Dr. Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell Profile picture
Fashion Historian. @Stanford grad. Tweets at @WornOnThisDay. Words at @TheAtlantic @WSJ @OrnamentMag @washingtonpost. Repped by @laurieannfox. Now on Bluesky!
May 17 17 tweets 11 min read
It’s time for #Bridgerton S3, Part 1! Sure, the frocks are a lot of fun, but there are also paintings! Let's take a look. (Spoilers ahead, obviously.) 🧵 Image Once again, the Bridgertons are getting dressed up for court. By this time (1815, tho the book is set in 1824) knee-length breeches were out of style. After the French Revolution, working-class trousers replaced aristocratic "culottes" in fashion; hence the term “sans-culottes.”
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Apr 11 7 tweets 6 min read
The #BridgertonS3 trailer has arrived! Colin has clearly been taking fashion inspo from the Duke of Hastings and I am HERE for it. But let's look at the paintings!



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Once again, Queen Charlotte's throne room is played by the Double Cube Room at Wilton House, with Anthony van Dyck's 1635 portrait of the 4th Earl of Pembroke and his family, his biggest canvas. The Tate has a fascinating look at the work's messy dynamics: tate.org.uk/tate-etc/issue…

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Jul 10, 2023 23 tweets 15 min read
I’m looking forward to this—I *love* a sweeping historical epic and I don’t know/care very much about Napoleon, so hopefully I won’t be distracted by the inevitable historical inaccuracies. Costume is not and should not be history, but few things jumped out of me, good and bad:🧵 A lot of Napoleon’s clothes and uniforms survive, including this tricolor sash he wore in Egypt, likely brought there by an Indian trader. It has the boteh or pinecone motif, originally Persian but known in the West as paisley, because imitations were woven in Paisley, Scotland.

May 10, 2023 6 tweets 6 min read
Another field trip to see “Guo Pei: Art of Couture” at the Bowers Museum. I saw their 2019 show “Guo Pei: Couture Beyond” and this was completely different! But also worth seeing for the shoes alone: ImageImageImageImage Pei is the only designer whose clothes I can look at and have NO idea what I’m looking at: ImageImageImageImage
May 10, 2023 4 tweets 4 min read
New costume rotation at the @AcademyMuseum! I made a special trip to see Elizabeth Taylor’s velvet-violet-trimmed Edith Head debutante gown from “A Place in the Sun” (1951), which launched a million prom dresses. I wrote about it in my @StMartinsPress book Skirts. But look …. 👀 ImageImageImageImage HELLO, JARETH. ImageImage
May 7, 2023 24 tweets 14 min read
These two are adorable, but the portraits in #QueenCharlotte are KILLING me. NONE of those people were even *born* in 1761! Image That is QUEEN VICTORIA. Specifically, her coronation portrait by Sir George Hayter. Her coronation was in 1838, 20 years after Charlotte DIED. ImageImage
Mar 27, 2023 19 tweets 13 min read
I'm not watching #MarieAntoinettePBS and I wasn't going to nitpick the costumes; I don't think that's very interesting or useful. Historical films are not (nor should they be) documentaries, and I don’t want to come across as a cranky pedant or yuck someone else’s yum. HOWEVER…. Image A few people have sent me this lewk and I'm going to do a 🧵, because it's something I've researched and written about extensively and because it shows how even well-intentioned, well-budgeted historical costuming can go off the rails when you don't HIRE👏FASHION👏HISTORIANS👏. ImageImage
Sep 6, 2022 21 tweets 14 min read
It’s pub day for SKIRTS! To celebrate, here’s one last 🧵about one of my favorite skirts in the book, and easily the most surprising: the poodle skirt. Everything we know about poodle skirts is wroooong! Decades of films, TV shows, and bobby-soxer Halloween costumes LIED to us!🐩 The poodle skirt as we know it—a circle skirt decorated with poodles and other kitschy appliqués—was a novelty worn by grown women for 2 years AT MOST, roughly 1952-54, before being consigned the children’s department and thence to the dustbin of history.
Sep 5, 2022 18 tweets 13 min read
My book Skirts traces the evolution of women’s fashion over the 20th century. But there’s one dress that never evolved—and it’s as wearable today as it was when it was first produced in 1909, IF you’re lucky enough to own one: Spanish designer Mariano Fortuny’s Delphos gown. A🧵: Fortuny was inspired by this Hellenistic sculpture of a charioteer dug up at Delphi in 1896, the same year the modern Olympic Games began in Athens. The life-sized bronze wears a long, pleated tunic called a chiton, belted above the waist, with thin straps crossing the shoulders.
May 5, 2022 26 tweets 9 min read
Glad the Kim K. convo is raising awareness about the ethics of wearing historic fashion. The LA Times asked me if I could think of comparable examples of celebrities wearing iconic museum pieces on the red carpet and I couldn’t--can you? It’s not unprecedented, though. A long 🧵: First of all, there’s a fine but distinct line between wearing vintage/archival fashion and actual museum pieces. Once a piece enters a museum collection, it usually doesn’t come out, and it’s protected by policies that keep it from being worn or otherwise handled irresponsibly.
May 3, 2022 6 tweets 2 min read
I’m seeing a lot of “I support abortion—in the first trimester!” on the TL today. I probably would have said the same thing before I personally learned all the ways a healthy, planned pregnancy can go tragically wrong in second trimester. Please read this: elle.com/culture/career… The *only* reason I didn’t have a 20-week abortion is that I live in California. When my 20-week scan indicated that my son would die before or just after birth, I didn’t have to abort immediately; I was able to wait 2 weeks for an amniocentesis, which proved otherwise. He’s 9.❤️
Sep 9, 2021 15 tweets 9 min read
A #StarTrekDay thread about fashion’s final frontier: the Skant. 55 years ago today, the USS Enterprise took flight with a miniskirted communications officer, Lt. Nyota Uhura, played by Nichelle Nichols. “In later years, especially as the women’s movement took hold in the ‘70s, people began to ask me about my costume,” Nichols remembered in her autobiography. “Some thought it ‘demeaning’ for a woman in the command crew to be dressed so sexily.”
Oct 21, 2019 11 tweets 8 min read
Kurt Cobain's thrift-shop cardigan is back on the market. I write about it in my new book, @WornOnThisDay. But when @RollingStone asked me to find out when it was originally made AND HOW MUCH IT COST, I didn't think I could do it. @WornOnThisDay @RollingStone It's pretty generic--which is undoubtedly why it appealed to Cobain's anti-fashion grunge sensibilities. I knew the brand--Manhattan--but there were a few different knitwear companies with "Manhattan" in their name. Fortunately, the reporter was able to get a photo of the label.