Fancy Dress Hire

Fancy dress costume hire has the advantage of being able to return the costume after the party, but consider the fact that most fancy dress shops wont stock any where near the 10,000 fancy dress costumes online available from Jokers' masquerade, and many of which are in a variety of different sizes. There are a few fancy dress hire online options, but to date most don't offer a huge variety of costumes and you can never be sure what condition your costume will arrive in.

Hiring a fancy dress costume can also work out more expensive than purchasing a cheap fancy dress costume, Jokers' Masquerade have a huge variety of online fancy dress costumes that are as cheap or cheaper than hiring a costume and because you own it and arrives brand new, this has to be a better deal.

Tip: If you never plan to wear the costume again, why not sell it on a site like Ebay after the fancy dress party, who knows your brand new Pirate Costume may end up costing you nothing!

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Taken from http://antiquedress.blogspot.com/

Costume Plates and Fashion Plates

Differences Between Costume Plates and Fashion Plates

Many people do not realise that there is a difference between a costume plate and a fashion plate. Fashion plates promote and publicize possible future fashions. Fashion plates are always intended as an idea of a how a new possible fashion might be worn. Some of the suggested fashions may never in reality ever be worn. They are a drawing of a designer's idea and often deliberately provocative. So fashion plates can and do often show an air of fantasy. You can read more about fashion plate history in my special new section soon where you will see images and read about names of typical fashion periodicals that carried fashion plates.

Costume plates are different in that they technically show costume as it was worn in the past especially everyday past fashions as an historical costume record. Such records of costume almost always include national or theatrical dress. Costume plates are about the fashions of the past and fashion plates are about fashion ideas in the here and now or the future.

If you want to collect fashion or costume plates some knowledge of the names of the original sources is useful and you will soon be able to read more about the first costume plates.

Fashion and Costume Print Prices

The late James Laver, fashion historian also noted that fashion plates were already becoming scarcer by the 1940s. Once moving film and movies arrived Hollywood and other film company costume departments began to snap up fashion and costume plates to enable them to reproduce costumes more accurately.

Today, it is still possible to find good fashion plates in antique shops, but more and more of us are buying our plates from internet shops such as those found at eBay which is an incredible resource for this format. It still amazes me how many have survived and the internet has opened up this easy to collect treasure for enthusiasts. In the main I feel sales of fashion plates are one of the things eBay does well with treasures to be found worldwide. It should be noted that fashion plates are different from trade plates, which were just advertisements which gave ideas on how to make up the fabric products sold by a manufacturer.

Hand Coloured Engraving from 1831 La Belle Assemblée

Prices vary and are dependant on the quality and rare value of the print. Here above and below I show two examples of fashion plate engravings bought from eBay in March 2005, through a respected UK seller known as Cabrio4. They cost me £15 for the two. Of course if many others had been bidding that day, my purchase may have cost me much much more or I may have abandoned buying the prints altogether. However these were both a very fine purchase and are in a timeframe worth collecting. The detail is exquisite. On other occasions I've paid much less or much more for a print.

One word of warning with bidding for these at eBay - don't get too carried away until you know what you are bidding on. Fashion plates can be like buses. You don't see many for a week or two and then just like buses dozens appear. My advice is that to begin collecting you just watch eBay sales of these for a few weeks if you are interested in starting a collection. Then use your knowledge to gauge the going rate noting the differences between types of plate and the variety available.

This pursuit can be an interesting and related alternative to collecting vintage clothing. It may be used as well, to enhance a clothing collection by helping you become more knowledgeable about style differences in fashionable dress.

I will be adding some more of Cabrio4's plates to the site in due course. If you want to learn more about fashion and costume plates please visit my new section on this topic in due course where more historical periodical naming information can be dealt with more fully.

