Fashion History Book Recommendations

My interest in the history of clothing and textiles is years in the making. And over time, my collection of books has grown exponentially. I will list open access sources of information in addition to my book recommendations should you have the desire. If you are at all curious about fashion throughout human history, this list may help you further explore that interest.

Be warned: my area of study is limited and rather anglicized. Though there are so many other avenues of fashion history to discover. 

Corset History 

Corsets: A Cultural History by Valerie Steele

Corsets by Jill Salen

Fashion and Eroticism Valerie Steele

Patterns of Fashion 5 Janet Arnold, The School of Historical Dress

Nineteenth-Century Fashion History 

Nineteen Century Fashion in Detail by Helen Persson, Lucy Johnston, and Marion Kite

Patterns of Fashion 2 by Janet Arnold

The House of Worth 1858-1954: The Birth of Haute Couture by Jean-Marie Martin-Hattemberg, Françoise Tétart-Vittu, Chantal Trubert-Tollu, and Fabrice Olivieri

Crinoline: Fashion’s Most Magnificent Disaster by Brian May (The guitarist of Queen himself!) and Denis Pellerin. The book is great fun. There are spectroscopic 3-D images, though I do think it is sensationalized just a bit. 

New Raiments of Self: African American Clothing in the Antebellum South by Helen Bradley Foster. Incredible, amazing, work using the accounts of surviving formerly enslaved people in the South. It fills a very under-researched area of fashion history beautifully. 

How to be a Victorian by Ruth Goodman. She's an incredible domestic historian who not only studies the past but lives it. She spent an entire year on a farm with some other history nerds and they all reared sheep, made their own clothes, used no electricity, and plowed fields using their own quicklime. Just search "Victorian Farm" on Youtube and you can watch the whole series in full. (At least, at the time of me writing this.) Loads of fascinating insights into many areas of daily life in the past. She also has books of a similar ilk on the Tudor and Medieval periods if that's your jam. 

Eighteenth-Century Fashion History

The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America by Kate Haulman

The American Duchess Guide to Eighteenth-Century Dressmaking by Abby Cox and Lauren Stowell

Patterns of Fashion 1 by Janet Arnold

Eighteenth-Century Embroidery Techniques by Gail Marsh

The Pocket: A Hidden History of Women's Lives, 1660-1900 (I put this one in the 18th-century category. Deal with it.) by Barbara Burman and Ariane Fennetaux

The Queen of Fashion by Caroline Weber

More Resources!

What I use to get a better idea of how people actually dressed in the past:

Old catalogs and magazines. 

• My favorites are Godey's Lady's Book and Mme Demorest. Though keep in mind it's still a magazine and therefore, not bound by the laws of physics. 

Archival footage

• The Library of Congress has digitized a portion of their undoubtedly mammoth collection of old films and anyone can access them. I suggest having a specific range of dates to help narrow down the search. Obviously, it's limited to the nineteenth century to now. But there's something about watching the averageness even of just a street in 1910. People who most likely didn't plan for their outfits to be captured on film that day. It's so real. 
• Though, you're kind of limited in terms of just how many centuries had photography and/or film. 

Newspapers 

• It's very easy to find databases online for newspapers from just about anywhere. If you're having trouble, try searching by year, place, keyword, that sort of thing. 

Family history websites. Just please don't be creepy about it. 

Digitized yearbooks

• There are a plethora of vintage yearbooks on the internet. It's one of the greatest things especially if you need to be brought back down to earth on the subject of retro hair goals.

Museum websites

• Most large museums have searchable online databases. I like filtering the textile pieces in the collection.

If you're similarly inclined to read a lot about a certain aspect of fashion history or history in general, please comment with your own favorite book/resource suggestions below! I want to know who else is interested in the language of clothing from any period. You are more than welcome to add to this list as well!