Costume Through the Ages: Over 1400 Illustrations

By Erhard Klepper

Book Overview

Few books of costume design will prove more useful to artists, students, stage designers, and scholars than this volume. Presenting detailed drawings in a continuous chronological format, it provides... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0486407225
• ISBN13: 9780486407227
• Release Date: June 1999
• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 0.84 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 8.4" x 11.0"

Customer Reviews

Cossie History

Lovely detailed diagrams, lots of illustrations packed into a slender volume, a great aid for costumes for period plays, historical stories and just for creating new designs using a little bit of 'something old'.

Great Reference

While the pictures are 2D sketches of actual paintings, sculptures, fashion plates, etc. and are not the best quality, I love this book for a quick reference. If I'm costume designing from a certain time period, I love using this book to glance through for ideas saying, I like those sleeves, or I'll use that cuff. If you're looking for a in depth look at fashion and details and lots of commentary, it's not the book for you. But if you're looking for a great priced reference of fashion through the ages, then it's perfect. I've had many professors for my costume design classes, historical fashion classes, etc who have required this as a text book.

a gift well received

This was purchased as a gift for my 11-year-old granddaughter who is very interested in historic costumes. She immediately, on Christmas day, sharpened the special hard-lead colored pencils I bought to go with it and proceeded to submerge herself in the detailed illustrations. Seemed like a successful gift to me.

Good for quick visual reference!

I love to use this book as a quick visual reference while working on shows. When helping a customer, or explaining something to an assistant at our shop, this book is the easiest way to do so. It is so great to have a book where I can flip to a certain date, and have pages full of pictures grouped together to show someone what exactly I am thinking of. We have to work at a fast pace, and this book saves me lots of valuable time.

A wonderful reference book that I couldn't live without

This is quite simply a fabulous book, and a very useful one too! I am an author who writes historical novels, and when I need to know what the characters I'm writing about would have been wearing in any given year from antiquity through to modern times (1930s), I turn to this book. Fortunately, it's not cluttered with text, but merely contains drawings, pure and simple and straighforward. It's the quickest, most accurate reference book I own, aside from my dictionary, of course. My only qualm is that it doesn't contain anything about undergarments, such as bustles, knickers, petticoats, crinolines or girdles. But then, the pictures in this book are sourced from historical paintings, sculptures, mosaics, illuminated manuscripts and so forth, which probably never showed such things, as they might have been considered indecent or irrelevant. (I suppose not too many people throughout history wanted to be painted in their underwear!) If you're a writer, an arts student, a costume designer or just someone who has an interest in the history of fashion, I would highly recommend this book to you.