Common Clothing Descriptions 1885

Costume Society of America. E-mail them and tell them what you are looking for. They might be able to point you in the right direction,

What area are you interested is? I have some reference books with quite a lot about clothes of that era, but they're primarily about the western US.

GO to the public library and take out periodicals from that time; look at the ads.

See if you can find the Sears Roebuck catalog.

See if you can get your hands on a copy of "The Writer's Guide to Everyday Life in the 1800's". These guides are part of a series of books geared toward writers who need to know about the trappings of daily life within a specific time frame.

Old bound issues of magazines from the period would also be helpful although unless you live in or near a major city may be difficult to find. It might be helpful to look through back issues of newspapers on microfilm (The New York Times, for example, can be accessed at many college and university libraries on microfilm) and look for ads that included drawings of styles.

Sears and Roebuck catalog reprints are available but they won't be of any help to you because Sears specialized in watches and jewelry in their early years which began in 1886. Clothing wasn't added to the catalogs until the late 1890's.

Look for movies with a setting in the mid-1880's or look for biographies complete with many photographs of that era.

Online sites that might help include www.fashionera.com. You might also type various word combinations into your favorite search engine and go from there.

Good luck!

Clothing.

If you search the web you will find some really good sites with actual photos of the clothes.

The best costume books are by G and/or C Willett Cunningham. (Mr and Mrs in real life.) Fabulous details but hard to get hold of.

Please remember that if you want accuracy your middle class people in 1885 changed clothes several times a day and wore morning, afternoon and evening clothes. Ball gowns etc came extra!

Women wore hats/bonnets/caps because a bareheaded woman was an affront to the Lord. Ditto the gloves.

Women's long hair was their crowning glory but very tiresome. They did not run around with it uncombed and undressed a la that awful new Pride and Prejudice film. Long hair is a pain, even at night it needs braiding or tucking into a cap or it will snarl and tangle and knot.

None of this will carry weight if you are writing a historical romance of course but if you want accuracy then please do your research.
Thank you.

I used to have a link (somewhere ...) to Cornell University's American Memory Project. One section was Nineteenth Century in Print, periodicals from that era. Very interesting reading.

Also, I used to read a board for Civil War re-enactors which had lots of links.

Good luck with your project.

Ann