The art of dress : clothes and society 1500-1914

The clothes worn by our ancestors afford an invaluable insight into lifestyles that have disappeared. Choice of dress at any point in time is determined by a number of factors, such as social and economic pressures, moral codes, technical advances, influence of designers and artisitc movements, and the vagaries of individual taste. The rich resources of the National Trust have been used by Jane Ashelford to produce this history of dress over the past 400 hundred years. The resources examined include family correspondances, diaries, inventories and household papers and many of the Trust's properties have their own costume and textile collections. The author looks at the social aspects of dress: how styles were conveyed, how and where materials were purchased, what all levels of society wore, from duke to serving boy, from widow's weeds to swaddling bands.