Women’s History Mid Century Fashion Design Archive of Hand Drawn Garment Sketches and Construction Notes 1950s to 1960s

Women's fashion

Archive

Fashion design archive, likely 1950s to 1960s, documenting women’s garment design during the mid-century through original working sketches that preserve both style development and the practical language of dressmaking. The archive is strongest as evidence of how women’s fashion was conceived on paper before production, with repeated attention to silhouette, trim, fabric, and construction. Dresses, blouses, coats, and eveningwear appear throughout, placing the material within the visual world of postwar American fashion as it moved from structured elegance toward sharper and more decorative later mid-century forms.

Archive of over 100 original hand-drawn fashion sketches on individual sheets measuring approximately 6.5 x 9 inches. The drawings are executed in ink and depict a wide range of women’s clothing, including fitted dresses, capes, blouses, coats, and formal designs, with careful attention to drape, proportion, neckline, sleeve treatment, and surface embellishment. Many sheets are accompanied by dense handwritten notes in the margins or on the reverse, recording measurements, fabric suggestions, and pattern or construction instructions. The combination of illustration and notation gives the sheets the character of working designs rather than purely display drawings, and suggests use in dressmaking, training, or client planning.

The archive belongs to the history of women’s fashion not only as a record of finished styles but as evidence of the design process itself, preserving the intermediate stage between idea and garment. Such working sketches show how fashion circulated through manual skill, technical knowledge, and close attention to fabric and form in the decades before design became fully digitized. Light general wear from use; overall very good. A substantial mid-century design archive that preserves the visual and technical vocabulary of women’s fashion making across more than one hundred original sketches.

Item #21828

Price: $885.00