Barbara Johnson

Barbara Johnson. Album of Styles. V&A Museum.

Barbara Johnson lived between 1738 and 1825 and kept a record of everything she had ever worn with drawings, swatches of fabric and notes.  This is the span from Handel's Serce to Beethoven's 9th Symphony, i.e. in that vague past that we never seem to synchronise.  

If you go year by year on Wikipedia for Canada, in 1738 it didn't exist, but smallpox had reached the prairies, and La Vérendrye was still working his way downstream from what would be Winnipeg.  Primitive, very distant.  By 1835, Canada still didn't exist, but the Irish poor had started to arrive.  By 1830, a flu epidemic hit many of the first nations in BC: the Fraser Canyon people disappeared completely. 

Meanwhile, Barbara Johnson, a member of a genteel class in a well-developed country was recording the nuances of seams and structure, textiles and line, and writing her own biography in dress.  As I write about Barbara Johnson, I also wonder whether we mark our lives against a greater history, or if our own identities are really charted against the sweaters we have loved.  Mine, and I still have it, a dark camel ribbed poor-boy like Françoise Hardy's – if you think this is an obscure reference, it actually encapsulates a very rich little era of no historical account at all. The history is that Pearson went to the States and called for a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam.  Both were equally identity-forming, one is known by everyone, the other history is mine alone.  Perhaps the purpose of work is not to speak, to demonstrate, to lecture, but is to sychronise such disparate histories.