Zara Kesterton, interviewed by Jake Bransgrove
Historian Highlight is an ongoing series sharing the research experiences of historians in the History Faculty in Cambridge and beyond. For our latest instalment, we sat down with Zara Kesterton, a second-year PhD candidate at Jesus College and former DHP editor-in-chief. We discuss artificial flowers, French fashion merchants, and some of the realities of being a young historian today.
What are you currently researching?
I’m researching the interaction between nature and fashion in eighteenth-century France, focusing particularly on artificial flowers. These are three-dimensional flowers usually made from silk or a type of cotton or linen weave. They were made predominantly by women. Flowers were worn particularly in court fashion, but also across the social spectrum. I look mainly at Paris and Lyon, and focus on the women who made them, the women who wore them, and what this might be saying more broadly about women’s engagement with botany, new discoveries, their knowledge of flowers, and why these accessories were so attractive.
What brought you to this topic?
I think it’s something that I’ve probably been destined to study! I’ve always worn flowers and enjoyed that kind of aesthetic since I was very young. There’s a photo of me in the Musée d’Orsay when I went with my mum when I was about five years old – and I’m standing in front of some paintings wearing a little white dress with pink roses on. I think that’s really when it all started!
During my undergrad at Durham, I had a tutor who used to work in Lyon. I’d read about this travel funding to go abroad to do research for your dissertation, and she mentioned that Lyon was a really beautiful place and that it had this great history of the silk industry. I really liked France, I liked textiles, I liked silk, but I’d never really thought about pursuing it as part of my historical research before. I went off to Lyon, loved it, had a wonderful time and from there went off to start looking at women in the textiles industries in France, until I finally arrived at flowers and fashion – which is my true calling, clearly!
How did you decide on the chronological remit of your project?
I think it evolved naturally. When I went on that first trip to Lyon, I realised that the eighteenth century was a really interesting period, especially in terms of guilds in both Lyon and Paris where, in a way, they’re coming into their full power since the fashion industry is expanding so rapidly – but also the guilds are starting to crumble, so there’s that interesting element to it. Also, it’s fascinating to see the increased involvement of women in the clothing industries, as people start to decide that actually only men should be making clothes for men, and women should be making clothes for women. When you look at flowers in particular, you really do see a blossoming of flowers in fashion from about the 1730s onwards, right up to the Revolution, and obviously beyond. But I think that people don’t know that there was a big artificial flower industry in France during this period, whereas the nineteenth century has been much more widely written about. That’s what decided my chronology.
It seems you’re bringing your project into conversation with several distinct historiographies here. What do you think that you’re bringing to the study of these? First of all, would you like to lay out what those are – where you sit in the ‘Venn diagram’ of historiographies and what your project gives to each?
I think my project really draws on two fields which have historically been quite separate: first of all there is the history of science and the history of women’s engagement with science. This is something that has been written about for the eighteenth century, mainly with regard to genteel women and their engagement with botany, how they might have engaged with it through their writings and their conversations, and potentially through their relationships with the men around them.
Then you have the history of dress, which is a field that has really flourished recently – I’d say within the past fifty years it’s come to the fore. It is more recognised today as a valid historical field but has maybe not always been so in the past. I think dress history is a great perspective from which to look at things, it highlights stories which haven’t really been told before. You can access the stories of people who might not have been literate for example. It’s a way into thinking about women who were making things for the fashion industry – and were not leaving a mark in another way in the historical record.
So I think my work sits at the intersection of those two, bringing histories of science into conversation with histories of dress, which is what I think these women were doing when they were making these artificial flowers, when they were drawn to these floral adornments in fashion. They’re speaking to these two interests – the aesthetic, the pleasurable interest in fashion, knowledge about fashion and dress, but also very specific knowledge about certain flowers, which might not have been all that common, which they might not have had access to in gardens for example. This is particularly for some of the more unusual flowers that I see cropping up in these records about the profession. My work and the people that I study speak to these two areas which have usually been seen as separate and distinct.
You made a point about the focus on elite women in the scholarship that you engage with. It sounds as though you’re indicating that you are trying to complement or go beyond that. What kind of historical agents are you examining that don’t fit into that trend?
