Category: 19th century

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Powerhouse Museum Electronic Swatchbook

Thanks to Fran on the GBACGCostumers Yahoo group, I’ve discovered the Powerhouse Museum’s Electronic Swatchbook.  Swatchbooks were designed so that fabric manufacturers, agents and merchants could show samples of their fabrics.  The museum has scanned several from their collection from the 1830s through the 1920s.  What’s cool is you can not only browse by year but also by color.  The swatches themselves are scanned in high res and you can zoom in really closely.

A great resource for dating fabrics and identifying good reproductions!

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Movie Review: Bel Ami (2012)

Hey look at me, doing all this blogging!  I’ve been thinking that I will post costume movie reviews as individual blog posts, and then also cross-post them to the appropriate Costume in Cinema page for posterity.  That way, it creates a bit more content for this here blog, plus allows you to let me know what you thought of the movie (and/or my review).

Bel Ami (2012)

Starring Robert Pattinson, Uma Thurman, Kristin Scott Thomas, and Christina Ricci.  Costumes designed by Odile Dicks-Mireaux.

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Based on an 1880s French novel written by Guy de Maupassant… and if that doesn’t give you an idea of the tone of this movie, then let me summarize late 19th century French literature for you:  the people are pretty, but the emotions are BLEAK and will hammer you over the head with their BLEAKNESS!  My boyfriend Robert Pattinson is Georges Duroy, a poor Algerian vet who climbs the Parisian social ladder by manipulating various women.   Pattinson’s performance is better than you might expect, you Twilight haters, but there’s a bit too much grimacing instead of emoting; the three female leads turn in nice performances, but nothing that made me jump up and down.  It’s unclear just what Duroy’s charm over women is supposed to be, exactly — most men can’t stand him, but when he smile/grimaces at a lady (or brings her a pear?), she just keels over, which never ends up working out too well for her.  The costumes are very pretty and quite accurate — I think the opening title card says it’s 1890, but I could be misremembering — they perfectly capture that transition between late 1880s bustle and 1890s.  Lots of pretty sleeveless evening gowns with that vertical line, hair up on top of the head in that pre-Pompadour (except Thurman, who randomly has hair that is about a decade out of style).  None of the gowns made me jump up and down, but they all looked RIGHT, and that’s saying something!  Also, I kept hoping Pattinson’s brows were going to get shaped up as his lot improved, but no dice.

My rating:  2 (out of 5)

If you like this era, you might also want to check my Victorian costume movie reviews.  I specifically recommend the following late bustle/early 1890s costume films:  An Ideal Husband (1999) and Tipping the Velvet (2002).


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Fix This Costume! Meh Edition

So last year, I made a Victorian fancy dress costume — specifically, a c. 1886 “champagne” costume.  You can read more about it here, if you’ve totally forgotten about it by now.

Last time we talked, I made some undies.  Well, I also made a dress.  I was really sick the week before wearing it, but pushed myself through finishing by telling myself, “It doesn’t have to be god’s gift to costuming.”  Well, that prophecy came true, as it wasn’t!  Didn’t help that I was still woozy and fever-y and sick on the night I wore it, but I had to go as my singing group (Bella Donna) was performing at the Vampire Ball.

So yeah.  I never found the right trim for it, even after looking at gazillions of beaded trims and christmas ornaments, so maybe it’s the lack of trim that made me feel so meh about it that I never finished blogging?  I don’t know!  I also think maybe the sleeves (which were supposed to be more interesting, but lack of time made for a crappy pattern, so I had to ditch the original plan and go simple) should be A) more interesting and B) in the gold fabric?  Or maybe a sheer, shiny gold tulle, and then echo that in a center front opening showing a faux underlayer in shiny gold tulle, as in the inspirational fashion plate?  And the skirt hem could be shorter?  Help me figure out why this costume is so unexciting, and maybe I can wrestle it into shape?  Or at least do better the next time I attempt fancy dress!  And for trim, go for shiny gold balls, or clear glass balls?  Had a long debate with my husband about that one — I was picturing shiny gold balls, but he kept pointing out that champagne was clear…

A note on the photos — I had to photoshop the base skirt on photos #2 and 3, as the settings on Trystan’s camera were off and it turned my green skirt purple.  So the color/shine is most accurate in picture #1.

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V&A Fashion Department Online Resources

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:

Finally, I noticed that they’ve started the V&A Online Journal — so far, there’s three issues.  The most recent one has a very interesting article for those of us who like to geek out scholarly-style:  “An Adorned Print: Print Culture, Female Leisure and the Dissemination of Fashion in France and England, around 1660-1779.”
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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.