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Vintage Dresses
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Fashionistas go wild for a good vintage dress, and it's easy to see why. As the fashion industry continually looks to its past for design inspiration, vintage dresses often have better construction and built-in support—and are made of finer...
Fashionistas go wild for a good vintage dress, and it's easy to see why. As the fashion industry continually looks to its past for design inspiration, vintage dresses often have better construction and built-in support—and are made of finer materials—than anything you can purchase off the rack today.
In the 20th century, women's dresses became both a vehicle for self-expression and a visual display of contemporary social values and the political climate. A vintage dress might reveal whether a decade encouraged femininity or androgyny, whether it supported modesty or sexual liberation, whether it was a time of scarcity or a time of abundance.
Previously, in the Victorian Era, upper- and middle-class women wore long dresses with small waists and voluminous skirts over corsets, layers of petticoats, and sometimes cage crinolines. The dresses, while often beautiful, were part of outfits that restricted movement and reflected society's belief that women belonged in the home and not in the public sphere, or the workforce.
Antique dresses from the 1910s reveal how mores were changing after the turn of the century, as more and more women were working, traveling alone, and demanding the right to vote. That decade, Paul Poiret and other avant-garde designers took inspiration from Asia and freed fashionable Western women from the rigid corseted silhouette. Poiret created vintage dresses inspired by Japanese kimonos, Chinese robes, and Indian saris. His haute-couture designs inspired ordinary women to wear sack-like tunics over slimmer dresses or even "lampshade" dresses with an upper tier that flared out to a hoop that landed somewhere above their knees.
In the 1910s and 1920s, as American women gained the right to vote, their dresses became both more revealing and more androgynous. The so-called Jazz Age "flapper look" involved short, sleeveless, drop-waist dresses that had boxy, boyish silhouettes. The knee-length skirts made it easier for young women to drive cars and ride in cabs without an escort, and it was initially quite titillating how these frocks showed off shoulders, necks, arms, and calves.
Vintage dresses from the Roaring Twenties are difficult to find in good shape. Originally, they were made of fragile silk chiffons sewn with beading or silk satins that had been soaked in metallic solutions. The beads and the metallic sheen made the fabric more prone to tear or fall apart, especially considering that young flapper wore the dress doing the Charleston on the dance floor for hours on end, night after night, emulating Clara Bow and Louise Brooks and other "it girls" in silent films.
In 1926, Coco Chanel, who first broke taboos putting women in relaxed wool jersey, introduced the concept of the "little black dress," or "LBD," in "Vogue." This short, simple, long-sleeved dress in crêpe de Chine asserted that black was no longer the color of mourning, but a color that could be worn at chic cocktail parties by women of any social status. Jean Patou, Elsa Schiaparelli, and Jeanne Lanvin were other influential designers at this time.
Curves made a comeback in the 1930s, when people struggling to get by during the Great Depression found escapism at the movies. The glamorous starlets of the silver screen wore elegant figure-hugging evening gowns while portraying a high-society world most cinema-goers would never inhabit. French designer Madeleine Vionnet is said to have mastered the bias-cut; her luxurious dresses used silk satins and velvets cut so that their grains draped diagonally across the body, hugging a woman's shape.
Sexy and sophisticated special-occasion vintage dresses cut this way used more fabric than dresses cut along the grain, so most women couldn't afford them. Instead, average American women and girls were recycling flour and feed sacks—which then came in pretty cotton prints—and hand-sewing them into simple house dresses.
As American men went off to fight World War II and women stepped into the workforce, women's daytime dresses became more masculine, using tweeds, big lapels, and shoulder pads, or being paired with jackets with those features. The shirtwaist dress, which had a limited number of buttons and a skirt with modest pleats or gathers, was another popular and simple style. Because America was rationing its fossil fuels and using less heat in the early 1940s, you'll see vintage dresses from the period with long sleeves, particularly dolman sleeves.
Even though daytime dresses were modest and practical, at night, women were expected to wow soldier boys with their stunning and feminine party dresses. While fabric rationing kept skirts slim, there were no limitations on embellishments like sequins or rhinestones, so a vintage 1940s cocktail dress can dazzle.
After the war ended and men returned to their jobs, women's dress became more feminine as Christian Dior introduced the "New Look" in 1947. Vintage dresses in this style emphasize the bust line and have voluminous, layered skirts and small waists with built-in boning and petershams for support. The New Look was a big influence on the standard strapless prom dresses made in silk, rayon, nylon, or taffeta, with tulle mesh embellishments.
