How to Read a Dress

How to Read a Dress

Author: Lydia Edwards

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-03-09

Total Pages: 488

ISBN-13: 1474286259

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Fashion is ever-changing, and while some styles mark a dramatic departure from the past, many exhibit subtle differences from year to year that are not always easily identifiable. With overviews of each key period and detailed illustrations for each new style, How to Read a Dress is an authoritative visual guide to women's fashion across five centuries. Each entry includes annotated color images of historical garments, outlining important features and highlighting how styles have developed over time, whether in shape, fabric choice, trimming, or undergarments. Readers will learn how garments were constructed and where their inspiration stemmed from at key points in history – as well as how dresses have varied in type, cut, detailing and popularity according to the occasion and the class, age and social status of the wearer. This lavishly illustrated book is the ideal tool for anyone who has ever wanted to know their cartridge pleats from their Récamier ruffles. Equipping the reader with all the information they need to 'read' a dress, this is the ultimate guide for students, researchers, and anyone interested in historical fashion.


How to Read a Dress

How to Read a Dress

Author: Lydia Edwards

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-10-07

Total Pages: 747

ISBN-13: 1350172243

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Fashion is ever-changing, and while some styles mark a dramatic departure from the past, many exhibit subtle differences from year to year that are not always easily identifiable. With overviews of each key period and detailed illustrations for each new style, How to Read a Dress is an appealing and accessible guide to women's fashion across five centuries. Each entry includes annotated color images of historical garments, outlining important features and highlighting how styles have developed over time, whether in shape, fabric choice, trimming, or undergarments. Readers learn how garments were constructed and where their inspiration stemmed from at key points in history – as well as how dresses have varied in type, cut, detailing and popularity according to the occasion and the class, age and social status of the wearer. This new edition includes additional styles to illustrate and explain the journey between one style and another; larger images to allow closer investigation of details of dress; examples of lower and working-class, as well as middle-class, clothing; and a completely new chapter covering the 1980s to 2020. The latter demonstrates how the late 20th century and early 21st century firmly left the dress behind as a requirement, but retained it as a perennially popular choice and illustrates how far the traditional boundaries of 'the dress' have been pushed (even including reference to a newly non-binary appreciation of the garment), and the intellectual shifts in the way women's fashion is both inspired and inspires. With these new additions, How to Read a Dress, revised edition, presents a complete and up-to-date picture of 'the dress' in all its forms, across the centuries, and taking into account different sartorial and social experiences. It is the ideal tool for anyone who has ever wanted to know their cartridge pleats from their Récamier ruffles. Equipping the reader with all the information they need to 'read' a dress, this is the ultimate guide for students, researchers, and anyone interested in historical fashion.


I Had a Favorite Dress

I Had a Favorite Dress

Author: Boni Ashburn

Publisher: Abrams

Published: 2011-10-01

Total Pages: 44

ISBN-13: 1613122020

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Open up a fresh and stylish story about growing up and keeping hold of your favorite memories. As the year passes, the narrator’s favorite dress goes through a series of creative changes, from dress to shirt to tank top to scarf and so on, until all that’s left of it is a good memory. Assisted by her patient and crafty mama, the narrator finds that when disaster strikes her favorite things, she doesn’t need to make mountains out of molehills—she “makes molehills out of mountains” instead! Structured around the days of the week, the story is also illustrated to show the passing of the seasons, a perfect complement to the themes of growing older and keeping hold (and letting go) of special mementos. Praise for I Had a Favorite Dress "A spunky story about adjusting to change with creativity and style. Tailor-made, so to speak, for the Etsy generation of DIY enthusiasts.” –Publishers Weekly “Everyone is smiling in the buoyant confections created by illustrator Julia Denos—including, it’s fair to say, young readers looking at them. Endearing picture book.” –Wall Street Journal “What could have been yet another example of kindergarten consumerism instead becomes one of resourcefulness and resilience.” –New York Times “Denos’s multimedia illustrations reinforce the narrator’s vibrant personality and the amazing transformations of the dress while capturing the action and emotion of the story. This book is sure to capture the imaginations of would-be seamstresses; children who can’t bear to part with a favorite item; and those who want to reduce, reuse, recycle.” –School Library Journal “Breezy in style, they smartly stitch each scene of alteration as the not-so-little girl sashays through the days of the week and the seasons. A charming interpretation of an old story that will speak to young fashionistas.” –Kirkus Reviews


Dress Coded

Dress Coded

Author: Carrie Firestone

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2020-07-07

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1984816446

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In this debut middle-grade girl-power friendship story, perfect for fans of Moxie, an eighth grader starts a podcast to protest the unfair dress code enforcement at her middle school and sparks a rebellion. Molly Frost is FED UP... Because Olivia was yelled at for wearing a tank top. Because Liza got dress coded and Molly didn't, even though they were wearing the exact same outfit. Because when Jessica was pulled over by the principal and missed a math quiz, her teacher gave her an F. Because it's impossible to find shorts that are longer than her fingertips. Because girls' bodies are not a distraction. Because middle school is hard enough. And so Molly starts a podcast where girls can tell their stories, and before long, her small rebellion swells into a revolution. Because now the girls are standing up for what's right, and they're not backing down.


