What People Wore When combines the studies of two classic nineteenth-century illustrators Auguste Racinet and Friedrich Hottenroth for the first time. Their works are presented first by chronology and then by subject, so that illustrators, historians, and students alike can choose to follow the path of fashion through the centuries, or study in detail the contrasting styles of individual clothing and accessories. Silhouettes reveal the shape of style through the ages, detailed cross-references draw attention to recurring motifs, and navigation bars help the researcher to travel the complex chronology of costume.With authoritative narrative from leading experts in the history of costume, extraordinary contemporary quotes that reveal the impact of style in its day, detailed annotation, and an extensive glossary, the book provides a magnificent study of the rich vocabulary of style through the ages.

At the turn of the century, ladies of privilege could easily afford their own dressmakers, and even middle-class housewives occasionally employed competent seamstresses. But many women did their own sewing, often relying on Dressmaking, Up to Date, a how-to book published by the Butterick Publishing Company. First published in 1905 and widely considered the first modern American sewing book, this extremely rare volume is published here complete and unabridged.This Butterick manual provides clear and concise instructions for altering patterns, hand-sewing stitches, and creating shirt-blouses, skirts, wedding and evening gowns, coats, jackets, maternity wear, undergarments, bathrobes, children's clothing, and many other articles of apparel. Today's costume historians and sewing enthusiasts will find fascinating instruction in such long-lost arts as boning a bodice perfectly, creating skirt sweepers and bust enhancers, concealing hooks and eyes, and other vintage dressmaking techniques.An indispensable archive of information on late-Victorian and turn-of-the-century clothing, this volume will be of immense interest to anyone fascinated by the fashion and costume of the period. It will... [Read More]

Queen Alexandra used clothes to fashion images of herself as a wife, a mother and a royal: a woman who both led Britain alongside her husband Edward VII and lived her life through fashion. Inside the Royal Wardrobeoverturns the popular portrait of a vapid and neglected queen, examining the surviving garments of Alexandra, Princess of Wales – who later became Queen Consort – to unlock a rich tapestry of royal dress and society in the second half of the 19th century.More than 130 extraordinary garments from Alexandra’s wardrobe survive, from sumptuous court dress and politicised fancy dress to mourning attire and elegant coronation gowns, and can be found in various collections around the world, from London, Oslo and Denmark to New York, Toronto and Tokyo. Curator and fashion scholar Kate Strasdin places these garments at the heart of this in-depth study, examining their relationships to issues such as body politics, power, celebrity, social identity and performance, and interpreting Alexandra’s world from the objects out. Adopting an object-based methodology, the book features a range of original sources from letters, travel journals and newspaper editorials, to wardrobe acc... [Read More]

After the Civil War the upper middle class in America expanded and became increasingly style-conscious. Visiting European royalty as well as American women returning from the International Exhibition in Paris in 1867 stimulated fashion awareness — and it was in this climate that the magazine Harper's Bazar flowered. Dedicated to being "A repository of Fashion, Pleasure, and Instruction," it brought to American women inside glimpses of the very latest European and American fashions, all in carefully detailed engravings. It was much the finest source for high fashion for this period.This book consists of the finest illustrations from Harper's Bazar between the years 1867 and 1898, the period of its peak importance. These illustrations not only show you what apparel appealed to our Victorian ancestors, but give you an idea of the evolutionary nature of fashion as well. You will see bustles come and go, natural forms become the vogue only to be superseded by the constricting hourglass figure. Each look is illustrated with a number of different garments. There are gowns for the morning hours, dinner dresses, sporting costumes, traveling clothes and apparel for special occasions: weddi... [Read More]

The first illustrated monograph dedicated to the history of the House of Worth, the world’s pioneering haute couture labelArriving in Paris in 1845, at the age of twenty and with only a few francs in his pocket, Charles Frederick Worth would go on to build the most prominent, innovative, and successful fashion house of the century. He was inspired by a love of fine art, luxurious fabrics, and his vision of the female ideal, and was the first to set out to dictate new styles and silhouettes to his elite clientele― not the other way around. He hosted them in his rue de la Paix salons, which included groundbreaking sportswear and maternity departments as well as silk, velvet, and brocade rooms, and a special salon with closed shutters and gas lighting designed to allow clients to try on ball gowns in lighting conditions precisely matched to those of the event at which they would be worn.Organized chronologically and illustrated with striking ensembles, paintings, and documents sourced from both private family archives and the best fashion collections from museums around the world, The House of Worth is an inspiring tribute to the house that started it all. 500+ illustrations in co... [Read More]

