I spent last weekend fascinated by pictures of beautiful Victorian dresses on the Metropolitan Museum of Art website. I had wanted to add some more Victorian dresses to my Victorian Dress Fashions page on Pinterest and figured that a museum website might be a good place to start. So, I decided to go to the biggest museum in the U.S. the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
I would have loved to have physically visited the Met and seen these dresses, but they aren't on display right now and New York city is not a hop skip and a jump away. So, I let my fingers do the walking or keying and spent several delightful hours just moseying through all their virtual displays. I have to tell you that the amount of donated material is just astonishing. I couldn't believe how many incredible Victorian dresses they have. Hundreds upon hundreds. All I could do was drool over them and think about what an astonishing display it would be to actually see them all in person. Ah, one can dream.
The nice thing about the Met website is you can see all their collections whether they are currently on display or not. Everything is cataloged and available online. You can even set up a "My Met" page where you can store and categorize your own MET favorites - which, of course, I did. Of course, seeing beautiful creations is the optimum. However, visiting the MET online is a close second.
While I was out there I quickly gathered that there were many, many dresses that might look Victorian, but actually aren't from that period which, of course, led me to a little research. If you're a follower of my Linda's Blog you know how much I LOVE history and love researching. My researching led me to several reference websites, several fashion websites, several museum websites, and so on. I was in research heaven which for me is like the next best thing to sliced bread.
What I learned was there are many, many periods to fashion and if you were to have a historic lineage display of the fashions throughout the years you'd be able to easily see how a Victorian dress might differ from an Edwardian or a Romantic period dress - even how the Victorian crinoline was different from the Victorian bustle dress.
It was a wonderful eye opener for me and benefited me in two ways. One, I got to exercise my brain by learning something new and two, I got a lot of research material for my Victorian Dolls, Victorian Traditions, The Victorian Era and Me Blog. My Victorian Dolls, Victorian Traditions, The Victorian Era and Me Blog is a personal, ad free blog all about the Victorian era, their history, their traditions, and my feeble attempt to create some Victorian dolls of my own.
With all this new knowledge I decided that I'd like to write a series on my Victorian Dolls, Victorian Traditions, The Victorian Era and Me Blog about the different fashion periods and show you some of the astonishing Victorian dresses that you can see on the Metropolitan Museum of Art website. Not only do you get to see some of their Victorian dresses, but they provide you a little insight into the dress and a little history surrounding the fashion. If you love Victorian dresses like I do you'll be in fashion heaven and be drooling over all the astonishing creations like I was.
I'll be sure to post on my Linda's Blog from time to time to let you know what's going on over on my Victorian Dolls, Victorian Traditions, The Victorian Era and Me Blog or you could bookmark it and check in from time to time yourself.
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