Customer Reviews

Victorian and Edwardian Fashion: A Photographic Survey (Dover Fashion and Costumes)

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I have bought (and loved) several costume research books on the Victorian/Edwardian era. Fashion plate oriented books, most notably "Victorian and Edwardian Fashions from 'La Mode Illustree'", are great for research, but for true visual aides, the photographs found in this book are indispensable. The photos range from amateur snapshots to posed, professionally done portraits. With an almost equal distribution of male and female subjects, this book may be the best guide to authentic Victorian and Edwardian costume. Unlike fashion plates, the photos show costumes for a variety of occasions and suitable for different ages and sizes. Spanning the entire Victorian and Edwardian eras, you can locate most popular styles within the tons of black and white photos. For realism, check out this book. If you are more interested in the latest in fashion of the time, check out "Victorian and Edwardian Fashions from 'La Mode Illustree'". A great source!

I love this book, have read it before in the earlier edition (Fashion and reality.) as I haven't read them paralelly I take their word for it that this edition is revised. All the elements I appreciated are still there.Beautifull, clear photographs with every detail showing.Blocks of text on the fashion in generall. Comments on the changes of fashion and how different factors interlink, obvius once pointed out but not seen in many other books. Such as who leads fashion, follows the main stream or is allready out of fashion, and why! Individuall short texts for each photo, wich points out what can bee studied in this particular picture.That in the same photo a person may wear warying items, in fashion different years, and you must look for the youngest element in order to date it. A clear deffinition of the aim and boundrys of the book, notes to quotations, index, and a bibliography all adds upp to an impression of a reliabel and abel author who has researched the subject thorougly. In addition she manages to write an english that is fun and easy to read even for me who does not have it as my first language.

This book is perfect for anyone interested in the Victorian Era. The book is full of beautiful pictures, and each one has its own caption. The pictures are all in order by year, so its fun to see how the dresses and hairstyles slowly changed from 1840-1910. Besides pictures, there is also alot of interesting reading. You get to learn all about men, women, and children's fashions of this era.

This book is an excellent contemporary resource for anyone interested in dress of the period. It contains portraits ranging from the posed and formal to the less formal (though still staged). As a record of what real people wore it is invaluable, showing not only the well-to-do and fashionable but the working classes as well, sometimes in uniform. Add to this that the settings also are recorded and it is a gold mine for anyone researching the period.

Imagine trying to research late 20th century fashion with nothing but Vogue magazine as a reference. Naturally you would assume that everyone had a BMI of 14%, bizarre hair was the rage, visible hard nipples were just part of the fashion, and we were all running around in the snow like suicidal mantis bugs with lipstick smeared halfway up our cheeks and nothing but the most outre $5000 tank tops money could buy.

This is effectively how we are presented with Victorian fashion. Illustrated high style fashion magazines like La Mode Illustree have become our "references" while relatively rarely do we see realistic depictions of the actual fashions of the time, and so illustrated example models of idealized bodies wearing idealized fashions become the assumed norm.

This book is about the best remedy for that short of a trip in a time machine. 235 photographs spanning the period from the introduction of the photograph in 1839 to the years leading up to WWI with heavy annotation present a fairly realistic overall picture of what a fashionable person of each age would be swishing about town in. The main focus is England though there are a few references to other countries (primarily France), and while there are references to the clothing of people of lesser means, this is primarily an investigation of those who had enough money to actually keep up with the fashions of the time.

Don't let the page count fool you, what this book lacks in size it makes up for in information density. Descriptions of fashions from both modern points of view and period text references are cross referenced with the included photographs and give a pretty complete picture of each trend and clothing item described. There is a fair amount of men's fashion described as well, which is pretty darn rare in Victorian references. My only issue with this book is the relative difficulty of following the photographic references as they are grouped together in four large clumps distributed throughout the book. The photographs are numbered sequentially but the photographic sections do not have page numbers, so finding the photographs referred to in a single sentence can take you flipping through half of the book. Given that there are in text references every 50 words or so this gets old extremely quickly, but even so it was worth the effort.

I expect this to become a go-to reference for Victorian clothing and it is highly recommended as such for those with more then a passing interest in Victorian and Edwardian fashion, though I will likely add some tabs to the photograph sections to make it easier to find the referenced images and I suggest doing the same.

Dover Publications, monarchs of 19th-century fashion surveys, have hit another one clean out of the park with this superb examination of Victorian and Edwardian fashion from the coronation of Victoria to the early 1900's. Originally published in England in the early 1960's as "The Mirror of Reality", this book was acquired and republished by Dover in a handy paperback edition up to their usual high physical standards (Dover is well-known for the high quality of its paperback books). Alison Gernsheim delves into every single aspect of costume in the period, from buttons to boots, and the accompanying B&W photos, well over a hundred of them, are worth even more words. The fashion-plate books such as Stella Blum's "Harper's Bazar 1867-1898" and Joanne Olian's "Victorian and Edwardian Fashions from La Mode Illustree" are absolutely indispensable for showing the fashions of the era as their designers conceived them, but you need - I say again, _need_ - this book to see how those dresses looked in the real world.

Since 1963, this has remained an important contribution to the understanding of the interface between fashion and social history. The author built her text from extensive research in contemporary sources, and there are footnotes so that we may retrace her steps. She did not always use dated photographs as evidence but since her theories are constructed from historical sources, I am inclined to forgive her when she selects undated pictures to illustrate her points.

The novice needs a warning that Gernsheim's history of fashion is almost entirely British (not American). You need to know that there are differences in chronology and taste between old world and new. -- And Gernsheim documents mostly the choices of the well-to-do. The book is also more text than illustration and the reproduction of the wonderful photographs does not do them justice.

That said, do not be deterred! "Victorian and Edwardian Fashion" is an excellent read and an absolute must-have if you are a serious researcher.

This informative book uses photos and illustrations well. It's probably best for readers with a pre-existing interest in the topic, as it's a bit dry and academic to draw in the first time visitor to the subject.

A good and informative book. Just looking through it I learned a few things that I hadn't ever heard or noticed before, such as the way that tightlacing of corsets doesn't seem to have been too common before the late 1860s.
The book is very reasonably priced. The only trouble, which probably, were it to be fixed, would make the book cost a lot more, is that I often wish the photographs were printed in better quality.

This compact book is full of photos and it has great explanations from beginning to end. The author explains carefully every photograph, and also each of the fashions worn by the subjects.

If you love old photos of Victorian and Edwardian fashions, then this is a nice book to own for your library. (Also, the price is reasonable).