Few books of costume design will prove more useful to artists, students, stage designers, and scholars than this volume. Presenting detailed drawings in a continuous chronological format, it provides a history of costume design through the ages, from the first century A.D. to 1930.
Culled from sculpture, lithographs, paintings, illuminated manuscripts, engravings, caricatures, fashion plates, photographs, and magazines, these illustrations have been carefully redrawn to bring out essential lines as well as all the details. Men, women, and children are shown in authentic dress, in characteristic period postures, and coiffed in contemporary hairstyles — even their gestures and bearing offer the reader insight into the attitudes and manners of their times. Due to the acceleration of change in styles, the book moves from single pages representing entire centuries to one-page-per-year depictions of fashion development. In all, more than 1,400 illustrations chronicle the full sweep of two millennia of Western garb, from Roman noble to Victorian dandy, from Elizabethan lady to Jazz Age schoolboy — all in easily accessible form.
Painstakingly researched and meticulously detailed, this book will be a valuable asset and resource for students, illustrators, costume and cultural historians — anyone interested in the history of fashion.