Vintage Fashion & Textiles

An extraordinary example of British avant-garde clothing made on the eve of the First World War will be offered at auction in Oxford next month.

London is thick with antiques events this weekend and here we pick two specialist fairs in Kensington.

Erté (1892-1990) was an artist and designer whose works influenced fashion, film and theatre throughout the 20th century.

There is nothing so stylish in the world of vintage frocks as a 1930s wedding dress – all Hollywood-style glamour with long silky satin gowns.

The European decorative arts that preceded the tribal session at John Nicholson’s (24% buyer's premium) on October 10 had included a handful of notable bids, not least the £14,500 (estimate £300-500) tendered by an Italian buyer for a small early 20th century Louis Vuitton leather box measuring just 11in (27cm) across.

The third and final exhibition of Brian Stonehouse’s (1918-98) fashion illustrations at Abbott and Holder opens this month, running from October 19-December 22.

“If you lived here you could make it absolutely divine,” wrote author Virginia Woolf to her sister Vanessa Bell in 1916.

Amarah Alexandra is a graduate of Birmingham City University and is this year’s winner of the Textile Society’s Graduate Award for Interior Textile Design.

Shown here is the central medallion of a patchwork and appliqué quilt believed to have been produced by some patriotic sewer to mark the 1815 marriage of Princess Charlotte, the Prince Regent’s daughter, to Prince Leopold of Saxe- Coburg-Gotha.

The great flowering of the kimono was in the Edo period (1615-1868) when the merchant and artisan classes, or chōnin, could not use their new-found wealth to improve their social status, so rigid was the shogun military hierarchy.

While it is well known that Queen Victoria sent her troops tins of chocolate boxes for Christmas in the second Boer War (1899-1902), the eight scarves she personally crocheted to send to individual soldiers are not so familiar.

The Dublin-born journalist Abraham ‘Bram’ Stoker’s first book, The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland, a handbook of legal administration in Ireland, hit the streets in 1879.

Looking at the images from Leyburn’s 1940s Weekend held at Thornborough Hall and in the main town square, you might think you were on a Second World War film or TV set.