The boxes of family photos and threadbare hand-me-downs at the back of your closet have as much to say about the history of fashion as the fine antique gowns in museums and textbooks.
by Ella Gray
I’m asking you to picture a dress from the 17th century. That is a vague and wide timespan, I know, but play along. Now, if you will, picture a dress from the 1970s. First thing that pops into your mind. I’ve been playing this thought experiment with my endlessly obliging friends, asking them to describe to me their mental images of fashion from the Regency period or Victorian era as compared to the 1960s or 1980s, and have found that they all possess the same bias that I do toward fancier clothing in the more distant past and much more casual and affordable clothing from the more recent past.
When I imagine the prototypical garment of an era in the distant past, I imagine fashion forward gowns and suits worn by the upper crust and well documented in portraiture. In my mind, the 17th century in womenswear is defined by long stays, lace collars, and powdered faces. When I imagine an era-representative garment from the recent past, my mind’s eye conjures something much more down to earth. The images that first pop into my mind when I think of 1970s fashion are similar to what my grandma wore to her secretary job or what my mom wore to visit her grandmother’s farm, impressions I have gathered from family photos, before I consider Halston or Yves Saint Laurent. A trip to the Halloween costume store confirms that my own tendency in this regard isn’t unique. Historical costumes depict notable figures or roles while a wall labeled as “decades costumes” displays normal middle-class apparel from the 1950s through 1990s.
In academic books overviewing distant dress history, the clothing of the working class is often treated as a footnote. But I don’t need a textbook to show me regular people wearing regular clothing 50 years ago, I can find that information in family albums on my grandma’s coffee table. I believe that the increasing ubiquity of casual snapshots taken by and of everyday people, hand in hand with relaxing cultural norms of dress and the ever-decreasing cost of clothing in global industrialized apparel production, has made it so that everyday garb has become the defining fashion aesthetic of modern time periods.
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Besides what details archeologists can glean from preserved garments, what we know of how normal people dressed prior to the advent of photography is highly mediated by those in positions of power— those with the power to document. Before photography, a portrait of oneself was a luxury few people could even dream of. The poor were certainly subjects of artistic work, but commissioning a portrait was the domain of the wealthy, like the Italian Renaissance art patrons of the Medici family. In Family Photographs: Content, Meaning and Effect, author Julia Hirsch credits the Renaissance family portrait with laying the groundwork for the modern family photograph by asserting that the self-contained family unit is worthy of recording pictorially.[1]
Victorian photo of the Webley Parrys family at the door of Blaenpant Mansion in Llandygwydd, Wales wearing 18th-century and traditional Greek costumes
Historian Nicole Hudgins expands on this notion of continuity between Renaissance family portraiture and modern family photography by charting the expanding accessibility of self-documentation as a map to the modern history of individualism, tracing the prerogative to obtain one's portrait from wealthy merchant families in the Renaissance to professionals and eventually small shopkeepers and industrial laborers by The Second Industrial Revolution. In A Historical Approach To Family Photography: Class And Individuality In Manchester And Lille, Hudgins examines fascinating photos taken of, and sometimes by, working-class and petit bourgeois families in Manchester, England and Lille, France from the 1870s onward, revealing the tender and private details of family life captured once the technology self-documentation became widely accessible in those areas.[2]
Hirsch too accentuates the impact of photography’s accessibility on the historical record, crediting the photograph with providing the means by which the poor could see themselves preserved and allowing them to acquire a visual history. “As generations pass, it is likely that most families will be able to look back at a visual record of several generations of their ancestors with a family pride and a sense of continuity which was previously available only to those who could afford to employ portrait painters to fill their walls with tangible evidence of their noble lineage. In this sense photography has a built-in democratic bias, and undermines the assumption that history consists only of a dreary procession of kings, generals and politicians."[3]
