I love fashions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and fun fact: men were every bit as into fashion, if not more so, than were women. In the days when an outfit could cost as much as a house, one… Read More
I just stumbled across a fascinating book called The Woman and The Car: A Chatty Little Handbook for all Women Who Motor or Who Want to Motor by Dorothy Levitt, written in 1909 (and available on Google Books here).
It’s… Read More
How have I not yet done a blog about codpieces?
Codpieces are among the more, shall we say, curious fashions of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—and that’s saying something, because there were some crazy fashions during this time. They were… Read More
In the course of doing some image research I stumbled across this 1542 German how-to book on Athletic Arts, called Paulus Hector Mair’s De Arte Athletica.
I tried to translate some of the German descriptions with Google Translate but mostly… Read More
Not long ago, as we were driving to New York, this guy passed us on the highway.
It reminded me of fashions people used to wear when autos first came out. I have blogged before about how the first models… Read More
Last month when I was in Paris my husband and I spotted a statue in a small park, and long before we were close enough to read the inscription I said, “That is so the 1830s.” Here’s the statue. In… Read More
Nightcaps—knitted wool or silk stocking caps– were worn from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century, until the arrival of central heating. Before the fourteenth century, people probably slept naked, according to Elizabeth Ewing in Dress and Undress: A History of… Read More
Here’s Marie Antoinette in the dress she wore for her coronation in 1775:
Her outfit is, of course, an extreme example of outlandish fashion, but this was the period of French fashion history characterized by hoops, heavy cosmetics, false hair,… Read More
On Friday I wrote about some bizarre (to us) eighteenth-century children’s fashions. What became the dominant fashion for kids of the nineteenth century? Sailor suits. To look at photos and portraits of kids from that century, you’d be forgiven for… Read More
I love the Minoans. I love their art, their fashions, their celebration of color, and their obvious joie-de-vivre, or whatever they would have called it. I thought it appropriate to blog about them during this time of year when the… Read More
William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616) signed his name with many different spellings, including “Willm Shaksp,” “William Shakespe,” “Wm Shakspe,” “William Shakspere,” ”Willm Shakspere,” and “William Shakspeare.”