Customer Reviews

Shoes, Hats and Fashion Accessories: A Pictorial Archive, 1850-1940 (Dover Pictorial Archive)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This review is from the viewpoint of a home sewer and crafter who adores vintage clothing, not a fashion historian, designer or illustrator.

Never having purchased any of the Pictorial Archives series before, I was surprised and initially disappointed by the black and white illustrations and the complete lack of text.

While it is fascinating to see how fashion accessories evolved over the decades there is no indication of whether an item was casual and day wear, or dressier for afternoon or evening. An index naming the style of each piece and/or notes explaining popular colors of the day would be helpful.

The black and white illustrations do render the detail of the accessories beautifully. With over 2,000 copyright free illustrations of wide variety of styles for men, women and children included I look forward to years of inspiration for fashion embellishment.

This book has lovely pictures, although the author admits she has taken the liberty to decide which should be included for each year. It would be an even better book if the articles were named, better yet a small description, sometimes I wondered if a shoe were a man or woman's.

I think the book is good but stops short of being great but it is interesting and I would like to a sequel with the other drawings that were left out of this edition.

This book is exactly what it claims to be - a pictorial archive. For descriptions or details, Dover has a wide selection of books that will be of immense help with materials, construction, and history. For those who already have a working knowledge of the century in fashion, this book is a candy store of visual tidbits.

Just a note: very few fashion illustrations of the nineteenth century were colored; hand-coloring was a labor-intensive process reserved for high-end publications with limited runs. Check my Listmania list for some books with color illustrations.

This book is great. It is just what I was looking for in doing some period research. The illustrations could only be better if they were in color. Anyone interested in fashion accessories of this period will not be disappointed.

The first thing you need to remember is that this is a 128-page book that covers 90 years of fashion accessory history. That means that there will be a limited amount of space that is devoted to any given year (an average of 1.4 pages per year). As this is a pictorial archive, the available space is devoted to images - not text. This makes the book an excellent, concise VISUAL overview of fashion accessories. However, it is not an end-all, be-all fashion accessory resource. If you require more detailed information, you are best off getting a book that focuses on a particular decade or even a particular year.

Images are taken from no less than 4 different fashion magazines. For example, Harper's Bazaar and The Delineator are American fashion magazines, while La Mode Illustrée is French. Thus you get selections from a wide range of sources. I have a friend that recently undertook a research project that required her to obtain and search through a year's worth of La Mode Illustrée. She ended up with a stack of material that was no less than 8 inches tall - this was for a single year for one publication. The editors have taken the time to go through a lot of different sources to compile a concise overview. Images are also printed as they were in the original sources - in black and white.

What this book does not do is give you information such as a detailed bibliography of where each image came from. Nor does it give labels or color or construction data. For that, you will need to go to other resources. I would say that this book is best used for dating specific styles, identifying a time period for further research, or as a clip art source. Go to other books for more specific information, but as a visual overview, it's reasonable for the money.

There is no text with this book which was a disappointment, however it served it's purpose of identifing the years that the styles were popular.

There is a great need for reference material of the past. particularly the 1900`s through 50`s. This publication had some good illustrations but there were no references as to source, just a time period and thus only of general backgroud reference. . I also found that many of the images were common available images elsewhere. The low price made the purchase an acceptable member of my reference library even if it be only for tracking down better information from other more detailed resources of the images that were shown. Phillip Nutt

I was not happy with this one, the whole book looks just like the cover. No real information inside, just a collection of drawings.

The pictures are great, but I'd like a few words by each image to tell what the hat, shoe, etc. was called. Good for artists, not so good for writers.