Antique dresses in illustrations

Technologies have made our life much easier, for example, photography, with its help we can save our own images on a computer, in a smartphone or in a cloud storage, where we can have access from any device anywhere in the world. With this ease of storage and transfer of data, we instantly know about the collections of fashionable dresses showcased at Paris Fashion Week, and the next morning we know which dresses were shown in New York!

Only this was not always the case. Our ancestors, who lived in the first half of the 19th century, had to preserve and transmit fashionable images in other ways. Fashion illustration was practically the only way to learn about the latest fashion. And there were also dolls - Pandorawho were dressed in miniature copies of fashionable outfits and they traveled from one hand to another, overcoming distances.

Thanks to dolls and illustrations, today we can see what dresses our predecessors wore, what images were in fashion in those years.

Shown here are illustrations of antique dresses from the first half of the 19th century. Some of the dresses are just under 200 years old, and in some of the illustrations we can see dresses over two hundred years old!

Antique dresses in illustrations

Such fashion illustrations are especially valuable for those who study the history of the costume, because in illustrations, in contrast to painting, all attention is focused on the dress and accessories - the personality of the model fades into the background. And the painters often, on the contrary, put the personality of the person they were drawing to the fore, while they could conjecture the outfits according to their own understanding. This is especially evident in the works of artists who painted characters and celebrities from previous years. Artists often dressed their heroes in more modern clothes, thanks to which we can see Mary Magdalene in Renaissance dresses ...

Looking through illustrations from the distant past, we can clearly see the original styles of dresses of those years, decorative elements, hats and other accessories.