A wonderful example of fashionable US Victorian day dress, composed of polonaise and trained skirt. Part 2 features the complete pattern.
I have the honor to own my great-grandmother’s 1875 wedding dress. The more I look closely at this heirloom, the more fascinating it is!
A wonderful example of fashionable Victorian day dress in America, composed of polonaise and trained skirt. Part 1: overview & skirt pattern.
An eye-opening combination of machine sewing and delicate hand stitching.
Bonus article from FR
A close look at an authentic Victorian dress, with many photos, construction and sewing details, and fashion plates of the time.
As a new costume enthusiast, you might be delighted with a particular Victorian pattern and sew it straight out of the envelope, just as it is. Experienced dressmakers might fall in love with an antique fashion plate, and recreate it to make something genuinely special.
But what if you want to make a gown that is not a direct copy of a fashion plate, or a pattern that dozens of people have already made? Suppose you want to design an original Victorian costume—something that no one's seen before, and yet which would be right at home on the pages of La Mode Illustrée, Godey's Home Journal, or Harper's Bazar?
If you've "been there, done that" and now want to make a truly original Victorian costume, read on!
We've gone through our links, pored over the bookshelves and searched for the best in books to help you create a masterpiece for the Natural Form Era 1876-1882.
We've got an awesome trilogy of ladies' tailoring books by Charles Hecklinger and his equally amazing trilogy of men's tailoring books.
Having trouble getting a smooth fit to a cuirass bodice or Princess dress? We've found period fitting guides with step-by-step pictures to guide you through the process. Want to know what options women had for corsets and petticoats? Check out a mail order catalog from 1883. And that's just the free stuff, not from a bookstore!
Marion's got all the books and resources you need to create an amazing ensemble for the Revolutionary period:
The Must Have books and the Nice-to-Haves;
A 1785 French fashion magazine with men's and women's dress, hat and wig fashions; and much more!
Knitted, embroidered, striped and painted: the Natural Form era had a diversity of stocking options for ladies.
Far beyond plain black or white, catalogs of the era carried fancy knitted stockings in gold, green and bright cardinal red zig zags, striped stockings in cardinal red, garnet, tan, grey and blue and embroidered cotton stockings in red, gold, black and white.
So get ready to shop for the perfect stockings, thread your embroidery needle or grab your knitting needles! We're diving into the realm of stockings and socks with fashion reports, catalogs from 1882, stocking embroidery diagrams and lots of knitting patterns for socks and stockings for all ages.
Last month I analyzed the skirt of a lingerie dress. This month I'll be looking at the associated blouse. In the Belle Époque literature the garment we're discussing goes by many names: waist, shirt-waist, lingerie waist, and lingerie blouse. I've chosen the term "lingerie blouse" because "blouse" is the only one of those terms that's still in use now for a vaguely similar garment.
Archive.org is an open digital library, without the international restrictions of Google Books. This month, we share with you a few of the great historical texts on a variety of subjects that we've found.
From 1820's fashion magazines to 1900's pattern drafting texts, to shoe making manuals and hairstyling guides, we've got a lot to keep you busy over the holiday season!
Analyzing, in exhaustive detail, the construction of a lingerie dress from about 1904.
Lingerie dresses and tailor-mades embody the dichotomies of the Belle Époque period. On one side, the lingerie dress is the essence of frilly ultra-femininity; contrast with it the equally popular severely tailored suit for the active, emancipated woman.
In this article, we dive into the finer points of a beautiful surviving piece of pure frou-frou.
Mary Dotson shares with us pictures of late 1890's wool tailored suit from her collection.
About ten years ago, I was approached by a vintage clothing dealer who though I might fit an 1890s dress.
Marion McNealy flips through her late 1890's fashion magazine collection and not only dates the suit to a specific season and year but finds the fashion plate that probably inspired it.
The era of Worth, Paquin and Doucet is long gone. But what was it like to be a wealth American woman traveling to Paris in the early 1900's, and visiting those houses to order a dress?
This month Marion shares excerpts from several Ladies' shopping guides to Paris where they discuss exactly what a lady should expect during a visit to one of the great houses, and what to beware of!
To the average American woman who visits Paris for the first time there is a glamour, surrounding the shops and the big dressmaking establishments.
She who would buy a French gown should first be sure that she knows how to wear one.
