The First Dress Historians | Eighteenth-Century Women and Fashion

Is fashion history a modern invention? We know Janet Arnold and twentieth-century dress historians, but surely people were interested in clothing of the past before that? This video introduces three early dress historians – Barbara Johnson, Ann Frankland Lewis and Laetitia Powell – who chronicled the fashions of the eighteenth century through prints, watercolours and dolls.

To find out more, take a look at modern-day dress historian Dr Serena Dyer’s forthcoming book, Material Lives: Women Makers and Consumer Culture in the 18th Century: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/materia...


Bibliography

Serena Dyer, Material Lives: Women Makers and Consumer Culture in the 18th Century. (London: Bloomsbury, 2021).
Serena Dyer, ‘Barbara Johnson’s Album: Material Literacy and Consumer Practice, 1746-1823’, Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies 42.3 (2019): 263-282.


Janet Arnold, Patterns of Fashion (London: Macmillan, 1989).
Nancy Bradfield, Costume in Detail: Women's Dress 1730-1930 (Plays Incorporated, 1968).
C Willet and Phillis Cunnington, A Dictionary of English Costume (Adam and Black, 1976).

Barbara Johnson’s Album: https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1...
Laetitia Powell: https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1...
Ann Frankland Lewis: https://collections.lacma.org/node/16...

Doris Langley Moore, Men, Women and Clothes: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00g...


Music
Bright Inspired Piano from Envato

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