Research Guides: THEA 309/310: History of Costumes: Costume Images

Digital Image Databases

Use digital image collections available through VCU Libraries to find high-resolution images for educational
(teaching, study, and research) purposes.

ARTstor
Now part of JSTOR, this image database features a range of images in the arts, architecture, humanities, and social sciences. Collections have been contributed by leading museums, photo archives, scholars, and artists.
Oxford Art Online
Integrated searchable access to Grove Art Online, The Oxford Companion to Western Art, Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms, and more.
(Limited to 3 simultaneous users)
Bloomsbury Fashion Central
Contains Berg Fashion Library, which provides cross-searchable access to interdisciplinary text and image content on world dress and fashion. Includes e-books, reference works, images, and more.
Vogue Archive
Image-rich primary source for the study of fashion, gender and modern social history. It presents a portrait of its era through photographs, articles, and advertisements. Contains every page of Vogue Magazine from 1892 to the present.

Image Websites

Image databases available online often contain high-quality images that are invisible to web crawlers.
You can use search engines and directories to locate these databases. Some examples are:

The MET Costume Institute
Images of costumes and accessories from the fifteenth century to the present. The MET allows use of their images for "limited non-commercial, educational, and personal use only." For more information visit the MET's Terms of Use webpage: (http://www.metmuseum.org/information/terms-and-conditions)
The Victoria & Albert Museum - Fashion
Features historical and contemporary fashion images. The V&A allows use of their images for "For educational use: this means the one-time use of Content by a student at an Educational Establishment." For more information, visit the V&A Terms of Use webpage: (http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/t/terms-and-conditions/)
Fashion Plate Collection (University of Washington)
The collection contains 417 digital images of fashion plates from 1806-1914 from some of the leading fashion journals of the time.
Pratt Institute Fashion Plate Collection
The Fashion Plate Collection consists of hand-colored fashion plates from the French periodical La Gazette du Bon Ton and its American edition, La Gazette du Bon Genre, distributed by Condé Nast.
FIT SPARC Digital
The digital collections of the FIT Library's Special Collections and College Archives. Features images from dozens of collections in the form of original fashion sketches, photographs, illustrations, and historic fashion plates. These collections contain many fine examples of women's wear, menswear, children's wear, millinery, footwear, jewelry, and costume created between the 18th and 20th century.
19th Century Fashion
Flickr album featuring fashion catalog images and illustrations of 19th century women's fashion.
NYPL Digital Gallery
New York Public Library's searchable database of 275,000 photographs and manuscripts from its collections. Also browsable by names and subjects.
National Gallery of Art - NGA Images
A repository of over 42,000 open access digital images from the collections of the National Gallery of Art.

Costume Image Books

Fashionable Clothing from the Sears Catalogs - Book Series
A series of books documenting fashion trends in America from the 1930s to the 1980s. A resource for fashion designers looking to revive and rework retro styles, for costume designers working to recreate an era, and for collectors and historians wanting to document vintage clothing. These book offers hundreds of full-color photographs, with thousands of items of clothing, shoes, and accessories pictured, along with detailed descriptions.
Dover Publications Series - Costume and Fashion
Costume design and pattern illustrations from different cultures and time periods.

THEA 309/310: History of Costumes

Costume History

Related Guide

Fashion Images & Copyright

Digital Image Databases

Image Websites

Costume Image Books