Victorian Fashion, Re-Stitched — Hand-Embroidered Fashion Illustrations

Description

Fashion illustrations were created to tell women what to wear. I like giving them a second opinion.

This collection transforms vintage Victorian fashion and corsetry illustrations through hand embroidery, bringing color, texture, and a distinctly contemporary hand to images once used to advertise and idealize fashionable dress.

Printed onto fabric, each historical image becomes the foundation for new embellishment. Embroidery follows—and occasionally disrupts—the original garment: corset seams are traced in saturated thread, sleeves become fields of color, flowers bloom from collars, buttons and pearl-like details add dimension, and elaborate nineteenth-century surfaces become tactile once again.

As a fashion historian and embroidery artist, I’m fascinated by the tension within these images. Victorian fashion could be extraordinarily beautiful and technically sophisticated, but fashion imagery also helped construct ideas about the fashionable female body. By physically stitching into these illustrations, I’m not simply recreating historical clothing—I’m responding to it.

The result sits somewhere between fashion archive, textile study, and contemporary feminist embroidery.

Each piece is individually embroidered, making every variation completely unique. Color palettes, stitches and dimensional embellishments vary from work to work.

Details

• Original hand-embroidered mixed-media artwork
• Based on vintage Victorian fashion and corsetry illustrations
• Historical image printed onto fabric
• Hand embroidered with cotton embroidery thread
• Select works feature dimensional embellishments such as buttons, pearls and floral embroidery
• Colored matting selected to complement each individual piece 5×7
• Each artwork is one of a kind
• Handmade by Ricamo Strano in New York

Please select your preferred design from the available options. Because every piece is embroidered individually, no two are exactly alike.