Dressing up and going out: Glasgow, glamour and rituals of getting ready

Before every night out comes the act of getting ready. As a ritual of adornment, dressing up and going out operates as both prelude and discrete entity. It has its own protocols and structures, making it a highly codified and culturally loaded act: one that provides a space for expression of self and the process of becoming, a conduit to the social relations that lie beyond.

Join us for a talk from Researcher Mairi MacKenzie, which will examine the creative process of getting ready for a night out in Glasgow and is bookended by contrasting depictions of people preparing for a night of dancing. The first, a clip of girls dressing up in anticipation of a Saturday night at The Tunnel nightclub (1990–2014) on BBC’s weekly fashion programme, The Clothes Show in 1996. The second is a more fanciful, impressionistic film of a girl on the brink of a night out in the film Masquerade (1953) by Scottish filmmaker Enrico Cocozza (1921–97). 

The talk also invokes a longer history of fashion, glamour, pleasure and dancing in a city that — as actor and comedian Elaine C. Smith puts it — ‘wears its money’ and where people take going out very seriously: at one time the city had ‘an above average provision of dancing facilities’ with more dancehalls per head of population than anywhere outside London between World War 1 and the late 1950s. 

Date: Thursday 2 April 

Time: 6.00pm

Location: Edward House, 199 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow, G2 3EX. 

Free event, but please book your tickets on Eventbrite here. 

If you have any questions or want to discuss access arrangements ahead of the event, please email: Sauchiehallstreet@glasgowlife.org.uk 

BIOGRAPHY

Mairi MacKenzie is Research Fellow in fashion history and curating at The Glasgow School of Art. Her current research interests are social and cultural histories of perfume, and style as a phenomenon of civic life in Glasgow. Her publications include Dream Suits: The Wonderful World of Nudie Cohn (Lannoo: 2011), Football, Fashion and Unpopular Culture: David Bowie’s influence on Liverpool Football Casuals (Routledge: 2019); and Perfume and Fantasy: Scent in Popular Culture and Everyday Life (Bloomsbury: Forthcoming). She has curated exhibitions at Mode Museum, Antwerp, V&A Dundee and she co-curated ‘Dressing Above Your Station: Fashion and Textiles in the Life and Work of the Artist Steven Campbell’ a virtual exhibition that took place in a virtual version of Tramway, Glasgow in 2022.