The Costumer's Manifesto: Costume Sites on the WWW #1: Favorites

Accessories
Book & Gift Store
Classes
Corsets & Underwear
Computers
Costumes 4 Sale
Costume e-Lists
Dance Costumes
Designs & Designers
Dolls
"Ethnic" Dress
Fashion Theory
Free eGroup
Free Stuff
Halloween
(Costume) History
How-To
Kinky Clothing
Major Sites
Military Uniforms
Movie Costumes
Museums
New Pages
Occupational & Occasion- Specific
Patterns
Questions?
Religious Dress
Theatre History
Travel for Costumers
Unite!
Vintage Clothing
Weddings
Weird Clothing

Costume Sites on the WWW #1: Favorites

By Tara Maginnis (web author of The Costumer’s Manifesto http://www.costumes.org)

In future columns I hope to do short reviews or links lists on specific costume topics. For this first column I’ll just tell you about my very favorite Costume sites on the net among the hundreds of good costume related websites:

La Couturiere Parisienne http://www.marquise.de/ By Alexa. My favorite costume site, due to it’s flawless design and research. Has costume images of 1400-1939 with particular emphasis on Rococo Dress, and women’s dress of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Includes lots of free printable scale patterns, and details of period sewing techniques.

The Elizabethan Costume Page http://costume.dm.net By Drea Leed. The most through, comprehensive, and well designed of a lot of good Renaissance costume pages. Well researched, lots of links, and literally every thing any costume person needs to research and replicate Elizabethan dress in an easy to navigate site

.L’ Age de’Or: French and English Baroque http://www.kipar.org/ By N. Kipar. Gorgeous web design, high research standards, and lots of images. Most of the second half of the 17th Century, but also bits and links on 18th Century, and Medieval costume and reenactment.

The Regency Fashion Page http://locutus.ucr.edu/~cathy/reg3.html By Cathy Decker. One of the largest costume focused sites on the web, covering not only the English Regency, but the whole late Georgian era as well, it is the most comprehensive, detailed repository on a small era (1790-1829) on the net.

The Art of Haute Couture

The Costume Book: The Non-Professional's Guide to Professional Results

The Theater of the Bauhaus (Paj Books)

Tie Dye! The How-To Book

The Complete Book of Seminole Patchwork

Beads in Fashion 1900-2000 Fashion Footwear: 1800-1970
Dare to Repair: A Do-It-Herself Guide to Fixing (Almost) Anything in the Home
Fashionable Clothing: From the Sears Catalogs - Mid 1960s

Tempus Peregrinator’s Weeb Site http://www.pipcom.com/~tempus/tempus/index.html By Ragnar Torfason. Wonderful information on late Medieval and Renaissance Men’s dress, general sewing and costume info, and lots of interesting side topics of a “Renaissance Man”.

The Costume Gallery http://www.costumegallery.com/ By Peggy Dunlap Ladnier. Lots of links, as well as a research library of fun stuff, like the Milanese Tailor’s Handbook of 1580, The Handbook of German Dress, and lots of Turn of the Century fashion magazines.

Bissonette on Costume http://www.kent.edu/museum/costume/ by Anne Bissonette. Museum site by Kent State University Museum curator, it has excellent pictures of items in their world class costume collection, with the sort of well researched commentary you would expect of one of the leading costume curators in the US.

The Museum of Costume http://www.museumofcostume.co.uk/ Official site of the Museum of Costume, in the Assembly Rooms, Bath. Has a searchable database of 18th Century men’s vests.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Collection http://www.metmuseum.org/collections/department.asp?dep=8 This most famous American costume collection only recently got it’s act in gear to make this site, but it has finally put a serious number of pictures of it’s collection online.

Lacis http://www.lacis.com/ By Perrin Kliot . Store site with books, needlework and corset materials for costumers, milliners and craftspeople.

Diotoma: Women in the Ancient World http://www.uky.edu/ArtsSciences/Classics/gender.html (url no longer working) Edited by Ross Scaife. A women’s Ancient history site with the best information on Ancient Greek & Roman costume.

The ULTIMATE Costuming Site! [No longer on the web.] By Tori. Despite the goofy egotism of this site’s title, this site is nonetheless, a very good series of links and articles on Medieval and Ancient dress.

The Costume Site http://milieux.com/costume/ By Milieux. The biggest purely links site is invaluable for finding what you want at other sites ASAP.

The Costume Ring http://nav.webring.org/hub?ring=costume;list The main web ring for costume sites, has lots of great sites all listed in ring form.

Costumer’s Quarterly Com http://www.costumersquarterly.com/ Commercial site selling hard to find costume supplies, with other good supply links.

Patterns of Time http://www.patternsoftime.com/ Huge selection of period patterns, and other costume supplies.

Farthingale’s http://www.farthingales.on.ca/home.htm Commercial site with very hard to find fabric and notions, especially those needed in the construction of period corsets and hoops.

The Museum for Textiles http://www.museumfortextiles.on.ca/ Museum site for the Textile museum in Ontario.

18th Century Clothing at Colonial Williamsburg http://www.history.org A new site that explains all the basics of Colonial dress to civilians, in an easy to understand fashion, with lots of nice pictures.

The Greater Bay Area Costumer’s Guild http://www.toreadors.com/costume/ By Trystan L. Bass. A good example of what an International Costumer’s Guild Chapter site should be: links to local stores, member sites, reviews of commercial patterns, lists of local events, and other helpful info.

Historic Costuming e-List http://www.egroups.com/messages/historic%2Dcostuming A popular e-List for posting questions and answers about researching and recreating historic costume. For other costume e-Lists go to http://www.costumes.org/pages/e_lists.htm

THE HISTORY OF COSTUME - c.1861-1880 http://www.siue.edu/COSTUMES/COSTUME1_INDEX.HTML By Braun & Schneider. A complete online reproduction of this important 19^th Century costume history book. Has lots of detailed information on regional dress in most periods prior to 1860.

Oriental Costumes; Their Designs and Colors, 1922 http://www.indiana.edu/~librcsd/etext/tilke/index.html by Max Tilke. Another reproduction of an important book, this one covering the dress of Asia and the Middle east in both pictures and text. The drawings depict most costume items flat so that reproducing their pattern is easy.

Celluloid Wrappers: Costume in the Movies http://www.fortunecity.com/lavender/heat/218/ by Eleanor M. Farrell. Intelligent articles on costume design in recent films and TV, with links to related sites.

This really just scratches the surface of good sites out there, for lots more of them, linked up by category, go to my site:

The Costumer’s Manifesto http://www.costumes.org by Tara Maginnis. Detailed historical sections, especially 18th Century, multiple links pages on very specific topics such as Fans, Costume Patterns, Kink & Fetish Costume, Religious Dress, etc. One of the largest most eclectic costume sites, with information on a very wide series of topics.

Next month’s column will be devoted to suppliers of hard to find costume materials. In a future column I want to focus on clothing related to WWII, including clothes rationing, uniforms, nylon, Zoot Suits, and items relating to the Holocaust. If you have good web links for any of these topics, or other topics related to costume, please e-mail me at Tara@costumes.org

Back to Costume Sites on the WWW articles from CRJ