Gilded Age Fashions

Women’s fashions in the late 1800s fully lived up to Mark Twain’s moniker for the era, the Gilded Age. Elaborate construction, rich colors, lavish fabrics and trim, and general love of excess typified high styles of the 1870s through 1890s. In this, they mirrored design in architecture, decorative arts, and interior design, as seen in our current exhibit, “Illuminating Design: The Deocoration and Technology of E.F. Caldwell and Co., 1895-1959.” But change was in the air, and a new archetype, the New Woman, was about to transform women’s clothing along with her role in society.

Join us for this discussion to revel in the gorgeous, and supremely impractical, fashions of the Gilded Age and peek at the new modes of the Progressive Era which followed.

Speaker: Alden O'Brien, Curator of Costume and Textiles