Your Wardrobe Unlock'd

A closer look at fashions for Autumn 1812, gathered from the pages of Ackerman's Repository and presented here to aid DPP hopefuls!

 Janyce Hill of the Vintage Pattern Lending Library gives us the fashion forecast for October, November and December 1912.

Janyce gives us the fashion forecast for summer 1912, including wedding fashions drawn from magazines of that year.

A closer look at fashions for Summer 1812, gathered from the pages of Ackerman's Repository and La Belle Assemblée.

A closer look at fashions for Spring 1812, gathered from the pages of Ackerman's Repository and La Belle Assemblée.

Janyce Hill gives us the fashion forecast for April, May and June 1912, drawn from fashion magazines from that year.

How to add more detail to your historic fashion illustration, how to use shadows and highlights, how to draw fabric, and how to add color.

Early medieval clothing: a potato sack with a girdle? Not necessarily: here lies an astonishing wealth of fabric, colour & detail.

The nuts and bolts of Regency:  how to be original, innovative AND authentic when Regency costumes are so often reproduced.

If you want to design your own historic fashions, you'll do well to learn how to make your own fashion sketches.

The Winterthur Collection  has many fantastic historical clothing and accessory catalogs. Here's the best  from 1850-1919

Diane shows us how to use "Match Points" to guarantee that your garment has perfectly matched plaids or stripes.

Plaids are Difficult, Stripes are Tricky, so we avoid them. But they can be tamed to impressive results: Diane shows how!

Jema Hewitt shows by example how to design fantastical Steampunk outfits without resorting to the same old clichés.

I have the honor to own my great-grandmother’s 1875 wedding dress. The more I look closely at this heirloom, the more fascinating it is!

A close look at an authentic Victorian dress, with many photos, construction and sewing details, and fashion plates of the time.

As a new costume enthusiast, you might be delighted with a particular Victorian pattern and sew it straight out of the envelope, just as it is. Experienced dressmakers might fall in love with an antique fashion plate,  and recreate it to make something genuinely special.

But what if you want to make a gown that is not a direct copy of a fashion plate, or a pattern that dozens of people have already made? Suppose you want to design an original Victorian costume—something that no one's seen before, and yet which would be right at home on the pages of La Mode Illustrée, Godey's Home Journal, or Harper's Bazar?

If you've "been there, done that" and now want to make a truly original Victorian costume, read on!

Right back at the genesis of YWU I wrote an article about what I called "Holy Grails".

I'm willing to bet that most of us reading this have such projects in mind. There's a book on your shelf that naturally falls open at a certain photograph; there's a bookmark in your web browser. But we never get around to trying - it's too impractical, too expensive, too difficult, just too much all around.

This year I've actually done one of these huge projects, when I recreated a vastly decorated Edwardian Worth gown (follow this link for a FREE slideshow of museum images), and I've got so much out of it that I'm going to use this article to pull you a little bit closer to tackling your own Grail. I'm going to tell you why it's worth trying such intimidating projects, and then show you how.

When I set out to learn more about European women’s turbans, I assumed this would be a fairly narrow subject. I had a few preconceptions shared by many costumers: namely, that turbans were limited to Regency period evening wear; that they looked much like the classic African, Middle Eastern and Asian wrapped headdresses on which the European fashion turban was based; and that a turban was always a turban. The reality turned out to be more complex.

In this article I'll discuss the evidence, show you lots of examples from various periods and then discuss in detail many ways to reproduce authentic looking turban headdresses - as well as how to recreate the beautiful ornamental pins that were used to secure and decorate them.

Here’s the setting: you’re sitting watching a great film or attending a wonderful play with incredible costumes, and a new character enters the scene.The moment you see them, before they open their mouth and utter a syllable, you know exactly who they are. Why?