The ambrotype, a wet collodion photography process first introduced in 1854, was cheaper to produce than the Daguerreotype which preceded it with wide use in the 1840s and 1850s. By the 1860s and 1870s, the even cheaper and more durable tintype superseded the ambrotype’s popularity, especially in North America.[4] Thanks to these rapidly improving technologies, a relatively affordable portrait studio existed on the High Streets of most modern towns and cities by the 1860s.[5] Still, most individuals or groups wanting their picture taken at that time would have to venture out of their homes to a photographer’s studio. According to dress historian Jayne Shrimpton, “It was understood that clients visiting the photographer's studio (or, less commonly, those inviting a photographer to their home) would be dressed in their best quality, most fashionable clothing. Wealthy subjects had many fashionable ensembles to choose from, whereas ordinary working-class ancestors usually donned their best outfit, kept for church on Sundays and special occasions.”[6] Theresa Rowat of the National Archives of Canada articulates how this tendency to dress up for studio photography impacts the study of dress history, “Costume in studio collections may be limited to formal attire and frontal views, since the photograph occasion is governed by the conventions of portraiture.”[7]
Ambrotypes by an unknown photographer of Paper Mill Girls, Dartford, England 1863
Some studio photographers kept garments on-hand to lend out to portrait sitters. In some cases, this may have been to offer respectable or fashionable options they could not otherwise afford to wear. A pair of studio ambrotypes of a girl who worked at a papermill in Dartford, England in 1863 show her in two outfits. In presumably the first photo taken, she is seated next to a fellow papermill worker and both girls are dressed in plain albeit clean dresses, suggesting along with their carefully arranged hairstyles that these are not their work clothes. In the second photo, she wears the more fashionable bodice and pinafore that her coworker was wearing in the previous image, clasping the slightly too small for her garment together at her waist. She also wears a beaded necklace, which may have also been lent to her for the purpose of the photograph.[8]
In other photos, garments borrowed from photographer studios allowed regular people to take part in the trend of costumed photo-play, a leisure class activity that evolved out of the tableaux vivant. As explained by Victorian art in literature historian Dr. Lucy Smith, “Rich families with time and money used photography to play games and create new experimental identities. [...] Adults were dressing up as their favourite characters from novels, songs and plays of the day, and as characters from history.”[9]
The mobility of the camera increased in strides through the second half of the 19th century. “By the 1880s, the camera was changing from a stranger you had to put on company manners for, into a member of the family, a part of everyday life.”[10] Home photography began to reach the masses in 1888 when the Eastman Kodak Company introduced a hand-held camera that allowed users to take 100 photos on a single, flexible roll of film. When it was time to get your photos developed, the entire camera would be mailed back to the Kodak plant, much like how disposable point and shoot film cameras operate today. The camera was so simple to use that Kodak marketed the device with the slogan "You press the button, we do the rest".[11]
Professional photographers became more mobile in the 1880s as well and they regularly traveled to their clients’ homes to take a family portrait in or, more often, in front of the family home.[12] Oftentimes, every occupant of the family home was pulled into the front yard, along with their most prized possessions, to have their likeness captured in an almost taxonomic survey of the household’s modest riches. Hirsch likens this display of often meager material possessions, especially common in the front-of-home photos of 19th century American homesteaders, to a modern-day family photo in front of a swimming pool or status clenching car.[13]
To me, these photos bring to mind the braggadocious commissioned portraits of the ascending Dutch merchant class that the Old Masters painted in the 17th century. Unlike these oil paintings, which attentively captured the luxurious lace and fine fabrics the sitters wore, at-home photography captured a lot of modest clothing with candid frankness. Bringing portrait photographers to the home removed a level of artifice from the images they captured. I spoke to Kiki Smith, professor of theater at Smith College and the creator of the Smith College Historic Clothing Collection, about what was worn in these front of the house family photos. She explained how families dressed up for these portraits to a vastly varying degree, recounting to me a collection of 19th century photos she studied from western Massachusetts, all taken by two professional photographer brothers. While Smith notes that most families pulled furniture out into the yard and some women appear to have thrown on a clean apron, most of these photos show families wearing everyday workwear. Probably not the kind of dress clothing that they would have worn to a photographer’s studio. One of the photos in the collection, however, is of a Black family in the front yard of their western Massachusetts hilltown home who appear to have donned their finest Sunday best for the photographer's visit.
