Found Online: The Gender and Women's Studies Collection at the University of Wisconsin (1910s-1930s)

You sometimes find fashion and costume history resources in the strangest places.  One of them is in the digital Gender and Women's Studies Collection at the University of Wisconsin.  The name of this site is enough to tell you that the scope of the collection is wider than fashion alone, but such is the importance of clothes and style in women's lives that there are plenty of things to explore if that is where your main interest lies.

Here are some of the highlights!  Click on the images to go to the publications.

What Well Dressed Women Will Wear This Fall.  This little catalogue from 1911 promotes coats and suits made by H. Black and Company under the trade name "Wooltex".

From the same decade: Portfolio of Lady Duff-Gordon's original designs, published by Sears-Roebuck in 1917.

Lady Duff-Gordon was an English couturiѐre who designed under the label "Lucile".  By 1917 she had salons in London, New York and Paris, had licensed her name for various luxury goods, designed for films and the stage and penned fashion columns for women's magazines (including Harper's Bazaar and Good Housekeeping).  She is also credited as the first designer to hold catwalk fashion shows with live models and music.

This portfolio was an attempt to make her fashions available to a wider public at a lower price: though the clothes are pricey for Sears they would have cost customers ten times as much to buy original designs at one of Lucile's salons!

Fashions of the Hour—published in January 1927 by Marshall Field & Company.  The latest fashions to buy from the Chicago department store.

And finally we have The Style Book of Slenderizing Fashions by Lane Bryant.   This catalogue contains 80 pages of clothes for the not-so slender woman including everything from hats to corsets.  The styles are typically 1930s, albeit in larger than average sizes!

Of course, this is not the entire collection.  When you visit the site, check out some of the periodicals there as well!