Taken from http://antiquedress.blogspot.com/

The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition

The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition

fashion in dress, the prevailing mode affecting modifications in costume. Styles in Asia have been characterized by freedom from change, and ancient Greek and Roman dress preserved the same flowing lines for centuries. Fashion in dress and interior decoration may be said to have originated in Europe about the 14th cent. New styles were set by monarchs and prominent personages and were spread by travelers, by descriptions in letters, and, in costume , by the exchange of the fashion doll . The first fashion magazine is thought to have originated c.1586 in Frankfurt, Germany; it was widely imitated, gradually superseding fashion dolls. Godey's Lady's Book, established in the United States in 1830, remained popular for decades. In interior decoration the influence of designers, such as Chippendale, Sheraton, and Robert and James Adam, was apparent in the 18th cent., but in costume the

...shion in dress, the prevailing mode affecting modifications in costume. Styles in Asia have been characterized by freedom from change, and ancient Greek and Roman dress preserved the same flowing lines for centuries. Fashion in dress and interior decoration may be said to have originated in Europe about the 14th cent. New styles were set by monarchs and prominent personages and were spread by travelers, by descriptions in letters, and, in costume , by the exchange of the fashion doll . The first fashion magazine is thought to have originated c.1586 in Frankfurt, Germany; it was widely imitated, gradually superseding fashion dolls. Godey's Lady's Book, established in the United States in 1830, remained popular for decades. In interior decoration the influence of designers, such as Chippendale, Sheraton, and Robert and James Adam, was apparent in the 18th cent., but in costume the only influential designer at that period was Rose Bertin, milliner and dressmaker to Marie Antoinette.

In Paris—the leading arbiter of fashion since the Renaissance—the fading influence of celebrities was coincident with the rise of designer-dressmakers in the mid-19th cent. Paris haute couture has remained preeminent in setting fashions for women's dress. Designers such as Charles Frederick Worth, Coco Chanel, Lucien Lelong, Elsa Schiaparelli, Cristóbal Balenciaga, Christian Dior, and Yves Saint Laurent have had fashion houses in Paris. In the latter part of the 20th cent. such American designers as Norman Norell, Mainbocher, James Galanos, Bill Blass, and Pauline Trigère competed successfully with Parisian designers. London, in the early 19th cent., became the center for men's fashions under the leadership of Regency dandies such as Beau Brummell . In the mid-1960s, London was again for a time the center of fashion influence.

The 1970s and 80s saw the beginning of more divergent trends in fashion. This was the result of the increasing popularity of ready-to-wear collections by major designers, which made fashionable label-conscious dressing possible for the middle class. Ethnic-inspired looks and the punk style enjoyed a period of popularity. Successful clothing designers such as Ralph Lauren, Georgio Armani, Gianni Versace, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Rei Kawakubo, and Geoffrey Beene widened their design horizons, licensed their names, and put their distinctive marks on objects ranging from furniture to cars, fabric, and perfumes. The look of luxuriance that emerged in the 1980s was countered in the 1990s with the production of classic understated clothes. Fashions are adapted for mass production by the garment industries of New York, Los Angeles, and other cities.

Bibliography: See F. C. C. Boucher, 20,000 Years of Fashion (tr. 1967); R. Lynam, An Illustrated History of the Great Paris Designers and Their Creations (1972); J. A. Black and M. Garland, A History of Fashion (1980); M. and A. Batterberry, Fashion: The Mirror of History, (1982); J. Laver, Costume and Fashion: A Concise History (1982); M. Tranquillo, Styles of Fashion (1984); A. Hollander, Sex and Suits (1994); Editors of Phaidon Press, The Fashion Book (1998); T. Agins, The End of Fashion: The Mass Marketing of the Clothing Business (1999); B. Cosgrave, ed., Sample: Cuttings from Contemporary Fashion (2005); V. Steele, ed., Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion (2005); C. Wilcox, ed., The Golden Age of Couture: Paris and London 1947-57 (2007).

Taken from http://antiquedress.blogspot.com/