Tim Arrowsmith

About Tim

My academic interests lie at the intersection of fashion, youth subculture and identity. The majority of my work over the last decade focused on capturing oral history about British youth motorcycle subcultures in the 1950s and 1960s. I own engineering companies in the UK & US, and a winery in Santa Barbara County, California.

I have conducted research in the following fields:

Oral History

Visual Culture

Fashion History

Material Culture

Subcultural Theory & Post-Subcultural Theory

Luxury Studies

Experience

Motorcycles

From 2009 to 2024 I attended the London College of Fashion as part of a Masters degree and PhD research program. For my Masters degree I initially researched men's bespoke tailoring and subsequently moved into motorcycle clothing and culture, which developed into a PhD research project in 2012. Since then I have focused on the intersection of subcultural fashion and motorcycle practice and how they have influenced contemporary revivalist cultures. I now combine my academic research with my three decades of experience in engineering, motorsports and winery ownership to offer consultancy services to manufacturers, hospitality and retailers in the motorcycle sector.
Temperature Indicators

Temperature Indicators is in its fifth decade of operation after being founded by David and Lynne Arrowsmith and is now in its third decade of my ownership. With facilities in the UK and US, the business serves the world's largest food beverage, medical, engineering and automotive sectors. We provide innovative engineering solutions that help our clients measure temperature, specializing in thermal process validation, temperature achievement and heat abuse. The chances are that you've either consumed some kind of food or drink, used a form of transportation or undergone a medical procedure in which our products played a tiny, but crucial part.
Arrowsmith Wine

Arrowsmith Winery is a charming boutique winery located in the picturesque Santa Ynez Valley, California. Our winery specializes in small-batch wines crafted from grapes grown in single vineyards. We pride ourselves on producing exquisite single varietal wines that reflect the unique terroir of our region.
That's why we meticulously manage every step of the winemaking process, from vine to bottle, ensuring that our wines express a true sense of place. Our very limited production allows us to maintain the highest standards of quality, producing elegant and balanced wines that reflect both Old World structure and New World flavors.

Academic Background

I obtained my MA in the History and Culture of Fashion at the London College of Fashion in 2011, and began studying for my Doctorate in 2012. The PhD project was awarded funding through the London College of Fashion Artscom Progressive Studentship, and reached completion in 2024. During this time I attended a significant component of the MA Fashion and Film and MA Fashion Curation programs at LCF, along with many lectures presented by researchers and lecturers at Central St Martins. This all supported the visual culture and material culture research I was undertaking as part of the MA History & Culture program. This incorporated a strong foundational component based on 20th century French Sociology and Cultural Theory, that included the work of Bourdieu, Barthes, Baudrillard and Foucault.

During the course of my research I conducted primary research in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum, Fashion Museum Bath, The Whitworth Manchester, the London College of Fashion Archive, FIDM Museum, Lewis Leathers, Brooklands Motor Racing Circuit and the Tom of Finland archive in Los Angeles. The early part of my research involved investigating the history of men’s tailoring on Savile Row, with primary research carried out in the private archive collections of several London tailors, including Hardy Amies. I carried out oral history interviews with current and former employees of H. Huntsman & Sons, including Richard Anderson, and Colin De’Ath, the former head coatmaker under their head cutter Colin Hammick.

For my MA thesis I explored an interest in the history of motorcycle clothing that had developed through the course of the program, focusing on the ways in which black leather emerged as a signifier of delinquency in mid century Britain. This would go on to be developed further as an Artscom scholarship funded PhD research project that was inspired by Stanley Cohen’s text Folk Devils and Moral Panics, culminating in a thesis entitled “An Oral History Investigation into Fashion Practices in British Motorcycle Youth Culture in the Period 1945 to 1966”. That abstract follows:

This is the first academic study to investigate the dress and consumption practices in British youth motorcycle subcultures in the post-war period through the collection of oral histories from motorcyclists active in the period 1945 to 1966. Interdisciplinary in nature, it incorporates and critiques existing subcultural and post-subcultural theories, and brings together unique interview testimony with visual material and material culture analysis to facilitate a new reading of a previously little studied subculture. Existing academic texts and popular, internal texts are used as sources, including illustrations and photography from the researcher’s archive of motorcycle magazines, books and advertising material from the 1910s to 1960s that have not previously been subjected to academic analysis. The thesis documents how semiotic meaning was created by young motorcyclists through the acquisition and modification of motorcycles, garments and accessories in the mid-century period, and the emergence of celebrated subcultural locations and structures in South East England. It documents how participants established subcultural identity and signified affiliation with others through practices of consumption, recording how these components of identity were combined with elements of riding practice to create a new and distinct subcultural entity within wider motorcycle practice. This is achieved by categorising motorcyclists and their motorcycles as hybrid entities according to dress practice, subcultural affiliation, motorcycle modification and riding behaviour. The study concludes with an investigation into the ways components of this British subcultural practice have been perpetuated and reinterpreted, both in online communities and through participation in revivalism events, existing in the latter alongside fashions and uniforms from the 1940s wartime period. The transformation of mid-20th century subcultural dress into benign luxury commodities in revival communities in the early 21st century is documented, as garments simultaneously lost both the functionality they provided to motorcyclists, and the social and cultural tension with which they were associated.

Throughout the MA and PhD program I frequently presented the findings of my research at a large number of academic symposia and conferences in the UK, including those held by the European Popular Culture Association in London, UK, and Turku, Finland.