The Costumer's Manifesto is written by Tara Maginnis, and proudly hosted by William Baker.

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Costume Books in Association with Amazon Com:

Books on 16th and 17th Century Costume & Culture

Queen Elizabeth's Wardrobe Unlock'd: The inventories of the Wardrobe of Robes prepared in July 1600, edited from Stowe MS 557 in the British Library, MS LR 2/121 in the Public Record Office, London, and MS V.b.72 in the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC Janet Arnold, the late, lamented goddess of costume research did this detailed study of every surviving garment, wardrobe record and portrait of Queen Elizabeth I, where she attempted wherever possible to match up the garments and portraits with the detailed wardrobe accounts kept by the government of the day.  The only complaint to be found is that few of the pictures are in color.  This large format book is considered the apex of detailed, stringent costume research work.

 

Patterns of Fashion 1: Englishwoman's Dresses and Their Construction: c.1660-1860 by Janet Arnold the late, great, goddess of us all.  Patterns from museum originals drawn on a 1/8" grid to 1/8 scale, plus line drawings and construction details telling you exactly how the beasts went together.  Great scholarship put into a form that has instant application to reproducing costumes for theatre or reenactment in real life.

Patterns of Fashion : The Cut and Construction of Clothes for Men and Women C1560-1620 Like the above, but further off the diving board.  Includes men's patterns too, plus photos and essays on the clothes.  You know this woman was truly devoted to her research the moment you start reading about the damage to the original costumes caused by the messy fact that most were once grave clothes

.  The Funeral Effigies of Westminster Abbey (includes a section by Janet Arnold)

Dressing Renaissance Florence: Families, Fortunes, and Fine Clothing Queen Elizabeth I Paper Doll

Gallery of Late-Seventeenth-Century Costume : 100 Engravings

French Baroque and Rococo Fashions
  Costume History
Louis XIV and His Court Paper Dolls
 
Amazon.com: Books: Cavalier and Puritan Fashions
Amazon.com: Books: Jacobean and Early Bourbon Fashion (Dover Pictorial Archives)

Dressing the Elite : Clothes in Early Modern England

A Brief History of the Tudor Age
Trippingly on the Tongue

 

European Costume and Fashion 1490-1790

Historic Costume CD-ROM and Book : From Ancient Times to the Renaissance
Full-Color Sourcebook of French Fashion : 15th to 19th Centuries
 
Gallery of Late-Seventeenth-Century Costume : 100 Engravings

Medieval and Renaissance Dances for Recorders, Dancers, and Hand Drums

Shakespeare's Kitchen : Renaissance Recipes for the Contemporary Cook

Plucked, Shaved & Braided: Medieval and Renaissance Beauty and Grooming Practices 1000-1600

Period Costume for Stage & Screen : Patterns for Women's Dress 1500-1800, Jean Hunnisett, Kathryn Turner (Illustrator) Worth every penny of it's hefty price tag, this book is high on scholarship, illustrations, easy to understand text and diagrams, and is one of the best, most detailed how-to manuals for costumers ever written. I had been working as a costumer for almost 20 years when I first saw this book and still, I'd say lots of it's techniques were a revelation. It shows in essence, how to reproduce costumes in this period in such a way as to make them indistinguishable from originals. 

Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture, 38)

A Drizzle of Honey: The Life and Recipes of Spain's Secret Jews

Blackwork Embroidery
Renaissance Patterns for Lace and Embroidery; An Unabridged Facsimile of the 'Singuliers Et Nouveaux Pourtraicts' of 1587.
Creating Personas
Traveling Dysshes; Or, Foods for Wars, Peace, and Potlucks
 
Amazon.com: Books: Elizabethan Costuming (For The Years 1550 - 1580)

Renaissance [MAGAZINE SUBSCRIPTION]

 

Fooles and Fricassees : Food in Shakespeare's England

Design Your Own Coat of Arms

Past into Present : Effective Techniques for First-Person Historical Interpretation 

Authentic Everyday Dress of the Renaissance : All 154 Plates from the 'Trachtenbuch'

Costumes and Scripts in the Elizabethan Theatres

The Stage Designs of Inigo Jones: The European Context

The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice (Women in Culture and Society)
The Book of the Courtesans: A Catalogue of Their Virtues

