(Part 3) Reddit mentions: The best fashion history books

I'm back!

Usually the info about beauty, makeup, and hairstyles, are found in fashion history books, so here a couple of general fashion history:

• Auguste Racinet. Complete Costume History, is like THE fashion history book. Published in the 19th century, includes info not only about fashion, but beauty, hairstyles, interior design, fabrics, prints, etc. If you want to buy it, take the version of the link. There is a cheaper edition, but it is smaller, and the point of this book is the amount of detail in the illustrations, so go for the big one.
  
• Pictorial Encyclopedia of Historic Costume: 1200 Full-Color Figures, by Karl Rohrbach
  
• A Pictorial History of Costume From Ancient Times to the Nineteenth Century: With Over 1900 Illustrated Costumes, Including 1000 in Full Color, by Wolfgang Bruhn & Max Tilke.
  
  Some books about beauty:
  
  
• The book Facing Beauty:  Painted Women and Cosmetic Art analyses the beauty and makeup through the eyes of art, from the Renaissance to the early 20th century.
  
• Face Paint: The History of Makeup by Lisa Eldridge, she is a makeup artists for celebrities and fashion editorials, and she has a YouTube channel with videos that are a nice complement to the book.
  
• Beauty and Cosmetics 1550–1950, by Sarah Jane Downing.
  
• If you're more like a experimentation person, take a look at The American Duchess Guide to 18th Century Beauty, which ahs tutorials for hair and makeup.
  
• Classic Beauty: The History of Makeup, by Gabriela Hernández.
  
• This edition of Arqueología Mexicana (E37) is all about body modification in the prehispanic cultures: face an body paint, tattoos, ear, mouth, and nose piercings.... It is sadly not available to read online, BUT you can buy it and they send it anywhere in the world. It is a bilingual edition.
  
  Here some online resources:
  
  
• On this site there's a compilation of articles about makeup through the ages.
  
• Here's another cosmetics site with more resources from ancient times to the 2000s.
  
• A little bit about Victorian Makeup and beauty.
  
• A paper published on a dermatology journal, COSMETICS AND SKIN CARE PRODUCTS: A Historical Perspective, by ZoeDiana Draelos MD.
  
• Silvousplaits on YouTube reproduces historical hairstyles.
  
• Also on YouTube, Janet Stephens is my favourite with the most accurate historical hairstyles, and a ton of research behind. She does not upload so often, but you can follow her on Facebook too.
  
• If you're fluent in Spanish, you can download this paper about body modification in the prehispanic Mexico.
  
• A little bit about tattoos in Ancient Egypt.
  
• A LOT of downloadable papers about body modification in Ancient cultures.
  
  And finally, not a resource, but LBCC Historical sells beauty products from historical recipes of different centuries, but you know, without lead and stuff XD
  
  Yeah, I'm a fashion history nerd, in case you haven't noticed.

My several month old list: Fashion Podcasts and Interviews

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I've been collecting a few podcasts to listen to in my spare time and came across an enormous amount when searching both on /r/malefashionadvice, /r/malefashion and /r/femalefashionadvice.

I thought it'd be nice to share a few I've found which were interesting and which other people can enjoy.

I know my fashion interests can definitely skew to the boring, so if you have any more suggestions please comment below!

Podcasts & Youtube:

• Dressed podcast run by two fashion historians this weekly podcast explores the incredibly rich and complex history behind the clothes we wear.
  
  
• Stuff you Missed in History Class which is part of the HowStuffWorks podcast network has some great episodes on fashion history, Marie-Antoinette and the first fashion designer Rose Betin. Search 'fashion' for some good hits.
  
  
• The Ultimate Fashion History is run by another fashion historian who produces great original content.
  
  
• Loose Threads this fashion intelligence and analyst company also has a nice podcast which talks about power suiting to product manufacturer.
  
  
• Unravel is done by three alumni of the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) graduate program who take a fresh and more modern approach to their topics. They go in-depth with their podcasts and have nice light hearted tone.
  
  
• The Talks has a wealth of good interviews with people in all walks of life, and there’s a good chunk of interviews of people in fashion. Here are a few selected ones: Tom Ford, Rick Owens, Thom Browne and Craig Green.
  
