Students at Bard Graduate Center developed this interactive feature, which uses surviving photographic portraits to explore the diversity of lace consumption in nineteenth-century America. The images displayed illustrate the changes in women’s dress and self-presentation brought on by the mechanization of the lace industry and the invention of photography and explores how American consumers incorporated lace into their fashionable ensembles, using it to communicate social standing, political leanings, family ties, and access to fashionable retailers. 

Developed by Antonia Anagnostopolous, Ariana Bishop, Emily Harvey, and Samuel Snodgrass.

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Brown, Jeannette, E. African American Women Chemists. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

“Chemical and Optical Discovery.” Pittsburgh Gazette, February 28, 1839, 2.

De Young, Justine. “1690–1699.” Fashion History Timeline, July 23, 2020, https://fashionhistory.fitnyc.edu/1690-1699/.

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———. “1860–69.” Fashion History Timeline, December 27, 2019, https://fashionhistory.fitnyc.edu/1860-1869/ 

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“Price List.” Jordan, Marsh and Company, 1897, https://archive.org/details/pricelist00jord/page/130/mode/2up?q=sewing+machine. 

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Rohrbach, John, Erin Kristl Pauwels, Britt Salvesen, and Fernanda Valverde. Acting Out: Cabinet Cards and the Making of Modern Photography. Oakland, CA: University of California Press; Fort Worth, TX: Amon Carter Museum of American Art, 2020. 

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Smith, Barbara Peters. “From White City to Green Acres: Bertha Palmer and the Gendering of Space in the Gilded Age,” University of South Florida Scholar Commons, September 2015, https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6973&context=etd.

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“The Nineteenth Century: The Invention of Photography.” National Gallery of Art, https://www.nga.gov/features/in-light-of-the-past/the-19th-century-the-invention-of-photography.html.

“The Return of Cabinet Cards.” LACMA, https://unframed.lacma.org/2021/06/28/return-cabinet-cards.

Tobin, Shelley, Sarah Pepper, and Margaret Willes. Marriage a la Mode: Three Centuries of Wedding Dress. London: The National Trust, 2003.

Wardle, Patricia. Victorian Lace. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1969.

Wolov, Beverly Efter. “Handmade European Lace in American Culture during the Gilded Age, 1880–1930.” Corcoran College of Art + Design, 2010, https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/handmade-european-lace-american-culture-during/docview/923293456/se-2?accountid=31516.

Zieger, Susan Marjorie. The Meditated Mind: Affect, Ephemera, and Consumerism in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018.