House of Flora (illustrations)

McLean builds strong connections between the cultural capital of the Jerwood prizewinning craft maker and the world of business and trade. It is crucial that higher education research can consider its relationship to the creative industries. London is a fashion capital, known for its style experimentation and playful creativity. The wit and anarchic play of the art school is a leading force in fashion innovation and Mclean's work articulates this clearly. Designing hats that reference the stylised coiffures of Hollywood icons, in the soft medium of felted wool, is a sophisticated play on the relations between nature and culture that, according to Levi Straus, are at the heart of all culture. The Fifty Hats that Changed the World makes direct allusion to the way that fashion is often regarded with mild disdain as insignificant or trivial, and the Design Museum London, an international leader in disseminating design discourse has, recently, included fashion design within its agenda for exhibition. McLean's work is a leading component of this transformation of design culture.

Containing precious metals: hallmarking, minting and the materiality of gold and silver in medieval and modern England.

This book chapter extends the argument constructed by Oakley in his conference paper ‘Containing gold: Institutional attempts to define and constrict the values of precious metal objects’ presented at ‘Itineraries of the Material’, a conference held at Goethe Universitaet, Frankfurt am Main in 2011. Oakley’s chapter investigates the social forces that define the identities, social pathways and physical movement of objects made of precious metal. It presents a case study in which constitutive substance rather than the conceptual object is the key driver behind the social trajectories of numerous artefacts and their reception by contemporary audiences. This supports the main contention of the book as a whole: the need to reconsider, and when necessary challenge, the dominance of the social biography of objects in the study of material culture. Oakley’s research used historical and ethnographic approaches, including three years’ of ethnographic field research in the jewellery industry. This included training as a precious metal assayer at the Birmingham Assay Office and observing the industry and public response to government proposals to abolish the hallmarking legislation. This fieldwork was augmented by archive, library and object collection research on the histories of assaying and goldsmithing. Oakley presents an analysis of the historical development and contemporary social relevance of hallmarking, a technological process that has never previously been subject to ethnographic study, yet is fundamental to one of the UK’s creative industries.