Dress history

Through analyzing modes of dress, different garment types, textiles, and accessories of a certain time in history, a dress historian may research and identify the social, cultural, economic, technological, and political contexts that influence such phenomena and experiences of living during the period under investigation.

This encompasses study centered in contextual historical grounding, which can include or stem from types or styles of clothing distinctive of a certain period in history, change in modes of sartorial expression, or the study of a specific garment or garment type.

Through dress historical analysis of the visual and symbolic attributes of clothing, social customs of a particular time period and place can be better understood.

[1] Approaches to dress historical research employ wide-ranging, cross-disciplinary academic methods of analysis.

[3] Research may be informed by a range of different types of primary sources, including contemporary surviving garments, written material, working documents (such as textile swatch books or account ledgers), popular press publications (such as magazines and newspapers), painting, and photographs.

Image of a printed fashion plate published in 1835 in the magazine Journal des demoiselles
Fashion plate, 1835. Journal des demoiselles
Salesman's Sample Book (England), 1784. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
(card and cat. description) This dress illustrates the fashion of the 1840s with its preference for overall floral designs in delicate tints. It displays the dominant lines of the time- close fitting, with short half-sleeves edged with lace. This ball dress foreshadows a new style of the 1850s, that of the widening bell-sleeve. The lengthened and widened sleeve complemented the increasing width of flounced skirts of day and evening dresses.
Ball dress, dismantled, c. 1840 , Auckland Museum