Tenant farmers in Iowa in photo by Farm Security Administration 1936, on display in "Real Clothes, Real Lives"
A more informal front of the house family photo from Wisconsin is featured in the New-York Historical Society’s exhibition “Real Clothes, Real Lives”, which Smith leant her costume collection to and helped curate. In this photo, one of the female family members is wearing a wrapper, which was sort of a Victorian predecessor to the dowdy, comfortable workhorse of the house dress. The woman in the photo appears to be pregnant, which might be why she wore this highly adaptable but rarely seen outside the house garment for a family portrait.
19th-century wrapper dresses from the Smith College Historic Clothing Collection
At its most mobile, the camera darts about the street, capturing subjects unawares. Edward Linley Sambourne, is sometimes credited as the first photographer of street fashion. Professionally, Sambourne was a cartoonist for an English satirical magazine but covert street photography was his secret hobby. With a hidden camera, he captured images of people, usually women, traversing the streets of London, Edinburgh, Amsterdam and Paris between 1906 and 1908.[14] These images grant us a rare peek at Edwardian era women without pretense, as they styled themselves for daily life. The photos of women from behind are of particular interest to dress historians, as the back view of designs were rarely photographed or illustrated at the time.[15]
Edward Linley Sambourne photo of a girl in Kensington
In hinging upon the photographer’s judgement of the moments worthy of record, Henri Cartier-Bresson's decisive moment, street photography often seeks the novel more so than the archetypal and while photography of those without the means to photograph themselves is often well intentioned, it is inherently informed by the motives of the photographer. The reason that the photograph was taken cannot but help to dilute if not entirely overpower the subjectivity of the subject. Hirch takes great care to differentiate between self-documentation and photos taken of the poor from an outside perspective, noting that documentary photography often lacks the careful inclusion of “little things”, small points of modest pride, that we find in family photography and stating that “until the manufacture of the inexpensive box camera, those of modest means are seldom photographed.”[16]
Arthur Munby photo of female collier from Rose Bridge Pits, Wigan, 1869
Victorian British diarist and poet Arthur Munby had a fascination with women of the lower classes. He wrote at length with quixotic and borderline fetishistic musings of their physical strength and perseverance. He collected impressions of the working-class women he encountered in London between 1859 and 1898, including the Shropshire-born maid-of-all-work who would become his secret wife, writing details of their lives in his diary and capturing their portraits. These images depict women too concerned with the harsh material realities of their lives and work to abide by strict Victorian moral codes of dress. They were photographed in pants and with skirts hiked up over the knee, with sleeves rolled above the elbow or in heavy work coats.[17]
Edward S. Curtis, who photographed Native American people between 1895 and the 1910s, has been similarly criticized for fetishizing the otherness of his subjects. Munby, despite the prurient curiosity driving his work, unfailingly supported the right of women to pursue all work and dress sensibly. On the other hand, any respect and admiration Curtis had for Native American culture is overshadowed by the legacy of the harm his work perpetuated. His portrait photography depicted the native people of North America as "The Vanishing Race", the title of his photo book published in 1904, which justified the mentality that the vast American West was unpopulated and prime for settler colonial expansion.[18]
Little Plume and son Yellow Kidney seated on ground inside lodge, photo by Edward S. Curtis circa 1910
Despite Curtis publishing his photos as documentarian works of ethnography, evidence suggests that many of the subjects presented themselves to his cameras in ways inauthentic to their daily lives. The people Curtis photographed, like any family dressing up for a rarely taken portrait, dressed up in the kind of traditional ceremonial clothing they did not wear on a daily basis. “When looking at an image taken by Curtis nearly one hundred years ago, a contemporary Blackfoot man remarked ‘...in this photograph of Yellow Kidney in his lodge, he’s wearing a weasel-tail suit. It’s just like wearing a tuxedo. It’s probably his best dress.’”[19]
Alice Austen and three of her friends, taken October 1891 and enscribed "The Darned Club"
