Ada Lovelace's satin gown

Hello loves!

I've been thinking a lot about Ada Lovelace recently. Specifically, I've been thinking a lot about her clothing.

Ada Lovelace was the 19th-century genius who basically invented computer programming — about 100 years before computers even existed. A brilliant amateur mathematician, she worked with Charles Babbage, the inventor of the Analytical Engine — a massive, mechanical contraption he designed to perform complex calculations (an early blueprint for the modern computer). While Babbage envisaged it as only a number-crunching machine, Lovelace realised its far greater potential. She pointed out that since anything — music, language, or abstract logic — can be represented by numbers, the machine could theoretically process any kind of information, not just maths. In this way, she laid the groundwork for what we now know as computer programming.

Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent. - Ada Lovelace

She is one of the most important women in history. She is one of the most important people in history.

There's a portrait of her hanging in the National Portrait Gallery. In it, she stands poised and delicate, milky skin glowing against a muddy background, her pale skin melting into the neckline of a voluminous white silk gown. A dainty slippered foot stretches onto a lush patterned rug, the carved wooden chair and staircase grounding us in an opulent domestic setting. The diadem in her hair and the jewelled pins on her shoulders assert her aristocracy. The gown is intricately rendered in glistening folds, her tiny waist made to look even smaller by the cinching of her rich velvet train. Every fold of that gown has been carefully observed and lovingly rendered. It's more a portrait of a dress than a portrait of a woman.

The room it hangs in, titled "Technological Transformation," celebrates the great inventors and engineers of Britain's Industrial Revolution. Ada is the only woman in the room — a situation she was likely all too familiar with in her own lifetime. And when you compare Ada's portrait to those of her contemporaries, something is very noticeable.

Can you spot it?

Here's Edward Jenner, who pioneered the process of vaccination. He's surrounded by representations of his work: quill and ink, papers, a cow's leg (his smallpox vaccine consisted of the milder cowpox virus). He's pointing at his big ol' brain, for extra emphasis. His clothing, though — boring as heck. The tablecloth is more interesting than his outfit.

Here's another one from the Technological Transformation room. This is Brunel, the chief engineer of the Thames Tunnel. Another black suit, papers, practical reading glasses. You can see a painting of the tunnel he designed propped up behind him, like Wile E. Coyote is trying to lure him into the wall.

Or here's our boy Babbage, Ada's mentor. His clothes are almost indistinguishable from the background. Instead, we get a lot of detail of his face. And there, on rich plum velvet to his side: a mathematical instrument (a pair of dividers) and a folder of papers.

You see it, right? In all of the other portraits, it's the work that's being honoured. In Ada Lovelace's portrait, there is not a single clue to any of her accomplishments. If you didn't know who she was, you'd think she's just a lady in a marvellous dress.

It wasn't always like this; male inventors from just 100 years earlier were painted far more fabulously. In life as much as in portraiture, wealthy Western men of the 1700s wore makeup, bright colours, high heels, lush patterned fabrics, wigs and ruffles.

Then, quite suddenly, they stopped.

Psychologist John Flügel dubbed this "The Great Male Renunciation": the period of time around the American and French revolutions (1775-1799) when Western men suddenly stopped dressing up.

Hitherto man had vied with woman in the splendour of his garments, woman’s only prerogative lying in décolleté and other forms of erotic display of the actual body; henceforward, to the present day, woman was to enjoy the privilege of being the only possessor of beauty and magnificence, even in the purely sartorial sense. - John Flügel, The Psychology of Clothes (1930).

There's an obvious logic to this - you don't want to look rich at a time when they're tossing rich people to the guillotine. But as this profound change in male fashion persisted, it became moralised. We began to develop the idea that dressing up was vain, conceited, marked you as an exploitative aristocrat. If "all men are created equal" (women and brown men obviously not included), then it follows that all men should dress identically: in a sombre, egalitarian black suit. This was the moment when fashion became "frivolous". In other words, this was the moment when fashion became feminine.

We have not shaken this monochrome masculinity in 200+ years. There have been bubbles of resistance, sure: the peacock revolution of the 1960s, Harlem dandies, macaronis, Sowetan Smarteez, sapeurs of Uganda and the DRC, Harry Styles, Prince, David Bowie... And queer culture has always challenged this strict gender boundary of Serious Male Attire versus Flouncy Lady Frocks. But for the vast majority of men, their clothing remains notably less decorative than women's clothing. Go into any clothing shop today and observe the endless colourful racks for women, versus the maroon, olive and navy corner for men (the only three acceptable masculine clothing colours).

Of course, when it became socially unacceptable for men to openly flaunt their wealth and class through their clothing, the need to signal status didn't go away: it got shifted onto their wives. Women dress up for fun, but we're also judged for it. Our hotness boosts the status of the men who are seen with us, and there's a reason we still talk about "trophy wives".

This portrait of Ada Lovelace was painted to celebrate her marriage to an earl. Her beauty and elegance in this portrait were praised in newspapers when it was displayed at the Royal Academy in 1836, and I imagine her new husband was pleased. Ada herself apparently didn't like it very much.

By the way, here's a daguerreotype of Ada (an early photograph), taken seven years after the portrait was painted. It gives us a much better idea of what she actually looked like.

I've always had complicated feelings about clothing because I've never felt fully comfortable with femininity. It's never been a language I speak fluently, a properly-fitting garment, a machine I understand how to operate. I used to believe all women received some secret "How to Girl 101" class in childhood, and I wasn't at school that day. But I've come to realise that all women feel this inadequacy, to a greater or lesser degree. Femininity is an impossible ideal no flesh-and-blood person can attain. Insecurity is the point.

