Downloadable The Mystery of Edwin Drood Costume & Makeup Design Booklet
I’ve been working on assigning dates to Detachable Starched Collars I own with information I’ve found through advertisements in Newspapers.com , Patent Records, clipped ads for sale on eBay, etc but was looking for more. Now I have run into some online copyright expired books and magazines that I think may help with doing this also. Many later collars have a lot of information about brand names, place of origin and manufacturing company names printed on the inside that help with this, and these books seem like they may be useful for narrowing down dates on collars by tracking the history of the name changes in the companies. Collar companies in the US were constantly eating one another, combining, breaking apart and vanishing through the whole second half of the 19th Century and first half of the 20th Century. Cluett for example went through all sorts of changes that may help date their collars. Some parts of these books seem to track a few of the dates of these mutations. If there is someone with better obsessive compulsive genes for working on forming this into cheat sheets and databases of collar names and dates faster, feel free to try. Meanwhile, if you are looking to “date” your own collars this is a good place to start.
New! Online Articles on Collars & Related Topics:
Library and Museum Collections for Study Related to Collars
I recently purchased this Early 1870s Man’s card stock weight Paper Collar for study and sharing. It came in an exceptionally nifty full color box, such is often found in 1870s -1880s collars. I’m guessing originally the box would have contained more than one, as these collars are rather fragile. The box has both a color lithographed top picture and a side indicator of size, both pasted on the yellow top of the box.
Despite the splendor of the box, however, the collar is the real treasure. It has an unusually complex folding system for making the shape. I have photographed and scanned it every which way so you can see how it is made, and even reproduce it with cardstock on your own!
The pattern of the collar as scanned, both partly folded and completely unfolded:
If Paper collars intrigue you, go to the cool illustrated 6 part scholarly article by Brenton Grom on the Disposable America site entitled Slaves of Fashion, Loafers of Industry: A History of Paper Collars and the Men Who Wore Them which has lots of pictures, incisive comment, research and, conveniently, patent illustrations that also can be used as patterns!
Physiognomy is a Psudo-science that was “studied” by 19th and Early 20th century actors and makeup artists to improve their study of faces. Unfortunately, the mid 19th & early 20th Century books on this fake “science” in these eras existed primarily to promote racist, sexist, and xenophobic views which trickled into the designs of stage makeup. Racists worldwide continue to cite this nonsense to “prove” superiority to groups and individuals they hate. This book is a particularly egregious example of this sort of thing, and was massively popular in late 19th Century America, so popular you can still easily find copies of it for sale on eBay for under 10 dollars.
The Collar
