Theatre 322: Period Styles

Starting with a basic keyword search for 'clothing' and combining with a set of dates to limit your search to Early Victorian period. You may also search for specific pieces of clothing or outfits: Dress, Suit, Shirt, Pants, Shoes/Boots, Coat, etc. Using basic keywords and using appropriate dates means you may not need to use specialized clothing terms in your search.

I used some options on the left to limit the search to men's clothes and to see a particular collection. I was able to limit to about 9 results that fit my time period. - For information on gathering information for labels, see the section of this guide 'help with labels'.

When I narrowed the above search to women's clothes (vs. men's) I wasn't able to find any physical examples of women's clothing. I tried a second search using a more specific search for "dress" and was able to find some examples of physical objects.

This is a good example of making sure you try multiple terms before giving up on a search. If you are struggling to find items for your time period, I would recommend trying some of the more specific terms for clothing. There are a number of museums with strong fashion collections, so try multiple museum sites.

Byzantine is a good example of using a particular style as our search term, rather than the type of object we are looking for. Byzantine period overlaps with a number of other Western styles on a timeline, so searching by the style - "Byzantine" - and refining the search by date, geography, type of object, etc. would be an easier way to find appropriate items in most databases/museum sites.

Here is a search at The MET's site using Byzantine. I then used the advanced search to limit by dates and geography to give myself a limited number of results. You can always go back and look at other parts of the world if you don't find something you are interested in.

There are a number of options in my search results that I could use to fill several requirements for Byzantine Era images. Examples from the above search:

As with all images from museum sites, all the information you need to create your labels is also included on the page with the image. You can download the image and even grab a link to the page to include with the label.