Our VP of creative projects shares what she’s into.

Today’s busy women have a variety of events and activities in their lives. Any also has an unique beauty and a personal style. You’ll find information in this category to every event, including the following. Sometimes all it requires to look perfectly polished is in knowing just how to dress up a certain style or what colors or accessories to pair it with. You’ll also find information on how to wear special occasion and evening pieces, from how to pull off the hottest formal runway fashions or dark red carpet looks to how to coordinate evening wear separates. Finding the perfect evening wear to fit the occasion, your budget, and your style can sometimes be difficult.

Use the tips and ideas from articles in this category to almost any evening event.

You’ll also find shopping suggestions and purchasing tips to need and the confidence that comes from looking your best. Use the tips and ideas from articles in this category to nearly any evening event. You’ll also find shopping suggestions and purchasing tips to need and the confidence that comes from looking your best.

While evening wear is essential, from evening wear for formal affairs and special occasions to casual dresses for simple dinner parties. So articles in this category are here to help, women may have challenges in finding just the right dresses and evening wear for the occasion to look their best. On top of this, our VP of creative projects shares what she’s into.

Now that the jeans and T shirts plague has reached our fancy restaurants, cocktail parties, and nightclubs, it seems as though no one except cares about dressing up anymore.

Vintage ain’t just for commoners. With celebrities plucking gowns from past designer collections or straight from the racks of vintage stores, retro looks are regularly featured on the redish carpet. You can find chic, wellmade frocks, and afford them, and similar forgotten tidbits of couturiers past. People connect with fashion history being that clothes are very tangible everyone wears them. On the blog, it’s for the general public, in my job I get to share it with students. Butthere’s not loads of reputable information out there. WayneGuite, and making fashion history available to everyone.

Wearing Special Occasion Looks.

Just in time for the Oscars, WayneGuite helped us compile a gorgeous, decade by decade guide to top party dresses of the 20th century, looks as showstopping today as when they first hit the scene. Moving into the 1910s and ’20s, we started to see major upward mobility. You could now have specialized clothing for different occasions, including parties. This is where it starts getting really entertaining, right? With more readymade clothing, fashion production became easier and cheaper. More than a hundred years ago, you wouldn’t have had enough clothing to designate certain dresses for special occasions. ‘middle class’ women could consume, the economy was great.

Literal foundation of the garment is of much lower quality, not only are the rhinestones and fabrics cheaper today.

Socialite Betsy von Furstenberg and friends getting dressed in a Look magazine article from When the strapless dress first became popular, its structural foundation was much stronger compared to modern dresses of stretch fabric. Fact, you can not see corsetry built into a dress anymore, unless you’re buying expensive formalwear. For instance, via shorpy. Because there was still this notion that the foundation had to be good, they all have builtin boning, the collection I currently work with has some cheap 1950s dresses, things you would’ve bought at an inexpensive department store.

Instead of better tailoring or putting in boning or a petersham, Nowadays, designers make up a lot through stretch fabrics, that was like a waistband that was put inside a dress to attach the bodice to your waist. Your foundation must be much lower, and there was no need to hike up the dress. These dresses hug the breasts, and that’s not a very good foundation for a garment. Whenever meaning they weren’t being held up at the bust it was the woman’s waist and her hips that held up the dress, most strapless dresses in the 1950s were boned and had petershams. They fal off, you have these beautiful dresses that the bride and bridesmaids are constantly hiking up being that they’re attached with cheap stretch fabric.

So party dress is definitely more casual now, and there’s a much wider various silhouettes and styles. I’d say if you were wealthy enough to have a party dress, Onehundred’ years ago, you didn’t own a huge variety. People wouldn’t even know you wore really similar dress repeatedly, you didn’t have as many parties to go to. You weren’t will be photographed and have your pictures spread around. Since it didn’t matter if you wore similar dress, you didn’t have dresses for different occasions. With that said, most middle class women will have had one good dress to wear for evening, parties, weddings, and akin formal occasions. It’s not a big deal when only the people at that event see your dress.

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Left, Poiret’s famous lampshade dress circa Via the vam.

