 Hello it's Rebecca at Timesmith Dressmaking. Welcome back to my channel. This week we're chatting about books, about 18th century dress. Whether you're a beginner and struggling to tell quickly whether a style is an 18th century style or Victorian or Elizabethan Tudor, how can you recognize 18th century? Or you've been making your own historical dress for decades. I'm going to look at a selection of books that I've roughly classified according to their purpose, what they can do for you, no matter what stage of this journey, how much knowledge or skill, or none at all that you may have. First of all, I have several books to share that feature visuals that give you chronological information as to the main styles of dress in the 18th century, what they looked like, so that you can recognize them, and with the help in breaking down the sequence, the changes over time. Even within the 18th century there was a lot of change and there was actually a lot of variety, there were more styles being worn at any given time than perhaps we think of. So these books are also the pretty pictures, but you're learning as you're looking at things too. The second category of books is what I call kind of the essays, they're written by historians to help you understand the context of the clothing. So they're heavier on text, but usually some very good pictures as well, but give you a broader sense of the meaning behind the clothing that you're looking at. And the third category I'm going to look at has to do with patterns on fabrics, what motifs and colors and combinations, how do you recognize what is a period appropriate print? So first up, looking at visuals. I'm going to start with a book that just came out fairly recently called How to Read Address by Lydia Edwards and there will be a link in the description below. This is a chronological look at changing fashion from the 16th to the 20th century, so it gives you a nice feeling of where 18th century fits into things, what came before and what came after. A typical page will show you an extent from a museum with information as to what it is, what style, what it was called. The year or year range was a decade period it came from and what museum it's in. So we have this fantastic Mantua early 18th century in the V&A with pointers to different features and tell you what they were and what was key about that time period, how you know that this was typical or maybe not, but the key zero in on some of the details help differentiate that gown from the 1720s from this gown from about 70, 80 years, 70 years later. So this is a really fantastic book and even those who know a lot about changing fashions and what were characteristics of certain time periods, it's still a really fascinating book and it's very well rounded too with references to art and depictions too of similar styles. It just pulls the whole thing together in a really easy to digest but really fascinating on the details too, so this book really liked that one. And then I've got a couple of books by an art historian Eileen Ribeiro looking at the visuals, the paintings and drawings that happen to be of people wearing fashions. So it's looking, what can we learn about the fashions of the period as they were painted by contemporaries at the time? Some of those motivations for art may not have been to record exactly what people were wearing or what we're seeing and some artists would drape their clients in costume to project certain themes or certain values of that time period and then other times people come and say I want to be painted in this as my best to show off my wealth. All sorts of motivations, all sorts of nuances you have to think about with art history in terms of what is what you're seeing actually reflection of what people were wearing but it can be a very useful guide to shapes and silhouettes and recognizing 18th century dress and getting some history behind key players and people, both their subjects, the sitters and the painters. So this book by Eileen Ribeiro, visual history of costume, I have another one by a same author, same art historian that is a little bit more theoretical on the themes and that we see in historical dress through the 18th century by means of portraits. It is a study of portraits so it is looking at the meaning of dress, historical themes, the ideas of your the image that you portray versus the reality, heroism. There were certain themes through history that marked how people wanted to be painted and how painters approached that, the relationships between painters and sitters. So that's kind of very heavy on the pretty pictures but also a very important scholarship on art history, a dress that we can learn from art history. The second category of books is, that I want to talk about, is the broader historical context. So starting with an oldie but goodie dressed in 18th century England by Ann Buck. Now Ann Buck was the curator of the costume collection in Manchester. Her title for 25 years, I love this, she was called the keeper of the costume and this book came out around the same time I was born so it's getting up there but there's so much in here that still holds up and is still good scholarship back in my legal days, we talk about is it all but is it still good law, can you count on it? One of the fantastic things I really appreciate about this book is that she breaks things down, categorizes things according to class or social standing people station in life and that and looks at their interactions with each other and with the social strata above and below. So people going to balls or birthday parties for example or masquerades and looking at each other you know and noting and writing about what they saw their their contemporaries wearing. So there's a lot of primary source documentation in this book but from it gives you almost a