AllTop Viral!

Every season, a new parade of dresses is trotted out to the stores, slight variations on the same cut with slightly different colors and patterns, and if you don’t fit the mold, you’re out of luck in the formalwear department.

Fortunately, vintage is all the rage, but if your waist isn’t narrow enough for the fifties and the blunt-cut, short-short skirts of the sixties aren’t your thing, Collector’s Weekly spoke to fashion archivist Jacqueline WayneGuite to provide a review of the best vintage dating all the way back to the 1910’s to satisfy your retro urge.

1910s

The Look: New Bohemians in Eastern-influenced tunics
Style Icons: Lillian Gish, Mary 

Collectors Weekly: Why were Eastern-influenced prints and fabrics so trendy during the 1910s?

WayneGuite: When Japan opened up to Western trade in 1850, you had this steadily increasing amount of Japanese and Eastern influence in all areas of art and design. The Impressionist painters were inspired by Eastern asymmetry. You also saw it in furniture design, and then it made its way into fashion. Paul Poiret, who was a very high-end designer working in France in the 1910s, heavily incorporated Eastern embellishment, prints, and design aesthetics into his fashion, but there were other designers doing it at the time, too…

…A popular party dress style was a looser tunic worn over a slimmer dress underneath, with a different kind of silhouette than we’re familiar with. Some were less shapely and more sack-like, and then others had a lampshade look with a hoop around the hip area. They generally went just past the hip, or fell somewhere between the knee and hip, and flared out around the hoop. The lampshade silhouette was pretty avant-garde. When I worked with the collection at North Dakota State University, we had a lampshade-style dress. Its owner might have been upper class, but she lived in North Dakota, so clearly this was widespread.

Full story at Collector’s Weekly via Presurfer.

Plunging into a treasure chest of fashion.

Photo credit: pintuck @ Flickr