Fashion ─ A Timeline in Photographs: 1850 to Today

One of America’s premier fashion historians offers an unrivaled and exceptional fashion resource. This immersive timeline is illustrated by photographs—over 700—that tell the story of fashion through its changing and multitudinous silhouettes. As the years advance, we watch crinolines inflate and deflate, the bustle shape-shift, skirts narrow, and sleeves balloon. The twentieth century opens with the S-bend corset, puffed at the waist, and as the decades progress, conformity all but disappears as clothing becomes more casual. In the twenty-first century, formalwear becomes more elaborate than ever.
Along with tracking every major change in fashion, readers also see evolutions in hairstyles, jewelry, hat styles, outerwear, and footwear. Milbank keenly illustrates how a certain style of dressing was ubiquitous—the same silhouette worn not only in France and the United States but also in many countries simultaneously. Real people—not only fashion models—are captured in casual outdoor scenes, strolling in Paris, New York, and London, lunching alfresco, playing croquet, riding horses, and even mountain climbing. Street photography of the last century is emphasized particularly: the earliest examples show women who dressed to be photographed at the races in France, as they were captured by the predecessors of such modern-day photographers as Mary Hilliard and The Sartorialist, whose pictures we also see as we traverse the most recent years shown in this panoptic volume.

Caroline Rennolds Milbank is a fashion historian and the author of four books and has been a costume curator for exhibitions at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Clark Art Institute.Harold Koda is curator in charge at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.