Kit ─ Fashioning the Sporting Body

This is the first edited collection of its kind to analyse the distinct but overlapping topics of dress, costume, sport and leisure history. For researchers of bodily adornment and movement, sport and costume history are both primarily concerned with industrial practice and embodied experience. The ways in which bodies are adorned, embellished and clothed (or revealed) highlights the hybrid nature of dress history, encompassing as it does the everyday clothing solutions of the mass of people and the unusual or more ceremonial aspects of costume, as well as elite high fashion. Although this is as yet an under-researched area, there are an increasing number of fashion and clothing undergraduate and postgraduate courses that specialise in sport and leisurewear. This publication is intended to give an introductory overview of the historical and contemporary issues as it does for the growing number of sport marketing and sports studies courses concerned with dress, costume history and branding.

This book was published as a special issue of Sport in History.

Jean Williams is a Senior Research Fellow at the International Centre for Sporting History and Culture at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. Having written on women’s football since 1998, Jean has recently publishedA Contemporary History of Women’s Sport 1850-1960 (Routledge, 2014). She is currently writingSend Her Victorious: A History of Britain’s Women Olympians 1900-2014, forthcoming in 2016.