"New Clothing and How It Should Be Made" (Girl's Own Paper, December 31, 1881)

 The important news for the would-be fashionable young lady of 1881 is that dresses are getting shorter:

It is a great pleasure to believe that the fashion for wearing short dresses, morning, noon and night, will not alter, and long trains show no signs of coming in again, and are not worn except on very special occasions, by elderly matrons, who prefer not to cut up a very handsome dress.  Short skirts are wider and though equally tight in the front, the advent of the tournure has made the sides and back much wider and more graceful for slight figures, because not so tight and clinging.

Enter "the second bustle"!  It's interesting in this context that "short" means "without a train", though skirts still trail on the floor.

The latest winter furs are discussed:

The lighter-coloured furs seem to have slipped out of fashion this winter, and the taste leans to dark browns and black.  The principal furs are—stone marten, seal, musquash, skunk, coney, opossum, black fox, and what is called Russian cat.  These are all moderate in price, and our illustration, "On the Ice", will show how they are worn.  The first figure wears a brown poke bonnet, a mantle of plush, trimmed with black fox, brown cashmere dress, brown velvet and fur muff, and a bunch of yellow crocuses.  The central figure wears a skating costume of plum-coloured, with a fur or feather border.  A wide lining of velvet on the tunic, which is caught up on one side.

Australia's Lost Department Stores I (Craven's, Spring-Summer 1928-1929)

 Back in the twentieth century, each capital city in Australia had a city centre filled with locally owned and run department stores.  Shoppers were spoiled for choice, and a visit to "town" was not only a shopping expedition, but a day's entertainment as well.  However, all good things come to an end.  The growth of suburban shopping malls, the spread of credit cards (as opposed to store-based credit) and the beginning of online shopping meant that many department stores were no long economically viable.  One by one the stores closed down or were absorbed by more flourishing concerns.

Today, only a few department store chains remain in Australia.  Every city centre has the same selection of shops and stores, all selling the same goods at the same prices.  All that remains of the old department stores are a few photographs, advertising and articles in yellowing newspapers, and people's memories.  And, of course, the surviving store catalogues.

Over the years I've collected a few of these catalogues.  Though I don't have a full set (by a long shot!) I do have a fair sample.  I'd like to take a look at some of these stores—and the fashions they sold to their customers!

I'm going to start with Craven's of Adelaide.  This  is the oldest Australian store catalogue in my collection, and also one of the rarest.   Craven's was originally established in 1886 as Craven and Armstrong.  Upon the death of Armstrong in 1912, Craven turned the store into a limited liability company and expanded the premises on the corner of Pultney and Rundle streets.  Craven's developed a reputation for offering "value for money" as John Craven was a shrewd buyer of merchandise.    

Up to the early 1950s advertisements promoting Craven's appear in all the Adelaide newspapers.  Things fall oddly silent after that, though Craven's was still in business.  Possibly it was already past its best, but the store in Adelaide hung on until 1965, when it was burnt down during a burglary.  The burglars got away with around £3,000 in cash, while the fire did around £250,000 worth of damage!  Craven's was apparently of so little importance by 1965 that the fire and the burglary weren't even mentioned in the local papers.  Instead it was reported in the Canberra Times.

The image above is from the inside front cover of one of J. Craven & Co.'s catalogues (the cover itself being damaged).  It's from the store's heyday, and illustrates some delightfully "twenties" voile frocks on the left, and cotton dresses with matching bloomers for little girls on the right.

La Mode (March 1839)

 

Like many nineteenth century fashion plates, this one was separated from of the magazine where it was originally published.  This means it has no context.  We can hazard a guess that it was published in a French magazine and happily it has a date printed on it, but otherwise we can't know what types of outfits these ladies are wearing (morning dress? promenade dress? afternoon dress?) or what their garments are made of.  Chances were that their garments were made of silk, plain (on the left) and figured (on the right) both being favoured:

Some of the dresses are decorated with fancy trimming, others with folds... but in whatever manner the skirt is trimmed, the sleeves must always be decorated to correspond.  Silks are upon the whole the materials most in request for promenade robes, for though white muslin begins to appear, it is but slowly, and mousselines de laine though enjoying a certain vogue, are not so distingué as silk.

The New Monthly Belle Assemblee, June 1839.

The Court and Ladies' Magazine of March 1839 announces that:

The newest mousselines de laine and de soie, are striped, two, three and four colours... Striped silks and satins are likewise coming in, so that striped dresses will be de rigeur this season.

Court and Ladies' Magazine, March 1839

Nearly two centuries later, what seems most evident is the way in which the fashionable silhouette of the 1830s has almost become that of the 1840s.  Skirts are now bell-shaped and reach the ground, while the full sleeves, modish in the earlier part of the decade, have shrunk and slid down to the lower half of the arm.  The bonnets our models are wearing are not quite as small and enclosing as the "poke" bonnets of the 1840s, but they're getting there.

200 Years Ago (Ackermann's Repository, March 1823)

 

Our model from March 1823 is warmly dressed in 

A deep amethyst-colour pelisse... wadded, and lined with pink sarsnet; a little wrapt, and fastened down the front with hooks and eyes...

It was trimmed with velvet.  

A pelisse was a front-fastening, full length coat with sleeves.  As an outdoor garment its main competition was the shawl:

Our fair pedestrians now rarely envelop themselves at once in a shawl and pelisse, though the latter have lost nothing of their attraction; but they present no peculiar novelty at present.  Shawls are confined entirely to high dresses: the Angola shawls begin to decline; but those of India are as fashionable as ever.  Promenade gowns are still principally of tabinet or silk: black is much worn in the latter.

So popular were Indian shawls that an entire industry developed around making cheaper imitations.  The most notable of these were the paisley shawls manufactured in Paisley near Glasgow.   Alas for Paisley, the industry collapsed when shawls fell out of fashion in the late 1860s, though the word "paisley" is still used to describe the kind of patterns that were woven into these shawls!