I shared a snippet of this fashion spread from the August 1916 issue of The Designer Magazine on Instagram, and thought you might enjoy seeing the full spread.
The Designer was the magazine issued to market Standard Patterns. It had colour and black and white fashion spreads, advertisements, articles on current events, home advice, and an agony aunt. Just about everything!
There is something for everyone in these spreads: shirtwaist and skirt combinations, full dresses, dresses in two parts. There are more streamlined numbers for the sophisticated girl; frothy, delicate numbers for the lady who likes her frills:
What do you think? Which is your favourite?
The blue number is rather fun. It reminds me of a project I was originally going to do for our local historical museum until they changed the time period to 1920s, sigh.
Love that orange dress with the black accents!
The yellow gingham! Reminds me of dresses my mother made for us one Easter. All of the are lovely.
“them” I meant to type all of them!
I like the blue dress the best, but I’d wear it without the vest held in place by the belt. I think the vest just looks silly and detracts from the lines of the dress, which I’d wear just with the sash.
The other three are not bad, in my opinion, but all have at least one feature that I’d want to remove, and removing it would be more trouble than removing the vest over the blue dress.
I really like the hats, especially the daisy one the lady in yellow gingham is wearing. My favorite dress is the light green on the top corner.
The blue one is nice, but the green one says spring is here!
I like the blue one the best, but without the scarf below the belt, or is it part of the dress?
The trouble with illustrations though is they never quite look like the picture when made up.
The orange one! I love the sleeves!
I instantly fell in love with the green one.
The blue one with striped vest (if you ditch the hat) or the orange one.
This – in my opinion – is one of the most awkward eras of fashion. All those layers and frills; it’s a dress wearing a woman. These aren’t as bad as the ones with the panniers (the upside down umbrella fold skirts, for example)
But they are dumpy.