fashion history – Cannonball Read 17

Work Reading: Fashion Edition

Dressed for the Photographer: Ordinary Americans and Fashion, 1840-1900 by Joan Severa

Vintage Fashion: Collecting and Wearing Designer Classics, 1900-1990 by Emma Baxter-Wright

March 7, 2021 by faintingviolet Leave a Comment

I’ve been preparing at work for a program discussing women’s fashion 1830 – 1930 for International Women’s Day/Women’s History month. For me it has been an excuse to pull some pieces out of storage and get them new photographs and update their records, as well as just working on something I find interesting. I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the past decade getting conversant on the changing women’s silhouette during that century of time (which is our primary interpretive period) and honestly – […]

It’s what makes the hatters mad…

Killer Style: How Fashion Has Injured, Maimed, and Murdered Through History by Alison Matthews David, Serah Marie McMahon

August 26, 2019 by cosbrarian Leave a Comment

#CBR11Bingo – History/Schmistory! Killer Style is a quick read for anyone interested in fashion history. It is geared towards tweens and teens, but the information is great for older readers too. The book accounts different ways that clothes have been dangerous to people. The authors lean less on freak accidents and more on how industrialization and the clothing construction industry have killed people in the making of clothes. (We do get our fair share of freak accidents, though.) We get information from the ways poisonous […]

What the Victorians Didn’t Want You to Know

July 17, 2017 by Ale Leave a Comment

Many thanks to faintingviolet for passing off Unmentionable to me. It was an excellent compliment to Bound to Please, and reading the two together helped create a uniquely full picture for what life was like for the middle-class Victorian woman. It was bad. Plain and simple. While it can be argued that pestilence, disease, a lack of flush toilets, and leeches being the closest thing to an antibiotic made life tough for everyone, these books shed an undoubted truth that however difficult it was for the males in society, […]

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