Now that the jeans and T shirts plague has reached our fancy restaurants, cocktail parties, and nightclubs, it seems as though noone except cares about dressing up anymore. You can find chic, ‘well made’ frocks, and afford them, and identical forgotten tidbits of couturiers past.I really value accessibility, says WayneGuite, and making fashion history available to everyone. On the blog, it’s for the general public, in my job I get to share it with students.
People connect with fashion history as long as clothes are very tangible everyone wears them.
‘middle class’ women could consume, the economy was great.
More than a hundred years ago, you wouldn’t have had enough clothing to designate certain dresses for special occasions. Moving into the 1910s and ’20s, we started to see major upward mobility. Now please pay attention. With more ready made clothing, fashion production became easier and cheaper. Of course, the literal foundation of the garment is of much lower quality, not only are the rhinestones and fabrics cheaper today. Have you heard of something like that before? You can not see corsetry built into a dress anymore, unless you’re buying expensive formalwear. Nevertheless, socialite Betsy von Furstenberg and friends getting dressed in a Look magazine article from When the strapless dress first became popular, its structural foundation was much stronger compared to modern dresses of stretch fabric. Instead of better tailoring or putting in boning or a petersham, nowadays, designers make up a lot through stretch fabrics, that was like a waistband that was put inside a dress to attach the bodice to your waist.
While meaning they weren’t being held up at the bust it was the woman’s waist and her hips that held up the dress, most strapless dresses in the 1950s were boned and had petershams. They fal off, you have these beautiful dresses that the bride and bridesmaids are constantly hiking up as long as they’re attached with cheap stretch fabric. Because it didn’t matter if you wore similar dress, most middleclass women should have had one good dress to wear for evening. Weddings, and akin formal occasions.You didn’t have dresses for different occasions. Notice, people wouldn’t even know you wore identical dress repeatedly, you didn’t have as many parties to go to. You weren’t will be photographed and have your pictures spread around.
If you were wealthy enough to have a party dress, the party dress is definitely more casual now, and there’s a much wider majority of silhouettes and styles.One hundred years ago, you didn’t own a huge variety. Left, Poiret’s famous lampshade dress circa Via the vam.ac.uk. She’s seeing those looks in magazines, and copying them herself.Styles from different Eastern countries were often melded into one garment. We have a robe in the Columbia collection that has Japanese kimono style sleeves, ‘Chinese style’ metallic embroidery, and colors that look ‘Indian influenced’. So this all has a ‘trickle down’ effect. It’s not that the ‘middleclass’ woman in America was buying Poiret. Therefore, the lampshade silhouette was pretty avantgarde. As a result, some were less shapely and more sacklike, and later others had a lampshade look with a hoop around the hip area. Let me tell you something. They generally went just past the hip, or fell somewhere between the knee and hip, and flared out around the hoop. We had a ‘lampshade style’ dress, when I worked with the collection at North Dakota State University. They always have to slim them down since the dresses were quite dumpy by today’s standards, when costume designers create garments for movies set in the ’20s.
Dresses were these boxy, boyish shapes, and to our contemporary eye, that doesn’t look very chic. In the 21st century, we look for to see a bit more of the body, and designers weren’t really showing much of it since women didn’t look for to look womanly. Women were going places unchaperoned and were just more physically mobile. Anyway, they’re climbing in and out of cars more, and so they need a shorter skirt to get in and out unescorted. There’s a gentleman or driver to they’ve been moving their whole bodies. They’re moving their hips, They’re moving their legs.
Party dresses of the 1920s were made for movement, like the designs at left from the National Suit Cloak Co, with their dropped waists and unstructured tops.
They literally used to soak the satin in metallic solution, that would add weight to the garment and give this thin silk satin a more luxurious drape and movement.When you soak fabric in metallic solution, it’s intending to deteriorate really quickly, plus they’ve been covering these extremely fragile fabrics with heavy beads.I’ve seen some that were just trimmed with beading.
