Edwardian actress Miss Lily Elsie. Restored and colored.

And for our final installment, as Lady Sybil would say: FORMAL WEAR, BITCHEZ. Feast your eyes on all the gorgeous beading and embroidery, darlings,

Here's my little glance at 1912. I'm telling you right now, in case you didn't already know this, but this year is going to get a lot more look backs than usual because it marks the one hundredth anniversary of...

He's the villain of the piece

Bonjour à tous ! On se retrouve aujourd’hui pour inaugurer une longue série d’articles consacrée aux costumes de la super série « Downton Abbey ». Pour ceux qui ne…

Includes: 1 Edwardian bodice (top-quality crepe, lace and velvet) 1 Edwardian skirt (top-quality crepe, lace and velvet) High quality loose-fitting romantic Edwardian 1910s style dress Unique and comfortable crepe fabric with a purposefully wrinkled appearance offers a graceful drape Romantic ruffled and lace design on bodice and skirt 1/2 sleeves Button enclosure in back on bodice Double layered floor-length skirt with crepe layer over soft cotton An elastic waistband in skirt for a comfortable fit This dress needs no hoop or petticoat underneath it Dry clean 44 inches (112 cm) long from waist to hem regardless of size We are based in Seattle, WA, the beautiful Pacific Northwest. Follow us on our Instagram @VictorianChoice ______________________________________________ The best way to tell which size fits the best is to measure your own sizes first (bust size with bra and waist size by measuring the narrowest part of your torso) and then compare them with our size chart posted below. Our Size Chart ( in inches ) Size Bust Waist S 32-35 25-28 M 35-37 28-30 L 37-40 30-32 XL 40-42 32-35 XXL 41-44 35-38 XXXL 44-47 38-40

Illustrated 1910s fashion archives for women. It was the era of the Titanic, the First World War, and women's lifestyles and fashion changed utterly.

Fashion plates, celebrity pictures and accurate movie costumes focusing on fashions and accessories from 1908 - 1914. Support Me on Ko-fi Tags: 1908

(Yes. Finally getting to that, only, uh, three months late? Right then.) In the 1900s, the female silhouette looked like this: This is known as the Edwardian era/look, the Gibson Girl look (so named for painter/illustrator/graphic artist Charles Dana Gibson, who painted a shitload of women in getups like this, and considered it his ideal), and the turn-of-the-century look, among other things. The posture was known as the "S shape", and the slant was mostly toward the super-feminine; lots of lace, silk flowers, and light, airy fabrics. It looks super-feminine even now, and I suspect had a hand in defining what we consider feminine to this day. But that figure was accomplished by some wicked-evil corsets. That's a corset for a grown woman. The waist is 22 inches/56 cm (everybody together now... OW). Check out the interior: Those are steel bars in there. This was also the era when women really got a rep as being 'fragile' and 'the weaker sex'. It wasn't all romanticized nonsense to keep a good woman down; I daresay if a man had to wear one of those, he'd be fragile and the weaker sex, too. Whole books have been written about how these torture devices caused uterine prolapse, broken ribs, weakened and atrophied torso muscles, hideous pregnancy complications, and nerve damage from pressing on the spinal column. But it sure looked good. (Dress also has a 22 inch waist.) I daresay this wasn't the start of the 'torture for vanity', but it sure as hell didn't help. One of the other interesting conventions of the era was the 'shirtwaist', or the separate shirt and skirt combo. This wasn't the first time they were worn, but it may be the first time they got super-fancy eveningwear treatment. This is the 'shirt' portion of an evening gown, which obviously would have been worn with an equally fancy skirt: By our old buddy Worth, of course. This puppy laces up the back for an extra layer of corseting. Eesh. This was also an era when women wore tea gowns; casual, loose-fitting dresses for swooning about the house. But when they went out, they had on a fanged corset and a fitted dress. Day wear: Evening: (That may also be day wear; these people didn't know how to do casual.) And even wedding: Everything was topped off with a glorious hat, of course. With a hat pin to hold it on, stuck through your ten miles of hair in a fancy updo. Because the hair was part of the outfit, and the hair was almost always done in some variation of a fluffy chignon. This look eventually lost popularity for several reasons: The sporting movement (especially bicycles) and leisure time began to really underline how awkward and ungainly this was for anything other than standing around and perhaps a slow walk. Designers themselves began coming up with things that looked flattering but didn't require the corsets (forerunners of that being Poiret and Fortuny). Women began realizing that corsets were literally killing them (often in childbirth). But the big reason? You ready for this? Most historians consider the death knell of the corset to be the rise in wages for servants; all those undergarments created a hell of a lot of laundry and no one wanted to do their own. Sad, yet it has a practical ring of truth to it. So what's it mean to us today? Well. I'm convinced it defined femininity for a century. The boyish looks of the 1920s and the punk looks of the 1980s are considered oddities; even a century later, 'feminine' in the western world still means boobs and bust and small waist, and lace, and flowers, and silky, sheer fabrics. We still squeeze ourselves into killer undergarments (some of us more than others) to achieve the look, although thanks to modern textiles we don't have to use steel girders any more. And again due to this era, we don't shy away from them - very few of us think twice when putting on panty hose, or underwire bras, or high heels - it's just the way it is. As for who can work this look, even now, believe it or not, just about everyone wears a variation of it sometimes. Skirt, frilly blouse, nice shoes? Don't we all do that? At least sometimes? (For dressing up in winter, this is my go-to; boots, long skirt, warm blouse. You can wear longies under it.) Depending on the shape of your face, the upswept 'do still works, too. Skip the corset, though. No one needs that torture. -- Silhouette photo from "The Fashion Designer's Directory of Shape and Style" by Travers-Spencer and Zaman. All clothing photos from Vintage Textile. (Some are still for sale.)