little gossipy sense because it's about you know real people observing other people and she has the chapters then according to kind of social status starting with crown and court, royalty, people of fashion, the gentry, servants, the common people and in a really useful chapter on buying and making clothes how people sourced goods that people weren't just at home making their own but there were very speciality trades and second hand markets and even ready-made clothing being made, a section of fabrics and wearers and dress in society. It's that broader scope that broader picture that this book is I think very good at setting up a scene and giving you a good grounding as to what English society and the relationship people had with the dress but I just want to flag out a couple of things just from the introduction the very beginning to set the scene that I think is really valuable and one of those is distinguishing fashion from dress. The fashion had to do with change and sequence that you looked at something that was brand new you'd never seen before and you knew what had come before and then you'd be watching with keen interest and that's what fashion historians looking back is that changing sequence, that parade of changing, changing fashions that defines what fashion is whereas dress and as a dress historian this is dear to my heart dress has to do with people's interactions with fashion what is available to them what they could do what they could buy what they could wear and their choices what did they actually wear and that's where there's so much variety and agency and choice and it's not just about oh I can get that but I will get that and then I will adapt it for me and express personal taste that's what the variation is and the relationship between fashion and dress it's intrinsic but it's tangled and complex and I think this book is very effective at untangling that and helping you appreciate the difference between fashion and dress and how these play out in human society and how people interact with each of those and my next book that is broader context really helps you understand society how it worked and the role that clothing played is this one I think this is an essential no matter where you are and your level of interest in 18th century dress the dress of the people by John Stiles this focuses on primary documentation primary sources in more than north of England but outside of London which is very valuable so it's ordinary people what they were wearing what clothing meant to them what they need what they needed it to do the function where they got it changes the materials lots of incredibly just fascinating pictures paintings caricatures cartoons and it's worth noting that John Stiles the other work that he's done I'll get it into my next category on fabrics that he's got incredible knowledge of people's eye for the aesthetics no matter what your your station in life there's certain things that had to do with kind of your pride and your dignity that clothing it's important to you for so that's an important book before I move into just talking specifically about fabrics just flag up one book that kind of verges into making construction but it's it's costume in detail by Nancy Bradfield where she took line drawings made line drawings with construction notes of lots and lots and lots of garments in the Snow's Hill collection some of this goes in rotation on on display at Barrington Hall to the National Trust property and this brand Bradfield made incredibly detailed drawings that this is this is very useful reference when you're constructing garments but equally it's just it's nice to sit and look at the pictures and just say it's one of those books that you can sit down with after dinner in a comfortable chair and on your favorite beverage and enjoy and normally when I make a top five essential books list for me my purpose being to make my top five would be very heavy on the how to make and construct front but this book is always included it crosses barriers that book and I think it's quite unique the last category I'd like to look at is how do you know if the fabric you're looking at is appropriate for 18th century we tend to say train your eye look at lots of extents look at lots of examples and there are lots and lots of gowns in museums in collections that you can look at online those are the intact gowns but they're not the full picture and there's also things like survivor bias so we tend to see a lot of garments that have survived because they belong to wealthy people but what about ordinary people like you and me if we reenact or do living history and we're portraying a more ordinary sort whether we want to call it working class or middle class how do we know what fabrics I mean you can just go the safe way and just do nothing but solids right and you just have a solid colored wool or solid colored linen when we look at things today we're often seeing patterns printed on cottons that are made to mimic the appearance of silk to mass of woven silks and it's so tempting to try to get the look of a silk in a cotton because it's often cheaper of course I'd like to refer you to some books that contain images clear depictions of textile remnants that so we have primary sources to see what these fabrics actually look like and these are cottons generally generally so the first one up is threads of feeling and it's by john styles who also wrote dress the people threads of feeling is a feature of tokens that were left at the foundling hospital in london by families or mothers who could not for whatever reason keep their child or their baby their infant and they would leave their child with the foundling hospital and often they would have some sort of fabric remnant a token pinned on their on their swaddling cloths on their on their wrappings in some way