Back from the dead? I must confess that I haven’t updated this blog on a frequency for my liking. I’ve been spending a lot of time editing various things behind the scenes, but never actually writing the articles that would offer even the merest glimpse of those newer things. Part of the problem seems to be that the source material I was planning to republish literally got lost in the mail. A fine excuse, since I have a lot more in my collection that’s equally interesting just three feet from me. France has an economical postage rate to efficiently deliver cultural works to the rest of the world, but it is slow. And apparently unreliable.
Still looking for La Mode Pratique Numéro 25 (23-Juin-1894)
Found an interesting book by the german author Annemarie Kleinert– DIE FRÜHEN MODEJOURNALE IN FRANKREICH. It’s out of print, but you can get the pdf from her website. I’m going through her list of french fashion journals now– trying to figure which catered to my interest in drafting instructions. Have located some interesting candidates–e.g. La Couturiere– Organe professionnel des Coutourières et Confectionneuses
Speaking of which, Gallica is great, but if you know a title, and want to dicover if it has been digitized, the BNF’s catalogue will actually let you search for something called La Mode without the getting thousands of results that a fulltext search would generate. (Yeah, La Mode is the second result, but I’ve been less lucky before.) Usually better filtering, too.