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Historical Fashion - Blog Posts
Fashion change.
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Something like this would be so colossally helpful. I'm sick and tired of trying to research specific clothing from any given culture and being met with either racist stereotypical costumes worn by yt people or ai generated garbage nonsense, and trying to be hyper specific with searches yields fuck all. Like I generally just cannot trust the legitimacy of most search results at this point. It's extremely frustrating. If there are good resources for this then they're buried deep under all the other bullshit, and idk where to start looking.
Ball gown, France, ca. 1865. Kobe Fashion Museum
https://www.gcv.org/historic-pattern-database/
This museum just posted a whole bunch of corset patterns for free from their collection!
CLOAKCLOAKCLOAKCLOAK
Does anyone want to see the presentation I made on what historical fashion trends we should bring back and which should burn in hell I made for a PowerPoint party?
ab. 1893 Scrap album fancy dress by Madame Gough, London (court dressmaker), Sarah Ann Gough (designer)
silk, cotton, linen, paper, glue, metal (fastening), wood, leather, baleen, wax, paint
(National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne)
Cashmere Cape, ca. 1912
Reville & Rossiter Ltd.
via Vintage Martini
HEY ARTISTS!
Do you design a lot of characters living in not-modern eras and you’re tired of combing through google for the perfect outfit references? Well I got good news for you kiddo, this website has you covered! Originally @modmad made a post about it, but her link stopped working and I managed to fix it, so here’s a new post. Basically, this is a costume rental website for plays and stage shows and what not, they have outfits for several different decades from medieval to the 1980s. LOOK AT THIS SELECTION:
OPEN ANY CATEGORY AND OH LORDY–
There’s a lot of really specific stuff in here, I design a lot of 1930s characters for my ask blog and with more chapters on the way for the game it belongs to I’m gonna be designing more, and this website is going to be an invaluable reference. I hope this can be useful to my other fellow artists as well! :)
(via "Nelly, Are You Aromatic Lover? Do You Love Flowers? This Beautiful Design For You " Mouse Pad for Sale by RAZ1995)
Gentlemen’s Regency Era Portraits
Rococo Cinderella for my illustration class
Edwardian cats for my illustration class
Evening jacket, 1937, by Elsa Schiaparelli
A fine and important Elsa Schiaparelli couture Zodiac jacket, the Astrology Collection, Winter, 1938-39, Paris. This is arguably one of the most beautiful of all Schiaparelli's creations with its glittering embroidery, shimmering star-shaped beads and rhinestones set against a midnight blue velvet background. Marlene Dietrich was photographed in her Beverly Hills residence in 1938 wearing the zodiac ensemble with matching dress. Schiap was fascinated by the night sky that she used to view as a child through her uncle's telescope - the renowned astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, director of the Brera Observatory in Milan. He inspired in her a lifelong fascination with the celestial realm. He commented that the moles on her cheeks reminded him of the Big Dipper which she adopted as her 'lucky star', incorporating it into printed fabrics, the fabric lining her salon, her own personal jewellery as well as on this magnificent jacket. Schiaparelli's press agent Hortense MacDonald stated that the Astrology collection was defined by Euclid's famous geometric treatise - 'Elements'.
The "Arlesienne" evening dress by the House of Worth (ca. 1912-13)
Worn by Queen Maud of Norway
They say fake it until you make it so I tried to make a real book cover for once. With this illustration, inspired by 'The Familiar' by Leigh Bardugo, I was trying to capture the allure of the book's world where history and fantasy intertwine. With ok results, I think lol
https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/egart/the-familiar/
Pride Flags Colorpicked from This Image
submitted by @edwardian-girl-next-door 🩷💛
Postcard of a very refined young man reading a letter with the precise degree of drama appropriate to the task, c. 1920s
Terror brainworms: I had to make a welsh-wig.
I decided not to do the 'curls' as they are on the show because they absolutely *eat* yarn and I didn't have that much left of this grey (that matches my Terror-inspired fingerless gloves). I think these garter-stitched double-ups will be just as effective as curls or bobbles would be for the purpose of a welsh-wig (they stop water dripping down the back of your coat).
I made them by knitting the current row of stitches together with picked up stitches from a row 7 rows previous (basically - pick up a stitch from row 7 rows behind, knit it together with current stitch, pick up new stitch...and so on).
