100 Things to Wear

The National Trust looks after more than 40,000 items of dress – from attire of extraordinary luxury to practical, everyday working clothes. This beautifully illustrated book features a selection of 100 important examples charting over 500 years of changing tastes and fashions.

100 Things to Wear is the first book to explore the breadth and depth of the National Trust’s dress collection, from attire of extraordinary luxury to everyday items worn by those who lived and worked in the Trust’s historic houses. Held at properties across England, Wales and Northern Ireland, the collection showcases a wealth of lived experiences from the opulence of the Tudors to the Windrush generation.

Accessibly written and illustrated with a wealth of new photography, 100 Things to Wear will appeal to everyone from fashionistas, researchers, designers and other industry professionals to all those with an interest in clothing and dress.

The book concludes with an illustrated glossary of terms relating to historic clothing and its production and a gazetteer of Trust properties with significant dress collections.

About the Author

Emma Slocombe is the National Trust’s Senior National Curator for Dress and Textiles and has been a curator at the National Trust since 2006. Her principal interests lie in early modern textiles, furnished interiors, and histories of textile recycling and repurposing – subjects on which she has published widely.

Helen Antrobus is an Assistant National Curator at the National Trust. Her research interests include 20th-century women, social and political landscapes, and histories of dress. In 2022 she co-curated Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. In 2018 she curated Represent! Voices 100 Years On at the People’s History Museum, Manchester. Her first book, First in the Fight: 20 Women Who Made Manchester, was published in 2019.

Patrick Grant is the founder of Community Clothing, the author of Less, and is familiar to BBC television viewers as a judge on The Great British Sewing Bee.