LibGuides: Fashion and Textile Studies: Databases and Websites

Getting Started

The Fashion and Race Database includes many different types of resources, including the reading lists pictured above.

The databases listed below are helpful places to start when beginning research on a topic.

The Asian Fashion Archive
The Asian Fashion Archive is a digital resource that highlights Asian fashion, culture, and history. Users can browse the site by region to find a wide variety of content, including videos, podcasts, museums and exhibitions, and books and articles.
Berg Fashion Library
This database offers fully cross-searchable access to an expanding range of Berg content collections including the Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress online, e-books, reference works, images, bibliographies, and much more.
Fashion and Race Database
Provides sources for learning about all matters connected to fashion, appearance, and race. Users can search the library for references; the objects section, for images and collections; and the profiles section for people who have shaped the history and business of fashion. In addition, the site contains essays and news, an events calendar, and directory.
Note: Users will be prompted to create a personal account on their first visit. Contact library staff with any questions.
The Fashion History Timeline
Oxford Art Online
A gateway that allows users to search Grove Art Online, The Oxford Companion to Western Art, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms and The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics simultaneously or individually.
Oxford Bibliographies (available through NYPL)
Oxford Bibliographies features updating topic overviews and annotated bibliographies with references to and descriptions of journals, articles, books, online resources, and collections. While this database does not include a dedicated set of bibliographies to do with clothing and dress, keyword searching can lead to many useful entries under Art History, Atlantic History, Childhood History, Medieval History, Islamic Studies, and more.
Vintage Fashion Guild
Vintage Fashion Guild is an international organization founded by vintage sellers. They offer resources to help with identifying labels, fabrics, furs, hats types and terms, and more.

Citation Indexes and Full Text Resources

In addition to the articles search feature in Folio, these resources can help you find references to relevant articles, as well as full text access to journals, books, newspapers, trade catalogs, and more. See the Periodicals in Print and Online page of this guide for links to many of our title-specific databases, such as Vogue and Women's Wear Daily.

Art & Architecture Archive
A full-text archive of magazines in the fields of art and architecture dating from the late-19th century to the 21st, including Apollo, American Craft and Craft Horizons.
Art & Architecture Source
Art & Architecture Source offers detailed indexing, abstracts, and in some cases, full text of articles on fine art, decorative art, commercial art, architecture, and architectural design.
Bibliothèque Forney
Bibliothèque Forney is a library specializing in crafts, design, fashion, and textiles. Their digital collections include many trade or commercial catalogs, as well as images of textiles.
Design & Applied Arts Index (DAAI)
Abstracts and indexes articles, news items, and reviews published in design and applied arts periodicals from 1973 on. Covers both new designers and the development of design and the applied arts since the mid-19th century, surveying disciplines including ceramics, glass, jewelry, wood, metalsmithing, graphic design, fashion and clothing, textiles, furniture, interior design, architecture, computer-aided design, web design, computer-generated graphics, animation, product design, industrial design, garden design, and landscape architecture.
Gallica
The digital collections of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Gallica includes many images in addition to digitized books, catalogs, and periodicals.
HathiTrust
HathiTrust is a partnership of academic and research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world. HathiTrust can be used to find books, newsletters, and catalogs that are in the public domain, and is especially useful for finding scans of older fashion or women’s magazines.

Try utilizing the Catalog search to look for the subject "fashion periodicals" or "women periodicals" in order to browse available titles.

Home Economics Archive
This database, created by Cornell University Library, contains digitized books and journals in Home Economics and related disciplines.
Internet Archive
A non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more. The site includes the Wayback Machine, a digital archive of the World Wide Web.

One way to browse this site is by collection. Curated groups of resources such as the Winterthur Library collection are an easier way to sift through the millions of options, and can lead you to works in the public domain as well as books that are available to digitally borrow with a free login.

JSTOR
A backfile of core journals in the arts and sciences, JSTOR contains millions of pages of high-quality PDFs of hundreds of academic journals. Note that JSTOR does not necessarily provide access to full-text articles from recent journal issues (see Project Muse for more current coverage).
Trade Catalog Online Resources
This list from the Library of Congress includes links to digitized primary source materials related to trade catalogs and literature.

Specialized Resources

CoPA (Commercial Pattern Archive)
A collection of commercial pattern data, including images, from several large commercial pattern collections in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. The database functions like a catalog of patterns and collections that researchers and designers can use to re-create or date clothing from the 1840s to the 2010s. A user name and password are required for access. Contact the library staff for the log-in information.
The Quilt Index
The Quilt Index is a digital repository of images, stories, and information about quilts and their makers drawn from hundreds of public and private collections around the world.