  
• Blamo! is a podcast by Jeremy Kirkland who talks to various people in the fashion world, from designers to GQ editors to street photographers. Notable episodes include: Robert Geller and Lawrence Schlossman of Four Pins fame.
  
  
• Business of Fashion has their own podcast section which takes fashion from a business perspective. The website as a whole is great. Original articles are informative and they have an indispensible Daily Digest worth going through. Site has a soft paywall.
  
  

  Others:
  

  
  

• Racked even though they have a lot of fluff articles and have to pull a lot of clickbait stunts the writers over at Racked occasionally write some really insightful articles on topics about garments, the industry or the politics of clothing and fashion.
  
  
• Google: We Wear Culture has a project centered around 'Fashion' titled "the stories behind what we wear". It has a lot of fascinating text and articles accompanied with beautiful images. They collaborate with notable several museums and brands.
  
  -----------
  
  Sources and thanks to:
  
  
• Early Morning Thursdays: Podcasts and Interviews by /u/setfiretoflames
  
• /r/AskHistorians flaired users' pages and sidebar
  
• An amazing amount of discussions and recommendations on /r/malefashionadvice, /r/malefashion and /r/femalefashionadvice
  
  -----------------------
  
  /u/setfiretoflames booklist Well Regarded Fashion Books: A Community List
  
  ----------------------
  
  Hey, want to get a nice coffee table book? Let’s make a list of some of our favorites.
  
  Note: I don’t own all of these, some are off friends’ recommendations, and some are for books that haven’t even come out yet. They are mostly in Amazon links for ease of use, but none of the links are affiliate ones (and any that are found in the thread will be removed).
  
  Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty
  
  Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style
  
  Ann Demeulemeester
  
  Blue Blooded
  
  BEAMS: Beyond Tokyo
  
  The Carhartt WIP Archives
  
  Dries Van Noten 1-100
  
  Hiroshi Fujiwara: Fragment
  
  Maison Martin Margiela
  
  Margiela: The Hermès Years
  
  Martin Margiela: The Women’s Collections 1989-2009
  
  Rei Kawakubo
  
  Rick Owens
  
  Rick Owens: Furniture
  
  Take Ivy
  
  Undercover
  
  Vintage Menswear
  
  Yamamoto & Yohji
  
  Yohji Yamamoto

I assume they started out as stickers hotels/airlines used to identify where bags were being taken, and then people started making similar ones for fun/vanity.

I just took a stab in the dark and googled bag stickers titanic, and it looks like they did have ones for specific fare classes.

And this site claims that as people came off ships, the luggage would be sorted to the proper hotels and they'd then use their stickers to confirm which hotel the luggage was headed.

Also not sure if this book would provide more insights, WORLD TOUR: Vintage Hotel Labels From the Collection of Gaston-Louis Vuitton.

This article says:
> Suitcases began as an afterthought in the luggage and leather goods business, but they soon became the very symbol of travel.

So it stands to reason why people would want to advertise where they've been, it was a status symbol when travel was starting to become popular with the masses.

And this article states:
> The golden era of hotel luggage labels ranged from about 1875 to the 1950s. Hotels designed and printed them to promote their establishments. Travelers gathered and pasted them as honor badges of their wide-ranging experience. As labels grew in favor, hotels tried to outdo each other with ever-larger labels and elaborate designs. Labels started to disappear as soft sided luggage came into favor and chains replaced individually owned and managed venues.

> Hotel luggage labels make for interesting history. For example, consider the composite image of various Bristol Hotel labels. As Victorian-era travelers grew more discerning, individual venues needed to convey a quality image to promote themselves. The many worldwide Bristol hotels of the golden age of travel were unaffiliated as the different independent establishment assumed the name Bristol to attract new customers.

I really don't know any info on the subject, your question was just interesting enough to google.

