Don't forget your slacks! Unpacking the Women's Wear Daily Archive

This fascinating visual archive brings together every issue of the popular and highly influential women's lifestyle and fashion magazine Women’s Wear Daily from its launch in 1910 to the current year, reproduced in high-resolution images.  Search the full text and or indexed keywords for every page, article, advertisement and cover.  Watch fashion trends unfold over the past century and discover the pivotal moments of change in the women's fashion industry.  

Whether you are researching retail business, fashion industry history, popular culture, gender studies, marketing, journalism, graphic design or anything else connected with the representation of the fashion industry over time, these magazine issues combine a news-style commentary on the business, designers, retailers, models and muses, with interesting and stylistically evolving illustrative content. 

Think "American" when searching the WWD archive

All the usual search tools are available, but you should bear in mind that Women's Wear Daily is American when choosing which words to search for.  Let's consider what happens when you saerch for women's trousers.  Last time I tried, a search for "trousers" returned 28,222 results, a search for "slacks" 55,237, and "pants" 95,337!  Clearly, 20th century Americans talked of wearing slacks more often than they did trousers.  You can combine these terms (search for trousers AND slacks AND pants) to make suer you find everything, but otherwise, the nuances of 20th century American English will largely influence what you find.

When searching for the impact of events, people or policies, don't expect to find anything specifically UK-centered. A search for "rationing" during the 1940s found very different results to those I would expect to find in post-war British publications.  With that said, the coverage of Royal Weddings, even those of minor royals, was relatively extensive, with plenty of British designers mentioned, and other royal photographs were published that had been actively kept from the British press.  Princess Margaret was never pictured smoking in the UK during her youth, for example, whereas within these pages are not only those photographs but captions explaining how Americans were being treated to candid images of the princess smoking that would never be allowed "back home" in her native Britain. 

Final verdict

As with any archive of such a long-lived publication, it's fascinating to watch the passage of time through the pages. The style employed in the formatting, the tone employed in the articles, and the technology employed in the display of representations all change as wonderfully as you would imagine. I'm sure students in Creative Arts will find it a hugely valuable resource, but I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to students from any of the other numerous disciplines, who I think would find useful content within it too. Go and have a look - you never know what you might find.