The industry's most prestigious fashion houses are currently celebrating haute couture week, but for the fashion world a century ago, every week was haute couture week. During the Belle Epoque, there was no such thing as an off-the-rack dress and clothes shopping was a luxury reserved for the wealth
In remembrance of the soldiers who served in the Civil War, the Liljenquist Family donated their rare collection of over 700 photographs to the Library of Congress
The industry's most prestigious fashion houses are currently celebrating haute couture week, but for the fashion world a century ago, every week was haute couture week. During the Belle Epoque, there was no such thing as an off-the-rack dress and clothes shopping was a luxury reserved for the wealth
Vintage photographs of street life in Victorian London by Scottish photographer John Thomson.
Anthropologist Arthur Munby studied the working conditions of women, concentrating his investigations on the ‘Pit Brow Lasses’ at the collieries in Wigan and championed these women’s right to work and to wear what they wished. Munby did not take the photographs himself, but commissioned local photographs to take them for him. These images were taken away from the pit brow in photographers’ studios which give them an ‘unnatural’ feel, but I can imagine that it was difficult to photograph them at work due to the limitations of photographic equipment and the fact that the colliery owners were probably not aware of Munby’s studies. The women are shown with the ‘tools of their trade’, (a shovel, a sieve, etc) and still dirty from working at the pit (I’m sure Munby requested they do not wash their faces beforehand) and wearing her work clothes. They are presented to us as if held up for examination, they have been objectified. These photographs of women wearing trousers shocked Victorian sensibilities and women working in a masculine world were seen as deviant; far removed from their traditional role as homemaker. The reason I have included these images in Style section is the girls have been transformed into icons – icons of the working classes, female icons and that is a part of what I am trying to do with the workers I am photographing. These photographs fit in with both the style and content of my work. They are workers photographed not actually working, which is also what I am doing myself.
Photographer Russell Lee captured rare moments of hardship and joy within the migrant farmer communities that were devastated by the Great Depression and formed refugee communities.
Breaking Ground focuses on the role played by women in the coal-mining communities of the 1800s.
While you celebrate your mom, take a look back at these historic photographs of mothers throughout the ages.