December 10, 1786 To be precise, it is not the leading fashion that we show in this Plate: it is not even fashionable, since frock coats must be of puce, black, or London chimney-soot colored wool, but it is a dress which could become fashionable for the reasons that we gave in the sixteenth and twentieth Books of the … Continue reading Magasin des Modes, 3e Cahier, Plate II
Category: 18th century
Magasin des Modes, 3e Cahier, Plate I
(Lately, I haven't had much appetite for sewing, or for writing substantive blog posts, so I'm going to bring back my translations in order to provide content and give me an outlet!) December 10, 1786 For showing winter dress, it would not suffice to give a Lady fully dressed in a satin gown (1); it … Continue reading Magasin des Modes, 3e Cahier, Plate I
A Georgian Reading List
I don't even remember what I was researching at the time, but as I went browsing through sources from the mid-18th century, I came across the play Polly Honeycombe, written in 1760 by George Coleman the Elder. It's a short farce about a girl who reads so many novels that she interprets her life through their … Continue reading A Georgian Reading List
AMBA: The Recent History of Mourning
This episode took me forever to write. I was originally going to start with a blog post I wrote a few years ago, relying on primary sources on mourning from the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. Then, as I started to go through it, I started to reinterpret a number of the primary sources, … Continue reading AMBA: The Recent History of Mourning
Before Victoria: White Wedding Dress (Part II)
So, previously I showed you a lot of examples of actual white or white-ish gowns worn for weddings, including fashion plates (as they are intended to be prescriptive of real clothing - they exist to tell you what you can/should wear); these prove at least that white was worn. Now I'm going to follow that up … Continue reading Before Victoria: White Wedding Dress (Part II)
Mimic of Modes 