So it seems like it was a cross between the advent of mass steamership travel, lots of luggage needing labels for ships/hotels, and people wanting to show off where they've been during a timeperiod that was just starting to have mass long-distance travel for leisure purposes.

https://christinathepolyglot.wordpress.com/2013/05/25/korean-traditional-hanboks/

This is a blog post that is a nice overall rundown of all the basic clothing items, accessories, symbolism, etc. of Korean traditional clothing.


http://askakorean.blogspot.com/2010/03/traditional-korean-hairdo-for-women.html
http://dressed-up-dreams.blogspot.com/2011_10_01_archive.html

Detailed blog posts covering traditional Korean hairdos.


http://media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com/originals/3c/6e/29/3c6e298c7c40e0e3010606f8ab40ff3e.jpg

An interesting photo-walkthrough of a natural, traditional way to color one's nails. I'm not sure if this was actually done in historic times, but it's an image I found once that I thought was cool.


http://sosteadyasshesews.blogspot.com/2013/12/hanbok-traditional-korean-womens-dress.html

A blog post of someone's personal hanbok-sewing project, which she intersperses with parts of her own research concerning the subject.


http://www.amazon.com/Traditional-University-Illustrations-Photography-Translation/dp/1905246048/ref=pd_sim_sbs_b_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=08ANRC6F6GFMF2EQ52JZ

I own this book, and it's extremely good, scholarly, and detailed with lots of modern color photos. It IS expensive though, at about $100. They section the book out by clothing categories, like shoes, hair accessories, norigae, pants, jackets, etc., and explain the construction, meanings, and why and how the items were used by whom. It's not completely exhaustive, for example it doesn't have examples of the famous Korean bridalwear, the clothing designs of royalty like the king, and I had really wished there was a bit more on skirts/chima and women's jackets, for example, but it covers a lot. None of the items in the book are depicted being worn though, which sucks since clothing laid flat doesn't look at all the same as on a person.

http://www.amazon.com/Korean-Costumes-Textiles-Yi-Song-mi/dp/B0012GFUTW/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1418714120&sr=8-5&keywords=korean+textiles

This book is much more affordable and covers many of the same types of items as the other book; I believe they even include a few of the exact same examples! It's nice, but the difference in price shows about the same difference in quality. The photos are overall not as nice, some being a bit off-color or blurry, and it is mostly a picture book without much of the explanation and detailed diagrams of the other book. Also less content. I did like that there were at least a few examples of some of the clothes being worn by people though.


Also as a bonus, this is Japanese and not Korean, but I figure anybody who's interested in learning more about traditional hanbok probably will appreciate seeing beautiful traditional things:
http://en.rocketnews24.com/2014/09/23/these-traditional-japanese-hairpins-may-be-too-beautiful-to-wear/

So, I'm putting this out there, but it is my best educated guess (that I'd wager my dog, named Napoleon Bonaparte III, on) that this is Revolutionary France. These are the reasons why:

1. The long coat-tails. The French were known for their fashion-forward styles even hundreds of years ago. The long coat tails were popular in the 1780s, especially among younger males. Victorian England had shorter coat tails, unless for a very fancy party, and even then, they looked different than what is seen in this photo. Example
   
   
2. The large coat cuffs. Cuffs are definitely the biggest giveaway here. Victorian English fashion had NO cuffs. Example of Victorian England fashion
   
   
3. Ruffles along neck. "Ruffs" from the 1600s were still in vogue in the 1700s, but were smaller and decorative. Victorian England was all about simplicity and straight, more "manly" designs. Same with any later dates.
   
   
4. Tall boots. Any earlier than 1750s and it would be shorter shoes and socks, but the really tall boot was inherently a French fashion. Actually, it was a French military fashion. This is also why I think the new Assassin might have ties to the French military. Here's Napoleon himself with the tall, black military boots
   
   
5. The waistcoat. You know all those paintings of men with their hand in their shirt? They're feeling up their waistcoat. The new assassin clearly has a waistcoat. Obligatory pic of waistcoat
   
   What People Wore is my source for most of this, but simple web searches can give you the same info. I also have a masters in Early Modern European History, which honestly has not been that useful until this very moment.
   
   Edit: words, link

This is an incredibly broad question since fashion is changing notable every decade during that time period. If you are looking for a general costume history overview of the pre-modern era I'd start by looking for some books in your local library. They're generally vague and sometimes use outdated ideas, but it's always a good base to start with. Sometimes even Barnes & Noble carries "Fashion", a book covering some of the Kyoto Costume Institutes collection from 18th-20th c. From there, researching original garments on museum collection websites or portraiture and fashion plates can give you a more detailed idea of the styles once you know the garment names and basic shapes. The Met Museum and the V&A have two of the largest online collections. Pinterest is also very helpful for this kind of search, though things are not always well documented and modern reproductions slip in occasionally. There are also many in-depth books on these eras, though none that covers the whole of it in great detail.

