Sewing and Collecting Vintage Fashions, by Eileen MacIntosh. Chilton Company, 1988

This book is aimed at the very beginner to vintage and historical fashion. It gives a (very) brief overview of Medieval and Tudor fashions, and then heads right into American Colonial, Regency, Victorian, and some Edwardian. These are definitely her eras; she’s also a writer of historical romances and apparently she sets them in these eras. There is info on where to find true vintage fashions, and a little bit about sewing, such as what things must be done by hand because they show and won’t be true to the era. She even gives what fabrics will be true to the various eras, something that is frequently overlooked- polyester satin Medieval gowns, anyone? There are some tiny patterns which you can scale up to human size to make your own reproductions, and a chapter on how to mend and alter vintage pieces to fit you. Other than those, which are to scale, the illustrations are hand doodled, with a few photos. There are a number of pages of resources, but many of them are no longer in existence. There is also a great bibliography- the books are dated but you can almost always find old books via the interlibrary loan system. So, good for a beginning costumer but not so much for anyone with experience. Three stars.

 

1940s Fashion: The Definitive Sourcebook, by Charlotte Fiell; intro. By Emmanuelle Dirix. Welbeck, 2021

The third (and, hopefully, not the last?) of this series gives us a lot more information than the first or even the second. We’ve got 36 pages of text, and it goes over the many changes the world went through in this decade. The Second World War changed the economy, there were shortages of materials, Paris was invaded, and there were radical changes in gender roles. Women went from needing pretty dresses for visiting and shopping to needing trousers and overalls so they could safely work in factories and in the defense industries (my mother was an arc welder in the shipyards, so I heard tales of this in first person, too). The shape of skirts went from full to narrow to accomadate fabric rationing. Hems went up, although not as far as in the 20s. Designers, unable to change silhouettes as they usually did for new seasons, concentrated on buttons, trims, and fabric manipulation to make dresses look new.

The rest of the book is the usual feast of period photos, clothing catalogs, designer drawings, and other period ephemera. There are more pages devoted to accessories and lingerie than in the previous two volumes. I’ve got to give this one a full five stars! l