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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...
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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 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...
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