Costuming

"This collection contains digitized fashion plates from the Irene Lewisohn Costume Reference Library. The plates feature men's, women's, and children's fashion and date between 1700 and 1955. The original items are contained in more than one hundred binders and boxes organized by date and/or topic." Be sure to open the Fashion Plate Subcollections link.

The Archive is free to search but you might have to apply to download.

"The Commercial Pattern Archive database, CoPA, contains 0ver 55,000 scanned images (clothing & pattern schematics) from 1847 to present. Collections from the US, Canada and the UK are represented in the database which functions like a Union Catalog of pattern collections. The Pattern Archive is a project of the US Institute for Theatre Technology (USITT) Costume Commission. The cornerstone of CoPA is the Betty Williams Collection."

The Digital Dress Collection contains images of clothing worn in Michigan during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Clothing reflects the culture and the time period of the wearer, so this collection offers insight into Michigan life and society. The items shown here are held in the collections of Wayne State University, The Henry Ford, Detroit Historical Society and Meadowbrook Hall.

This exhibition catalog from the Fashion Archives and Museum of Shippensburg University illustrated the evolution of fashion from 1800 to 1900 and the dramatic changes in silhouette that evolved from decade to decade.

Over 500 fashion plates from 1806-1919 from University of Washington Libraries Digital Collections. Many are from some of the leading French, British, American, and other continental fashion journals of the 19th century and early 20th century: Belle assemblée; Le bon ton; Le Follet, Courrier des Salons; Journal des Dames and Des Modes; Godey's Lady's Book among others.

Currated by the National Portrait Gallery, this is a group of 562 hand-colored engravings illustrating a century of fashions. Primarily showing women's dress, they were published in English and French magazines between 1770 and 1869.

"This site is a pilot project for an online research tool for the study of women’s dress in America from 1770 to 1930, and based on research materials from the personal research archive of costume historian Nancy Rexford. In over 30 years of consulting work, Ms. Rexford has collected materials that serve as an impressive finding aid both to women's fashion periodicals from the late 18th to early 20th century and to original objects that are in small collections all across the country. Ms. Rexford's notebooks are organized by item type, with photocopies of fashion illustrations, text, and advertisements from a multitude of different fashion periodicals. Each item is placed in chronological order, so by looking through the notebooks page by page, one can more easily see subtle variations in fashion over time."