Milly Cox (UK)

Originally from Leeds, I began my academic journey at Bradford art college where I spent a very happy year completing a diploma in Fashion. After this, I spent the next two years competing A levels as an independent student, before going on to an undergraduate degree in Classical Civilisation at the University of Leeds.

During my degree I continued to pursue my interests in fashion and focused on the significance of textile props in Aeschylus’ trilogy of tragedies, the Oresteia.

The Mst in Classics at Oxford then allowed me to delve even further into my fascination with combining Fashion and Classics. In my first term I researched the sensory and kinesthetic affect that costume has on audiences in modern productions of Greek tragedies. In Hilary I went on to explore textile weaving as a cognitive lens for investigating the psychological and sensorial experiences of women in Homeric epic.

My master’s thesis then explored the power of costume as a politicizing strategy and a tool for ideological manipulation in Euripides’ Ion.

In my DPhil, my research delves into the cultural significance of classically inflected fashions in the long nineteenth-century. Focusing on the relationship of clothing to the physical body, my research interrogates the social, cultural, artistic and political reasons for the prevalence of the post-classical in nineteenth-century Fashion.

When I’m not doing research on dress history, I spend much of my free time designing and sewing clothes.