A flurry of last-minute withdrawals meant that Object Pitch Day 6 was less packed than previous sessions. Who can blame the dropouts? As previous days had shown, the competition was certainly fierce and only the...

In the nineteen teens, the silhouette of what women wore looked a lot like this: Fashion historians are always going on about what was happening socially defined what people wore. Sometimes they're full of it, but in this case, they were spot on. Women were fighting for the right to vote here in the US, and getting more liberated all over the world. Check out these suffragists: Sure, I'm a fashion geek, but whenever I think "right to vote", I think of these clothes. These were what the stylish, independent, badass woman was wearing in the 1910s. (They were independent, but never thought to take off their hats... I wonder if that was a style concern, or a social one?) One of the first things these independent, badass women did was ditch the corset. Since women had been wearing corsets for a century, no one was quite sure how to dress. Remember our old buddy Poiret? He was one of the first to jump on the no corset idea, and he did a better job of it than most: Fortuny also worked in this era, giving the world the Delphos gown and loose jackets and capes: But really, other than a few skilled designers, the bulk of women's clothing in this era was very obviously in transition, between the ruffles and fluff of the 1900s and the sleek glitz of the 1920s. Everyone seemed paranoid at the idea of someone getting a glimpse of an uncorseted breast or waist, and so they layered like crazy. No one's quite sure, but most historians think the bra didn't get invented until the 1920s, so this era was underlined (haha) but a lack of what we think of as proper undergarments. I guess this is kind of how we still dress, when not wearing a bra and worried about stray jiggles. (Don't we?) Occasionally, you run across something sleeker and slimmer, but I suspect the sleek evening dresses had stays and boning sewn into the dress itself instead of a corset. Not much of a change, except in terminology. (We still do that. I've sewn stays into evening gowns, myself, when making them. These days we use plastic, but we're still using engineering to strap ourselves in.) Remember, many of the women wearing these dresses were the same ones who'd been wearing corsets in the 1900s. If they grew up wearing corsets, they would have had small waists even after they took the corsets off. And since we're enjoying the clothes, here are some coats from the same era:

When the Titanic sank in April 1912, fifteen hundred people lost their lives, including John Jacob Astor IV, Isidor Straus (co-owner of Macy’s), and James Crawley and his son Patrick, the heirs to the (fictional) Earl of Grantham and his estate, Downton Abbey. Thus begins the tale of the Crawley family, their servants, and their […]

Flickr is nothing without you, our community. We want to make sure this community continues to thrive, grow, and inspire, so we've made some big changes.

And for our final installment, as Lady Sybil would say: FORMAL WEAR, BITCHEZ. Feast your eyes on all the gorgeous beading and embroidery, darlings,