Costumes Society Of America Dress

If clothes make the man, who makes the clothes―and the trends they inspire? Fashion historian Daniel Delis Hill takes readers on a fascinatingly detailed tour of America’s changing sartorial landscape, tracing menswear from the tailors and “slop shops” of the early nineteenth century to Calvins, tattoos, and the Armani tux. Each chronological section covers the full range of men's clothing by category, including suits and evening wear, outerwear, sportswear, accessories, sleepwear, swimw... [Read More]

Form-fitting dresses, silk veils, earrings, furs, high-heeled shoes, make-up, and dyed, flowing hair. It is difficult for a contemporary person to reconcile these elegant clothes and accessories with the image of cloistered nuns. For many of the some thousand nuns in early modern Venice, however, these fashions were the norm. Often locked in convents without any religious calling―simply to save their parents the expense of their dowry―these involuntary nuns relied on the symbolic meaning of... [Read More]

Managing Costume Collections offers systematic approaches to organization, accessibility, record keeping, safety, and a host of other stewardship concerns related to managing costume collections of every type. Conceived to address needs long identified by the Costume Society of America, this guide is written for a broad spectrum of collection managers at museums, historical societies and houses, university theaters and study collections, and company archives, as well as for vintage dealers, priv... [Read More]

For anyone who has ever loved a Jane Austen novel, a warm and witty look at the passionate, thriving world of Austen fandomThey walk among us in their bonnets and Empire-waist gowns, clutching their souvenir tote bags and battered paperbacks: the Janeites, Jane Austen’s legion of devoted fans. Who are these obsessed admirers, whose passion has transformed Austen from classic novelist to pop-culture phenomenon? Deborah Yaffe, journalist and Janeite, sets out to answer this question, exploring t... [Read More]

Between 1678 and 1710, Parisian presses printed hundreds of images of elegantly attired men and women dressed in the latest mode, and posed to display every detail of their clothing and accessories. Long used to illustrate dress of the period, these fashion prints have been taken at face value and used uncritically. Drawing on perspectives from art history, costume history, French literature, museum conservation and theatrical costuming, the essays in this volume explore what the prints represen... [Read More]

          This unique book, by a man who has chosen to "dress plain," describes the history and use of hats, bonnets, dresses, overcoats, and other articles of clothing used by the various religious groups who wear plain garb. This is the first comprehensive book about why more than 150,000 persons in North America wear plain clothes for religious reasons. Who are the various people who dress plain? Where do they live? Why do they do it? Where did the plain pattern come from? Don't they... [Read More]

The intersection of women’s fashion and big business in the US has always been acompelling study across social strata. The ready-to-wear apparel industry thrives on creating a presumably original design that is then interpreted into copies. Called design piracy by some and the knock-off process by most in the industry, copying fashion designs is a firmly embedded business strategy that predates even the advent of women’s ready-to-wear in the late nineteenth century. Historically, some indust... [Read More]

Tens of thousands of shoemakers worked in eighteenth-century Paris and London, but if any wrote about their trade before M. de Garsault in his 1767 Art du cordonnier, nothing survives. Surprisingly little scholarship has been published since, until this richly contextualized translation. Informing this edition are D. A. Saguto’s extensive notes and incisive examinations of eighteenth-century German and Italian sources as well as later French editions of Garsault’s work. The result is an eleg... [Read More]

Clothing is the most personal expression of a culture. Objects of dress and adornment reveal so much about the individuals who wore them and the cultures and times in which they lived. History, art, technology, psychology, culture, social systems, customs―all are reflected in people’s clothing.Countless treasures exist in clothing and textile collections across the U.S., but until now no comprehensive directory to the collections was 04 Activeable. Clothing and Textile Collections in the Uni... [Read More]

Flip on the entertainment news, open an issue of a popular magazine, or step into any department store—and you’ll appreciate the impact of the multibillion-dollar fashion industry on American culture. Yet its origins in the nineteenth-century “rag trade” of Jewish tailors, cutters, pressers, peddlers, and shopkeepers have yet to be fully explored. In this copiously illustrated volume, scholars from varied backgrounds consider the role of American Jews in creating, developing, and further... [Read More]