This website describes my work as an author, editor, reviewer and trustee. It provides information about and links to various organisations and individuals with whom I am involved in one or more of those roles.

I trained as an historian and, a little later, as a dress historian at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. That training led to a career in museums as a curator of dress and textiles at Chertsey Museum in Surrey, the London Museum/ Museum of London in Kensington and the City of London, and the Court Dress Collection at Kensington Palace before it was absorbed into Historic Royal Palaces. Opportunities to undertake research and to write and edit publications developed when I was a curator and became part of my duties as Assistant Director and then Deputy Director and Chief Curator at the Museum of London. When I became a freelance editor and writer in the late 1990s I described myself as a dress and social historian rather than a consultant as I use some but not all skills acquired in previous roles.

Currently I am an editorial consultant for Bloomsbury, advising on the curation of content for their forthcoming digital Bloomsbury Dress and Costume Library.

My most recent major publication is The Dictionary of Fashion History (Berg, 2010, revised second edition Bloomsbury, 2017). I was a contributing editor to the award-winning Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion (Berg, 2010), and I co-edited Costume – the journal of the Costume Society from 2014 to 2019.