What people wore, year by year, from 1900 to today. Each view shows the looks from five years either side of the selected year, so styles drift into one another the way they did on the street. Figures are cut out of mail-order catalogs, magazines, documentary photographs and street-style photography; every one keeps its year and source, and links back to where it came from. Tap or click any figure.
Catalogs show what one kind of store sold to the customer it imagined. To show what people actually wore, across ages, communities and subcultures, the collection also draws on magazines and photographs. It is still a sample, not a complete history.
Where the figures come from
- CatalogsSears, Montgomery Ward, Eaton’s, JCPenney, Spiegel, Sears Canada, early style books (Lane Bryant, National Cloak & Suit, Hart Schaffner & Marx and others), 2000s teen catalogs (Alloy, dELiA*s) and Nordic mail-order catalogs, from the Internet Archive and christmas.musetechnical.com
- MagazinesLIFE, Ebony, Jet, Spin and Vibe, from scans on the Internet Archive
- PhotographsPublic-domain and freely licensed documentary photographs from the Library of Congress and Wikimedia Commons, credited to their photographers
- 2010s–2020sStreet-style photography published by The Cut (New York Magazine), credited on each photo
AI in this collection
Some figures were cut off at the page edge or damaged in the source. Those were completed or redrawn with AI (OpenAI image generation) and checked side by side against the original; each is labelled, links to the unrestored cutout, and is tinted by “Show AI areas”.
The year comes from the source; where a style book prints no year it is shown as attributed, with the evidence. Some figures are well-known people as they appeared at the time. Catalogs, magazines and photographs remain credited to their publishers and photographers; this is a non-commercial archive.