These are three different sleeves for evening:
With patterns available for sale from The Delineator, February 1895.
How can you not love those sleeves? I'm working on an article to submit to a big costume history journal, a material culture study of clothing my great-great-grandmother Marie left behind when she died at a young age. This is what was in! hip! it! But you knew that already.
Marie didn't have any dresses that I can identify as strictly eveningwear, which might look like your best memory of Worth or Paquin:
Marie never owned anything so décolleté, and everything has long sleeves. But this is another of the seemingly endless variations on "puff sleeves" that were popular from, shall we say, 1894-6ish or so. They've become an icon of this decade, and the daytime equivalent are often all described (mostly inaccurately) as "leg-o-mutton" style. Dozens of names pop up in contemporary literature, and Janet Arnold, for one, has documented various different names. All marketing, I'm sure, and I doubt most women could tell the difference, as I doubt few 1990s women could differentiate pedal pushers from clam diggers?
Would it be worth straightening this out? Write a paper on sleeves? This is one of the challenges I find in researching costume history. I am so attracted to the idea of truth-telling down to the stitch, but is it worth our time? It's still such a young field, is there more to be done at the macro level? Because these poufs look pretty macro to me...
*The Met has really done wonders with their website, now it's actually worth searching their collections pages! It's super dynamic, now including pictures of some of the dresses, like the above, in past exhibitions or dressings, as well as close-ups, related events...the works! Finally.
Also, while of course every employee and intern at the CI has a scholarly appreciation for all objects therein, I am probably the only person who has worked with the collections team there that actually admired all these '90s examples--look at that coloring, nothing like silt-and-offwhite to highlight your complexion. So many putrid greens and acid mauves as well...I'll take them all, with black lace on top!
With patterns available for sale from The Delineator, February 1895.
How can you not love those sleeves? I'm working on an article to submit to a big costume history journal, a material culture study of clothing my great-great-grandmother Marie left behind when she died at a young age. This is what was in! hip! it! But you knew that already.
Marie didn't have any dresses that I can identify as strictly eveningwear, which might look like your best memory of Worth or Paquin:
such as this randomly chosen example from the Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Possibly Charles Frederick, possibly his son Jean Phillipe, c. 1894, silk.*
Marie never owned anything so décolleté, and everything has long sleeves. But this is another of the seemingly endless variations on "puff sleeves" that were popular from, shall we say, 1894-6ish or so. They've become an icon of this decade, and the daytime equivalent are often all described (mostly inaccurately) as "leg-o-mutton" style. Dozens of names pop up in contemporary literature, and Janet Arnold, for one, has documented various different names. All marketing, I'm sure, and I doubt most women could tell the difference, as I doubt few 1990s women could differentiate pedal pushers from clam diggers?
Would it be worth straightening this out? Write a paper on sleeves? This is one of the challenges I find in researching costume history. I am so attracted to the idea of truth-telling down to the stitch, but is it worth our time? It's still such a young field, is there more to be done at the macro level? Because these poufs look pretty macro to me...
*The Met has really done wonders with their website, now it's actually worth searching their collections pages! It's super dynamic, now including pictures of some of the dresses, like the above, in past exhibitions or dressings, as well as close-ups, related events...the works! Finally.
Also, while of course every employee and intern at the CI has a scholarly appreciation for all objects therein, I am probably the only person who has worked with the collections team there that actually admired all these '90s examples--look at that coloring, nothing like silt-and-offwhite to highlight your complexion. So many putrid greens and acid mauves as well...I'll take them all, with black lace on top!