www.fashion-era.com is based in the United Kingdom
and is a sister site of
www.computerperformance.co.uk. Fashion-era looks at
women's costume and fashion history and analyses the mood of an era. Changes in
technology, leisure, work, cultural and moral values, homelife and politics have
all contributed to lifestyle trends which influence the clothes women in
particular choose to wear. These are the changes that make any era of
society special in relation to the study of the costume of a period.
New eras always herald new fashions. New fashions are
invariably old fashions with a fresh twist, be it a new fabric or a new way of
wearing or accessorizing an outfit. We look at fashion and accessories, beauty,
makeup, hair and body adornment, jewellery and materials, and other innovations
which highlight the new trends and define the era in which we live.
We suggest British museums to visit, paintings to view and contemporary books to
read. If you teach we provide some costume silhouettes and outlines
for you to download and duplicate for school use in history and craft lessons. We give you
tutorial tips on making fashion workboards or storyboards for college interviews.
We encourage you to experiment and try fashion sketching and send in your
sketches to display in the fashion galleries.
 Pauline Weston Thomas has been an honours Dress, Textiles and Design
graduate and British qualified teacher since the 1970s. At university she
also gained 2 distinctions in her subject field and was 3rd year student prize
winner. She has been interested in
women's fashion, textiles and costume in history since age 3. From 1979 she taught
practical and theoretical aspects of fashion, garment construction, costume and
fashion history, textile science and consumerism to students as well as
to teachers and lecturers of the subject within Great Britain.
Current interests include developing web site and web graphic design skills.
Other interests include creative fashion design, tailoring,
pattern drafting,
machine embroidery, computer linked machine knitting, reading, interior design
and making soft
furnishings, sugar craft,
cooking and entertaining. Her
favourite sport is shopping until she drops. Her other favourite sport is
people watching for trends.
Costume history has been a real passion since she saw
a museum exhibition of costumes made for the BBC production The Six
Wives of Henry VIII in the early 1970s. Growing up, Pauline loved
historical costume productions on TV especially serializations of the
Dickens and Austen novels. She adored Irene's famous sexy, black lace
dress in the original black and white version of The Forsyth Saga and
was thrilled with the costumes in the colour production of the Pallisers
and the Onedin Line. Nowadays she finds it hard to sit through a
TV production without analysing a sleeve or a silhouette, or feeling
alarmed at the inappropriate use of synthetic fabric which drapes
differently to the natural fibres found in authentic costumes. Apart from working on her website
in the past few years, Pauline has also found time to verify antique costumes
from Castle Howard.
Pauline is very happily married to Guy who also taught
her to build the website. They spend their spare time being
together sitting two feet apart computing on their own computers, whilst listening to sloppy
love music at the same time. Bliss. They like working on new projects
together and have been developing ebooks for both Pauline's site
www.fashion-era.com and Guy's
site www.computerperformance.co.uk
in the past year. To relax they like watching a good detective,
historical or forensic production or combination of all three ideas
together.
Read further
below Pauline's account of how she developed her website
Guy Thomas is a Science graduate, qualified teacher and for
the past decade a software trainer. Now a Microsoft Certified Software Engineer,
Microsoft Certified Trainer, he specialises in training current Microsoft products such as Windows 2008
Technical courses. Guy is also an MVP one of Microsoft's selected Microsoft
Valued Professionals.
You can visit the
website of Guy
Thomas - particularly useful if you are interested in getting the best from your
computer or require training in new Microsoft products.
His free newsletter tips and ebooks on scripts are
hugely popular in the global IT community. He has many computer troubleshooting ebooks for sale
and offers a free sample ebook to all visitors and online consultancy
advice.
In 2004 Guy started to develop a new fun website called
www.guy-sports.com/ which has
free clean humour. By June 2010 there were over 1100 humour pages of
pictures and jokes.
Just before the millennium, and for about 5 years I kept saying I was going to build a web
site, but I made no move to do so. After watching the world wide web develop for
many years, I came to the conclusion that the sites I liked best were content
rich and full of meaty information with relevant illustrations that served a
purpose.
I have found nothing more frustrating than going to a site and
finding there was very little
to interest me, or brief text and irrelevant pictures. In 2000 I noticed too that
fashion/fashion history sites fell into several categories with many being
either totally illustrative with minimal written explanation, or academic with
no illustrations, or restricted to an interest in a single costume topic.
