White wedding dresses were popular in fashionable circles by the mid-19th century, even though many brides still chose other colours. The idea of a once-in-a-lifetime wedding dress was more flexible than today, and wearing white was quite a new fashion. Victorian dresses that look very “bridal” to us now were almost the same as evening [more...]
Surely fashions come and go, without anyone “deciding”? Well, actually, there are individuals and organizations that give a “guiding hand” to the whims of fashion. The Color Marketing Group is an association of people who work with color. They design with color, market color, and teach color. The Group holds regular conferences and workshops at [more...]
Burberry Group plc is a leading global fashion brand which now sells womenswear, menswear, non-apparel and children’s wear. It is famous for its iconic trademarked check design and British heritage branding. In 2009, the company’s global luxury goods market estimated retail value was over 150bn Euros. A far cry from its establishment as a Victorian [more...]
When we say French twist, French manicure, French cuffs etc. are these truly French fashions? French people call the chic hairstyle we know as a French twist or French roll a chignon banane (banana bun). On the other hand, a French braid or French plait has the same name in France – tresse française – [more...]
They may seem horrible to us, but feather fans with a cute dead hummingbird were a Victorian fashion for more than twenty years. Stuffed and wired into shape, the bird was posed stylishly, sometimes along with feather flowers or even insects. The fans weren’t the folding type, but the kind that was sometimes called a [more...]
Bustles were undergarments for dresses designed to swell out dramatically at the back of the skirt, in the fashion of the 1870s and 1880s. Dressmakers had various ways of providing hidden support for these curves. Bustles generally depended on cushioning, or a frame, or some combination: padding held in shape with wires, or a frame [more...]
Planning a wedding dress for a period drama is not just a question of research plus design flair. It’s true the dress must look authentic for that particular era as well as suiting the actress, her character, and the overall mood and setting. Yet at the same time, the designer has to think about the [more...]
I used to see the paisley design as a curled leaf or feather, without thinking about its history. Paisley fabric is “patterned with distinctive, ornate, teardrop- or feather-shaped figures, based on an Indian pine cone design”, according to the dictionary. Textile experts have called it a “drooping bud” or a “Kashmir cone”. It’s also been [more...]
In the late 1600s shawl was not yet an English word, though it was beginning to turn up in travellers’ descriptions of clothing they had seen in southern Asia. In the 1700s fine cashmere shawls from Kashmir and India arrived in Western Europe. At first they were not treated as clothing, but used to ornament [more...]
Pashminas took off in the later 1990s, when draping a generous piece of woven cashmere round your shoulders was a fashion trend in Western countries. At the end of 1996 a London journalist reported that “style guru Lucia van der Post” said the pashmina was “the most chic shawl around town”. The New York Times [more...]
Coco Chanel was born on 19 August 1883 as Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel, although her surname was erroneously recorded on her birth certificate as Chasnel. That mistake later made it difficult for others to trace her family history, which suited Coco as she had concocted a false story of her early years to hide the fact [more...]
The bikini experienced a surge of popularity in the second half of the 1900s, but the two-piece swimsuit is much older than that. Two millennia previously, Latin writers and poets including Ovid and Martial mentioned bikini-clad athletes and sex workers. At least five ancient statues exist of Venus clad in a bikini, and at Piazza [more...]