. Where it affects only a caption, the caption is fixed.