The Tudor Tailor, Seventeenth-century Women's Dress Patterns Book One and Book Two, and What Clothes Reveal are some of my often referenced books. There are many more depending on whether you are more interested in the clothing construction side, the high fashion, textiles, or trade and everyday wear.

• Ann Dem Backlaces - After six months of searching, found a pair only a half-size large
  
  
• Less is More: Minimalism in Fashion - I've actually already read this for a paper I was working on, but both the photographs and text is excellent, and my coffee table needed some sprucing up.
  
  
• Softcover of Japanese Fashion Designers: The Work and Influence of Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo - read this as well, but thought I would give it a reread before proposing it for the FFA book club.
  
  
• The Japanese Revolution in Paris Fashion - this is my alternate to the above. It's actually adapted from a PhD thesis but was a great read. It provides an excellent overview of the machinations of Fashion Week as well as how Japanese designers caused such an upset in the early 1980s and the lasting impacts of their work on Western designers. If you've any interest at all in fashion history I thoroughly recommend it.

I can't specifically give you fashion history, but it occurs to me that fashion from around the turn of the 19th century is still very popular among Jane Austen enthusiasts (source: my closet). So perhaps that may aide your search.
One book that I know has pictures is this one: http://www.amazon.com/Fashion-Time-Austen-Shire-Library/dp/0747807671
It has more attention on men's fashion than many others I've seen.
This book is being sold through the Jane Austen Centre, which has always seemed to be pretty invested in historical accuracy, but I'm not sure if it has pictures. http://www.janeaustengiftshop.co.uk/collections/books/products/jane-austen-fashion-penelope-byrd
I hope that helps a little. I only wish I could help with kilts specifically.

I definitely recommend Tim Gunn's Fashion Bible. I love Tim Gunn, he is super passionate and funny and both come through in his writing. While not going too deep into any one topic, you can still learn tons. It's a great jumping board to get into parts of fashion you didn't even know fascinated you until he talks about them.

Edit: It's more "Tim Gunn races through the history of fashion" than a bible of how-tos, so don't be misled by the title. Because of his humor, I retained a lot more than I would from someone's dry ramblings.

I literally just returned Making Vintage 1930s Clothes for Women to my Library after getting it through the Inter-Library Loan system and I absolutely recommend it... Actually... Well, here. I'll just give you my whole ILL list that I just returned, since this is exactly what I was studying the last two weeks lol. They're not tutorials or anything, but if you're interested in midcentury and surrounding eras they're definitely helpful for understanding style and technique- which is something you absolutely need to understand in addition to understanding basic modern sewing, depending on what you plan on doing.

As for videos and the like, Closet Historian and Angela Clayton are the only people I'd really personally recommend. There are a few others, but I can't think of their names off the top of my head right now. But I recommend both of these two at the very least, because they use authentic patterns. So while the prints, fabrics, and some construction techniques (etc) might not be "period correct", you're at least getting accuracy in terms of cut and style... Something I can't say about 90% of what people consider "vintage" or "pinup" now, even in reproduction.

Okay!

I do not do very much with ancient clothing, so I have fewer recommendations there. I'm a big fan of Aphrodite's Tortoise: The Veiled Woman of Ancient Greece by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, which I used to write a substantial answer on ancient veiling. It's extremely detailed on the subject of what evidence there is in artwork and in texts about the custom of veiling and about the different types of veils themselves. (I think I found it on Academia.edu, full disclosure.) Another I've referenced here is Body, Dress, and Identity in Ancient Greece, by
Mireille M. Lee. It treats on all aspects of ancient Greek fashion, from pieces of clothing to hairstyles to views on body hair, and I find it quite readable.

I find that basically all academic writing on nineteenth century dress takes place in journals like Dress, Costume, and Textile History - books tend to be more focused on sewing or on gorgeous catalogue photos. The Corset: A Cultural History by Valerie Steele is an exception, a really good discussion of not just the history of corseting but the history of how society has regarded the corsets themselves and the women who wore/wear them, from the constant fear of vain and seductive tightlacing to marketing strategies used by post-industrial manufacturers. Joan Severa's Dressed for the Photographer: Ordinary Americans and Fashion, 1840-1900 is also a detailed exploration of men's and women's dress during the Victorian era (the only thing I quibble with is Severa's frequent use of judgey language when discussing corsetry of the 1840s and 1850s). Both of these are useful for understanding the everyday dress of working women.

