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This Site is about fashion history as shown in images of royal and aristocratic women from the Renaissance (ca. 1500) to the Belle Époque that came to abrupt end with the outbreak of World War I in 1914.
I endeavor to post the highest quality (usually, but not always, the largest) images I can find. I will clean up images to remove spots, scratches, sepia tone, other monotone colorations, etc, especially in parts of an image away from a woman or her dress. But I will clean up heavily marred faces and dresses if necessary and if I can do it. These changes within an image will be described if done with Photoshop (you can lie with Photoshop). I will also modify margins by cropping or re-coloration of border areas or by straightening tilted images and recoloring the edges of the new borders, but usually not state that I did it.
The site is broken into albums by chronological order approximately by century until the 19th century that, for the purposes of this Site, began in 1789 and ended in 1914. The 19th century had four distinct fashion epochs. Each section begins with a page like this one that has a Table of Contents for the epoch. The Table of Contents has links to Albums with all of the images for the epoch. The albums contain individual discrete images as well as Subalbums that contain three or more images of the same person or persons wearing different dresses. Some Subalbums contain Albumettes for especially well-documented persons like French Empress Eugénie, Austrian Empress Elisabeth, or Queen Alexandra of Great Britain.
Dates listed are the date depicted in the image; the date the image was created by an artist or released may be different. The titles identify the person(s) and may not be the title used by the gallery or organization with the image.
Please click on images after they first appear - the image that posts after you click may be of better quality than the first one and it can be downloaded.
Blue with dashed underline means a hyperlink to a visual Web site, another location on this Site, or e-mail. Green with a dashed underline means a hyperlink to a musical or music-video Web site. Magenta with underline means a link to a page, the major subdivision of this Site. Pages are also identified in the banner above every page and image on this Site; pages have Tables of Contents (except for the Notices and Definitions page).
TABLE OF CONTENTS
The Table of Contents for the entire Site follows.
Page: Notices and Definitions
Album: New Content (images posted over the preceding three or so weeks)
Page with Table of Contents: Grand Ladies of the Farthingale Era
Album: The Early 1500s - 1470 to 1550
Album: The Middle 1500s - 1550 to 1590
Album: The Late Farthingale Era - 1590 - 1620
Album: Iberian Style in the Farthingale Era
Page with Table of Contents: Grand Ladies of the Reigns of Louis XIII and Louis XIV - 1620 to 1715
Album: Transition from Ruffs to Collars - 1620 to 1630
Album: Collars to Casual - 1630 to 1640
Album: "Casual" Dress - 1641 to 1683
Album: End of the Era - 1684 to 1715
Album: Iberian Dress in the Louis XIII and XIV Eras
Page with Table of Contents: Grand Ladies of the 1700s
Album: Grand Ladies of the Reign of Louis XV - 1715 to 1774
Album: Grand Ladies of the Reign of Louis XV - 1775 to 1789
Album: Russian Style from 1715 to 1789
Page with Table of Contents: Grand Ladies of the Revolution, Empire, and Romantic Cycle - 1789 to 1836
Album: Revolutionary, Napoléonic, and Romantic Era
Album: Iberian Style in the Revolutionary Era
Album: Russian Style in the French Revolutionary Era
Page with Table of Contents: Grand Ladies of the "Early" "Victorian" Era - 1837 to 1870
Album: "Early" "Victorian" - 1837 to 1870
Album: Iberian Style Between 1837 and 1870
Album: Russian Style Between 1837 and 1870
Page with Table of Contents: Grand Ladies of the Bustle Era
Album: The Bustle Periods - 1870 to 1890
Album: Iberian Style in the Bustle Periods
Album: Russian Style in the Bustle Periods
Page with Table of Contents: Grand Ladies of the Belle Époque