In the late '40s and early '50s, house dresses would be made of novelty or small floral prints, and even dresses made of one color would have embellishments of lace or netting. Thanks to the tiki trend, so-called "muumuu dresses" in bright Hawaiian floral prints were also popular during the 1950s.
In the mid-1950s, Dior apprentice Yves Saint Laurent debuted dresses in new, Modernist shapes, including the triangular A-line dress, the big-shoulder, narrow-hipped look of the Y-line dress, and the short, tent-like "trapeze dress." Cristóbal Balenciaga introduced baby-doll dresses with high waists and round "sack dresses." Dior's Saint Laurent and Hubert de Givenchy both embraced the clean lines of Modernism and developed their own versions of the shift dress in 1957. Around the same time, Emilio Pucci began to create dresses in his signature fabrics, which had whirling, psychedelic patterns in bright colors, and by the 1960s, dresses in his prints became a staple of a fashionable woman's closet.
In 1961, Givenchy made his shift dress sexier and slinkier for Audrey Hepburn in "Breakfast at Tiffany's," a look that redefined the concept of the elegant little black dress. Also, First Lady Jackie Kennedy made the single-color shift dress look classy and forward-thinking in the early 1960s. That decade, young women and teen girls had more disposable income to spend on fashion and going out than ever before. For that reason, "Swinging London" innovators like Mary Quant, Ossie Clark, and Celia Birtwell produced cheap and colorful waistless shift dresses and pinafores with scandalously short skirts for rebellious teens called "Mods." The work of Pop artists like Andy Warhol and Modernists like Mondrian were adopted into chic, fun party dresses, and other whimsical dresses were made of paper, vinyl, or metallic yarn.
The Summer of Love in San Francisco in 1967 and Woodstock in New York in 1969 brought counterculture fashion to the mainstream. The flower-power style involved loose-fitting peasant-style dresses with ankle-length maxi skirts, in prints ranging from tie-eye to ethnic patterns borrowed from tribes all around the globe. Initially, hippie "back to nature" style was low-brow, embracing home-made, used, and thrifted clothes fashionistas rejected, but it wasn't long before the movement's look was co-opted by high-end designers.
While "Vogue" editor-in-chief Diana Vreeland had fallen in love with bohemian Middle Eastern and African-print caftans in the early '60s, Yves Saint Laurent and other designers responded to the Summer of Love with "gypsy" couture, which featured bias-cut chiffon dresses layered with transparent fabrics and draping scarves. Hippies favored natural colors like green and browns, but by the 1970s, psychedelic dresses in earthy tones were made in unnatural and itchy polyester fabrics.
You can see nostalgia for homesteading in vintage "prairie" style dresses from the '70s such as those made by Jessica McClintock’s label Gunne Sax, while other designers like David Bowie costumer Kansai Yamamoto embraced the flamboyant, sparkling, over-the-top artifice that characterized Studio 54 and other disco hotspots. Gianni Versace, Giorgio Armani, Sonia Rykiel, Karl Lagerfeld, and Missoni rose to prominence in this decade.
The second-wave feminist movement of the 1970s brought more women to the workforce in the 1980s, and again, masculine dresses with big, bold shoulder pads and embellishments became all the rage (think "Dynasty"). Because it was a time of prosperity, women rejected the granola styles of the past two decades for bold, futurist looks. Vintage dresses from the '80s are characteristically flashy and tight, sometimes featuring blinding neon colors and stretchy artificial fabrics like Lycra and spandex.
Continue readingFashionistas go wild for a good vintage dress, and it's easy to see why. As the fashion industry continually looks to its past for design inspiration, vintage dresses often have better construction and built-in support—and are made of finer materials—than anything you can purchase off the rack today.
In the 20th century, women's dresses became both a vehicle for self-expression and a visual display of contemporary social values and the political climate. A vintage dress might reveal whether a decade encouraged femininity or androgyny, whether it supported modesty or sexual liberation, whether it was a time of scarcity or a time of abundance.
Previously, in the Victorian Era, upper- and middle-class women wore long dresses with small waists and voluminous skirts over corsets, layers of petticoats, and sometimes cage crinolines. The dresses, while often beautiful, were part of outfits that restricted movement and reflected society's belief that women belonged in the home and not in the public sphere, or the workforce.
