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Laura Ashley Limited, Published 1983. Hardcover, 162 pp.; 27 cm; First Edition; illustrated with color and black-and-white photographs, fashion plates, prints, caricatures and portraits. Photographs by Mark Cobley; foreword by Laura Ashley.
In Very Good condition with a Very Good dust jacket. Green cloth-covered boards with gilt lettering on spine; bumping to bottom front corner, mild surface and edge wear. Binding tight. Small hole to paper at front inner hinge; 1/4-inch tear to paper at gutter along sewing on Foreword page; otherwise pages clean and unmarked. Cream dust jacket with period painting of a young woman in a red striped dress at her sewing on front panel and photograph of a model in a lace-trimmed bonnet on rear panel; a few nicks and tears of 1/4 inch or less and light creasing along edges, mild shelf and edge wear with some light scuffing and soiling. Now in an archival quality (removable) Brodart cover. Social history of English dress drawn from the collections of the Gallery of English Costume at Platt Hall, Manchester, written by its Keeper (Tozer) and Assistant Keeper (Levitt). Begins with the history of the Georgian house and of the collection itself, built on the 3,500 items gathered by Drs. C. Willett and Phillis Cunnington and bought by the City of Manchester after the Second World War. The essays then follow clothing across class and occasion: Lancashire printed cottons and the shift from wood block to roller printing, provincial women's dress, the gentleman and his tailor, fine linen, dressmaking and millinery, wedding clothes, shopping, working-class dress (including the Wigan pit brow girls in trousers), seaside wear and evening dress of the 1870s. Surviving garments photographed for the book appear beside fashion plates, caricatures, period photographs and contemporary texts. Ends with a reading list of secondary and primary sources held in the Platt Hall library. Contents: Platt Hall; Prints; Provincial Women in the Eighteenth Century; The English Gentleman and his Tailor; Fine Linen; Dressmaking and Millinery; Love and Marriage; The Gent; Shopping for Clothes 1770-1870; Working Class Clothing; The Seaside; Social Events in the 1870s; Reading List.