I think elite women will always be part of my work anyway, because people like Marie-Antoinette were so influential in the fashion of the time. They do figure in my work and I think that there are more interesting things to be said about them than what has been said already.
But at the same time, I’m trying to complement that side by looking at figures which are less well-known, by looking at the production side of fashion history, not just consumption. That means looking at fashion merchants, some whom are relatively familiar figures, like Marie-Jeanne ‘Rose’ Bertin, who is well known among dress historians, not necessarily so much beyond that, but also other fashion merchants. These are people who sell any type of adornment to do with women’s fashion. They wouldn’t sell the clothes themselves – they wouldn’t make a dress – but they would sell the trimmings that went onto that dress, and that involved flowers, feathers, lace, maybe small accessories such as shawls or hats.
I’m looking at a fashion merchant in Lyon. She didn’t have a terribly big business, but she catered to people in France but also across Italy. She would send her agent out to places like Marseille, and also to Genoa, to Milan, to Rome, and they would cater to the artificial flower market there and sell these goods on to other people. So I’m trying to access the histories of these kinds of fashion merchants and, in a more obscure way, the women who made artificial flowers. Often the fashion merchants who were selling flowers might be making the flowers in-house, but they might also be outsourcing that work – and so I’m trying to access what their experience might have been.
A lot of that will be necessarily speculative, because I can read the descriptions of the flowers that they’re making and assume that if somebody is making, for example, a narcissus flower, then they must be going out and studying this narcissus, and making observations, looking at it from all sides, and counting how many petals it has, and what the leaves are doing, and where the placement of stamens are for example. I know that they were trying to make these flowers very realistic from contemporary descriptions of people wearing flowers, where viewers don’t know if it’s real or not, and it’s also perfumed to smell like a real flower. So I know what they’re striving for – but I don’t have the flower itself. I don’t have a diary entry from a flower maker saying ‘today I went to the botanic gardens, and I studied such-and-such a flower.’ I’m trying to use what we can tell from the written record to try and extrapolate and understand what their experience might have been.
Perhaps you could speak to interesting, unusual, standout experiences in the archive. Do any come to mind?
Absolutely. One of them was this fashion merchant that I discussed from Lyon. I was in the archive just a month ago and the box of her files was such an exciting one. First of all, I opened up her letters and on the first page there was a beautiful drawing of how these flowers should be arranged that a fashion merchant from elsewhere in France had sent to Mademoiselle Mandier. So they’d sent this order, ‘I want these garlands of flowers and they should be arranged like this.’ That was something I was not expecting to find and it’s just gold dust, you know? I’ve been reading for so many years these long descriptions of flowers that are part of clothing but not really to have a clear idea of how they might have been arranged and what that might have looked like, so to have these drawings was really fantastic.
And then as part of her orderbook there were these tiny little envelopes that were pinned onto the front. And I thought, ‘Oh, I wonder if there’s something inside that?’ I went up to the archivist and asked, ‘do you think I’m allowed to open these little packets that are pinned together?’ And she said, ‘Oh I’m not sure, we’re going to have to ask the paper conservator to come and check!’ So I waited with bated breath. Eventually this paper conservator comes in, and they’re both looking at it and muttering with each other. I was just thinking, ‘please, I just want to see what’s inside these, my curiosity cannot handle this wait!’ And eventually they say, ‘yes, I think we can open these.’ So I unpinned the packet – and I unfolded it, and there were these tiny little samples of metallic braid that were silver, and sort of gleamed, and were joined by ribbon. And then the next packet was lovely – two strips of fabric printed with blue stripes and then orange stripes. And they were so fresh, and so vibrant, and it felt like I was the first person to see these in hundreds of years. I mean they might have been opened by people since in the archive or since they’d been deposited but it was such a magical moment to see the sample that the fashion merchant had slipped inside the packet 250 years ago.
A lot of what you’ve said sounds as though it would fit quite comfortably in an Art History department. But you’re in the History Faculty here at Cambridge. Is there anything that you’ve found jarring working on the subject that you are but doing so in a history faculty? Does that feel strange in any way?