Antique dresses from the 1910s reveal how mores were changing after the turn of the century, as more and more women were working, traveling alone, and demanding the right to vote. That decade, Paul Poiret and other avant-garde designers took inspiration from Asia and freed fashionable Western women from the rigid corseted silhouette. Poiret created vintage dresses inspired by Japanese kimonos, Chinese robes, and Indian saris. His haute-couture designs inspired ordinary women to wear sack-like tunics over slimmer dresses or even "lampshade" dresses with an upper tier that flared out to a hoop that landed somewhere above their knees.
In the 1910s and 1920s, as American women gained the right to vote, their dresses became both more revealing and more androgynous. The so-called Jazz Age "flapper look" involved short, sleeveless, drop-waist dresses that had boxy, boyish silhouettes. The knee-length skirts made it easier for young women to...
Fashionistas go wild for a good vintage dress, and it's easy to see why. As the fashion industry continually looks to its past for design inspiration, vintage dresses often have better construction and built-in support—and are made of finer materials—than anything you can purchase off the rack today.
In the 20th century, women's dresses became both a vehicle for self-expression and a visual display of contemporary social values and the political climate. A vintage dress might reveal whether a decade encouraged femininity or androgyny, whether it supported modesty or sexual liberation, whether it was a time of scarcity or a time of abundance.
Previously, in the Victorian Era, upper- and middle-class women wore long dresses with small waists and voluminous skirts over corsets, layers of petticoats, and sometimes cage crinolines. The dresses, while often beautiful, were part of outfits that restricted movement and reflected society's belief that women belonged in the home and not in the public sphere, or the workforce.
Antique dresses from the 1910s reveal how mores were changing after the turn of the century, as more and more women were working, traveling alone, and demanding the right to vote. That decade, Paul Poiret and other avant-garde designers took inspiration from Asia and freed fashionable Western women from the rigid corseted silhouette. Poiret created vintage dresses inspired by Japanese kimonos, Chinese robes, and Indian saris. His haute-couture designs inspired ordinary women to wear sack-like tunics over slimmer dresses or even "lampshade" dresses with an upper tier that flared out to a hoop that landed somewhere above their knees.
In the 1910s and 1920s, as American women gained the right to vote, their dresses became both more revealing and more androgynous. The so-called Jazz Age "flapper look" involved short, sleeveless, drop-waist dresses that had boxy, boyish silhouettes. The knee-length skirts made it easier for young women to drive cars and ride in cabs without an escort, and it was initially quite titillating how these frocks showed off shoulders, necks, arms, and calves.
Vintage dresses from the Roaring Twenties are difficult to find in good shape. Originally, they were made of fragile silk chiffons sewn with beading or silk satins that had been soaked in metallic solutions. The beads and the metallic sheen made the fabric more prone to tear or fall apart, especially considering that young flapper wore the dress doing the Charleston on the dance floor for hours on end, night after night, emulating Clara Bow and Louise Brooks and other "it girls" in silent films.
In 1926, Coco Chanel, who first broke taboos putting women in relaxed wool jersey, introduced the concept of the "little black dress," or "LBD," in "Vogue." This short, simple, long-sleeved dress in crêpe de Chine asserted that black was no longer the color of mourning, but a color that could be worn at chic cocktail parties by women of any social status. Jean Patou, Elsa Schiaparelli, and Jeanne Lanvin were other influential designers at this time.
Curves made a comeback in the 1930s, when people struggling to get by during the Great Depression found escapism at the movies. The glamorous starlets of the silver screen wore elegant figure-hugging evening gowns while portraying a high-society world most cinema-goers would never inhabit. French designer Madeleine Vionnet is said to have mastered the bias-cut; her luxurious dresses used silk satins and velvets cut so that their grains draped diagonally across the body, hugging a woman's shape.
Sexy and sophisticated special-occasion vintage dresses cut this way used more fabric than dresses cut along the grain, so most women couldn't afford them. Instead, average American women and girls were recycling flour and feed sacks—which then came in pretty cotton prints—and hand-sewing them into simple house dresses.
As American men went off to fight World War II and women stepped into the workforce, women's daytime dresses became more masculine, using tweeds, big lapels, and shoulder pads, or being paired with jackets with those features. The shirtwaist dress, which had a limited number of buttons and a skirt with modest pleats or gathers, was another popular and simple style. Because America was rationing its fossil fuels and using less heat in the early 1940s, you'll see vintage dresses from the period with long sleeves, particularly dolman sleeves.
Even though daytime dresses were modest and practical, at night, women were expected to wow soldier boys with their stunning and feminine party dresses. While fabric rationing kept skirts slim, there were no limitations on embellishments like sequins or rhinestones, so a vintage 1940s cocktail dress can dazzle.
