I hope you enjoy the fashions from the past as much as I enjoyed collecting them. To the best of my knowledge there is no copyrighted material here. If I have overlooked something, PLEASE, email me and I will remove it immediately. Enjoy!!!

The 18teens was a time of great freedom for women — freedom in speech and in manners and in movement. Society as a whole was less restrictive in the early 1820s than it was to be for another one hundred years. Perhaps the natural reaction to those years of freedom was a pendulum swing in the opposite direction. By the mid 1820s the Ideal of Womanhood had begun. Women were told from all quarters that their job was to stay close to the home and shape the world only through their calm and morally pure influences on the men in their domestic circle. Men were to protect women from a world thought to have grown harsher with the advances of technology.

Part of the schooling of women to their new role came through the trends in fashion. British fashion historian C. Willett Cunnington wrote in the 1950s that the 1820s was when costume began to develop the expression of class distinctions and the age of the genteel had begun in grim earnest...From the beginning of this period for nearly a century, petticoats and prudery combined as a gigantic force.

The popular figure was termed the "Grecian bend", made up of the pigeon-breasted bosom, tiny corseted waist, and full, swayback hips.  High, boned collars were worn in daytime with long sleeves, while some evening gowns were extremely low-necked with a band or ribbon for a sleeve. Wide picture hats were worn through the decade; all skirts swept the floor.

The latest fads:

Bicycling craze
Pastel silk sashes round young women's waists or tied flamboyantly in their hair
Men's straw boaters
Specially-engineered "health" corsets
Huge picture hats piled with flowers, ribbon, and stuffed birds or feathers
Shirtwaist blouses were developed for the new working women.

                                       

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On to the 1920's, the Jazz Age, era of the Flapper