The Chronicle Of Western Costume: From The Ancient World To The Late Twentieth Century

“The definitive guide to the history of western costume.”?Antiques Info Here, in more than one thousand full-color illustrations, is the history of Western fashion, from ancient Egypt to twentieth-century Paris. John Peacocks meticulous drawings are organized in chronological sections and accompanied by detailed descriptions of each figure, including the individual items of costume shown and the many types of fabric, cut, pattern, and color that have been used over the centuries. This unrivaled reference work on how people have dressed in the western world throughout history includes an illustrated glossary with additional information on technical terms. 1000 color illustrations.

Reviews

I think this a very interesting book if you want to know about how the different fashions through the Ancient to the Modern Centuries and how the people wore them and what they looked like. I make cloth dolls and if your making anything with Cloth dolls or minidolls you need to make everything authentic. Even if you dont make doll clothes or dolls you would still find the book very interesting just finding out how people dressed through the centuries.
Several years ago I picked up John Peacocks Costume: 1066 to the Present, Third Edition and have cherished it ever since. I have spent countless hours pouring over the beautiful clothes and was happy to have a great reference on hand whenever I needed to find out what someone would dress like at a certain period of time. However, there were certain flaws in that book for someone with a broad interest in costume: it only covered English clothes and further, it only covered upper-class English clothes. Plus, although the sketches were gorgeously done, they werent in color.

This book seems to be in direct answer to all my silent complaints about the earlier book. Here, Peacock has created a gorgeous work filled with color illustrations of costumes over a broad span of time, countries and classes. It begins with the Ancient World, displaying costumes categorized by geographic region (Egypt, Crete, Greece, Babylon, Assyria, Persia, Rome, Byzantinum) and from then on shows costumes chronologically, from c. 100 AD to 1980. On the two-page spread covering c. 1655-1665, a German countrywoman, an Austrian queen, an English cobbler and a French gentleman (and several others) are all displayed, and such variety is found throughout this book. What is very interesting is not only how the different classes are dressing at the same time, but also how in the same span of five years, the costume of the upper classes from two different countries shows slight differences. The detail is amazing, down to the (often silly) hats, shoes, hair, etc. once thought fashionable.

Each section of illustrations is followed by several pages of a brief explanation for each costume. Although I disliked how this broke up the flow, I do understand that this sort of information could be useful for people with an eye to designing a costume themselves. I do have one word of caution about this book, however: the women of Ancient Egypt and Ancient Crete apparently walked around bare-breasted (at least according to John Peacocks illustrations), so those who are easily offended might want to cover certain parts of these pages.

I cannot recommend this highly enough for those interested in period costumes. I have yet to find another book so filled with beautiful (color!) illustrations of such a broad perspective.