Victorian and Edwardian Fashion


Book Description

Bonnets, capes, caps, shawls, bodices, and crinolines as people actually wore them from 1840 to 1914. More than 200 photos depict aristocrats and members of the middle class as well as celebrities.




Victorian & Edwardian Fashions for Women, 1840 to 1919


Book Description

If you love the designs, fabrics, and sheer beauty of 19th and early 20th century women's fashions, this book will be your guide and time machine. It presents over 450 enchanting color photographs of modern-day models wearing the dresses, waists, undergarments, and accessories of this elegant era, including daywear, sportswear, and formalwear. Unusual items such as fancy dress, aesthetic garments, and reform styles are explained and illustrated. This book will help both novice and expert collectors accurately identify and date their collections by evaluating the silhouette, construction, style, and details of fashionable garments. Sound advice for maintaining, laundering, and repairing them is also provided, as is an updated price guide.




Fashions of the Old South Coloring Book


Book Description

Clothing worn by plantation society shortly before the beginning of the Civil War. This collection of 29 carefully researched illustrations captures the fine details of these garments, which include walking costumes, evening gowns, morning and afternoon dresses, and wedding apparel for women, as well as suits, vests, trousers, and handsome military uniforms.




Authentic Victorian Dressmaking Techniques


Book Description

Vintage guide offered turn-of-the-century seamstresses clear instructions for altering patterns and creating shirt-blouses, skirts, wedding gowns, coats, maternity wear, children's clothing, and other apparel.




Making Edwardian Costumes for Women


Book Description

Edwardian fashions for women were characterized by the S-shaped silhouette, embellished with lace, tucks, ruffles, tassels, frills and flounces. This essential book includes eleven detailed projects, which form a capsule collection of clothing and accessories that might have been worn by an Edwardian governess, a woman travelling on an ocean liner, a campaigning suffragette, or a wife overseeing a busy household in a large country house. It explains making sequences in full and advises in detail on how to give the garments a fine, authentic finish. Eleven detailed projects are included, based on the dress collections at Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove, and Worthing Museum and Art Gallery. Each project includes a detailed description of the original garment, with an accompanying illustration alongside photographs of the original pieces, and scaled patterns are included for all projects with a list of materials and equipment required. Includes step-by-step instructions with information about the original techniques used and close-up photographs of the making process, with further chapters on tools and equipment, fabrics, measurements and sizes, and how to wear Edwardian fashion with ideas on creating new outfits from the featured projects. Also includes advice on how to adapt garments to make them suitable for both wealthy, leisured women, and for their poorer counterparts. Aimed at costume makers, museums and re-enactors and beautifully illustrated with 200 colour photographs.




Godey's Fashions


Book Description

Superbly rendered illustrations, adapted from Godey's Lady's Book, a rare nineteenth-century fashion magazine, provide authentic views of evolving Victorian modes of apparel — from lace-edged necklines and elongated bodices to fitted bonnets and extravagant bustles. Thirty ready-to-color illustrations depict lavish dresses and gowns of velvet and damask; smart riding outfits trimmed with braid and gilt; an elegant cashmere shawl, children's outfits; as well as hair ornaments, footwear, and other accessories. A lovely collection that offers an authentic glimpse of what well-dressed ladies and youngsters of the Victorian era were wearing, this is a must-have for coloring book fans, costume designers, and cultural historians.




Jacobean and Early Bourbon Fashions


Book Description

For fashion enthusiasts and coloring book fans: handsome, accurate drawings of elegant apparel worn by royals and the wealthy, and the simple fare of the common folk in 17th-century France and England. Forty-five full-page illustrations depict figures wearing doublets and farthingales, exquisite lace collars, bucket-top boots, and other attire. Captions.




Regency Women's Dress


Book Description

The distinctive style of the Regency period is a source of endless fascination for fashion academics and historians, living historians, re-enactors and costume designers for stage and screen. Author and fashion historian Cassidy Percoco has delved into little-known museum hoards to create a stunning collection of 26 garments, many with clear provenance tied to a specific location, which have never before been published and never – or very rarely – displayed. Most of the garments have an aspect in their construction that has not been previously documented, from a style of skirt trim to the method of gown closure. This practical guide begins with a general history of the early 19th-century women's dress. This is followed by 26 patterns of gowns, spencers, chemises, and corsets, each with an illustration of the finished piece and description of its construction. This must-have guide is an essential reference for anyone interested in the fashions or the history of the period, or for anyone wishing to recreate their own beautiful Regency clothing.




Dress Culture in Late Victorian Women's Fiction


Book Description

In her immensely readable and richly documented book, Christine Bayles Kortsch asks us to shift our understanding of late Victorian literary culture by examining its inextricable relationship with the material culture of dress and sewing. Even as the Education Acts of 1870, 1880, and 1891 extended the privilege of print literacy to greater numbers of the populace, stitching samplers continued to be a way of acculturating girls in both print literacy and what Kortsch terms "dress culture." Kortsch explores nineteenth-century women's education, sewing and needlework, mainstream fashion, alternative dress movements, working-class labor in the textile industry, and forms of social activism, showing how dual literacy in dress and print cultures linked women writers with their readers. Focusing on Victorian novels written between 1870 and 1900, Kortsch examines fiction by writers such as Olive Schreiner, Ella Hepworth Dixon, Margaret Oliphant, Sarah Grand, and Gertrude Dix, with attention to influential predecessors like Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot. Periodicals, with their juxtaposition of journalism, fiction, and articles on dress and sewing are particularly fertile sites for exploring the close linkages between print and dress cultures. Informed by her examinations of costume collections in British and American museums, Kortsch's book broadens our view of New Woman fiction and its relationship both to dress culture and to contemporary women's fiction.




Lady Helena Investigates


Book Description

A reluctant lady sleuth finds she's investigating her own family. 1881, Sussex. With a drowned husband—the second love lost—an overbearing family, no longed-for child, and the responsibility of a huge baroque mansion, it's not surprising Lady Helena Whitcombe is overwhelmed. When attractive, mysterious, French physician Armand Fortier disturbs her first weeks of mourning with his theory of murder, Helena's reluctant and ineffective attempts at investigation are hardly life-changing—until the resulting revival in her long-abandoned herbalist studies bring her into confrontation with her past and her family's. Can Lady Helena survive bereavement the second time around? Can she stand up to her six siblings' assumption of the right to control her new life as a widow? And what role will Fortier—who, as a physician, is a most unsuitable companion for an earl's daughter—play in her investigations? Every family has its secrets. The Scott-De Quincy family has more than most.