Styles from different Eastern countries were often melded into one garment. There wasn’t a whole lot of purity in fashion it was an amalgamation of all these cultures rolled into one garment. Normally, right, a Asianinspired robe is worn over a slimmer skirt in this outfit by Madeleine Laferriere from Via. For example, she’s seeing those looks in magazines, and copying them herself. So this all has a trickle down effect. It’s not that the middleclass woman in America was buying Poiret. Actually, we have a robe in the Columbia collection that has Japanese kimonostyle sleeves, ‘Chinese style’ metallic embroidery, and colors that look Indianinfluenced.

Some were less shapely and more sacklike, and later others had a lampshade look with a hoop around the hip area.

Clearly this was widespread, she lived in orth Dakota, its owner therefore the lampshade silhouette was pretty avant garde.

They always have to slim them down as the dresses were quite dumpy by today’s standards, when costume designers create garments for movies set in the ’20s. They’re climbing in and out of cars more, and so they need a shorter skirt to get in and out unescorted. You can’t have those long gowns constricting your legs, in a car, you could drive yourself. They wanted to look streamlined, They didn’t need to look super feminine. You can find some more information about this stuff here. The dresses were these boxy, boyish shapes, and to our contemporary eye, that doesn’t look very chic. In the 21st century, we seek for to see a bit more of the body, and designers weren’t really showing much of it being that women didn’t seek for to look womanly. There’s a gentleman or driver to as well as to show off your body while doing them. Alice Joyce.

It’s funny as the fabrics for party dresses in the 1920s were typically really fine, thin silk chiffons, or weighted silk satins.

It’s planning to deteriorate really quickly, plus they have been covering these extremely fragile fabrics with heavy beads, when you soak fabric in metallic solution. On top of that, with stylish, some were completely covered in beads, from shoulder to hem, Art Deco designs in the beading. They literally used to soak the satin in metallic solution, that would add weight to the garment and give this thin silk satin a more luxurious drape and movement. They’re quite modest, They’re still party dresses.

Not lots of them exist anymore, at least the dresses that were well worn. While creating an even more stimulating effect when she was dancing, when the garment went into motion, the dress was activated. So, publicity stills taken of Norma Shearer (left, in and Jean Harlow (right, in flaunt their sultry, bias cut silk dresses. They would fall apart. Photographer George Hurrell captured the glamour of Old Hollywood styles, that amped up the sex appeal using halter tops and lowcut backs.

You turn the pattern on a diagonal and lay it on to the fabric, with the bias cut.

They’re now diagonally on the body, The lengthwise and crosswise grain are not horizontal or vertical on the body. We go from the boxy, boyish shape of the ‘20s to a very womanly shape. I’m sure you heard about this. Right, so this Vionnet gown shows how lowcut backs contrasted with excessively low hemlines, even in the Depressionera when extra fabric was a true luxury. Now let me tell you something. It hugs your curves, since there’s more stretch on the bias. Via metmuseum. For example, left, therefore this 1930s advertisement shows the diagonal seams and limited ornamentation of popular biascut dresses. It hugs the body more closely since That changes the fit of a garment. When you refer to the Old Hollywood look, generally most people are thinking of the 1930s, and it’s the idea of these silk satins or velvets that cling to the body.

The French designer Madeleine Vionnet is the most credited with mastering the bias cut.

It’s this culture of escapism. In the course of the daytime, everyone had to be very utilitarian. You will think they’d use less fabric, yet the bias cut actually uses more fabric, since we were in the Depression. With that said, because they wanted that freedom once in a while, they cut back a whole heck of a lot more on everyday dresses and splurged a bit more on their party dress. They really wanted to live it up, when people went to a party. Now pay attention please. Hollywood movies in the 1930s are all about escaping the troubles of the economy and everyday life.

Evening attire needed to be glamorous, in contrast, you also had this patriotic duty to be beautiful for the soldiers. There were restrictions on how much fabric you could buy or how much fabric should be in a particular dress, though there’re quite a few of examples of Hollywood and ‘highend’ designers completely flouting those rules. Evening attire that tried to make women look beautiful and feminine, it was this duality of a masculine style for day and for work. You should take it into account. For practical purposes, among the things they have been rationing throughout the war was heat, by turning the temperature down to cut back on energy use, women needed sleeves. You see, you needed to wow the boys. Normally, it’s the only periods that you see sleeves on dresses. Your party dress needed to be a showstopper.

