Cover image from Barnes & Noble website.
Very welcome news to costumers is that the great Patterns of Fashion book series begun by Janet Arnold, who died in 1998, is being continued. Arnold wrote three gridded pattern books, (Patterns of Fashion 1660 to 1860, Patterns of Fashion 1860 to 1940, and Patterns of Fashion 1560 to 1620, and I just received information from the Costumers’ Alliance about a British source that is continuing her work.
Jenny Tiramani, principal of the School of Historical Dress in London said:
“Please tell people that we have decided not to use a distributor or to put the book for sale on Amazon. They take too much money and we need the funds to keep the school going and to publish Patterns of Fashion 6 & 7 which are both already in the pipeline!
We will be selling the book ourselves from our School of Historical Dress webshop and will try to give a good price for those people buying the book in countries far flung from the UK.
[Patterns of Fashion] 5 is in China being printed next week and published 31st October. …We need all the publicity we can get as the publisher of all future volumes of the series!”
Please support this incredibly rare and precious resource, the School of Historical Dress!! Here is where you can find their web site.
Mantua, Late 17th century, Collection of the Metropolitan Museum.
Other books include Seventeenth Century Women’s Dress Patterns (Vols. 1 & 2), and Waistcoats from the Hopkins Collection c. 1720-1950 “The waistcoats are shown with close-up details of its shape, construction and decoration, alongside images of people wearing similar styles from the same time period.” Janet Arnold’s other books are also available.
(One virtue of the Patterns of Fashion Series — aside from the meticulous research — is their large format: printed on extra wide paper, the scaled patterns are easy to refer to while you are working.)
Patterns of Fashion 4 covers body linens 1540 to 1660 — “the linen clothes that covered the body from the skin outwards. It contains 420 full colour portraits and photographs of details of garments in the explanatory section as well as scale patterns for linen clothing ranging from men’s shirts and women’s smocks, ruffs and bands to boot-hose and children’s stomachers.
witness2fashion 
Many thanks for sharing these information!
I looked at their website but failed to see how to order online, I will get in contact with them 🙂
Their courses are very interesting, judging from their descriptions, although I’m a total novice in the field
I found the website hard to use, too. That’s why I linked to it on more than one way — “publications” doens’t always show up. I was able to make 1890’s costumes using Janet Arnold’s Patterns of Fashion and my experience with from sewing modern patterns, even before I studied costume construction in grad school. (I did know about flat-lining, a couture technique often illustrated by the Fifty Dresses blog.
Thanks for your reply. I emailed them and as I ‘m in London, I hope I can maybe purchase on site, easier than having things shipped
Oh, I envy you!
I’m sure each location has its good things at hand 🙂
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