Alice Austin is best known for her street photographs of working-class people around the turn of the 20th century in Manhattan, but her most revealing work are the more personal photos of her friends and family taken in the privacy of her bucolic Staten Island home. The photographs Austin took of her social circle enjoying leisure in the domestic space reveal Victorian era upper middle class women behaving intimately in same sex pairings and experimenting with gender presentation in their dress.[20] Although it is impossible to define Austin with modern labels of sexuality she herself never used on record, Austen spent the majority of her life with her female partner Gertrude Tate and photographed female friends in what could be inferred as other same sex relationships.[21] Fashion historian Keren Ben-Horin, who also contributed to the curation of the New-York Historical Society’s “Real Clothes, Real Lives”, has studied the work of Austin at length. She spoke to me about how rare and special these glimpses into turn of the 20th century queer life are and about how Austin’s street photos of working class Manhattanites were less capable of capturing the truths revealed in privacy. She drew a comparison to Mary Cassatt, mentioning how little respect was given to art depicting the domestic sphere in the 19th century but how fascinating those depictions of historical home life are to us today.
This sphere, the private domestic lives of women, is where I am most confident that amateur snapshots have altered, or rather corrected a gap in, the historical record of dress and fashion. Photography in the late 19th century, as an artform one could pick up without formal training, became a frequent pursuit of women. Women who had the means and time to practice photography, a cohort that expanded over the 20th century as photography became increasingly easier and more affordable, took pictures what they could. In many cases, this happened to be their daily, domestic lives.[22] Kodak recognized this market and capitalized on female customers with targeted marketing campaigns casting the mother as the documentarian of the family. “By the 1970s, more than 60% of pictures in the US – the world's largest photography market – were being taken by women.”[23]
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Through the exhibition of working women’s garments, the New-York Historical Society’s “Real Clothes, Real Lives” seeks to tell the stories of women whose clothing rarely makes it into the pages and halls of fashion history. Among the artfully displayed garments and accompanying historical photos is a 1930s house dress with a delicate gingham print. This is described in the exhibit as an example of what Kiki Smith has dubbed the “Invisible Dress”, so called because these dresses were so cheap that they were not even advertised in catalogues or magazines. Between the lack of promotional images of these garments and the fact that women would usually not wear something this casual outside of the home, pictorial evidence of these once ubiquitous dresses barely exist in the historical record. Both Smith and Ben-Horin spoke to me about the difficulty of finding photos of women wearing these “Invisible Dresses” in their research and curation, especially among images in public archives available for use in a museum. The photos utilized in “Real Clothes, Real Lives” to illustrate how these dresses were worn were taken as a part of the Farm Security Administration's efforts to document rural poverty in the Great Depression and Dust Bowl.[24]
Photograph of the "Invisible Dresses" by Anna-Marie Kellen for the Smith College Historic Clothing Collection
To think, generations of women lived the majority of their adult lives in garments broadly considered unworthy of documentation. I wonder if today’s so-called Trad Wife[25] influencers would purport to feel the way they do about traditional gender roles if their perception of the traditional housewife was not derived from delusory images of the archetype baked up in Hollywood and Madison Avenue boardrooms, but instead influenced by real photos of how real women doing domestic labor dressed and looked. The accessibility of self-documentation by photograph has changed this.
Photo by Lady Clementina Hawarden of her daughter
I think for many people, home photos of their mother can be their first exposure to what women were wearing before they themselves were old enough to develop memories of fashion. It stands to reason that these photos could leave one with the impression that their own mother’s fashion sense was more emblematic of the years around their birth and early childhood than might actually have been the case.