When you get to postgraduate level, I think it really depends on the people that you’re surrounded by. I think it might potentially feel a bit strange in a different department. My supervisor, Professor Ulinka Rublack has gathered around her a crowd of people who are really passionate about and who really see the value in material culture, and in quite creative approaches to writing history. Because of that I’ve never felt like I’m out of place in the Faculty when I’m around people that appreciate the kind of work that people like Ulinka do.
I have a master’s in History and in Art History – because I decided that one year was not enough! I needed to be more qualified. And I think it was quite interesting to see the different perspective, to be in an Art History faculty, but ultimately, I think that History is such a broad church that I found people are quite open to a variety of different interpretations. Whereas sometimes in Art History, things like dress history and material culture can even be a little more surprising, because they’re so used to looking at paintings and at drawings and prints – that anything three-dimensional can be a little nerve-wracking sometimes for some kinds of art historians. In History, the field has borrowed from so many disciplines and approaches that, so far at least, it doesn’t seem to have posed too much of a problem!
As a historian, can you think of any really helpful advice that you’ve been given?
I think that a variety of people have told me at various moments of doubt throughout my career so far that I just have to follow what I’m passionate about. And that will lead you to interesting places, and that’s really what you have to pursue. There comes a moment, especially when you’re applying to PhDs, when you wonder if you should be working on a different project or if you should be doing something that might be more conventionally thought of as important or worthwhile studying. Or even to join somebody else’s project and tag onto an existing network. But I think, at the end of the day, academia in general is quite a precarious field at the moment and it’s difficult to do something like this half-heartedly. You have to really, truly believe that what you’re doing is interesting and there has to be something magical about it that keeps you going, that sustains you even when academia can be quite difficult. So yeah, I think that has been a useful thing to hold on to.
Are there any historians that you admire, or have learnt a lot from?
I think there are many that I have learnt from in different ways. There are some whose styles of writing are particularly effective and interesting, and there are those who I think have been influential through their kindness and generosity in sharing elements of their research and supporting others. Somebody like Julie Hardwick, who’s a fantastic historian of French sexualities and gender, was really inspirational for me, particularly when I started working on Lyon, and someone who I’ve come back to for advice since. She works a lot in the Lyon archives and is always willing to put me in touch with other people. Obviously Ulinka has always been really supportive, ever since I did my master’s here – four years ago, almost five years ago now – and I think her support has really been fundamental.
There are also historians who I think in their collaborative approaches have been really fantastic. I’m part of the ‘Women in Flowers’ network, which is just a little informal network that we’ve set up growing out of a few conferences I’ve been to, particularly in the past year, where people have come together to share the innovative stuff that they’re doing on women’s history and how that intersects with botany and flowers in particular. I admire everybody who’s a part of that – but particularly Tori Champion and Susannah Lyon-Whaley, who’ve been running it alongside me. It’s been really nice to have that space to share and engage with other people and to discuss problems and complexities and joys that we come across in our research. I’m sure that there are hundreds of other people that I’ll think of as soon as we stop recording – but yeah, those are some that really stand out.
A final question: thinking about where we are right now and what Cambridge has to offer, what do you think the university really succeeds at in its producing or rather providing a context for your kind of research? What does Cambridge have to offer that you think is really special?
I think, first of all, its amazing collections and legal deposit library! It’s a wonderful thing to be able to go and find pretty much any book that you need. I use the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert a lot – this massive encyclopaedic effort from late eighteenth-century France. All the plates from the Encyclopédie are just down the road in St John’s College library and that’s wonderful to be able to access. There are some really innovative things happening, particularly around material culture. There are opportunities to get involved – even as a student – with teaching, with organising, and to really take on quite a lot of responsibility at a major university and to be able to throw yourself into that even while doing your PhD.
It gives you opportunities in that sense that might be more difficult to come across elsewhere sometimes – and just the confidence, I think. Before I came here for my PhD or even before my master’s, to do something like studying flowers and fashion, which is often thought of as quite a frivolous subject and perhaps something with not so much substance behind it, I think just to have the added weight of a name like Cambridge behind it feels quite exciting and special. It’s quite a confidence boost, in days when all of us might be wondering exactly where we fit in, how worthwhile what we’re doing actually is. Just to know that the university is supporting and funding research like this is nice to have behind you, I think.
Doing History in Public 