Alison Toplis

With its intricate, decorative embroidery, the smock frock is often wrapped in nostalgia for England’s rural past and celebrated as one of the country’s few surviving forms of folk dress. Yet these garments were, in fact, the high-vis jackets of the Victorian era: practical, hard-wearing workwear worn by labouring men across the countryside. Textile historian Alison Toplis explores the men who wore smocks and the women who made them, revealing the ordinary lives, skills and labour hidden behind this ordinary extraordinary garment. Includes a display of historic smocks from the Corinium Museum collection.

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