The “dress diary” of this book’s title is a bulging album of 2,134 small swatches of fabric: a compilation of snippets, fragments and pieces. Until Kate Strasdin got to work, it was merely a junk-shop curiosity, its creator long forgotten. The album was found in a Camden bric-a-brac stall in the 1960s and handed to Strasdin by a fellow student in a lacemaking class. These random stops in its afterlife are a pleasing reflection of its physical nature.
Each of the swatches has a handwritten caption featuring a name, and sometimes a date or an occasion. The album appeared to be a collection, added to for more than 30 years, of one woman’s wardrobe and those of her friends; a chronicle of mid- Victorian fashions in bits of textiles. But the identity of its creator was only revealed by Strasdin’s transcription of the caption attached to a slip of white muslin: “This is the dress my charming Anne was married in,” signed Adam Sykes. The book’s creator was a woman named Anne Sykes.