with the with the practice being that the mother would have retained a piece of that same fabric so that if her circumstances changed if something enabled her to come back and claim her child that she'd have this token that matched the child's token and that's what this book is a collection of those tokens called threads of feeling and it is it's heartbreaking that context but to look at the examples of the fabrics that were left gives you an idea of printed cottons most of them were indeed printed cottons in the time period that that tokens were being left at the foundling museum it's sort of 1750 1790 that sort of period so a lot of 1760s and it's can be quite surprising some of the prints that to our eye might seem quite modern but lots and lots of prints and you can get a feel for the colors bearing in mind that some of them may have faded or had a degradation in the colors that are being depicted but the outlines the motifs the scale some of them can be quite realistic and others quite abstract this is a wonderful wonderful it's quite slim again with all the other books i will try to include links to all of these in the description below so you can find them and the last one is a big book this is the published publication collection of the album that miss barbra johnson kept that served as a bit of a household diary as a record of her own good housekeeping management for money she had a set income a limited income and yet due to marriages within her family her younger brothers tended to marry into society so she had social obligations and appearances she needed to make she needed to look smart so she was making her money go spending as wise as she could maximum bang for the buck and she kept fabric snippets and record how much of this fabric she got how much she paid for it and what it was intended to be made up to she did not just buy a stash and sit on it because fabric was expensive was valuable so she would indicate what it was what she bought it for in mind and there's there's lots of context to the introduction is written by natalie rostine of the v&a museum who's looked into the context and some of these things that could be identified as to what party or ball or or a social event that miss johnson wore some of these things too and could be but again sometimes the samples are quite surprising and can be linked to sample books from weaving houses things things like silks uh so she miss johnson wore she had the full full gamut of of silks uh wool cotton and linen and and given her circumstances in life she really made the made good use of the cottons so this album starts I think in the 1750s when she was quite young so it does actually record there are a few things that are on the cusp of her child even really her childhood before she moved into adult fashions uh there are floral prints of both cottons and linens there are collections at this page just got a bit of knotted fringe it was sometimes called fly fringe just little samples of that it's a remarkable book um up until recently this was quite hard to get a hold of um and expensive when you did and then the vna they have the original the original journal they've digitized quite a lot of it it can be very hard to look out on a phone or mobile device so you kind of need to go to a desktop to go into the the vna online the museum digital collection and search for um the barbara johnson album um where you if you're on a desktop you can you can but it's not not all of the samples are there and it can be hard to search it is kind of a page by page trawling through um i happened to find this book at a fairly decent price just before the vna announced that the digital collection was then available on their website which i might not have bought the book if i'd known that was about to happen but i referred to this book on regular basis and i'm really glad to have it so that's barbara johnson her album of fashion and fashions and fabrics of her lifetime and she did live into the regency um the period and um was can't be presentable um and up to fashion she was not an old woman insisting on you know clinging to the styles of her youth she did keep up to date and her terminology is interesting always to read too as to what the different gown styles that she referred to that she had in her wardrobe so that's a little peek back um a slice of time a real woman and her real clothing her real wardrobe and her buying habits her tastes what she liked what she could get and what she spent her limited funds on so this has been a bit of a whirlwind trip through i think some highlights my bookshelf i'm always bookmarking and uh saving on the internet links to books that i would like to read or acquire and so my collection my my library so my library is always growing if there's anything that you wonder if i've run across a book on any particular subject um can try to help you out so let me know but again if you have any comments any of these books any more information about how to find them um or what they contain but i can certainly let you know what's in the table of contents and in the indexing so that you know whether the book is worth borrowing from your library or trying to get a copy uh or even pooling with friends if you've got a costume in group um see if you can put together a group library where you're all pooling your your resources as something that you can all share and benefit from so i hope that's been interesting so next week i'm going to talk about patterns and that includes books with patterns in them including gridded patterns and patterns that can be graded up uh also ones with with shapes in the period um style so we'll look at those next week i have lots on those i could i could talk for hours and do several different episodes several videos just on those so take care and we'll see you next week