Library Research Guides: Fashion and Costume History: Home

Vogue Archive

Vogue Archive
The Vogue Archive is an exclusive partnership between ProQuest, Vogue, and Condé Nast (the global publisher of Vogue) to present the full run of the American Vogue, 1892 to present, for the library market. Every page, cover, advertisement, image, and fold out is indexed, searchable, and viewable in beautiful high-resolution color.

More than 400,000 pages are included, constituting a treasure trove of the work from the greatest designers, photographers, stylists and illustrators of the 20th and 21st centuries. The Vogue Archive is both an essential primary source for the study of fashion and a unique record of American and international popular culture.

Featured Resource: Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion

The Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion includes articles on body adornment, the fashion industry, the development of fabrics and textile technologies, and the social meanings of dress, as well as representative costumes from a wide range of historical eras.

Selected databases, websites, and digitized journals

Internet Archive This link opens in a new window
Offers permanent access to historical collections that exist in digital format. Includes many 19th and early 20th century periodicals that have fashion information and images.

The Met's Heilbrunn Timeline
Contains a number of fashion entries.
NYPL Digital Gallery
NYPL Digital Gallery provides free and open access to over 880,000 items digitized from the The New York Public Library's vast collections, including fashion plates and photographs.

Artstor This link opens in a new window
Collections to note:
--Condé Nast
--The Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at The Met
--Gazette du Bon Ton (Minneapolis College of Art and Design)
--Magnum Photos: Contemporary Photojournalism
--Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
--CUNY Fashion Studies Collection
--RISD Library Picture Collection: Edwardian Fashion Plates
--Smith College Historic Costume Collection

ARTstor Fashion and Costume handout
Documenting Fashion: A Dress History Blog (The Courtauld)
A blog that documents fashion – as image, as object, as text, as an experience, and as an industry. Written by Rebecca Arnold, Lecturer in History of Dress and Textiles, and current postgraduate and research students of the history of dress at The Courtauld Institute of Art in London.
AFCW: Africa Fashion and Cultural Week
AFCW is a prestigious Fashion and Cultural franchise that comprises an amalgamation of creative thinkers ranging from fashion designers, models and textile distributors to artisans, culinarians and musicians.

Gerritsen Collection This link opens in a new window
Premier international collection of digitized material (1543-1988) on the evolution of a feminist consciousness and the movement for women's rights. Includes Journal des dames et des modes (Paris, 1912–14).

150 Years of Harper's Bazaar
The premier issue of Harper's Bazar (Nov. 2, 1867).
Fashion Plates (Los Angeles Public Library)
Over 6,200 hand-colored, finely detailed fashion illustrations produced between 1780 and 1880 for British and American fashion magazines. The plates depict fashionable styles of dress for men, women and children, and constitute valuable source material on the history of dress during this period in history.
Fashion Plate Collection (University of Washington)
Many of these plates are from some of the leading French, British, American, and other continental fashion journals of the 19th century and early 20th century: Belle Assemblée; Le Bon Ton; Le Follet, Courrier des Salons; Journal des Dames and des Modes; Godey's Lady's Book and Magazine, and others.
The Myrtle Tyrrell Kirby Fashion Plate Collection (Claremont Libraries Digital Collection)
The Collection comprises 650 images of nineteenth-century fashion plates from the Macpherson Collection of the Ella Strong Denison Library at Scripps College. In addition to the Myrtle Tyrrell Kirby collection, the digital collection includes 65 fashion plates donated to the Denison Library by Elliot E. Lawrence.
Fashion Plates Digital Collection (Iowa State University Library)
The Collection (1776-2003) contains plates of general fashion dating back to the 18th century and continuing through the 20th century.
"In Memoriam: The 10 Most Influential Articles Published on Style.com" (article)
From the site: "While Style.com no longer exists, it made its mark in the fashion world with some influential posts that attracted the attention of many readers. We explore the 10 most influential articles published by the once-popular site."
Le Moniteur de la Mode: Journal du Grand Monde (via Google books)
La Sylphide (Paris. 1840)
34 years of publication available via the BnF's Gallica site.
Godey's Lady's Book and Magazine

Websites of Costume, Design, and Textile Museums

Fashion & Textile Museums
Where to see the best museums for fashion & textiles around the world.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute
Textiles (National Museum of American History)
The 50,000 objects in the textile collections fall into two main categories: raw fibers, yarns, and fabrics, and machines, tools, and other textile technology. Shawls, coverlets, samplers, laces, linens, synthetics, and other fabrics are part of the first group, along with the 400 quilts in the National Quilt Collection.
Victoria and Albert Museum
The V&A has an extensive costume collection. Search the collections here: http://collections.vam.ac.uk/
Fashion - National Museum of African American History & Culture
Australian Museum of Clothing and Textiles
The museum collects, conserves, documents and displays items of clothing, textiles and related items both domestic and commercial, from Australia’s earliest times to the present day.
Fashion Museum Bath (UK)
The Fashion + Textile Museum (London)
The Digital Dress Project
A collaborative project of the Henry Ford Costume Collection and three other US museums. The Digital Dress Collection contains images of clothing worn in Michigan during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Kyoto Costume Institute (KCI) Digital Archives
The KCI Digital Archives on the KCI website presents image and text for approx. 200 objects from their collection, arranged in chronological order.

Research Tips

Citing your sources research guide (includes info about citation software – i.e. EndNote)

Consult bibliographies or footnotes at the end of books and articles

Email citations to yourself to save time and to stay organized.

Remember to note the location of any books you find in the catalog. Your research may be interdisciplinary and you may find useful books both in Clapp Library and in the Art Library.

using truncation symbols will work in most databases

Newspapers (i.e. New York Times) are great places to find information on exhibitions and artist biographical info.

Try searching via Google Scholar (rather than Google).

Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory (either search as ‘title’ in the catalog or you can find this on the Databases A-Z page) is a great place to check where specific journals are indexed. For example, if you know that there is a terrific article in Renaissance Quarterly, but you have no idea what is the issue or date, you can look up Renaissance Quarterly in Ulrich’s; then click on the “Abstracting/Indexing & Article Access” tab to see where the journal is indexed. Then search for the article in any of those indexes to which we subscribe (ie. BHA, Historical Abstracts, Academic Search Complete, etc.).

Subject Librarian

Brooke Henderson

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Art Library, Jewett Art Center
Phone: 781-283-3258

Subjects: Art & Architecture, Media Arts & Sciences