Welcome to Litsy!

Lovely presentation with lots of helpful annotations on specific dresses. The introductory essays for each chapter worked less well for me -- they discuss specific trends WITHOUT reference to any of the examples. Sometimes they mention photos, but they're on another page, and the text doesn't actually say something like 'see fig. 3'.

So interesting and useful, but flawed!

Picked this up after seeing @CoffeeCatsBooks posts. It provides a nice overview of the way women's fashion has changed over time and the cycles trends can go through. It would have been even better with a tighter geographical focus (instead of trying to cover the entire Western world) and another round of copy editing.

This book is filled with beautiful dresses (along with some truly hideous ones). Each major shift in design is begun with a few pages of explanation. Each of the dresses has explanations pointing out the shifts. It still amazes me that woman's design shifting from the relative freedom of the regency period to such stylized confinement. The regency dress in the top right corner is made from Indian muslin and has a gorgeous embroidered net overlay.

Okay, I promise this is my last posting on this book before my review. This is another connection for those that read To Marry an English Lord. This dress was worn by Lady Curzon (nee Leiter), Vicereine of India. The dress is by Jean-Philippe Worth, son of Charles Fredrick Worth.

For those of you that read To Marry an English Lord, this is one of Charles Fredrick Worth's creations, which so many of the American heiress swore by.

Loving this book. It really helps you understand the shifts in style. While I can't help but admire the beauty in these dresses, it pains me to think of the women toiling to make them and ruining their eyesight.

Yay! My weekend book mail! 📚Already started looking through How to Read a Dress and love it, but I want to finish reading Gather the Daughters first, which is off to a strong start.

If, like me, you are the sort of person who loves analyzing Western fashion within the context of history and, say, trying to guess the time in which a given portrait was painted based on the dress of the woman depicted, you will want to pick up a copy of this book, stat. It‘s an excellent guide to the specifics of women‘s fashion in terms of how shapes and details changed and evolved over time.

#lyricalapril #hello Hello to these new books I received in the mail! #bookmail #nonfiction