After the war ended and men returned to their jobs, women's dress became more feminine as Christian Dior introduced the "New Look" in 1947. Vintage dresses in this style emphasize the bust line and have voluminous, layered skirts and small waists with built-in boning and petershams for support. The New Look was a big influence on the standard strapless prom dresses made in silk, rayon, nylon, or taffeta, with tulle mesh embellishments.
In the late '40s and early '50s, house dresses would be made of novelty or small floral prints, and even dresses made of one color would have embellishments of lace or netting. Thanks to the tiki trend, so-called "muumuu dresses" in bright Hawaiian floral prints were also popular during the 1950s.
In the mid-1950s, Dior apprentice Yves Saint Laurent debuted dresses in new, Modernist shapes, including the triangular A-line dress, the big-shoulder, narrow-hipped look of the Y-line dress, and the short, tent-like "trapeze dress." Cristóbal Balenciaga introduced baby-doll dresses with high waists and round "sack dresses." Dior's Saint Laurent and Hubert de Givenchy both embraced the clean lines of Modernism and developed their own versions of the shift dress in 1957. Around the same time, Emilio Pucci began to create dresses in his signature fabrics, which had whirling, psychedelic patterns in bright colors, and by the 1960s, dresses in his prints became a staple of a fashionable woman's closet.
In 1961, Givenchy made his shift dress sexier and slinkier for Audrey Hepburn in "Breakfast at Tiffany's," a look that redefined the concept of the elegant little black dress. Also, First Lady Jackie Kennedy made the single-color shift dress look classy and forward-thinking in the early 1960s. That decade, young women and teen girls had more disposable income to spend on fashion and going out than ever before. For that reason, "Swinging London" innovators like Mary Quant, Ossie Clark, and Celia Birtwell produced cheap and colorful waistless shift dresses and pinafores with scandalously short skirts for rebellious teens called "Mods." The work of Pop artists like Andy Warhol and Modernists like Mondrian were adopted into chic, fun party dresses, and other whimsical dresses were made of paper, vinyl, or metallic yarn.
The Summer of Love in San Francisco in 1967 and Woodstock in New York in 1969 brought counterculture fashion to the mainstream. The flower-power style involved loose-fitting peasant-style dresses with ankle-length maxi skirts, in prints ranging from tie-eye to ethnic patterns borrowed from tribes all around the globe. Initially, hippie "back to nature" style was low-brow, embracing home-made, used, and thrifted clothes fashionistas rejected, but it wasn't long before the movement's look was co-opted by high-end designers.
While "Vogue" editor-in-chief Diana Vreeland had fallen in love with bohemian Middle Eastern and African-print caftans in the early '60s, Yves Saint Laurent and other designers responded to the Summer of Love with "gypsy" couture, which featured bias-cut chiffon dresses layered with transparent fabrics and draping scarves. Hippies favored natural colors like green and browns, but by the 1970s, psychedelic dresses in earthy tones were made in unnatural and itchy polyester fabrics.
You can see nostalgia for homesteading in vintage "prairie" style dresses from the '70s such as those made by Jessica McClintock’s label Gunne Sax, while other designers like David Bowie costumer Kansai Yamamoto embraced the flamboyant, sparkling, over-the-top artifice that characterized Studio 54 and other disco hotspots. Gianni Versace, Giorgio Armani, Sonia Rykiel, Karl Lagerfeld, and Missoni rose to prominence in this decade.
The second-wave feminist movement of the 1970s brought more women to the workforce in the 1980s, and again, masculine dresses with big, bold shoulder pads and embellishments became all the rage (think "Dynasty"). Because it was a time of prosperity, women rejected the granola styles of the past two decades for bold, futurist looks. Vintage dresses from the '80s are characteristically flashy and tight, sometimes featuring blinding neon colors and stretchy artificial fabrics like Lycra and spandex.
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Best of the Web
1960s Fashion and Textiles
Put on your go-go boots and check out this wavy, groovy tribute to 1960s fashion and textiles,...
Vintage Fashion Guild
The VFG is a non-profit international educational organization dedicated to the promotion and...
Fashion-Era
Bursting at the seams with content, this site contains hundreds of pages of fashion and costume...
Fashion Columbia Study Collection
The Fashion Columbia Study Collection (FCSC) is the digital home of the Columbia College...
Costume Collection, National Museum of American History
Women’s dresses are the most requested objects in the Smithsonian’s 30,000-piece Costume...
Club & Associations
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