More Snapshots from History

[mothwing]

I have a thing for beautiful women in beautiful dresses on sepia pictures. But then, who doesn't.



It's sad that they only have the names of the Caucasian women on these pictures. I wouldn't fancy finding myself called "young Caucasian-05" on a popular vintage picture site. The site is fittingly called Old Pictures and can be found here. The pictures below were taken in the US, also in the last century, some of them in the nineteenth century.

Ok. Off to take Sev to the vet, he needs a shot. Wish me luck.

Comments

[moonystone.livejournal.com]

Beautiful pictures. The child looks decidedly, and deservedly, unhappy.
They're name research appears to me slightly rascist, but then that could be due to bad archives who didn't regard it as necessary to preserve a black woman's name...

Good luck!

[mothwing.livejournal.com]

I blamed it on the archiving, to be honest, but I still found it sad - so many nameless people.

Fashion for children in those days decidedly struck me as odd, I included that poor girl for that very reason. She looks more like a doll than a child, and it looks as though those clothes were about as comfortable as a cardboard box. It's the same with some of the dresses up there compared to the dresses of the working women. Not that dresses are ever really that practical, but the peacock varieties always seem to be considerably worse, whereas the difference between a dolled up man and his plain clothes does not seem to be that great. But maybe I underestimate the impracticality of a male clothes of the day.

[moonystone.livejournal.com]

I visited a museum exhibition about clothes once, and they said that childen's clothes only become real children's clothes towards the 20th century.
And, imho, they're chaging that back to litle adult's clothes right now.
Women's clothes "of the peacock variety" are absolutely the most unpractical ever. Still are.
I don't think that men's clothes are that impracticle, that'S against the so-called male nature. Even though all these skin-tight white jeans or baggy pants can't be that practical...
Anyway, as a curious fact of dress history: some men in England of the 1820s wore jackets which included a corset, they were called Butterfly Dandies. ;)