Besides recollections of wiping my runny nose on my mom’s capri pant leg or how she unbuttoned a strap of those denim overalls all pregnant women wore in the early aughts so that I could lay my head on her chest while we watched TV, I have very few distinct memories of how my mom dressed when I was a small child. My focus back then was on other matters, like convincing someone to give me a cookie or tying electrical cords around the house into knots. It wasn’t until later in middle school, incidentally around the time I first started getting hand-me-down clothing passed to me from my mom, that I began to pour over old home photos of her. I studied the way she dressed and styled herself, those family snapshots of her newlywed late 20s and early 30s as a mother became like a guide for me to womanhood and self-presentation. Unlike the few flimsy ideations of adulthood I could glean from fashion magazines, these photos made picturing my future simple since I already had her face and many of her work skirts.
I don’t think I’m the only young woman of my generation who feels this way about older photos of their mother. I’ve seen so many videos on TikTok where girls and young women collage together images that remind them of their mothers as younger women: CDs, bottles of perfume, capacious leather purses, the Barnes and Noble cafe, dangly earrings, fad diet foods, candles, and hairstyles. I’ve seen some designer items appear in these photo reels, but they lean more into the realm of high-end mall brand bags and special occasion shoes than they do runway couture. The nostalgia here is twofold, both a reminiscence for the aesthetic trapping of their own childhood as well as a sort of mourning for the type of aspirational adulthood one might have dreamed about in childhood. For me, emulating how my mom dressed and styled herself at my age makes me feel like an adult, like I’m doing something right. I feel connected to her and guided by her every time I wear a cardigan shell set or leave a lipstick stain on a can of Diet Coke.
The South African photographer Lebohang Kganye explored this connection in her photo series "Ke Lefa Laka: Her-Story."[26] After her mother passed at the age of 49, Kganye recreated family photos of her mom, wearing her mother's clothing and traveling to the exact spot the original image was captured. In digitally superimposing her own recreations of her mother onto the original reference images, Kganye casts herself as her mom’s ghostly body double. She said of the process it took to identify the photo locations, “A lot of the research allowed for… an intimacy that I would have otherwise not had.”[27]
This work makes me wonder how clothing played a part in remembering loved ones in a time before photography, particularly those who lost mothers without ever having the chance to take their picture. In our interview, Kiki Smith told me about a garment that the dress historian Nancy E. Rexford studied and wrote about, a dress tailored in the fashion of the 1830s that sat untouched in a family home in Salem, Massachusetts for decades. The woman who had owned the dress had passed away and had left behind daughters. Considering the cost of fabric and clothing in the 19th century, a family of sisters not altering and repurposing the garment would have been a deliberate decision. Rexford theorized that the garment must have had a potent sentimental value to the late woman’s daughters, an object that preserved the memory of what she looked like even if a photographic image of her never existed.
Just a few generations ago, a person like myself, a middle class American woman, may have only had one photo of their mother and in it, she would probably be posed rigidly wearing her wedding dress or Sunday best clothing. I feel so lucky to possess photos of my own mother in a wide range of clothing, from the polished outfits she wore to photographer studios for family portraits to the casual clothing she wore around the house when I was small. Images of her in the jean jacket she wore when she took us to the park or the oversized tee shirt from her 5k through the cemetery that she wore to bed are totems of my mom in my childhood as I remember her, warm and nurturing.
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When I asked Kiki Smith why it is important to tell the stories of everyday women, the driving ambition of much of her life’s work, she told me a story about her favorite response to Real Clothes, Real Lives: 200 Years of What Women Wore, the book she published in conjunction with the New-York Historical Museum exhibition. After reading the book, her neighbor’s sister, a retired librarian in the Midwest, proclaimed that she had never before considered herself as a part of history.
