Retro Fashion

Remember knitted bathing suits and utility clothes? Fifties shirt-waisters and the ever-rising mini? Mods, rockers, hippies and the happening boutiques of swinging sixties London? Retro Fashion takes the reader on a journey along the ever-changing road of what we wore, from the turn of the 20th century to the 1980s.

Packed with over 400 images, the volume charts the contrasts and rapid evolution of style across the decades from the lush dance dresses of the pre-WW1 era to disco divas of the 1970s, the trusty Burberry trench coat to the space age creations of the sixties.

A chapter on everyday clothes is a nostalgic trip down memory lane while pages devoted to the influencers and arbiters of style show how fashion designers and some of history’s most iconic clothes horses have set trends
that filter down to the mass market. Compiled from one of the UK’s most unique historical archives,

Mary Evans Picture Library, Retro Fashion is not only a celebration of glamour and style, but also a fascinating insight into how clothes are part of the fabric of all our lives.

Lucinda Gosling

Lucinda Gosling is an historian and chief archivist for the Mary Evans Picture Library.

She studied history at the University of Liverpool and has contributed articles on illustration, royal history and WWI to various publications and is the author of Brushes and Bayonets, a survey of Great War cartoons from the Illustrated London News archive.