Nineteenth Century Womens Fashion

A glorious companion volume to Historical Fashion in Detail- The 17th and 18th Centuries and Modern Fashion in Detail, this book captures the opulence and variety of nineteenth-century fashion through an authoritative text, exquisite colour photography and line drawings of the complete garments. From the delicate embroidery on neoclassical gowns to the vibrant colours of crinolines and the elegant tailoring of men's coats, the richness of the period is revealed in breathtaking detail. The garments showcased here, drawn from the V&A Museum's world famous collection, were at the height of fashion in their time. They display a remarkable range of colours, materials and construction details- from the intricate boning on women's corsets to the patterned silk of men's waistcoats. Seen in close-up for the first time and further illuminated by detailed commentary and line drawings that show the ingenuity of the underlying construction, these carefully chosen garments illustrate some of the major themes of nineteenth-century dress.

Follow high-style couture trends over a 100-year period from 1800 to 1900, as illustrated in 374 color photographs of original, hand-colored fashion plates from the author's private collection. The 11 chapters (organized by decade) include a brief survey of the subtle changes in clothing design through each decade and a social history of the times. Follow the whims of fashion on this promenade through the 1800s, when high-society women sported beribboned toques and turbans and crinolines, capes, and extravagant sleeves. Based mostly on original French artwork, the fashion plates, which appeared in magazines of the day, also document fashion illustration as an evolving art form, making this book an invaluable resource for historians, scholars, theater costume designers, artists, and fashion enthusiasts.

De ontwikkeling van de maatschappelijke positie van de Engelse vrouw in de negentiende eeuw, inclusief beschrijvingen van kledingstijlen en -stukken en de redenen hiervoor.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, rural New England society underwent a radical transformation as the traditional household economy gave way to an encroaching market culture. Drawing on a wide array of diaries, letters, and published writings by women in this society, Catherine E. Kelly describes their attempts to make sense of the changes in their world by elaborating values connected to rural life. In her hands, the narratives reveal the dramatic ways female lives were reshaped during the antebellum period and the women's own contribution to those developments. Equally important, she demonstrates how these writings afford a fuller understanding of the capitalist transformation of the countryside and the origins of the Northern middle class. Provincial women exalted rural life for its republican simplicity while condemning that of the city for its aristocratic pretension. The idyllic nature of the former was ascribed to the financial independence that the household economy had long provided those in the farming community. Kelly examines how the juxtaposition of rural virtue to urban vice served as a cautionary defense against the new realities of the capitalist market society. She finds that women responded to the transition to capitalism by upholding a set of values which point toward the creation of a provincial bourgeoisie.

The book traces the evolution of men's, women's and children's clothes throughout the 19th century, during which sweeping social changes were reflected in contemporary fashions.

“Meticulously researched and beautifully illustrated . . . indispensable to anyone interested in the era.” —Tasha Alexander, New York Times–bestselling author of the Lady Emily series What did a Victorian lady wear for a walk in the park? How did she style her hair for an evening at the theater? And what products might she have used to soothe a sunburn or treat an unsightly blemish? USA Today-bestselling author Mimi Matthews answers these questions and more as she takes readers on a decade-by-decade journey through Victorian fashion and beauty history. Women’s clothing changed dramatically during the course of the Victorian era. Necklines rose, waistlines dropped, and Gothic severity gave way to flounces and frills. Sleeves ballooned up and skirts billowed out. The crinoline morphed into the bustle and steam-molded corsets cinched women’s waists ever tighter. As fashion evolved, so too did trends in ladies’ hair care and cosmetics. An era which began by prizing natural, barefaced beauty ended with women purchasing lip and cheek rouge, false hairpieces and pomades, and fashionable perfumes. Using research from nineteenth-century beauty books, fashion magazines, and lady’s journals, the author of the Parish Orphans of Devon series brings Victorian fashion into modern day focus—and offers a glimpse of the social issues that influenced women’s clothing and the outrage that was a frequent response to those bold females who used fashion and beauty to assert their individuality and independence. “An elegant resource that I will be reaching for again and again.”—Deanna Raybourn, New York Times-bestselling author of the Veronica Speedwell novels

By the middle of the century, men were prompted to disdain the decadent and gaudy colors of the pre-Revolutionary period and wear unrelievedly black frock coats suitable to the manly and serious world of commerce. Their wives and daughters, on the other hand, adorned themselves in bright colors and often uncomfortable and impractical laces and petticoats, to signal the status of their family.

Like the figure of the governess, the seamstress occupied a unique place in the history of the nineteenth century, appearing frequently in debates about women's work and education, and the condition of the working classes generally in the rapidly changing capitalist marketplace. Like the governess, the figure of the needlewoman is ubiquitous in art, fiction and journalism in the nineteenth century. The fifteen articles in this book address the seamstress's appearance as a 'real' figure in the changing economies of nineteenth-century Britain, America, and France, and as an important cultural icon in the art and literature of the period. They treat the many different types of needlewomen in the nineteenth century-from skilled milliners and dressmakers, some of whom owned their own businesses selling merchandise to other women (forming a unique 'female economy') to women who, through reduced circumstances, were forced into the lowest end of paid needlework, sewing clothing at home for starvation wages-like the impoverished shirt-maker in the famous Victorian poem by Thomas Hood, 'The Song of the Shirt.' This volume assembles the work of leading American, British and Canadian scholars from many different fields, including art history, literary criticism, gender studies, labor history, business history, and economic history to draw together recent scholarship on needlewomen from a variety of different disciplines and methodologies. Famine and Fashion will therefore appeal to anyone studying images of work in the nineteenth century, popular and canonical nineteenth-century literature, the history of women's work, the history of sweated labor, the origins of the ready-made clothing industry and early feminism.

In nineteenth-century Europe and the United States, fashion—once the province of the well-to-do—began to make its way across class lines. At once a democratizing influence and a means of maintaining distinctions, gaps in time remained between what the upper classes wore and what the lower classes later copied. And toward the end of the century, style also moved from the streets to the parlor. The third in a four-part series charting the social, cultural, and political expression of clothing, dress, and accessories, Fashioning the Nineteenth Century focuses on this transformative period in an effort to show how certain items of apparel acquired the status of fashion and how fashion shifted from the realm of the elites into the emerging middle and working classes—and back. The contributors to this volume are leading scholars from France, Italy, and the United States, as well as a practicing psychoanalyst and artists working in fashion and with textiles. Whether considering girls’ school uniforms in provincial Italy, widows’ mourning caps in Victorian novels, Charlie’s varying dress in Kate Chopin’s eponymous story, or the language of clothing in Henry James, the essays reveal how changes in ideals of the body and its adornment, in classes and nations, created what we now understand to be the imperatives of fashion. Contributors: Dagni Bredesen, Eastern Illinois U; Carmela Covato, U of Rome Three; Agnès Derail-Imbert, École Normale Supérieure/VALE U of Paris, Sorbonne; Clair Hughes, International Christian University of Tokyo; Bianca Iaccarino Idelson; Beryl Korot; Anna Masotti; Bruno Monfort, Université of Paris, Ouest Nanterre La Défense; Giuseppe Nori, U of Macerata, Italy; Marta Savini, U of Rome Three; Anna Scacchi, U of Padua; Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, U of Michigan.