Current fashion sites are also often directed to the very
young hip consumer with funky ideas that are great when you are 18, but not so
relevant as time moves on. I wanted to fill that gap.
I got started after listening to some tapes by Anthony Robbins
that I had bought my husband in 2000. He loves motivational tapes and they
suit a man who is difficult to buy for! One the main theories is one I have always
agreed with, that by repetition
you learn something or achieve something. Persistence pays off. You just have to remind yourself that
slow and steady wins the race and keep plodding away - getting started is the
first step.
Getting started on the Website
So having started with serious intent it took me a year in
2001 to produce the first 90
pages of this site. I knew nothing about web building so spent about a month
reading downloaded web articles on approaches to building a site, understanding
affiliates and methods of giving information for a niche market. Together my
husband and I simply tried to understand the long term impact of the internet on
the world and how we could contribute to it in a meaningful and useful way.
After a brief introduction to the HTML editing software called
FrontPage, I wrote up the initial content of over 130,000 words by typing - as many do,
with two fingers. (By 2004 the site content was double that and by
December 2005 there were 508 detailed public access pages. Technically
there are now thousands of pages underpinning the website.)
I had a lot of existing material and
a teacher had been used to planning courses. I had a vision of how I saw
the whole, so writing about something I knew was probably the most
straightforward aspect of building the site. I decided that rather than have
lots of pages in progress I would aim to finish over 90% of the initial planned pages before
launching. From that initial plan I could see lots of strand areas suitable for
future development.
Next I had to learn a graphics package and decided to buy
Paint Shop Pro 7 software. I found it frustrating and was going around in
circles for a few days. The solution again was to download stacks of free PSP7
tutorials from the web, print them out and study them for hours. I worked my way
through most of the tutorials. After about 2 weeks I had grasped the mechanics
of it and spent a couple of months just playing with it, trying out techniques
and learning how to clean up illustrations and have fun with graphics.
Paint Shop
Pro 7 is, in
my opinion, worth about five times the basic price. I love working with PSP which enhances my design ability way beyond my normal aptitude. I
particularly like the layers feature of PSP. Understanding layers in
important when making original web pages. After
this, several months work went into refining and resizing images into JPEGs for application
in FrontPage. Everything always takes much longer to do than you think, however
many web experts out there tell you it can be done instantly.
N.B. If you want to learn more about PSP please use the search
facility with Google and the words PSP tutorial since I will be unable to
correspond on this.
If I could start again tomorrow it would be done totally
differently now I know some of the problems and some of the answers. For now
this is the mark 1 version that will stay, but it will eventually get changed
around as time permits. It's even something I'm looking forward to - a little
like having a new outfit.
In January 2002, exactly a year to the day that I bought the web name
www.fashion-era.com my husband showed me how to upload the material to a host
server. For the technophobes reading this, it took me about six goes to absorb
how to do it confidently on my own. Since then we've moved host servers 3
times and now happily use Third Sphere Hosts which enables us to keep great
statistics of the site. Along with having broadband the whole process of
uploading is much simplified and much faster than when I first attempted it.
Now that the site is much larger than when I
first built it, it has become even more complex to keep modifying and add new
pages ensuring all links are good. Tweaking the site and amending little errors
seems to take forever. If you find any howlers or broken links please mail me at the
address below.
2002-3 As the year 2002 progressed I became quite unwell.
There came an enforced break from developing the site when I had occult primary head
and neck cancer
treatment from mid 2002. In 2002 I could find little pictorial
internet information, so I decided to write up the experience and you can read
about and see photos of the effects of
radiotherapy treatment when applied to the head and neck. See more
links below of this information,
which was once very hard to find back in 2002.
2003 I started real work again on the fashion-era website
in late Spring 2003 and launched a Windows OS compatible
Fashion Illustration Templates ebook.
2004 In January and February 2004 I launched printable ebooks. For
example,
The History of Undergarments.
My priority now is to add and develop new web pages of
missing information and expand areas that are lacking whilst developing new
personal areas of interest. If you want details of any new pages or
special offers and ebooks on launch, please sign up for the newsletter.
All new pages are listed at the top of the fashion-era
sitemap every week.
December 2004. Seasons Greetings to everyone and
thank you for visiting the site again and again. What a busy year.
