Every year the Oakland Museum holds their White Elephant Sale, a cross between an antiques market and thrift store, held in a ginormous warehouse conveniently about 5 min. from my house!  This year we went to the preview sale (Bay Area-ites take note, the official sale will be March 3-4), as we have for the past few years, to get an early crack at buying — and I mean early, as in showing up by 8am on a Sunday and waiting in line for 2 hours.

But, it was worth it, because I got a great haul!  I’ve finally figured out how to target my arriving-early time — in the past I’ve tried to head for vintage clothes first, but the vintage dealers literally clean the racks out in about 5 min. flat.  This year I headed for sewing first, and finally have figured out where the NICE fabric is kept, so I grabbed a shopping basket, threw all the silk in it, and then sorted through to figure out what I wanted to keep.

Here’s my haul:

Just a quick update to say thanks for your feedback on my bling issue and Costume College teaching ideas!  You all sold me on the white Indian choker set… but then some BASTARD stole the auction away from me!  I then spent the past week stalking ebay, where I found various sellers selling the same set but in different colors, until this morning when another white set popped up and I grabbed it.  Now I just have to wait for it to ship from India.

And, in CoCo news, I proposed the following three classes:  social history of hair (1770s-1820s), 18th c. dress variations, and 17th-18th c. patches.  Yet again, 18th c. court dress gets no love — I’ve thrown that out before online and only get crickets back — someday I’m going to foist it on you guys anyway, and I can teach it to the two people who show up!

Possibly old news to you, but the Victoria & Albert Museum’s Fashion department has recently-ish revamped their website and added a lot of interesting content — mostly articles, some videos.  You can get to the main hub here, but here are some specific items of interest:

• Underwear: From Corsets to Bullet Bras and Back (video)
• Introduction to the Fashion Gallery (video)
• Corsets & Crinolines in Victorian Fashions
• Crinolines, Crinolettes, Bustles and Corsets from 1860-1880
• Behind the Scenes: Conservation of a Victorian Wedding Dress
• Corsets and Bustles from 1880-90:  the Move from Over Structured Opulence to the ‘Healthy Corset’
• Men’s Court Dress: Russia 1720s-1917
• A History of Pockets
• Embroidery Pattern Books, 1523-1700
• Introduction to English Embroidery
• Designs for Embroidered Fashion: Lady Middleton’s Pattern
• Conservation of the May Primrose Dress (1885)
• Conservation of James II’s Wedding Suit

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.

As previously noted, the GBACG is having what should be an amazing Titanic event.  While I’d love to make something new, money is tight enough that I really shouldn’t be spending money on yards of silk.  And, shockingly, I tried on my 1910 Lady Maud evening dress and it still fits, and since I’ve only worn this ONCE, I really should wear it again!

But now I’m trying to figure out the bling issue!  I’ve been vacillating between a few concepts:

Concept 1:  Super bling in a period style, like that worn here by Queen Sophia of Greece in 1915:

The problem is I’m having a hard time finding a good, wide choker that’s NOT pearls.  Pearls are nice, and they’re period, but they’re not exciting me right now.

Concept 2: Indian jewelry.  Did you know that of all modern cultures, Indian women have the best clothes?  Seriously!  And their jewelry is pretty kick ass too.  Given that my dress is made from a sari, and the Delhi Durbar of 1911 inspired lots of Indian influences in the fashions of 1911-12, and given that modern Indian is faaabulous and quite affordable on ebay, I thought of going full on Indian — hey, I could be returning to America from India and the Durbar!

Combination #1: white Indian jewelry. Then I came across this white Indian jewelry set, and I thought it might be a great merger of the two ideas — choker, bling, Indian:

But what about headgear? I was initially thinking of trying to make some kind of bandeau, like this one from Vogue:

However, the Indian sets come with a piece of hair jewelry that’s really gorgeous, but a different look — the maang tika, which hangs over the part and onto the forehead (ok this lady doesn’t have a center part, but you get the idea):

But then I found this tiara on ebay and it’s really calling to me — but it’s silvertone, not gold, and the Indian jewelry sets are almost all goldtone!

First world problems, solve them for me.  Go full Indian?  Combine goldtone Indian with silvertone tiara?  Ditch the Indian idea and keep trying to find some kind of non-cheesy rhinestone choker (which could be impossible)?  What’s working for you?

I decided to post the article on 1912 evening wear for men and women that I wrote for GBACG’s newsletter to my Fashion Trends for Winter/Spring 1912 page.  I’m super excited about the upcoming Titanic Dinner that GBACG is putting on — can you tell?

Trystan has written an excellent primer on copyright for costume bloggers that’s worth checking out.  It’s a good rundown on the essentials and can help us all determine what’s legal to post and what’s not.

