1811 Regency dress, New York Times illustration, 1913
How Today’s Styles Ran Their Course 100 Years Ago is a New York Times article (in PDF format) that ran in the paper on July 27, 1913. In it the author provides a comprehensive early 20th-century view of French fashions that were popular a century before. The author contrasts the racy French directoire styles with the more sedate British fashions of the period, and traces the evolution of the free flowing, transparent Grecian-inspired clothes to the tight, constricting crinolines that made their appearance in the second half of the century. The author worries that the fashions popular at the turn of the 20th century echoed “the scandalous gowns influenced by Paris directly after the revolution.”
This nearly century old article is definitely worth reading for its historic value and for its insights.
Read more on the topic:
- Les Incroyables et Merveilleuses: Fashion as Anti-Rebellion
- Les Merveilleuses
- Clothing of 18th Century England
- Fashion, Culture and Identity, Fred Davis, 1992, Google Book (Partial Book):
Jane Austen's World 
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