DrEmily Brayshaw

Dr Emily Brayshaw is internationally recognised for her work on the visual culture of fashion and performance costume. She is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Technology Sydney and was recently lauded by UTS as one of their top experts who reached a total estimated media audience of more than 1 million for their work and commentary in 2023.

Emily's inter-disciplinary research examines the past, present, and future of critical fashion and performance costume with a focus on identities, material costume, embodiment and costume design methodology from the nineteenth-century to the present day. She has held her Honorary Fellowship since 2019, where she has strongly contributed to the academic disciplines of critical costume and fashion studies through her research and practice. At the same time, Emily contributes to the arts in Sydney, working as a costume designer on critically acclaimed theatrical productions and as the principal viola of the Woollhara Philharmonic Orchestra.

Emily's publications since 2020 include
• 2020 “Unravelling Psychologically: Knitting in Performance Costume and the Themes of You Got Older (2015)”, Textile: Cloth and Culture, 18(4) 344 – 354.
• 2020 “An ‘Armour’ Against Anguish: Costume Design Considerations Around Protecting Actors in Emotionally-Distressing Roles”, Studies in Costume and Performance, 5(2), 239 – 253.
• 2020 Chapter 2.3, “Extravagance, Expense and Notoriety in Costume: Gaby Deslys and Parisian Modernity on the American Stage, 1911 – 1914”, in Pantouvaki, S. & McNeil, P. (eds), Performing Costume-New Perspectives on Performance, Bloomsbury: London.
• 2021 Chapter 6, “Dressed to Quill: The Origin and Significance of the Feathered Showgirl in World War I Paris,” in Kurkdjian, S. & Bass-Krueger, M. (eds), Women and Fashion in War, 1914 – 1914, Bloomsbury: London.
• 2021 “Oskar Schlemmer’s Kitsch (1922): A Contextualisation and Translation”, The Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 13(1), 1-15.
• 2021 “Costume Behaving Badly: Poverty, Disease and Disgust in Early-Twentieth-Century American Vaudeville”, Fashion Theory, 26(6), 757 – 775.
• 2023 “Dressing for the Viola: An Autoethnographic and Historical Exploration of Women’s Orchestral ‘Blacks’”, Journal of Dress History, 7(3), 9-23.
• 2024 “From Caftan King to Peacock Pasha: Demis Roussos and Orientalist Decadence in Men’s Fashion and European Popular Culture, 1968–1980”, Critical Studies in Men's Fashion.
• 2024  “Birkenstock in Australia 1992 to 2002: A Stable Shoe for Shifting Terrains”, in Schneider-Braunberger, A. (ed.), Birkenstock: History of a Universal and Zeitgeist Brand, Penguin: Munich.
• 2024 “From Hilarious Hippies to Hair-raising Horror: Thirty Years of Birkenstock Shoes in Film”, in Schneider-Braunberger, A. (ed.), Birkenstock: History of a Universal and Zeitgeist Brand, Penguin: Munich.

In 2022, Emily contributed to the Sydney Mechanics' School of Arts lecture series, is a writer for The Conversation, and is highly sought after for media commentary into issues surrounding fashion, dress, performance costume, aesthetics and the applied arts, having completed more than 100 interviews for radio and print since 2020.

Professional
• Member of The Footwear Research Network: https://footwearresearchnetwork.org/
• Member of The Association of Dress Historians https://dresshistorians.org/