And while we’re on the topic… I want to boost the signal on one particular portion:  crediting others for their work.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen people post about something online that they’ve made or “researched” and I just KNOW exactly whose work they’ve used — without crediting the person who originally came up with the technique/did the research.  It sucks, because it can make the original maker/researcher feel like not sharing their techniques/research if others are going to essentially appropriate it — take the credit for all that hard work.

Nobody’s perfect, and sometimes we just plain forget, but if you try out somebody else’s technique, drop a mention!  Even if you improved on it; you can say “I started with Jane Costumer’s tutorial, and found that if I did X differently it worked better for me!”  If you draw on somebody else’s research, just add a mention — “Jane Costumer’s article on Obscure Hat from Obscure Town got me thinking…”  One way I like to do this is to have a “Useful Links” section on my project pages — I can just list the sites that I found useful, and I know I’m covering my bases.

Costuming is a small world.  When you DON’T give a shout out to others for their work, we are all thinking, “Wait, hasn’t X done a lot on this?” or “Gee, it sure sounds a lot like Y’s research/method.”  And it looks tacky, even if you didn’t MEAN to take credit for their work, we are probably thinking that you did… so to avoid looking tacky, drop a quick mention and/or link and then you know you’ve covered your bases!

I’m trying to decide what to offer to teach at Costume College this year.  Here’s a bunch of ideas — I’d love to hear feedback on what sounds interesting!  Some ideas are fleshed out, some are still rudimentary…

Social History of Hair in England, 1770s-1820s

The changes in English hairstyles from the Georgian to the Regency will be traced, focusing on their social, cultural, and political context. From women’s gigantic “poufs” and men’s wigs of the late 18th century, through the “natural” and classical styles of the Regency, hairstyles underwent significant stylistic changes. These represented shifts in politics and society and served as a locus for debate around issues of gender, class, and politics.

18^th Century Court Dress

The origins and developments of women’s formal court dress in France and England from the late 17^th century through the early 19^th century.

18^th Century Dress Variations

What’s the differences (and similarities!) between a mantua, robe a la francaise, and a robe a l’anglaise?  How did those three main 18^th century dress styles change over time?  For that matter, what’s a Brunswick, polonaise, sultane, or levite? Come geek out over 18^th century dress! We’ll look at their origins in the late 17^th century, trace the major styles throughout the century, and discuss as many of the weird variations that we can fit in!  This class will make far more sense to you if you have a basic idea of 18^th century women’s costume, as we’ll be tracing individual styles over time, rather than going through a chronological rundown.

Hand Sewing Some Basic Garment

I keep thinking of doing some half/all day workshop where we hand sew some small basic garment (a partlet would work really well) and in the process learn the basic handsewing stitches and treatments… but I don’t know if this is too basic!

18th Century Patches (or Cosmetics?)

I want to do more research into 18th c. beauty patches, but I don’t know if there’s enough to make a full class, so maybe as part of a discussion of cosmetics?

How much did I love Andrea Riseborough’s gown — an updated 17th c. dress by Vivienne Westwood?  SO MUCH!

Researchers of 16th century English costume are probably familiar with Lucas de Heere’s sketch of middle and lower class London ladies (discussed here, higher resolution image here).  It’s an important source, given that de Heere is documented as having actually BEEN in England when it was drawn, and it shows the common people.  Most images depicting common people of this era are drawn/painted by people who may never have seen a commoner of whatever-country in their lives.  There are a couple other famous-within-the-costuming-community images by de Heere:  his images of Irish dress and his allegory of the Tudor succession.

About five years ago, I found some further images of Englishwomen by de Heere in a book on the Valois tapestries, but they weren’t the highest resolution and were only in black and white, which started me on a hunt to find more.  It turns out that he published a costume book with a number of images I’d never seen.  I found an online copy of a dissertation written somewhere in the Netherlands or Belgium which included all of the images, but the resolution was TINY.  So, every year or so I’d do some poking around and hope to find an online or print source with usable images.  And today I found it, digitized at the University of Ghent!

There’s a lot that’s in it that I think will be very interesting to 16th c. costume researchers.  The book is a mix of representations of historical and contemporary dress.  Some of the illustrations are probably pretty accurate, and some may be completely made up.  However, there are enough images that are likely to be correct to make it a great source for costume research, and importantly costume books like this often served as models for future painters (ie an artist needed an image of some French peasants to fill out his/her landscape, so they’d copy those peasants out of a costume book).

Here is a link to the bibliographic data on the book, and here’s the scanned PDF of the book itself…. and here are some individual images from the book that I find most interesting!