For a while in my 20s, I went through a Great Renunciation of my own and packed away all the clothes in my closet, replacing them with five identical black dresses that I wore on rotation for an entire year, so I could free myself from the stress of figuring out what to wear every day. It was a relief for a while, but in the end, I missed dressing up.

These days, I vacillate between dressing like a rainbow-neon KTV presenter and a 19th century male engineer, still neurotically obsessed with clothing because it's still something I feel I never get quite right. Whenever I launch a new book, or I'm invited to speak in public, I get way more stressed about what I'm going to wear than about what I'm going to say. I have a 90s uniform for Girls of Little Hope-related events: dungaree shorts, an obscure 90s riot grrrl band tee, chunky boots, fake choker necklace. Whenever I do a Manage Your Money-related thing I go head-to-toe Hannah Lavery and try to embody Confident Bossbitch. I've been doing film and TV pitches recently, and I haven't quite figured out that uniform yet - the last TV pitch I went to, the producer commented that I looked very "London Fashion Week", which I think is code for, "Girl, you're trying too hard". Mortifying.

The best item of clothing I've ever owned is a t-shirt my best friend Melanie made me when we were 15, featuring Andy Warhol-style pop portraits of my #1 celebrity crush, who was ... uh ... the poet Lord Byron. Who, incidentally, was Ada Lovelace's father.

Byron was terrible (there's a great episode of the podcast Decoder Ring about how he was rightly cancelled in the 1860s). Ada's mother was so petrified she'd become anything like him that she steered her away from poetry towards mathematics. Yet, I loved that t-shirt because it felt so me. When teenage girls have crushes on men, it's often not that they want to be with someone like them, it's that they want to be them. I too, wanted to be a feckless fuckboi poet (mad, bad, and dangerous to know). Eagle-eyed Girls of Little Hope readers might spot a nod to this t-shirt in chapter 17, by the way 😏

Sometimes, dressing up feels like self-fashioning, like trying on a new identity, empowering. Other times, it feels oppressive, narcissistic, having to treat yourself like a brand, reducing all your accomplishments to whether you look hot in a frock.

“Women constantly meet glances which act like mirrors reminding them of how they look or how they should look. Behind every glance there is judgment.”
― John Berger, Ways of Seeing

Some days I long for a uniform; other days I long for Cher's wardrobe from Clueless. I hope that if I'm ever praised it's because of my accomplishments or my generosity; and at the same time, I think it must be sad to be straightjacketed in black.

I can tell myself that the beauty of being alive today is that, really, you can dress however the heck you like. But that's not entirely true, is it? We're social animals, and we can't pretend that our sartorial choices don't matter. Other people judge us for what we wear. Other people police what we can wear safely.

Growing up in Pretoria in the 2000s, my younger brother grew out his long, gossamer white-blonde hair. It lay in a glossy mane halfway down his back, as shiny as Ada Lovelace's white gown. He didn't mind how often he was "Ma'amed" in public, but he did mind how often he was "Moffied", in dangerous hisses that threatened violence. Sometimes that violence became literal. He was relentlessly bullied throughout primary school: one kid used to wait for him on his walk home and assaulted him daily. When my mom reported it to the school, they suggested my brother cut his hair.

Clothing isn't frivolous: everything we wear has profound social meaning. What it feels possible to wear reflects our sense of what it feels possible to be. I want to live in a world where men can wear pretty dresses and artist aprons and baby carriers and women can wear lab coats and business suits and stained sweatpants and people who feel like both or neither can choose without fear.

We do make progress, generation on generation. In the same year Ada Lovelace's portrait was painted, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson was born. She became the first woman to qualify in Britain as a physician and surgeon. She cofounded a medical school for women, campaigned for women's right to vote, and became the first woman mayor in England. When her portrait was painted in 1900, at the age of 64, she insisted on wearing her plain academic gown, only conceding to add a pearl necklace when the painter begged her to brighten up the outfit. When she saw the completed painting, she complained that he made her fingers look too delicate.

There's been a resurgence of interest in Ada Lovelace because computer science today is somehow more gendered than it was in the mid-20th century. There's a great episode of the Planet Money podcast discussing the reasons why, if you're interested.

Ada Lovelace's mother tried so hard to keep her away from the arts, lest she succumb to the taint of her father's "madness". She failed. Ada always said that it was the integration of her instincts for beauty and for mathematics that was her unique genius, calling her approach "poetical science". She asked questions about how the technology might effect society — questions her contemporaries were not asking. Her knowledge of music allowed her to foresee uses of algorithms beyond mathematics. She is a beautiful example of why it matters that the people building technology come from different backgrounds; her genius is as connected to the abilities her culture would have dismissed as feminine as to the abilities it would have praised as masculine.

There's a funny historical coda to all this. Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine was inspired by an earlier machine called the Jacquard Loom, which used punched cards to encode intricate patterns in textiles. The "serious engineering" vs. "silly decoration" binary has never, truly, been real.

So, in a roundabout way, the portrait of Ada Lovelace's dress is a nod to the invention of computing, her genius painted lush and shining across the canvas.

Wishing you high heels and recognition for your best qualities,

Sam

Thank you to my dearest Melanie Smuts who showed me Ada Lovelace's portrait, and made me an iron-on transfer t-shirt of Lord Byron when we were 15.