This is in dk-weight (8ply) 100% wool at 6 stitches per inch, like my gloves (not historical as it's not fine enough, but yarn I had on hand, plus some close-but-not-that-close darker yarn when I ran out, which I think they definitely would do in the 1840s). I feel like one (at least) of the Terror boys would have mended their wig with some other yarn!
I've put this on Eric, a stuffed hippo, who is why my tumblr is called 'hippocrafty' - the original plan was for Eric to model my crafts. I'm a) cursed to live in a warm & fairly dry climate & b) have long hair, so I won't get much use out of a welsh-wig for its original purpose, but it's a warm comfy beanie with a bit more to keep my neck & ears warm when I have my hair up so I'm very happy with it.
Jules Joseph Lefebvre (1836 – 1911)
art details of headpiece jewelry
This project is finally finished! I started this dress back in July '24, thinking that I had plenty of time to finish it before my trip to Dickens on the Strand in December. Of course, I grossly underestimated my ability to get distracted, so I was, as is tradition, finishing this dress up in the hotel room the first night of the event. But hey, at least it was finished!
Things started with the skirt, which was based off several designs I kept seeing in 1850s fashion plates that have tiered skirts with ruffles on them. I had always slated that amazing plaid fabric for something mid-Victorian, and the ruffles seemed like a good way to accent such a busy fabric, and to help keep fabric usage down, as I only had 9 yards of the plaid.
The ruffles were attached to a plain black panel, which was then attached to a plaid panel, which was gathered onto the skirt base, which was also made of plain black taffeta.
I hadn't decided on a bodice design when I first started, and when it came time to make it I was definitely in a time crunch, so it's pretty much a straight make of Truly Victorian's TV440. The front closes with hooks and thread bars, but I ended up making it slightly too small, which led to gapping over the bust. I didn't have time to fully address this before the event, so I made a fichu in black taffeta that I could wear to cover it.
To make the fishu, I traced the back bodice pattern onto the fabric, then just drew in the tails in chalk. I mocked it up in cotton first, and then cut it out in taffeta. If I were to do it again, I would remember to put the taffeta on the bias so it would stretch over my bust correctly. The taffeta was also super slippery on top of the bodice, which was also taffeta, so even though I intended to wear it like a sontag, as seen above, I ended up wearing it with the tails down in front.
The undersleeves were finished in the hotel room just before my first event. You can't really see them in any of the pictures, but they definitely helped make the outfit feel complete, and I didn't have my naked forearms flapping around for all the world to see!
There's a much more in-depth writeup on my main costuming blog, including a lot of skirt math!
I do want to note that the whole "women are allowed to dress masculine and wear trousers" thing needs to be viewed in its historical context:
People fought for generations to be allowed to dress that way. They fought hard to be allowed to wear pants. Blue jeans were a symbol of feminist revolution. Women were barred from workplaces and schools for wearing them.
This is not some a natural fact that women dressing masculine is less shocking and humiliating. That normalization was fought for and hard-won.
And yet so many people erase the struggles of those people who fought to make that happen and pretend that it's just normal and natural that people don't see women "dressed like men" as ridiculous.
The Marriage of Figaro has what's called a "breeches role" which is a woman wearing men's clothes playing am ale role. This was done partly due to the vocal range requirements, but in many cases it was done comedically. It was risque and sexualized or comic relief that a woman was dressed as a man.
Anti-suffragette posters mock women wearing pants - well they were bloomers and split skirts back then - and mocking more masculine cut styles of clothes. This was meant to portray this as ridiculous.
They mocked the "new woman" in Weimar Germany, lamenting that they were too masculine.
This is a political cartoon from the 1920s depicting a woman in masculine dress deciding which bathroom to use:
Sorry but you're erasing these struggles and flattening history when you say this shit.
Women were killed and institutionalized in the struggle to make this happen. It really fucking bothers me the way it's framed as "people just don't find it as weird when women dress masculine."
Yes they fucking did. Until women and transmasculine people fought for their right to wear what they want. It's normalized because people struggled to normalize it.
And it's not normal everywhere. There are many countries where it's still illegal for women to wear pants. Sudan, Saudi Arabia.
Even in the US, it's forbidden and considered ridiculous in groups like the FLDS, the Amish, and the Hutterites.
We are flattening and erasing the struggles of women when we say these things. I know we're trying to build theory here but you can't build solid theory on a foundation of lies.