Women's Workwear and Uniforms Catalogue Scan Collection Album Started

Today I've made a start on creating a series of new photo albums in which I am planning to eventually deposit my entire collection of women's work-wear and uniform catalog scans of which I've spoken previously. In creating theses albums I am attempting to endow this blog with something more of the feeling of a full-blown web site. The resolution will be kept relatively low to save bandwidth but I will be more than happy to provide the full size image of any picture for anybody interested. Just e-mail me with the request. Similarly should anyone out there have any relevant photos, drawings, scans etc then please feel free to contribute - just send them to me by e-mail and I will add them to the album and / or the blog. They don't have to be directly relevant to the goings-on in the book / books but it would be really great if folks would send in their impression of how they imagine the girls and staff etc to look or indeed how they would like them to look (there are one or two changes mooted for volume 2, in particular in the schoolroom - and then there are the prison uniforms for the girls held in that particular section).

Part of the reason for providing this resource is to share around my collection (for those interested in such things) and thus ensure its survival and partly it is to illustrate some of the terms used in the INSTITUTIONALISED series. In particular I've noted that to the American audience, and perhaps to others, the term ‘overalls’ probably conjures up an image of bib and braces dungarees and denim even as pertains to women. In the book I have a definite, if perhaps somewhat dated, image in mind when I use the terms – dress style overall, frock overall or nylon overall -as descriptive terms applied to the green and white striped uniforms that the young ladies incarcerated in the institution are obliged to wear. Some of the pictures will also help illustrate certain aspects of the staff uniforms that some may not be familiar with such as Petersham ribbon or tippet as pertaining to part of a nurse's uniform.

There is not that much there at the moment but I plan that this resource will grow over time, and hopefully quite rapidly, and will cover a range of uniforms across a swathe of time from the 1950s to the near present.