Despite the fact that it used a lot more material than a set in sleeve would, the dolman sleeve was very popular. There’s excess fabric under the arm, It’s all one piece. Nevertheless, there were no restrictions on embellishments like sequins, or spangles as they would’ve called them, or elaborate, ‘rhinestone covered’ buttons. Lots of garments were decorated in buttons, sequins, or anything people could get their hands on to embellish a party dress. It’s similar to a loose, kimonostyle sleeve without any seam between the bodice and the sleeve. Considering the above said. For the most part, they have been cutting back on fabric, that definitely flouted the law.

That style dominated throughout the 1950s, especially for the middle class woman in America.

Like that set from Right, Left, pattern makers like McCall’s and ogue made the New Look available to middle American women, teenage girls at a ‘highschool’ dance in monochromatic, ‘multitextured’ dresses, circa Via shorpy. Then the New Look worked its way down to her, she was buying that trickle down fashion, she was not buying Dior. That was a popular party dress style, a strapless dress with a very full skirt and a tiny waist. Generally, it’s really the first time we see Middle America wearing these cute, strapless, prom style dresses.

You definitely see them in the ’50s, mostly small florals, novelty prints got started in the 1940s. It should probably have some netting, lace, silk satin, or rayon on it, if the dress was one color. It’s not anything loud. This is where it starts getting entertaining, right? They wanted to have some visual variety. Actually, it wasn’t just one fabric and one color. It’s always small and feminine and pretty. Left, Twiggy wears a pink felt shift dress on the cover of Seventeen magazine in Right, Yves Saint Laurent’s Mondrian dress embodies the quintessential mod look, circa Via metmuseum.

The 1960s were like Heck no!

They have been wearing mod suits, the Beatles weren’t wearing party dresses. They’ve been pretty boxy. You had artists like Andy Warhol, and his muses were wearing very mod styles. It went straight from the shoulder to the hem, or had an A line effect, it didn’t necessarily hug the bust. Your party dress was probably a basic, Aline shift dress that hung its weight from the upper body. Actually the pop art of that period and the music people listened to were all converging and influencing fashion, and fashion was also influencing them. I’m sure you heard about this. We’re intending to focus on the youth of today. Consequently, it was the first time you had skirts above the knee. Just think for a moment. We’re tired of these used up, ‘oldfashioned’ ideas. You also had a more streamlined effect as mod influenced fashion in all areas. Young women wanted to wear short skirts.

1960s are interesting since you start to see a speeding up of trends. We recently had an one shoulder dress from the ’80s donated to the Columbia collection, and the shoulder with a strap has these giant fabric flowers. You’d have this big, chunky, embellished cuff on your dress, instead of wearing a bracelet. They’re huge, and look, there’re lots of them. It’s really cool that they have been bringing very much attention to that one shoulder with all this fabric, It’s a little jarring to the eye today. Ok, and now one of the most important parts. Designers incorporated these ‘mocknecklaces’ that were actually sewn onto the dress around the collar or the neckline. By the end of the ’60s, mod was almost dead, and fashion had moved onto this very chunky embellishment, especially for party dresses. Yes, that’s right! Women wanted heavier, more bohemian embellishments on their dresses, instead of streamlined.

Left, so this Yves Saint Laurent ensemble from 1980 raised the bar for bold shoulder detailing.

As Lycras and spandexes were entering the market in larger numbers, you also had a bunch of fabrics with more stretch to them so tight party dresses were really popular. In the 1970s, the colors were really muted and muddy, these earthy rusts and oranges and greens. It’s that idea of the fashion cycle, that we look for to see what we haven’t seen in a long time. There is a lot more information about it here. Right, Iman models for YSL’s Rive Gauche line in 1980, that incorporated bright colors and excess fabric just beneath the shoulder line. So, via metmuseum. We turned to super bright and neon colors, in the ’80s, people wanted something fresh and different.

I lived through much of what was represented here, as a Boomer born in 1951. Very good interview questions! Organization by decade is a great presentation of the fashions of the times. Very good interview questions! By the way, the organization by decade is a great presentation of the fashions of the times. Therefore, I lived through much of what was represented here, as a Boomer born in 1951. Kinds of Women’s Evening Wear. Wearing Special Occasion Looks. Follow us onTwitter.