The parasol — an essential accessory for women in the nineteenth century — acted as a bridge between traditional feminine ideals and modernizing society, thus bringing the seemingly contradictory aspects of frivolity and modernity into dialogue. Despite their emblematic role, parasols are often overlooked in fashion history and museum collections. This article reassesses parasols as both fashion accessories and cultural artefacts and explores when and why they reached their peak in popularity by combining object-based research with a theoretical approach. Drawing on fashion magazines, contemporary writings and images, this research demonstrates that changing ideologies of femininity played an essential role in the rise and fall of the parasol’s fashionability. By examining the parasol collections at the Art & History Museum and the Fashion & Lace Museum in Brussels (Belgium), the article simultaneously provides a framework to date and contextualize parasols.

This article explores the cut, construction and silhouette of early nineteenth-century men’s coats as a methodology for the development of contemporary womenswear. This practice-based research focuses on aspects of bespoke tailoring between the late eighteenth and twenty-first centuries, with a specific interest in the period between 1820 and 1845, examining how the forms and shapes of the garments were achieved through methods of construction, and how these, in turn, helped to shape discourses surrounding gender narratives. Christian Dior and Vivienne Westwood designs have been selected as examples of womenswear that were shaped by historical forms, tailoring and notions of gender. In order to explore how the techniques of men’s tailoring can be translated into a contemporary women’s garment, a woman’s jacket, drawing on elements of historical design, construction and bespoke tailoring methods, was produced by the author. The very feminine form, with an emphasis on sharp shoulders, narrow waist and wide skirt, captures the hourglass shape found in men’s tail and frock coats of the early nineteenth century as well as Christian Dior and Vivienne Westwood’s tailored garments. The past and the present are thereby brought together through bespoke tailoring.