It’s funny being that the fabrics for party dresses in the 1920s were typically really fine, thin silk chiffons, or weighted silk satins. They’re quite modest, They’re still party dresses. They would fall apart. Doesn’t it sound familiar? Not loads of them exist anymore, at least the dresses that were wellworn.
Publicity stills taken of Norma Shearer (left, in and Jean Harlow (right, in flaunt their sultry, bias cut silk dresses.
It hugs your curves, since there’s more stretch on the bias.
They’re now diagonally on the body, The lengthwise and crosswise grain are not horizontal or vertical on the body. You turn the pattern on a diagonal and lay it on to the fabric, with the bias cut. It hugs the body more closely, That changes the fit of a garment. It’s a well we go from the boxy, boyish shape of the ‘20s to a very womanly shape. Right, therefore this Vionnet gown shows how low cut backs contrasted with excessively low hemlines, even in the Depression era when extra fabric was a true luxury. Left, now this 1930s advertisement shows the diagonal seams and limited ornamentation of popular bias cut dresses. Now look. Hollywood movies in the 1930s are all about escaping the troubles of the economy and everyday life. It’s this culture of escapism. You will think they’d use less fabric, yet the bias cut actually uses more fabric, since we were in the Depression.
Besides, the French designer Madeleine Vionnet is the most credited with mastering the bias cut.
During the daytime, everyone had to be very utilitarian.
They really wanted to live it up, when people went to a party. Certainly, you needed to wow the boys. Your party dress needed to be a showstopper. For instance, evening attire needed to be glamorous, in contrast, you also had this patriotic duty to be beautiful for the soldiers. Also, for practical purposes, the things they have been rationing in the course of the war was heat, by turning the temperature down to cut back on energy use, women needed sleeves. It’s amidst the only periods that you see sleeves on dresses. On top of this, there’s excess fabric under the arm, it’s all one piece. For the most part, they have been cutting back on fabric, that definitely flouted the law. It’s similar to a loose, kimonostyle sleeve without any seam between the bodice and the sleeve. Even when it used far more material than a ‘setin’ sleeve would, the dolman sleeve was very popular. On top of this, it’s really the first time we see Middle America wearing these cute, strapless, promstyle dresses.
New Look worked its way down to her, she was buying that trickle down fashion, she was not buying Dior. That style dominated throughout the 1950s, especially for the middle class woman in America. It’s not anything loud. It wasn’t just one fabric and one color. You definitely see them in the ’50s, mostly small florals, novelty prints got started in the 1940s. Also, it’s always small and feminine and pretty. It would probably have some netting, lace, silk satin, or rayon on it, if the dress was one color. Usually, your party dress was probably a basic, ‘A line’ shift dress that hung its weight from the upper body. We’re tired of these usedup, ‘old fashioned’ ideas. 1960s were like Heck no! Normally, young women wanted to wear short skirts. Although, it was the first time you had skirts above the knee. We’re intending to focus on the youth of today.
It went straight from the shoulder to the hem, or had a Aline effect, it didn’t necessarily hug the bust. You also had a more streamlined effect as mod influenced fashion in all areas. I know that the pop art of that period and the music people listened to were all converging and influencing fashion, and fashion was also influencing them. Nonetheless, you had artists like Andy Warhol, and his muses were wearing very mod styles. With that said, the 1960s are interesting as long as you start to see a speeding up of trends. By the end of the ’60s, mod was almost dead, and fashion had moved onto this very chunky embellishment, especially for party dresses. Eventually, women wanted heavier, more bohemian embellishments on their dresses, instead of streamlined. For instance, we recently had an oneshoulder dress from the ’80s donated to the Columbia collection, and the shoulder with a strap has these giant fabric flowers.
They’re huge, and there’re lots of them.
Via metmuseum.org.
Left, therefore this Yves Saint Laurent ensemble from 1980 raised the bar for bold shoulder detailing. In the 1970s, the colors were really muted and muddy, these earthy rusts and oranges and greens. Furthermore, we turned to super bright and neon colors, in the ’80s, people wanted something fresh and different. Organization by decade is a great presentation of the fashions of the times. Know what guys, I lived through much of what was represented here, as a Boomer born in 1951.