Women's Fancy Dresses Fashion
The fashion of women's fancy dresses was spread directly to individual women of the middle class through fashion magazines that were going to be developed gradually during the past centuries. Occasionally a little bit articles and columns were published in magazines of the eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth century.
It was not possible without the help of editors and publishers that they included detailed explanations about the fashion of women's fancy costumes through which real fashion magazines flourished and they succeeded in their efforts.
The first American fashion magazine named "Philadelphia's Album" and "Ladies' Weekly Gazette" published an illustration of contemporary fashion of women's fancy dresses. Soon afterwards "Godey's Lady's Book" was founded in 1830 and came into the hands of women readers that became the most famous women's fashion magazine in America.
That fashion magazine had a focus on literary and intellectual but its illustrations about women's costumes, particularly its fashion plates that were hand-coloured steel engravings, became a key to its success.
Over some years, Godey's Lady's Book started to print nearly twenty plates in each issue, generally featuring small groups of women wearing their fancy dresses of the latest fashion hand-painted in watercolours. Fashion of children's fancy costumes was occasionally included in that fashion magazine. Although these hand-made decorative illustrations were expensive many other fashion magazines of women's fancy dresses followed the success of Godey's Lady's Book.
Historical women's fashion essays, descriptions of the latest styles in fancy womens clothing, and patterns for women's fashionable dressing and accessories were not only the regular features of Godey's lady's Book but also in the periodicals like Ladies' Companion, Peterson's Magazines, Harper Bazar and Demorest's Monthly Magazines. Some of these magazines were circulated nationwide and became a source of inspiration for spreading fashion of womens fancy dresses in rural areas of the country.
These women's fashion magazines continuously adopted new and the best ways to display the fashion of women's costumes according to their circumstances and the fashion of women's costumes was accessible to most women across the United State of America (USA) and the United Kingdom (UK).
However, these women's fashion magazines promoted themselves as the best source of the latest women's fashion. These women's fashion magazines also virtually discouraged excessive concentration on fashion.
These women's fashion magazines admired the fashion in their columns and news when women used fashionable fancy dresses to show their sense of aesthetics and moral values and also discouraged and condemned when women used these fancy costumes to deceive or flirt with others and to hide their moral inferiority complexities.
Godey's Lady's Book highlighted the greatest danger posed by the fashion of women's costumes was that it diverted the concentration of people, especially women towards women's fashion rather than paying attention to spiritual and moral self-improvement.
Anti-fashion And Dress Reforms By The Fashion Magazines
Various concerns about women's fashion in clothes were much more described in other women's fashion periodicals and other sources of media. Women's fashion was regularly discouraged in medical journals, sermons, popular magazines, and even fiction.
Fashion of fancy womens clothes was associated with each imaginative offence, mental illness, physical injury, immoral behaviours, lack of patriotism, reckless spending and many more besides these. Women's rights activists initiated anti-fashion reforms in womens fancy dresses, not all activists were in a proto-feminist position. Most of the fashion criticizers relied on the quite restricted ideas of women's virtue and modesty.
Conclusion
Competitors of women's fashionable dresses agreed to raise their voices against womens fashion and Womens Fancy Dress reformers not only changed their way of dressing styles but they also pursued women to do similarly.