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Pit Clothes

Almost nothing survives. Working clothes worn to destruction are not collected, and what we have of them is mostly photographs of men standing at the top of a shaft.

Three photographs of miners: a portrait at Brookside, a close view of a uranium miner's hands, and an individual miner near Dawson

The Railwayman’s Coat

Heavy wool, high collar, company buttons. Built for standing on an open platform in February by companies that were, briefly, the largest employers on earth.

Three photographs of railway staff in uniform, Hungary, early twentieth century

Academic Dress and the Hood

A vestigial garment that stopped being clothing and became a code. The hood carries faculty, degree and institution in a system almost nobody inside it can fully read.

Two portraits in academic dress and a doctoral robe held in a museum collection

The Coat Was Black First

Medicine spent most of the nineteenth century in black frock coats and changed to white in about a generation. The switch was not about hygiene. It was a claim to be a science.

A seventeenth-century physician in black, a rail of white lab coats, and a surgeon in modern scrubs

The Nurse’s Cape

Lined in a colour that identified the school, worn outdoors over a uniform designed for indoors. The cape is the only part of Victorian nursing dress that survived into living memory.

A nurse's outdoor uniform in watercolour, an American Red Cross nurse photographed in 1918, and a 1944 uniform dress

Livery, and Who It Belonged To

A servant in livery wore their employer’s colours, cut from the employer’s cloth, on the employer’s account. The garment said whose you were before it said what you did.