Démodé

historical costume projects & resources

Cool Image Resource

Gallica is the digital library of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and in addition to having an AMAZING collection of interesting historical resources, I recently found that they have digitized some really interesting images… most particularly, a number of press photos of fashions worn at horse races from the 1900s onwards.  The 1910’s images are particularly stunning, and there appears to be more from the 1920s-30s, but I haven’t delved too deeply in the later stuff.

This stripey dress on the right is particularly calling to me — I’m wondering if I could repurpose my supplies from my long-planned-never-made 1909 suit project?  Or is the stripe not strong enough?

Fashions worn at the Auteuil races, June 1911

This outfit is also pretty kick ass:

Fashions worn at the Auteuil races, 1911

Here’s a link to all their images with the subject of fashion (“mode”) — 552 total, seems to cover late 19th century and into the 20th century.  If you’re interested in a more limited date range, try using their advanced search page and enter Subject: mode, By document type: Images, and then put some dates into By publishing year.

One thought on “Cool Image Resource

  1. You could re-purpose the fabric, but I don’t think it will be as striking as this. But still nice…written as I drool over the pictures….

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