Right back at the genesis of YWU I wrote an article about what I called "Holy Grails".
I'm willing to bet that most of us reading this have such projects in mind. There's a book on your shelf that naturally falls open at a certain photograph; there's a bookmark in your web browser. But we never get around to trying - it's too impractical, too expensive, too difficult, just too much all around.
This year I've actually done one of these huge projects, when I recreated a vastly decorated Edwardian Worth gown (follow this link for a FREE slideshow of museum images), and I've got so much out of it that I'm going to use this article to pull you a little bit closer to tackling your own Grail. I'm going to tell you why it's worth trying such intimidating projects, and then show you how.
I've often been frustrated that there are wonderful Victorian patterns available (published in the period or drafted from extant dresses) but there is very little information on how to put the pieces together or on the other finishing details that go into making historical dress.
Here I'll address this gap by doing a photographic analysis of the construction techniques used in three Victorian evening bodices in my personal collection.
Due to the Single Pattern Project, I'm most interested in the elliptical style. Two of the bodices were either worn with elliptical skirts or with the early bustle style, the third was probably worn with the earlier circular hoop style.
I've often been frustrated that there are wonderful Victorian patterns available, but there is very little information on how to put the pieces together or the other finishing details that go into making a dress.
My goal with this article is to address this gap by doing a photographic analysis of the construction techniques used in three Victorian skirts in my personal collection. Due to the Single Pattern Project, I'm most interested in elliptical skirts, but I only have one in my collection. Therefore, I've chosen a skirt from the preceding Hoop era, and one from the following Early Bustle era to compare to the elliptical skirt.
While there are wonderful Victorian dress patterns available, either published in the period or drafted from extant dresses, there is very little information around on how to put the pieces together in a historically accurate way or complete the other finishing details that go into making a dress of this style.
If you're going to go for accuracy with your Single Pattern Project, Sunny Buchler redresses the balance for you this month with her photographic analysis and comparison of the construction techniques used in four 1860s bodices in her personal collection.
Nine pages and over a hundred large and detailed clickable images in this article alone will give you every minute detail you could ever want to know about constructing your bodice!
The Commons on Flickr is a collection of historic public domain photographs from a variety of institutions from around the globe, including the Library of Congress, National Galleries of Scotland and George Eastman House.
Marion McNealy shares some of her favorites from this collection from around the world.
Have fun finding favorites of your own and exploring this interesting look at the past!
This month, we talk to a master of accurate historical costume, German artist Mauritia Kirchner. Her portfolio features a vast selection of the most extraordinary historical reproductions, complete in every detail down to the exquisite hand embroidery and taking an average of six months to complete.
Mauritia agreed to talk to us about her work, her principles, her methods and her dream project.
This month we publish the runner up in our essay contest.
Transitional eras fascinate me. In times of rapid social and technological change, what people wear changes dramatically as fashion collides with reality.
One such era is the early 20th Century. The years ending 1914 were named La Belle Epoque as people looked back wistfully upon the era. The graceful long gowns, the carriages, the attentive servants, all faded into autumnal memory after the Great War.
This month, Loren Dearborn takes us aside and whispers in our ears about how to fake an 18th century quilted petticoat convincingly.
This month we feature a great research site: Wikimedia Commons. It's so much more than a place to host pictures for a Wikipedia entry!
We'll show you how to use the site, demonstrating its vast scope, giving you some in-roads and showing you where to start when you're looking for ideas or references. No longer will you need to stare at a blank search box, wondering where to begin!
This month, we feature the blog, EnglishCut as our website of the month. Hear a classically trained Savile Row tailor share some of the secrets and the everyday realities of this ancient profession, including a half hour video in which you can watch him sharpen his chalk and work with the fabric.
You may remember reading in January's blog that Katherine Caron-Greig was in Paris for the New Year, happily photographing some of the best paintings in the Louvre. Such was our jealousy that it seems only right to feature the Louvre as our Website of the Month for February!
I was once told how a woman vowed to visit every single work of art in the famous Paris museum; it took her five full days to see it all. The Musée du Louvre houses 35,000 works of art drawn from eight departments, displayed in over 60,000 square meters of exhibition space dedicated to the permanent collections. The website encourages the visitor to "explore the works on display, taking a thematic or cross-departmental approach," but on such a vast site, this can be daunting! To get you started, we've picked out a few highlights for you...
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