Common Wear

‘Common Wear’ is a collection of prototype uniforms for Snibston Discovery Museum staff, created in collaboration with Steve Swindells, and part of ‘Mining Couture’, one of seven commissions delivered through Leicestershire County Council’s Snibston Discovery Museum and the Transform programme between June 2010 and March 2012. In the context of ‘Common Wear’ we were aware of current popular trends evident in work wear that seemingly lacked the couture craft of early 20th century dress. For example, though contemporary fluorescent miners’ overalls are probably designed to comply with health and safety regulations they lack tenderness, style, and overall respect for the wearer in respect of ‘humanness’ despite being conceived in an age dominated by individual materiality. This evidence is borne out on seeing work-wear at the National Coal Mining Museum collections in Wakefield, seemingly indifferent to normal fashion etiquette, that embodied tenderness and human touch by both design and the wearer through alteration, darning and stain. In the search for a simple elegance of common wear that relates to the legacies of mining in modernity we looked to constructivist/futurist designs and the Russian avant-garde – a fashion that responded to linear graphic grids of modernity. Early 20th century modernity was symbiotic with modern industrialization, in which coal mining played a major part, however our awareness lay in the growing status of coal mining from 19th century to the 20th century (in terms of social identity, political and civil rights) and by what means that status is comprised in clothes.