Smith is on a mission to archive family photos that cast normal women leading humble lives as the touchstones of history that they were. Together with dress historian and scholar Nancy E. Rexford, Smith is currently working to develop an online software that would allow users to date their own family photos through a series of guided questions regarding the clothing worn in the images. In addition to helping families better understand their own ancestry and photographic relics, this software would compile an archive of historical images of regular family life that would otherwise probably deteriorate in families’ attics and basements and closets without preservation.
Photography plays a vital role in allowing modern readers of history to relate to and empathize with people from the past. As Ben-Horin explained to me on the topic of choosing photos to use in the “Real Clothes, Real Lives” exhibit, photography embodies a garment in ways that a mannequin never could. Just as the internal patchwork on a bodice tells us a story unseen from the exterior of a garment, photos showing how women wore their hair or what tools they carried in their aprons are indispensable to our understanding of the intricacies of their daily lives.
Without images of what real women really wore, it is impossible to fully picture what their lives were like. When we collectively imagine a past informed by paintings and posed portraits, we fail to acknowledge the daily struggles and modest victories of most women’s lives. Photos of women as they really are matter because, as Smith said to me, quoting Antonio Muñoz Molina, “We see things if we know they exist.”
Ella Gray is a New York City-based writer and apparel designer. You can find her Substack here.
[1] Family photographs: content, meaning, and effect by Julia Hirsch, New York: Oxford University Press, 1981
[2] A Historical Approach To Family Photography: Class And Individuality In Manchester And Lille, 1850-1914 Nicole Hudgins Journal of Social History, Vol. 43, No. 3 (spring 2010), pp. 559-586
[3] Family photographs: content, meaning, and effect by Julia Hirsch, New York: Oxford University Press, 1981
[4] Daguerreotypes, Ambrotypes, and Tintypes from Wylie House Exhibits at Indiana University Bloomington
[5] Victorian working women: portraits from life by Michael Hiley, 1979
[6] Family photos: what are they wearing? By The Findmypast Team | May 24, 2011
[7] Photographic Archival Sources for Costume Research by Theresa Rowat, Canadian National Archives
[8] Victorian working women: portraits from life by Michael Hiley, 1979
[9] Photography and Dressing Up in Victorian Cardiganshire by Archifdy Ceredigion Archives, October 2018
[10] 19th Century Family Portraits: Looking into Home, Sweet Home from Smithsonian Institution, Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, April 1986
[11] 19th Century Family Portraits: Looking into Home, Sweet Home from Smithsonian Institution, Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, April 1986
[12] A Forgotten Genre of Photography: The Family in Front of the House in late 19th century U.S. by Michael J Douma, April 4, 2020
[13] Family photographs: content, meaning, and effect by Julia Hirsch, New York: Oxford University Press, 1981
[14] The Edwardian Style Spy Photographer August 25, 2022
[15] Edward Linley Sambourne: Hidden Street Fashion By Landis Lee, posted on February 16, 2013 by Keren Ben-Horin
[16] Family photographs: content, meaning, and effect by Julia Hirsch, New York: Oxford University Press, 1981
[17] Victorian working women: portraits from life by Michael Hiley, 1979
[18] How You See Us, How We See Ourselves: A short history of Indigenous Peoples and Photography by Sarah Stupar, Concordia University (Canada)
[19] Pictures, not merely photographs: authenticity, performance and the Hopi in Edward S. Curtis's the North American Indian by Heather Lin Skeens, Iowa State University
[20] Alice Austen House Museum
[21] Fine, Bright Day: The Photography of Alice Austen by Alice Austen House
[22] Woman and Domestic Photography by Lilly Hilton
[23] The rise and fall of Kodak's moment, University of Cambridge
[24] Library of Congress, Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives
[25] Land Ho by Gaby Del Valle, The Baffler no. 70, September 2023
[26] The Secret Art of the Family Photo By Michael Johnston, The New Yorker, July 14, 2022
[27] In old family photographs, a South African artist reenacts her late mother’s life by Jacqui Palumbo, CNN, March 24, 2022
