Historical Fashion in Detail: The 17th and 18th Centuries

This volume offers the opportunity to see fragile clothes in detail. Perfection is in the detail: decorative seams, exquisite stitching, knife sharp pleats and voluptuous drapery feature alongside more usual techniques such as stamping, pinking and slashing. Many of the skills displayed have been lost to the modern world: such labour-intensive handwork is no longer done and these effects cannot be replicated by machine. Yet many fashion designers take their inspiration from the past, adapting ideas to a more contemporary idiom.