How to Read a Dress

How to Read a Dress

Author: Lydia Edwards

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-03-09

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 1474286240

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Fashion is ever-changing, and while some styles mark a dramatic departure from the past, many exhibit subtle differences from year to year that are not always easily identifiable. With overviews of each key period and detailed illustrations for each new style, How to Read a Dress is an authoritative visual guide to women's fashion across five centuries. Each entry includes annotated color images of historical garments, outlining important features and highlighting how styles have developed over time, whether in shape, fabric choice, trimming, or undergarments. Readers will learn how garments were constructed and where their inspiration stemmed from at key points in history – as well as how dresses have varied in type, cut, detailing and popularity according to the occasion and the class, age and social status of the wearer. This lavishly illustrated book is the ideal tool for anyone who has ever wanted to know their cartridge pleats from their Récamier ruffles. Equipping the reader with all the information they need to 'read' a dress, this is the ultimate guide for students, researchers, and anyone interested in historical fashion.


A Life-Long Story

A Life-Long Story

Author: Anonymous

Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand

Published: 2022-10-25

Total Pages: 478

ISBN-13: 3375122977

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Reprint of the original, first published in 1859.


Dress, Distress and Desire

Dress, Distress and Desire

Author: J. Batchelor

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2005-05-11

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 0230508200

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Dress, Distress and Desire explores representations of sartorial experience in eighteenth-century literature. Batchelor's study brings together for the first time canonical and non-canonical texts including novels, conduct books and women's magazines to investigate the pressures that the growth of the fashion market placed on conceptions of female virtue and propriety. It shows how dress dispelled the sentimental myth that the body acted as a moral index and enabled the women reader to resist some of sentimental literature's more prescriptive advice.


Victorian Dress in Contemporary Historical Fiction

Victorian Dress in Contemporary Historical Fiction

Author: Danielle Mariann Dove

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2023-10-19

Total Pages: 211

ISBN-13: 1350294691

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Victorian Dress in Contemporary Historical Fiction is the first full-length study to investigate and attend to the deeply suggestive and highly symbolic iterations of Victorian women's dress in the contemporary cultural imagination. Drawing upon a range of popular and less well-studied neo-Victorian novels published between 1990 and 2014, as well as their Victorian counterparts, 19th-century illustrative material, and extant Victorian garments, Danielle Dove explores the creative possibilities afforded by dress and fashion as gendered sites of agency and affect. Focusing on the relationship between texts and textiles, she demonstrates how dress is central to the narrativization, re-formulation, and re-fashioning of the material past in the present. In its examination of the narrative trajectories, lively vitalities, and material entanglements that accrue to, and originate from, dress in the neo-Victorian novel, this study brings a fresh approach to reading Victorian sartorial culture. For researchers and students of Victorian and neo-Victorian studies, dress history, material culture, and gender studies, this volume offers a rich resource with which to illuminate the power of fashion in fiction.


Fear and Clothing

Fear and Clothing

Author: Jane Custance Baker

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2023-01-26

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 135024032X

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Through analyzing dress in detective fiction, Fear and Clothing reveals a cultural history of identity affected by the social upheaval caused by war. In-depth analysis of interwar publications by a comprehensive range of writers reveals readers' anxieties and fears about class, gender and race and how these changed over the period. Although read and written by both men and women, detective fiction was deemed at the time to be a masculine and high-status entertainment. However the literature demonstrates an admiration and acceptance of the woman's identity, performed during the Great War and continuing throughout the interwar period, as girl pal and female gentleman. In chapters that explore age, character, class, masculinity, performative womanhood and race, Jane Custance Baker exposes how dress was a status marker to both male and female readers, made anxious by social change brought about by war. Dress in detective fiction reveals a set of signs to be read, digested, and possibly employed to model the individual reader's personal dress choices. Fear and Clothing sheds new light on dress of the period, the social and cultural environment as depicted in the popular fiction genre in the early 20th century, and is of interest to researchers and scholars within dress history, literary and historical studies, as well as anyone who enjoys the history of detective fiction.