Patterns of Fashion 2 focuses on the eighty-year period preceding the Second World War. Beginning with a day dress from c. 1861-3 from the London Museum and ending with a 1938 Evening dress from the V&A costume historian and researcher Janet Arnold traces period and style and draws up patters from t[...]

No one interested in the history of dress, from art historians to stage designers, from museum curators to teachers of fashion and costume, can function effectively without Janet Arnold's "Patterns of Fashion" series, published by Macmillan since 1964. Since her untimely death in 1998, admirers of h[...]

The vast wardrobe of Queen Elizabeth I is legendary: in her own time some of the richly embroidered gowns were displayed with other treasures to dazzle the eyes of foreign visitors to the Tower of London. The quantity of clothes recorded in the inventories taken in 1600 would seem to suggest sheer v[...]