Textiles and Dress

1830s in Western fashion

1830s fashion in Western and Western-influenced fashion is characterized by an emphasis on breadth, initially at the shoulder and later in the hips, in contrast to the narrower silhouettes that had predominated between 1800 and 1820. Women's costume featured larger sleeves than were worn in any period before or since, which were accompanied by elaborate hairstyles and large hats. The final months of the 1830s saw the proliferation of a revolutionary new technology—photography. Hence, the infant industry of photographic portraiture preserved for history a few rare, but invaluable, first images of human beings—and therefore also preserved our earliest, live peek into "fashion in action"—and its impact on everyday life and society as a whole.

Also on this shelf

See also

• ▸Kit (association football)
• ▸Buswell & Nyberg
• ▸Early Slavs

Uncatalogued shelf

Text from Wikipedia; plate via Wikimedia Commons. Text CC BY-SA 4.0; plate freely licensed (see Commons). Source record. Images and catalogue data are reproduced from open-access collections.