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Member Nicole Jenkins is a costume designer, vintage clothing aficionado, and owner of the highly respected vintage clothing store, Circa, in the heart of Melbourne’s vintage district in Gertrude Street, Fitzroy.
Nicole is the author of two books, Love Vintage and Style is Eternal
Buy Style Is Eternal by Nicole Jenkins on Amazon
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Pamela Wiggins’ Warman’s Costume Jewelry is at once informational and dazzling. It is one of the guides that vintage costume jewelry experts and collectors turn to, and trust, the most.
The book containsPamela Wiggins Siegel is a writer, editor, and appraiser specializing in antiques and collectibles with an emphasis on collectible costume jewelry. Pamela co-founded Costume Jewelry Collectors International. You can find her website here.
Buy Pamela Wiggins’s book Warman’s Costume Jewelry on Amazon
Radical Rags: Fashions of the Sixties
by Joel Lobenthal
(Abbeville Press ISBN 0-89659-930-2) Buy Now
The book is look at the fashions and fashion influences of the 1960s. The book focuses on the fashion scenes in London, New York, Paris, Rome and the US West Coast and it also profiles the major designers of the time.
Every fashion history fan knows about Mary Quant and Andre Courreges, but where does one go to learn about Deanna Littell and Emmanuelle Khanh? To “Radical Rags”, of course!
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Roger K. Burton’s Rebel Threads: Clothing of the Bad, Beautiful & Misunderstood features over 1300 examples of rare vintage clothing from the Contemporary Wardrobe Collection, an over 20 thousand-item archive of street style from 1940 to 1980. Rebel Threads traces how street punk styles were assembled and worn by the mostly teenage sub-culture in the swing, counterculture and blank generation eras.
Burton has 50+ years of experience collecting vintage street fashion. A former mod himself, he supplied much of the original mod clothing for the 1978 cult film Quadrophenia, before establishing the Contemporary Wardrobe Collection, to provide street fashion for TV and Film. He has dressed literally hundreds of influential bands, including David Bowie and the Rolling Stones.
Buy Roger K. Burton’s Rebel Threads on Amazon
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Secondhand Chic: Finding Fabulous Fashion at Consignment, Vintage, and Thrift Stores
by Christa Weil
(Pocket Books: ISBN: 0-671-02713-1)Buy Now
This book is a guide to shopping the secondhand market for wearable clothing. It tells how to identify the elements of a top-quality garment, discusses labels and designer diffusion lines, and discusss when not to buy a flawed item. It also compares and contrasts the various types of secondhand stors in which clothing is generally found.
I love this book. It is a guide to buying quality clothing: spotting construction techniques that indicate quality, telling the difference between types of fabrics, knowing the difference between Geoffrey Beene and Geoffrey Beene Sport.
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Why did the 19th-century Old West hold such power in post-Second World War United States? Sonya Abrego thoroughly and meticulously addresses the incorporation of this iconic style in Westernwear: Postwar American Fashion and Culture. Abrego’s expert commentary, along with the wealth of images in the book, make the book a compelling resource.
Sonya Abrego is an instructor at Parsons School of Design, The New School, and The Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, USA. She is a design historian specializing in the history of American fashion in the twentieth century. She holds a PhD in decorative arts, design history, and material culture studies from Bard Graduate Center, USA, and takes an interdisciplinary approach to examining the connections between dress, popular culture, and modern art and design.
Buy Sonya Abrego’s Westernwear: Postwar American Fashion and Culture on Amazon
Susan Langley has lectured widely on historical fashion, curated six exhibits for the Lorenzo State Historic Site in New York, and hosted several live shows on Personal FX: The Collectibles Show. She resides in New York State. Sue has written several books on vintage fashion, including Vintage Hats & Bonnets 1770-1970: Identification & Values and Roaring ’20s Fashions: Deco
Buy books by Susan Langley on Amazon
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The Costume Collector’s Companion 1890-1990 by Rosemary Hawthorne
(Aurum Press ISBN 1-85410-552-3)
Buy Now
This is a decade by decade guide to collecting clothes and accessories from the 20th century. The focus is on fashions from the UK, where the author is located. Included are descriptions of clothing items that were typical of each decade.
Rosemary Hawthorne has written the most charming and interesting guide to a collection that I’ve ever read. She approaches the subject of vintage fashion by writing about her own collection.
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In this micro-history by VFG member Wendy Dager, you’ll learn that on April 1, 1944, the American people were subject to a federal excise tax that encompassed a large number of items the US government had deemed luxuries. Among them were handbags, a necessity that cost consumers an additional 20% of their retail value. Twenty years of FET had an enormous impact on much more than the pocketbook. An early form of today’s “pink tax,” it was placed on numerous women-centric items, including jewelry, furs and face creams. This tax affected industries, feminism, politics and journalism, and forever altered the designs of mid-century purses, which remain a fashion staple.
A writer of everything from children’s educational programming to humorous mystery novels, Daeger is curator of the online handbag museum The Vintage Purse Museum. You can find her “Pain in the Purse” blog, with bonus photos and information to go with the book HERE.
Buy Wendy Dager’s book Pain in The Purse: The Tax That Changed Handbag History on Amazon
Wig, Hairdressing and Shaving Bygones
by Gail Durbin
(Shire Library, ISBN: 978-0-85263-663-3) Buy Now
This small but informative book covers a topic not often explored: The history of wigs, hairdressing and men’s shaving accoutrements.
Starting from 1624 the author explores the reasons why wigs became fashionable from their practical beginnings to becoming the fashion of the court, the clergy and of upwardly mobile society.
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