When I became a freelance author and editor in the late 1990s, I used my expertise as a dress and social historian to change direction. The previous twenty-five years of working in museums had provided me with a range of curatorial skills upon which I built a new career. 

My most recent non-fiction publication is The Dictionary of Fashion History (Berg, 2010, revised second edition, Bloomsbury, 2017). Subsequently I was an editorial consultant for Bloomsbury, advising on content for their digital Dress and Costume Library, launched in 2023; also contributing a series of contextual articles for this resource. 

In 2026 my first novel was published by Troubador. It is called The 350th Anniversary Year and combines fantasy, mystery and romance set in an imaginary central European country in the late 1990s.