Name/Title
American Victorian Costume in Early PhotographsEntry/Object ID
2025.111.1Description
"Clothing of the Victorian era in turn delights and horrifies us. Billowing hoopskirts, modes. poke bonnets, absurd and cumbersome bustles, dirt-collecting trains, painfully corseted wasp waists, leg-o'-mutton sleeves, outrageous hats-
-one sartorial excess succeeded another. It was
the last period in the history of costume to display such incredible extravagance and impracticality in dress."
-from the Introduction
Fortunately, the Victorian era was also the first to be recorded in photographs— daguerreo-types, ambrotypes, tintypes, etc. And in this book, the first book on Victorian costume to be illustrated solely by American photographs, we find a varied and wonderful panorama of fashions and faces from the 1840s to the turn of the century. Moreover, this book shows how ordinary Americans dressed, as opposed to the fashion plates and photographs of royalty, statesmen and theatrical stars that generally illustrate books on this subject.
Over 280 rare photographs depict American men, women and children of all ages, dressed in what must have been, in most cases, their Sunday best. From page to page, in both text and pictures, every trend in 19th-century fashions unfolds dramatically, particularly in women's styles— prim and demure in the 1840s, then, after a lively 50-year parade of hoops, bustles and bloomers, the shirtwaists and tailored suits of the Gay Nineties. Changing fashions in hairdressing and tonsorial styles emerge as well, as do certain ideals of beauty and the attractive pose.
Beautifully reproduced, the photographs in this collection bring the nineteenth century to life-not as a static collection of museum mannequins but as a fascinating pictorial record of actual people captured in a moment of time. Costume historians will appreciate the authenticity and detail of the clothing depicted here; photographic historians and collectors will find the book a helpful tool in dating and identifying images. And anyone intrigued by the fashions and finery of times gone by will delight in this treasury of vintage views.Create Date
May 28, 2025