How to Do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians

English Costume from the Early Middle Ages Through the Sixteenth Century

English Costume from the Seventeenth Through the Nineteenth Centuries

Elizabethan Costuming

Methods and Practice of Elizabethan Swordplay

American Family of the Pilgrim Period Paper Dolls in Full Color

European Civil and Military Clothing : From the First to the Eighteenth Century 

The Various Styles of Clothing

Tailor's Pattern Book 1589 : (facsimile) by Juan de Alcega, translation Jean Pain & Cecilia Bainton. A connoisseur's lust-object; includes a complete facsimile of the original, plus translation, definition of terms, and a scholarly treatise on tailoring in the 16th Century.

Blackwork Embroidery

Blackwork

Renaissance Fashions

The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men (The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe)

Elizabethan Costumes Paper Dolls

Great Characters from Shakespeare Paper Dolls

Elizabethan Treasures : The Hardwick Hall Textiles

Renaissance Patterns for Lace and Embroidery; An Unabridged Facsimile of the 'Singuliers Et Nouveaux Pourtraicts' of 1587

Hispanic Costume Fourteen Eighty to Fifteen Thirty
Men's Seventeenth & Eighteenth Century Costume : Cut and Fashion
 
The Dress of the Venetians, 1495-1525 (Pasold Studies in Textile History 7)

The Devil's Cloth (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism)

Tudor and Elizabethan Fashions

Historical Fashion in Detail: the 17th and 18th Centuries

Tudor Costume and Fashion, Herbert Norris. A long out of print classic, heavily geared towards the needs of Shakespeare productions and people doing English History plays. Norris' books have long been hunted through antiquarian booksellers by serious costumers. 

vecellio.gif (15304 bytes) Vecellio's Renaissance Costume Book : All 500 Woodcut Illustrations from the Famous Sixteenth-Century Compendium of World Costume; Cesare, Vecellio. The first great costume book written (or to be more accurate, drawn), this work is absolutely indispensable for costuming Shakespeare or Ren Faires. It is most interesting in that it shows not only contemporary European Renaissance dress, but also what these same Europeans thought was the modern dress around the world, as well as Medieval and Ancient dress. This book is probably the closest image of what costuming in Shakespeare's stage would have looked like, since plates in it are suspiciously close to the costumes shown in the Titus Andronicus drawing.   

Where Queen Elizabeth Slept & What the Butler Saw : Historical Terms from the Sixteenth Century to the Present

The Writer's Guide to Everyday Life in Renaissance England : From 1485-1649
 
The English Housewife
Sallets, Humbles & Shrewsbery Cakes: A Collection of Elizabethan Recipes Adapted for the Modern Kitchen
Daily Life in Elizabethan England
The Tudor Housewife
What Life Was Like in the Realm of Elizabeth : England, Ad 1533-1603 (What Life Was Like Series)

A Visual History of Costume : The Sixteenth Century, Jane Ashelford. Lots of mainly B&W reproductions of paintings with concise scholarly histrory, intended for the theatre costumer intent on greater historical accuracy.

A Visual History of Costume : The Seventeenth Century, Jane Ashelford. Lots of mainly B&W reproductions of paintings with concise scholarly histrory, intended for the theatre costumer intent on greater historical accuracy.

Henry VIII and His Wives Paper Dolls

Dress in the Age of Elizabeth I; Jane Ashelford. Lots of mainly B&W reproductions of paintings with concise scholarly histrory. Longer, and a bit more in-depth on the Elizabethan period than the above two series books, it is obvious that this is the must-have one for any historical recreationist intent on wowing their friends at Ren Faire.

Italian Renaissance Costumes Paper Dolls (Paper Doll Series)

High Fashion in Shakespeare's Time A good book for kids who need to do history reports on costume.

High Fashion in Stuart Times A good book for kids who need to do history reports on costume.

The Costumer's Manifesto is proudly hosted by William Baker.

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This Page is part of The Costumer's Manifesto by Tara Maginnis, Ph.D.  Copyright 1996-2010.   You may print out any of these pages for non-profit educational use such as school papers, teacher handouts, or wall displays.  You may link to any page in my site.

This page last edited on 12/06/2006