Hey! I'm a big fan of your historical work (especially your sewing!) and thumbed through your pinterest awhile ago (thank you for linking it at some point) and was wondering if you have any reference books for period fashion that you like! Not any period in specifics, just any literature or media that you've found helpful, or return to often! Thank yeww
Hello ! I've listed a few books that were useful to me to understand construction on historical clothing in this post, but I've used those books more in my little historical costuming hobbies than for design.
When it come to character design historical references, my main sources are portraiture and contemporary illustration and I find most of it on archives or museum's online ressources. The only physical book of that type I sometimes use is Racinet's Costume History. I have a few books for napoleonic uniforms that sometimes come in handy including a few from the Men-at-Arms series of Osprey.
I think my main hubs for design references are probably the online collection of the V&A and Gallica BNF (the online ressource of the french national library).
For medieval stuff, I like to look at digitized versions of heavily illuminated manuscript like Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry in the collection of the castle of Chantilly ( loads of colourful XVth century fashion) or the lovely Manesse Codex on the website of the Heidelberg University Library (14th century, some of these are the cutest stuff you've ever seen).
These days, for my revolutionary calendar project, I'm using a lot of illustrations from the Gallica digitizations of several "Cris de Paris " street studies, esp the ones by Vernet and Poisson, for reference of commonfolk clothing from the late 18th century and early 19th.
For 16th-17th century stuff, it's even earsier ; paintings from the early modern era depict garments very realistically both in upperclass portraiture and in scenes that represent lower class people like tavern scenes and the like. For these I honestly just rely on wikisource for high res files of classic european masters stuff.
To be fair I usually hang out on Pinterest, try to find stuff that looks credible and matches the vibe of whichever project I'm working on and work backwards looking for the sources if I don't know them already. A lot of old fashion plate books and manuscript can be found fully digitized online, no need for an expensive library and acres of shelf space ! Hope this helps !
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MORE ARTFIGHT!!!!!! D’ivry and Calvereaux belong to @olibheare Bhat belongs to @doodlerh and Lulu belongs to @pinkiepig !! closeups of my favorite parts utc
visdev stuff from a group storyboarding project in college. Unfortunately the files for this weren’t processed correctly so it’s lost pretty indefinitely
Our high-level dnd party! (from left to right: Luster for @rosebudorwatevr, Professor Rigel Solas for @aiderynddraig, Marcus is mine, and Red for @ear-a-corn!)