Lavishly illustrated history of vintage fashion, makeup, and hairstyles for women in the 20th Century
An Evening of Fashion – Savoy Hotel London 1951 Pathe fashion newsreel in luscious color. Includes an exclusive peek backstage during the show. Let’s join the stars, celebrities and Britains top fashion designers. The occasion, a mannequin parade with a difference. Beginning beautifully by this Worth model Rolande, exhibiting this banana coloured facecloth dinner dress, …
Pathe News report on the new US hairstyles – From America comes a new 1940’s hairstyle that’s almost as smooth as a plate across the top of your head. For the girl with an oval face, this is the newest idea with soft curls drooping to the shoulders. A variation, is a centre parting and …
Charles ‘Teenie’ Harris from Pittsburgh USA, is now acknowledged as one of the great photographers of his generation. His documentation of the daily lives of African American women and men in a collection of some 80,000 photographs, is quite simply unique. The Photographs of Charles Harris African American Women of the 1940’s We’ve picked out …
Visionary designer forerunner to Dior – In 1938, a young American female fashion designer named Elizabeth Hawes, an author, a journalist, a political activist and union organiser with the foresight of Chanel and Dior and a razor sharp wit that made her the Dorothy Parker of fashion, published a book called Fashion is Spinach, a long forgotten …
When tobacco tied in with 1940s fashion allure – Whilst the War Production Board had begun pushing sensible restrictions in women’s clothing through its L-38 Apparel order, silhouettes had tended toward the slim side in tobacco advertising since the mid 1930s, particularly in Marlboro cigarettes, a brand, though chiefly remembered for its cowboy image of the …
Rare photos of the 1954 Paris Fall Collection opening – Paris in the late summer of 1954 was about as glamorous as it could ever have been, with the like of Dior, Givenchy, Fath, Balenciaga and Balmain all vying for attention. And Life Magazine’s Mark Shaw was there to capture the elite designers and their …
Vintage advice for bespectacled girls 1943 – We generally flee like mad from statistics, but the other day we ran smack into some figures on girls who wear glasses, that sent us dashing out to find out more about them. Do you know that you and some 25,000,000 of your sisters in the United States wear …
Rare Images of American Black Women in WW2 Service. Researched by Barbara Lewis Burger- National US Archives It is difficult enough to find photographs of ordinary black women in WW2 who served in the US Forces in the 1940s, and extraordinarily difficult to find images of women who served, as many thousands did. Most of …
New Gamine Figure of 1949 turns heads American women, battle-scarred survivors of the 1947 style revolution, when the New Look took over, are hearing disquieting reports from the fashion front: Having made over their figures for the New Look, was it possible that they were going to have to do it all over again? The …
British Wartime Tutorial from 1942 – If you want a new hat, now that hats are rationed, there are ways and means. Turbans are the means and Anne Edwards – fashion editor of Woman shows us some of the ways. Method 1: Having tied the knot on top of the head, you can see how easy …