In recent months I've added sections on
cloaks and capes history, mourning dress
and christening dress history, another section on
pattern drafting a skirt
block, a Christmas section of 18 pages
and other costume history additions on
many topics. In October 2004 the fashion-era forum was added. This
has given me an opportunity to pass comment on ideas related to the broader
aspects of the site subject matter.
15 March 2005
The year has started
briskly with me adding some 50 new web pages to fashion-era since the start of
2005. This includes a large section of
my personal
hints and tips about
selling and buying vintage on the internet. A new section with a
timeline of 40 years of
silhouette dress
changes from 1900 to 1940 showing line drawing illustrations I've
made. I hope people will find these drawings useful for all sorts of
projects and another section explaining
how to
date old photographs using costume as a guide.
I've also started to
review films with costume
interest and have added some new fashion drawing galleries of visitor's
work. October 2004 also saw the launch of our fashion forum
called the fashion-era forum.
20 November 2005
This year I have added many more pages especially extra images
of the 1920s,1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. As well as this, there are extra new
pages in the Christmas section, my personal experience of finding
hair extensions, lots more
Hats & Hairstyles, a large new section about
Fashion Plates History and also a look at
artisan Indian Fashion and Accessories.
The Fashion Trends section has also been
updated twice this year and new
Fashion Design Galleries
have been added.
Always check the
Sitemap weekly if you seek new information or use the search facility on
site if you are lost! Hopefully you are navigating the site more easily
since we changed most pages to drop down (Milonic) menus. We have more
work to do on this next year to make it even more user friendly for you.
I continue to work on the website
with enthusiasm and have plenty of ideas and areas I wish to develop further. My husband Guy has also
been very busy developing his original website www.computerperformance.co.uk
He has also created a newer site
guy-sports.com with a great
new clean humour section. The former has lots of computer scripting
information and the latter has clean, but amusing jokes and funny images.
As Thanksgiving Day 2005 approaches,
despite the fact that we do not celebrate the event in Britain, I remain a very
thankful person and thank God for a chance to continue with my life, my husband
Guy, and my web work. Happy Thanksgiving to you all.
With Christmas just around the corner I hope you will also have a very enjoyable
festive season - and of course I hope you are able to shop until you drop, then
rest up browsing fashion-era.com's latest
pages.
2006
The
Fashion-era Forum has grown to over 1000 members with new members joining
daily. Spring Trends 2006 have
been added.
New pages include a few pages on Queen Elizabeth's clothes until 1977, plus 3
pages with pictures of fashions from the mid 1970s.
Recent site improvements include
replacement of our old red header list. Now we have new spring out Milonic
style navigation. This should help you navigate areas more easily, as the site
has now has 550 pages including some costume image colouring in pages for
children's clothes.
The first 10 pages of a new fashion trends section for Autumn Winter 2006/7
was added.
August 2006
20+ new pages in the 2006/7
Trends
section. Recent additions include wedding pages about fashion history old
photographs from the C20th.
Feb 23 2007
The site has some
new spring summer
2007 fashion trend
pages
Late Summer 2007
I nursed my mother much of 2007 until her passing, and slowly restarted
web work whilst sorting related personal tasks. We began with a page on key fashion
trends for autumn winter 2007-2008 and we hope more new exciting pages will be
added in due course.
October 2008
This has been a year of very slowly getting back on track for me. New pages include
fashion trends and more analysis of old wedding photos.
Look out too for pages on Egyptians,
Ancient Greeks
and Romans.
July 2009
15 new pages added containing 100 free line drawings related to
C20th fashion
history silhouettes from the wartime 1940s fashion era -
1940-1950.
In August new Autumn/Winter trends for 2009/10
were added.
November 2009
In the month of October 2009 www.fashion-era.com had over 1 million unique visitors and
over 50 million hits.
June 2010
Global communication is speeding up fashion so much that seasonal differences
in what is in or out of fashion have merged. Now I am concentrating more
on specific micro trends. Looks such as the
Maxi Dress and influences
such as Mad Men Fashions
are micro trends at some point. At the early stage these micro trends so often
sink, but many can and indeed do become must-haves and thus become major fashion
trends - fashion history in the making.
Kindest regards and greetings to all our site visitors
- Pauline Weston Thomas & Guy Thomas.
About Us
was last edited Jan 2013. Pauline Thomas
Current number of text pages
890, 1 January 2013
|
This is totally unrelated to the fashion and costume aspect of the site
and is a personal diary of my head and neck cancer treatment. All
prayers from all over the world have been most welcome.
|
|
