A-hem! It's all in the details

Dress adjustment for Millicent Fawcett

It’s all in the details. Our amazing designer Eve Oakley was hard at work ensuring that Millicent Fawcett’s costume fits to a T. Eve has lavished time and attention on these beautiful costumes which are meticulously researched and beautifully made.

Clothing gives us another fascinating insight into how our lives were lived in the past. Millicent herself and her fellow suffragists gave rise to a small but significant change in dress.

The long skirts of the suffragists who walked through heavy rain from Hyde Park to the Strand in the 1907 protest were utterly ruined. In fact it became known as the Mud March. When the Great Pilgrimage of 1913 was organised, the lesson of the Mud March was recalled and the women who marched from Carlisle and Bristol, Wrexham and Cambridge were confident enough to pin up their hems a good few inches. Their determination to win the vote overcame any qualms about the immodesty of revealing their ankles.