So, I’ve been working on a big collection of 1950s dresses for the Jewels and Gemstones paper dolls. Right now, there’s 5 dolls and a lot of pages of clothing. I have no idea if I’ll put all of it on the blog, save some for Etsy, use some for Patreon. Who knows at this point!
My major resources for this project were the Catalogs & Wishbooks Site which appears to be someone’s passion project and contains over 200 fully digitized catalogs from the 1940s to the 2000s. It’s an amazing piece of work which, as someone who manages digitization projects for a living, I am in awe of. These digitized catalogs have made researching 20th century fashion so much easier.
Other resources have included the Vintage Pattern Wiki and museums of course, but there’s something about the raw amount of content from the Catalogs & Wishbooks Site.
I didn’t really have a clear plan how I was going to structure these sets when I drew them, so everything is a little scattershot in terms of year and style.
I didn’t do anything that was evening gown level in this set. I tend to find evening clothing less interesting to me then things people wore day to day. One of the reasons I love drawing from catalogs, is because it means that the item was actually available to people to purchase, unlike fashion illustrations which are often very high end designer fashion. Nothing wrong with that, but it interests me less then what most people had access too. Catalog aren’t aspirational, usually.
One thing that struck me while working on this was how many pages in these catalogs were devoted to hats. Hats are something women do not normally wear anymore, but they were super popular in the 1950s and didn’t really fall out of fashion until the 1970s.
I digress.
The next step is to scan these and clean them up and then layout and color!
Wow! I look forward to seeing what you do next. The 1950s is my favorite decade and it makes me smile to see paper dolls wearing my favorite fashions.