À la mode is the best new shop where you can buy the oldest styles. We have the most opulent Victorian evening gowns, the flashiest flapper ensembles, and even some pieces you may recognize from today. Please use the dropdown menu in the top left corner to select your time period of choice.
This website is a brainchild of the fall 2024 Design, Ornament, Adornment class in the History of Art and Architecture department at Middlebury College. Over the course of the semester, we discussed how aspects of women's clothing could be both restrictive and liberating throughout different time periods. We visited the Middlebury College Costume Archive Collections to study garments from the Edwardian period and the 1920s. We also gathered information about late Victorian pieces from the Sheldon Museum collection, which was supplemented by our class readings.
With so many comparisons to be made about fashion from all three of these periods and the current day, we decided that a mock website would be an interesting way to "market" these items to potential buyers. It allows us to draw conclusions about the beauty standards and values of the time that each garment is pulled from. It also shows us what components of fashion have remained or been recycled as trends resurface and fade away.
As you peruse this site, we would like to leave you with this quote from Marcel Proust, a famous French novelist and literary critic (1871-1922):
"...when a belief vanishes, there survives....a fetishistic attachment to the old things which it did once animate, as if it was in them and not in ourselves that the divine spark resided..."