Now that the jeans and T shirts plague has reached our fancy restaurants, cocktail parties, and nightclubs, it seems as though no one except cares about dressing up anymore. You can find chic, ‘wellmade’ frocks, and afford them, and similar 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. There’s a lot more info about this stuff here. People connect with fashion history as clothes are very tangible everyone wears them. It’s a well more than a hundred years ago, you wouldn’t have had enough clothing to designate certain dresses for special occasions. With more readymade clothing, fashion production became easier and cheaper. Moving into the 1910s and ’20s, we started to see major upward mobility. Middleclass women could consume, the economy was great.
Actually the literal foundation of the garment is of much lower quality, not only are the rhinestones and fabrics cheaper today. You can not see corsetry built into a dress anymore, unless you’re buying expensive formalwear. 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. 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. With that said, 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. Consequently, they fal off, you have these beautiful dresses that the bride and bridesmaids are constantly hiking up as they’re attached with cheap stretch fabric. Of course, people wouldn’t even know you wore identical dress repeatedly, you didn’t have as many parties to go to. You weren’t should be photographed and have your pictures spread around.
So if you were wealthy enough to have a party dress, the party dress is definitely more casual now, and there’s a much wider various silhouettes and styles.’Onehundred’ years ago, you didn’t own a huge variety. Because it didn’t matter if you wore identical dress, most middleclass women will have had one good dress to wear for evening. Weddings, and akin formal occasions.You didn’t have dresses for different occasions. 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, Chinesestyle metallic embroidery, and colors that look Indian influenced. Therefore, it’s not that the ‘middleclass’ woman in America was buying Poiret. With all that said… That said, this all has a trickle down effect. We had a ‘lampshadestyle’ dress, when I worked with the collection at North Dakota State University.
Some were less shapely and more sacklike, and others had a lampshade look with a hoop around the hip area.
They generally went just past the hip, or fell somewhere between the knee and hip, and flared out around the hoop.
The lampshade silhouette was pretty ‘avant garde’. In the 21st century, we need to see a bit more of the body, and designers weren’t really showing much of it being that women didn’t seek for to look womanly. That’s right! 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. You see, the dresses were these boxy, boyish shapes, and to our contemporary eye, that doesn’t look very chic. You see, women were going places unchaperoned and were just more physically mobile.
There’s a gentleman or driver to they’ve been moving their whole bodies. You should take this seriously. They wanted to show off that movement. With that said, they’re moving their hips, They’re moving their legs. Anyways, 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 preparing 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.
They’re quite modest, They’re still party dresses. It’s funny as the fabrics for party dresses in the 1920s were typically really fine, thin silk chiffons, or weighted silk satins. They will fall apart. Anyways, not the majority 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. Of course you turn the pattern on a diagonal and lay it on to the fabric, with the bias cut. We go from the boxy, boyish shape of the ‘20s to a very womanly shape. It hugs your curves, since there’s more stretch on the bias. That’s right! It hugs the body more closely because That changes the fit of a garment. They’re now diagonally on the body, The lengthwise and crosswise grain are not horizontal or vertical on the body. Left, with that said, this 1930s advertisement shows the diagonal seams and limited ornamentation of popular ‘bias cut’ dresses.
Right, that said, 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.
Hollywood movies in the 1930s are all about escaping the troubles of the economy and everyday life.
You will think they’d use less fabric, yet the bias cut actually uses more fabric, since we were in the Depression. It’s this culture of escapism. On top of that, they really wanted to live it up, when people went to a party. Of course, throughout the daytime, everyone had to be very utilitarian. Anyways, the French designer Madeleine Vionnet is the most credited with mastering the bias cut. That’s where it starts getting serious. You needed to wow the boys.
Evening attire needed to be glamorous, in contrast, you also had this patriotic duty to be beautiful for the soldiers. Your party dress needed to be a showstopper. For practical purposes, the things they’ve 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 among the only periods that you see sleeves on dresses. Nonetheless, there’s excess fabric under the arm, it’s all one piece. Normally, it’s similar to a loose, kimonostyle sleeve without any seam between the bodice and the sleeve. Actually, for the most part, they’ve been cutting back on fabric, that definitely flouted the law. Normally, even if it used far more material than a set in sleeve will, the dolman sleeve was very popular. It’s really the first time we see Middle America wearing these cute, strapless, promstyle dresses. Basically the New Look worked its way down to her, she was buying that ‘trickledown’ fashion, she was not buying Dior.
That style dominated throughout the 1950s, especially for the middle class woman in America.
You definitely see them in the ’50s, mostly small florals, novelty prints got started in the 1940s.
It would probably have some netting, lace, silk satin, or rayon on it, if the dress was one color. It’s not anything loud. Just think for a moment. It’s always small and feminine and pretty. Now let me tell you something. It wasn’t just one fabric and one color. You also had a more streamlined effect as mod influenced fashion in all areas. Young women wanted to wear short skirts. With that said, your party dress was probably a basic, Aline shift dress that hung its weight from the upper body. With all that said… We’re tired of these used up, ‘oldfashioned’ ideas. We’re preparing to focus on the youth of today. A well-known fact that is. 1960s were like Heck no! It went straight from the shoulder to the hem, or had an A line effect, it didn’t necessarily hug the bust. Now look. It was the first time you had skirts above the knee.
Actually the pop art of that period and the music people listened to were all converging and influencing fashion, and fashion was also influencing them. You had artists like Andy Warhol, and his muses were wearing very mod styles. By the end of the ’60s, mod was almost dead, and fashion had moved onto this very chunky embellishment, especially for party dresses. For instance, women wanted heavier, more bohemian embellishments on their dresses, instead of streamlined. Accordingly the 1960s are interesting being that you start to see a speeding up of trends. We recently had a ‘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 loads of them.
Via metmuseum.org.
Left, now 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. We turned to super bright and neon colors, in the ’80s, people wanted something fresh and different. Therefore the organization by decade is a great presentation of the fashions of the times. I actually lived through much of what was represented here, as a Boomer born in 1951.