THE V&A

Research Institute

Dr Victoria de Lorenzo

Lecturer, History of Design and Material Culture

I am textile and business historian. I am interested in the materiality of textiles as agents of economic and cultural change from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. In my research, I combine business records with other archival and material sources.

At VARI, I am a Lecturer in the History of Design and Material Culture on the V&A/RCA postgraduate programme, where I teach the only module currently available in Britain that takes a cross-chronological and connected approach to understanding the global dis/connections within the communities once associated with the Spanish territories across the Americas, Asia, Africa and Europe. As part of my role, I also coordinate students’ placements.

Before joining the V&A, I worked at London College of Fashion (UAL), and as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Edinburgh on the AHRC-funded public engagement project Connecting Threads  where an interdisciplinary team investigated the south-to-south fashion history of the Madras handkerchief to challenge Eurocentric fashion narratives. In parallel, I developed an expertise in the textile suppliers for the European haute couture. The histories of these suppliers illuminate economic policies, European textile industrial heritage and evolution of consumers’ material literacies in the twentieth centuries.

I am also Textile History’s Exhibition and Media Reviews Editor.

Selected publications

More about me

My ORCID profile