Dr Sian Weston

Biography

Sian Weston is a researcher, writer and curator working across fashion, dress, consumer culture, material culture, archives and contemporary visual culture. It is a form of research-through-practice, between academia and the creative industries.

She is currently developing We Were Fab: Dressing and Dressing Up in Late Twentieth Century Britain, an auto-ethnographic publication that places everyday dress, vernacular fashion, consumption, identity, migration, and manufacturing into a lived experience. We Were Fab builds on The Changing Face of Burberry (Bloomsbury Academic 2022) which traces the transformation of Burberry from a nineteenth-century semi-rural, craft-based manufacturer into a global fashion brand and cultural object.

Sian is also co-developing Proving Ground: Millbank and the Manufacture of British Authority with Professor Andrew Groves from the Westminster Menswear Archive. They work with Friends of Millbank, the Thorney Island Society and the Imperial War Museum London on a socially-engaged piece of research. Proving Ground examines Millbank as a site where British authority has been constructed, tested and legitimised over the course of two centuries, where the same ground has housed a penitentiary, a convict transit depot, military medicine, state administration, art education and luxury spectacle. Each phase reorganised the body. Each produced a form of proof: moral, medical, imperial, and cultural.

Sian has worked inside the creative industries with designers, artists, collections and cultural organisations, including African-American artist Glenn Ligon on From Brixton to the South Bank with David A Bailey (ABP) and the Hayward Gallery; Rotterdam-based Atelier van Lieshout on An Ideal Home, in partnership with the V&A; British-Asian artist Hetain Patel on Sine Language, a UK touring show; and Yinka Shonibare on Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle, Fourth Plinth.