Ash,Juliet <br/><br/>
The Prison Uniforms Collection at the Galleries of Justice Museum, Nottingham, UK  
Juliet Ash 
 - Oxford:  Oxford Univcersity Press,  2011. 
<br/><br/> Dress historians are often distanced from the experience of the history of clothing because they privilege sight over touch. In conventional dress archives issues of conservation and the hierarchy of knowledge favour the ways of visualizing of clothes adhered to by museums since the seventeenth century. In the last decade, the appearance of prisoners’ clothing has been brought closer to us globally through controlled photographic and archival representations online. But the touch of the cloth as well as its visual materiality brings us closer to the experience of the denial of sensuality and identity construction embodied in prisoners’ uniforms. Unusually, the uniforms in the Galleries of Justice Museum, Nottingham, can be handled and photographed at close quarters. Partly this is owing to the hardwearing and cheap quality of fabric used in the make of prisoners’ uniforms and the mass-produced cloth of staff uniforms in the mid-twentieth century, which do not require sophisticated conservation. Partly to date, there has been little interest in the history of prisoners’ uniforms. It is as though dress history has bypassed the changes in inmates’ clothing and secreted them away as the inmates themselves were historically hidden from the sight of the public. Additionally, the stains evident on the clothing, from constant use or lack of official conservation, contribute to our knowledge of the subjectivity embodied in the materiality of imprisonment.