From the winner of the Booker Prize: A ravishing book that opens a window into the lives, designs, and passions of Mariano Fortuny and William Morris, two remarkable artists who themselves are passions of the writer A. S. Byatt. Born a generation apart in the mid-1800s, Fortuny and Morris were seeming opposites: Fortuny a Spanish aristocrat thrilled by the sun-baked cultures of Crete and Knossos; Morris a member of the British bourgeoisie, enthralled by Nordic myths. Through their revolutionary inventions and textiles, both men inspired a new variety of art that is as striking today as when it was first conceived. In this elegant meditation, Byatt traces their genius right to the source.Fortuny’s Palazzo Pesaro Orfei in Venice is a warren of dark spaces imbued with the rich hues of Asia. In his attic workshop, Fortuny created intricate designs from glowing silks and velvets; in the palazzo he found “happiness in a glittering cavern” alongside the French model who became his wife and collaborator, including on the famous “Delphos” dress—a flowing, pleated gown that evoked the era of classical Greece. Morris’s Red House outside London, with its Gothic turrets and secr... [Read More]

Offering a unique anthology of primary texts, this sourcebook opens a window on the writing that shaped and mirrored Victorian fashion, taking us from corsets to crinolines, dandies to decadent 'New Women'. A user-friendly collection that provides a solid grounding in the fashion history of the nineteenth century, it brings together for the first time sources that trace the evolution of dress and the social, cultural and political discourses that influenced it.Featuring seminal writings by authors and commentators such as Oscar Wilde, Thorstein Veblen and Sarah Stickney Ellis, plus satirical cartoons, illustrations and fashion plates from key sources such as Punch magazine, it combines primary texts and illustrations with accessible explanatory notes to offer a wide-ranging overview of the period for both students and researchers. Each section opens with an introduction that examines the major trends in Victorian clothing – and the material, economic, scientific and cultural forces driving those trends – situating the texts in the pressing social anxieties and pleasures of the time. Exploring both menswear and womenswear, and key topics such as corsetry, dress reform and mourni... [Read More]

Every generation can recall and identify with the fashion icons and idols of their era. The crinoline-caged Victorian female, the Gibson girl, and the grunge-layered youth of the 1990s all reflect the influences and extremes of their life and times. The start of the 19th century marks the dawn of the designer, a sartorial influence that became a star-studded industry. Fashion: A Visual History charts those points in time when distinctive styles that began as extravagances of the very rich permeated through well-dressed society until a cut of cloth or choice of accessory defined fashion. This elegantl- dressed volume asseses the contribution of such innovative players as Worth, Chanel, Dior, Saint Laurent, Klein, Westwood, and Gaultier, as well as the effects of stage, sceren, music, dance, and sports celebriries on our ever-changing sense of fashion. Each spread focuses on a definitive item--be it bowler hat or little black dress, stiletto or caftan--or identifies key shifts in fashion that reflect excess, liberation, austerity, nostalgia, and technology, displaying it in contemporary images ranging from paintings and illustrated fashion plates to cartoons and photographs. Evocativ... [Read More]

Quilts and Color presents more than 60 graphically bold American quilts from the Pilgrim/Roy Collection, one of the finest and largest collections of quilts in the world. Influenced by twentieth-century art developments such as Abstraction, Op art and the Color Field movement, Paul Pilgrim and Gerald Roy were among the first to appreciate quilts as more than simply decorative bedcovers, women’s fancy work or symbols of a rustic past. Reproduced brilliantly and arranged by ideas based in color theory--Vibrations, Mixtures, Gradations, Harmonies, Contrasts, Variations and Optical Illusions--each quilt in this book is celebrated as a unique work of art. The accompanying text also sheds light on the social and cultural history of the quilts and the practices and aspirations of their mostly anonymous makers, who created such works of enduring beauty and arresting visual impact. Quilts and Color accompanies an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

What People Wore When: A Complete Illustrated History of Costume from Ancient Times to the Nineteenth Century for Every Level of

"This Dover edition, first published in 2004, is a selection of plates from the work originally published by A. Zwemmer, Ltd., London, in 1955, under the title A pictorial history of costume: a survey of all periods and peoples from antiquity to modern times including national costume in Europe and non-European countries. This edition contains all the plates that appear on pages 1 through 126 of the original edition"--T.p.

Albert Michelson's Harmonic Analyzer celebrates a nineteenth century mechanical calculator that performed Fourier analysis by using gears, springs and levers to calculate with sines and cosines-an astonishing feat in an age before electronic computers. One hundred and fifty color photos reveal the analyzer's beauty though full-page spreads, lush close-ups of its components, and archival photos of other Michelson-inspired analyzers. The book includes sample output from the machine and a reproduction of an 1898 journal article by Michelson, which first detailed the analyzer. The book is the official companion volume to the popular YouTube video series created by the