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Fashion trends may be fleeting from one decade to the next, but historians can gain significant insights into a society’s evolving beliefs and values by examining what people wear. This month, Bloomsbury Collections brings together selections from our comprehensive Fashion History library to take a tour of fashion through the decades: from the restrictively feminine corset of the early 1900s, to homefront suit and dress styles during the 1940s and 50s, to what fashion’s future might hold as we head into the mid-21st century.
With primary source illustrations and deep analyses, these selections are part of Bloomsbury Collection’s Fashion library, offering thousands of titles in subject areas including Fashion and Culture, Fashion Marketing and Advertising, Design, and Fashion History, and Fashion Journalism.
What piece of women’s apparel illustrates the history of anti-feminism more than the corset? In The Bad Corset: A Feminist Reimagining, author Rebecca Gibson translates and critiques the original 1908 French text Le Corset, by Ludovic O’Followell, through a feminist lens to explore the evolution of female agency and choice, inspiring readers to reconsider how we think about the shaping of women’s bodies and lives.
In this provided introductory chapter, Gibson begins her tour of O’Followell’s original text, which includes early 20th century advertisements offering women the opportunity to conform to “healthy” social standards.
Every historical era ushers in social and cultural changes, and those changes can be tracked through popular fashion. In How to Read a Dress: A Guide to Changing Fashion from the 16th to the 21st Century, author and historian Lydia Edwards examines the evolution of women’s fashion from the 1550s to the present day, considering how textures, colors, and styles illustrate shifting roles and perceptions of women.
Read this provided chapter, complete with primary source illustrations, about the fashions that became popular after World War I, from flapper fringe to formal tea gowns—and what those fashions said about women’s roles of the time.
Picture Post magazine, published in the UK from 1938 –1957, was made famous by its pioneering photojournalism, vividly capturing a panorama of wartime events and the ordinary lives affected. In Women in Wartime: Dress Studies from Picture Post 1938-1945, Geraldine Howell examines this primary source as a cultural record of women’s history.
Follow the magazine’s visual narrative of the 1930s and 1940s with this sample chapter exploring how design, style and fashion were affected by, and responded to, the state of being at war—and the new roles it created for women.
The 1950s was a time of social upheaval, as well as sweeping conservatism and materialism. Dress and Identity in America: The Baby Boom Years 1946 – 1964 examines the era through the lens of fashion, considering how both masculine and feminine identities changed, illustrated by styles including gray flannel suits for men and “ultrafeminine” housewife fashions for women.
In this sample chapter, author and fashion historian Daniel Delis Hill analyzes New Look fashion created by ready-to-wear makers, from full dresses to pencil skirts, and the post-War social roles these styles were meant to help women fulfill.
The Peacock Revolution in menswear of the 1960s came as a profound shock to much of America. Men’s long hair and vividly colored, sexualized clothes challenged long established traditions of masculine identity. Daniel Delis Hill’s Peacock Revolution: American Masculine Identity and Dress in the Sixties and Seventies is an in-depth study of how radical changes in men’s clothing reflected, and contributed to, the changing ideas of American manhood in an era of social revolutions.
Read this sample chapter exploring the ranging roles men discovered in a post-war world, from beatniks to teddy boys to mods, and the fashion styles that embodied them.
Welcome to the 1980s: when popular women’s fashion styles ranged from power suits and shoulder pads to conservative-coded print dresses. Lydia Edwards explores the striking cultural contradictions women faced during the “Me” decade in the final chapter of her book How to Read a Dress: A Guide to Changing Fashion from the 16th to the 21st Century, and what it meant to dress for success.
As times change, so do the ways we use fashion to present ourselves. The End of Fashion: Clothing and Dress in the Age of Globalization offers essays examining how the age of technology and globalization continues to shape our sense of self, and how fashion appears to be moving away from statements of status towards new forms of self-expression and individuation.
This sample chapter by Valerie Steele considers the possible “end of fashion” and the cultural ideals that future fashions might illustrate, from global democratization to new frontiers of cultural diversity.
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