Costume Society of America

Form-fitting dresses, silk veils, earrings, furs, high-heeled shoes, make-up, and dyed, flowing hair. It is difficult for a contemporary person to reconcile these elegant clothes and accessories with the image of cloistered nuns. For many of the some thousand nuns in early modern Venice, however, these fashions were the norm. Often locked in convents without any religious calling-simply to save their parents the expense of their dowry-these involuntary nuns relied on the symbolic meaning of secular clothes, fabrics, and colors to rebel against the rules and prescriptions of conventual life and to define roles and social status inside monastic society. Calling upon mountains of archival documents, most of which have never been seen in print, Forbidden Fashions is the first book to focus specifically upon the dress of nuns in Venetian convents and offers new perspective on the intersection of dress and the city's social and economic history.

In the early 1940s, American designer Emily Wilkens went beyond her previous experience in children's wear to create costumes for two teenage characters in a Broadway play. Recognizing the growing importance of the teenager in American culture, she soon launched Emily Wilkens Young Originals, the first designer label specializing in upscale, fashionable clothing for teenage girls. Within the space of a few years, Wilkens skyrocketed from obscurity to national recognition, yet even today many fashion insiders would not recognize her name. Fashion historian Rebecca Jumper Matheson explores intertwining stories of female agency through the history of Wilkens and her teenage clientele. Wilkens retained both artistic and business control over her label in an era when most American ready-to-wear designers were anonymous employees of manufacturers. Wilkens parleyed her relative youth into a big-sister image which, like her dresses themselves, allowed her to mediate between the concerns of her teenage clients and their parents. Contrary to popular wisdom, Wilkens's designs declared that even a teenager could be fashionable. In doing so, Wilkens laid the foundation for the seismic shift that would occur later in the twentieth century, when youth became the fashionable ideal. Young Originals traces Wilkens's career from fashion illustrator in the 1930s to spa and beauty expert in the 1980s, emphasizing her consistent ideal of healthy, youthful beauty.

Between 1678 and 1710, Parisian presses printed hundreds of images of elegantly attired men and women dressed in the latest mode, and posed to display every detail of their clothing and accessories. Long used to illustrate dress of the period, these fashion prints have been taken at face value and used uncritically. Drawing on perspectives from art history, costume history, French literature, museum conservation and theatrical costuming, the essays in this volume explore what the prints represent and what they reveal about fashion and culture in the seventeenth century. With more than one hundred illustrations, Fashion Prints in the Age of Louis XIV constitutes not only an innovative analysis of fashion engravings, but also one of the most comprehensive collections of seventeenth-century fashion.

Managing Costume Collections offers systematic approaches to organization, accessibility, record keeping, safety, and a host of other stewardship concerns related to managing costume collections of every type. Conceived to address needs long identified by the Costume Society of America, this guide is written for a broad spectrum of collection managers at museums, historical societies and houses, university theaters and study collections, and company archives, as well as for vintage dealers, private collectors, and living history performers. Drawing on the wisdom of many disciplines, Coffey-Webb takes a holistic approach to problem-solving, explaining appropriate procedures and the reasons behind them, to arm collection managers, specialists and nonspecialists alike, with sufficient tools to make informed decisions on their own. She also offers alternative solutions to the recommended guidelines. Although there are books on costume conservation, there is a paucity of 04 Activeable material on costume-collection management. Managing Costume Collections is the first work in collection management to address a wide audience, from general to academic and hobbyist to professional, interested specifically in costume.

In Depression-era Dallas, Elsie Frankfurt and Edna Frankfurt Ravkind raised five hundred dollars and launched a daring new enterprise, Page Boy Maternity Clothing-the first to engineer elegance in comfort. When Louise Frankfurt Gartner joined the team, the sisters' combined engineering, business, and PR genius made Page Boy the foremost maternity-clothing manufacturer in the United States. Dressing entertainment icons such as Loretta Young, Elizabeth Taylor, and Florence Henderson, Page Boy broke new ground in every direction. Innovative marketing and business strategies would make the Page Boy label internationally known and land the Frankfurt sisters celebrity in their own right. As a company, Page Boy would thrive until the end of the twentieth century, leaving a rich legacy in the histories of fashion and women in business. Illuminating the Page Boy story are Goldman's insights into the history of maternity clothing in the U.S., America women in business prior to the 1930s, Jewish involvement in garment manufacturing in Dallas, and ultimately the decisions that would lead to Page Boy's demise.