In the twentieth century, the concept of "working women" changes, so it's harder to pin down exactly how to address it ... Dress Casual: How College Students Redefined American Style by Deirdre Clemente is vital, imo, to understanding the casualization of dress in the mid-twentieth century (which has knock-on effects on women who worked). Making War, Making Women: Femininity and Duty on the American Home Front, 1941-1945 by Melissa McEuen is a fascinating study on how women took on more a public role in the workforce during the war years, and were also expected to maintain their appearances to an unprecedented degree.

Outside of fashion, you might be interested in "Just a Housewife": The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America by Glenna Matthews. This deals with the changes in the way that housewifely skills were seen in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - how they went from expected drudgery that you passed off if you could, to something seen as real work that required skill and practice, and back to unfulfilling drudge work that was avoided by increased consumption of ready-made goods.

Much more outside of your specific topics, but Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America by Jo Paoletti is just a really good read. As a Millennial, I have a hard time imagining a world without intense gender color-coding for children, and learning about just how recent it is for the coding to exist, let alone be so intense, is very cool. (My favorite color is blue. When I was a little kid, my male friend would always tell me it couldn't be, because blue was for boys.)

Daily Life in Medieval Europe may be a bit too general for what you are looking for, but it does include a section on clothing and even includes some cloth patterns if you are trying to make your own medieval clothing.

Another book, Fashion in the Middle Ages may be closer to what you are looking for, but again this is much broader than your specific 'winter/cold weather' clothes.

This book Medieval Tailor's Assistant: Making Common Garments 1200-1500 may be your best bet. From a customer review:
>This book covers everything you ever wanted to know about medieval clothing, from measurements, patterns and materials to methods of construction. It has over 400 illustrations of medieval clothing, and 121 patterns for shirts and smocks, cotes, doublets, kirtles, hose, surcotes, cotehardies, gowns, overkirtles, cloaks, children's clothing, headwear, and accessories.


Sorry I couldn't be of much help other than a few Amazon links, but hopefully one of these will at least point you in the right direction.

Edit: oops! Saw someone else recommended Tailor's Assistant already. My apologies, but let us know if you find anything interesting!

Just got done reading Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo, this reminded me of an anecdote in there. The silver on the Mercury spacesuits was largely just to make it look cool. The actual spacesuits were military drab, similar to flight suits of the day.

This kind of stuff has been going on for maybe 60, 70 years now. And I'd highly recommend Spacesuit to anyone interested in how the media played a huge role in the Space Race.

If you want to know more about the A7L space suit development I recommend reading this . I was expecting more engineering/technical information, but the political and orginizational history of the space suit development was still fascinating.

I really wish these pictures and the museum displays would show the actual pressure suit without the outer micro-meteoroid garment. You could see all of the interesting details of creating a constant volume suit.

For a history of spacesuit development in general and USA in particular I can't recommend Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo highly enough. It goes all the way from the realization that we need oxygen at high altitudes (so many people died in hot air balloons) to modern spacesuits.

They had this link in the "about" section of the youtube video.

It's a fascinating story, but it's not like NASA called the International Latex Company (Playtex) out of the blue a couple of weeks before the project and asked for a spacesuit.

Forgive me for any slightly mangled details. It's been awhile.

ILS (again, Playtex) won the contract for the Apollo suits in '62, but was forced to work as a sort of subsidiary of Hamilton Standard for three years. Hamilton didn't trust them to do the job so made it's own suit, submitted it in '65 and it was horrible. They blamed ILS and ILS lost it's contract.

NASA, not having a suit, threw an open competition. ILS engineers broke into their old offices at Hamilton, stole their designs back and designed a brand new suit over the course of weeks. It was the only competitor whose suit both fit through the door of the Apollo command module and didn't burst.

For more info, there's Fashioning Apollo (I haven't read it, but I've heard good things), and Moon Machines part five (really good).

If you want to get into the technical aspects, this was suggested to me by Ted Southern when I asked him about glove design: AAS History Series, Volume 24. I got the paperback for thirty bucks. It's $2000 now for some reason.