Dressing for Success: Colonial Commerce, Gender and Aspiration

This paper follows the shifting politics of textiles through production, sale and consumption from the perspective of a colonial draper’s family. When Joseph Thompson, linen-draper, emigrated to Sydney from east London in 1834, he was accompanied by his wife, ten of his children, his brother, a nephew, a servant, and four bales of cottons and woollens, ‘selected with great care from the first Houses in London’. Thereafter he regularly advertised the arrival of consignments of boots and shoes, bonnets and caps, parasols and handkerchiefs, dress lengths and shawls. His lists of French muslins, Swiss cambrics, Welsh flannels and Irish linens, ‘jaconet’ muslins and ‘cashmere’ shawls pointed – discursively and materially – to the regions of Britain, Europe and South Asia from which the fabrics were either sourced or imitated, and are a reminder of the new patterns of labour exploitation and commercial imperial expansion that produced them. The Thompson family’s varied colonial fortunes were fashioned from the cloth of Britain’s commercial empire.

Conversely, Thompson’s success in selling his fabrics to the ‘ladies of Sydney and others’ at once encouraged and depended upon a gendered culture of consumption, in which clothing marked gentility, respectability or vulgarity. The Thompson family themselves, though their fortunes were built on finery, had a finely graded moral attitude to dress and display, which produced paradoxical interplays between commercial culture and middle-class morality. Dressing the people of Sydney in an age of colonial emigration, exploitation and aspiration engaged a multi-layered politics of race, class and gender.