The clothing and fashions of a given time period give us insight into the lives and culture in which they lived. It's a good way to get a really good "feel" for the time period. Many of the costumes I have pictured, especially up to pre-18th century, are of wealthier classes. Mostly because they're the ones who could afford to have portraits and artworks done of them. Throughout history, fewer representations of the lower classes are found.

I do illustrations of historical costumes and rely almost solely on the internet for my research. Throughout my searching, I have come across numerous sites mainly dealing with sewing and putting together specific garments. Most of them have poor illustrations of what the finished product looks like and what few paintings or artworks they use to illustrate them are usually of poor quality.

Of the sites I've visited, most of them have so much superfluous information that you have to spend hours plowing through it to get to the good illustrations. Many have dead links, links that have a very tenuous connection to the subject or have NOTHING to do with it, poor quality pictures, illustrations so tiny you can barely see them or if you can, they're so small that they're of no use as far as seeing any details, and completely inaccurate timeframes in which the costumes occurred. I've also seen many sites with photos of reenactors dressed in costumes. Sometimes they're a bit inaccurate. I only use them in this site when I was pretty sure they were historically authentic. Where I can, I use paintings or artwork done at the time in question and not reproductions.
Another one of my peeves about costume sites is that they go into these lengthy explainations about the costume when all you need is a nice, big detailed picture to go by. This is about the only place where I get verbose. Unless something obviously needs explaining, I let the costumes speak for themselves. I also don't get into footwear or undergarments. WHO CARES?! I would however like to thank costumes.org and The History of Costume By Braun & Schneider. Costumes.org has some of the flaws I mentioned above, but both sites have yielded a lot of fantastic images.

I'm not a historical reenactor or someone who manufactures historical costumes - although this site may be beneficial to such people - but I did put this site together to help anyone doing research for historical costumes and who needs a ready, concise, quick overview of costumes during any given historical period.

With this website, I've tried to put together a comprehensive yet concise collection of good-quality illustrations of historical costumes that I've found on the internet or that I've scanned from books. I'm not infringing on copyrights because I'm not profiting from this site in any way and they are used for educational purposes. When possible, I try to be as exact with the dates as possible. I have not included all the extra information, links that go nowhere, tiny pictures you can barely see, blurry pictures or material that is off-subject.
I have also included a military section, including uniforms, arms and/or armor for many of the time periods. I've also taken out the background in many of the pictures,so if you want to print them, you won't waste ink printing unnecessary background space.

Just choose the time period you want by clicking on the links on the right and left.
The division of the time periods goes pretty much with the pictures I've done on my website

www.angelfire.com/az3/ciab

Questions? Comments? Dead link? email me at azartist37a@yahoo.com