Cassidy Percoco, Fashion Historian
Hello! It's been a while - due to American politics, personal issues, and other factors, I just haven't had the energy to spend on historical sewing or writing about fashion (beyond what I do for AskHistorians; link to my profile if you'd like to read some short articles on a variety of social history topics) … Continue reading A New Kind of Transitional Stay
I probably would have been at this point several days ago, but I went with the Theory "batiste" from my swatches, and it proved to be more like a tightly-woven percale, and I was having the hardest time getting pins and needles into it. Let this be a lesson: always test a swatch by pleating … Continue reading Thesis Update – Nearly There!
For some reason, I sketched out the pink taffeta gown and the interesting corset I examined yesterday. (I used Patterns of Fashion as a reference for the gown but still managed to make the figure too short in the leg ... not sure how.) And I thought I'd post the pictures I took of my … Continue reading Pictures!
I began discussing this in my post on the mantua. As the wealthy began to create separate public and private lives, they desired paintings of themselves in private, dressed in ways they could never appear in public. Some of the sitters wore actual negligée dress, but some were painted in an invented costume meant to … Continue reading Artistic Neoclassical Costume
The shift was easy, apart from all of the flat-felling, but the stays are proving less so. There don't seem to be any patterns of extant examples in the style I'm looking for - as I pointed out in my post on corsets of the period, most surviving pieces are either conical (early 1790s) or … Continue reading 1790s Stays
Mimic of Modes 