This thesis examines women’s use of style as a tool of expression in late 1970s and early 1980s Glasgow. Drawing together a cross-section of recent critical theoretical perspectives, it aims to demonstrate that a consideration of style as an instrument of marginal biography can allow researchers to draw new historical knowledge from existing visual sources. In doing so, it intends to address the problem of women’s absence, reduction and subjugation in dominant narratives of Glasgow in this period, and lay the foundation for style’s use as a critical historical lens in new contexts.

Depth and Surface proceeds in four, illustrated case studies. In the first case study, it examines the development of women’s style as a reaction to experiences of slum clearance in Glasgow over the course of the 20th century, acting as a way to bear witness, with one’s body, to lost material landscapes and ways-of-life. In the second, it looks at the decline of public wash-houses in Glasgow in this period, investigating how forms of dress and comportment developed in these spaces came to have a bearing on the late-1970s and early-1980s phenomenon of ‘Glasgow style’. In the third, women’s patronage of two second-hand clothes markets in Glasgow’s East End is viewed as a symbolic, subversive reclamation of the heavily stigmatized trade, and an acknowledgement of marginalised women’s role in creating and sustaining it. In the fourth, the rise of the Glasgow-borne, low-cost department store What Every Woman Wants over the course of the 1970s and 1980s is taken as an insight into women’s reveries for new political futures in the period.

Together, these case studies chart women’s surfacing as subjects in the changing political, social and economic landscape of late-1970s and early 1980s Glasgow. It finds, here, that style is worthy of further historical attention both as a subject and method: presenting a way of interpreting the dressed body as a harbinger for complex, unseen narratives of marginal urban life.