Patterns of Fashion 2 focuses on the eighty-year period preceding the Second World War. Beginning with a day dress from c. 1861-3 from the London Museum and ending with a 1938 Evening dress from the V&A costume historian and researcher Janet Arnold traces period and style and draws up patters from the original garments on grid paper with construction instructions. This is introduced by excerpts and reproductions from fashion magazines of the period. Contains 226 black and white illustrations. 34 patterns.

No one interested in the history of dress, from art historians to stage designers, from museum curators to teachers of fashion and costume, can function effectively without Janet Arnold's Patterns of Fashion series, published by Macmillan since 1964. Since her untimely death in 1998, admirers of her work have been waiting, with increasing impatience, for the promised volume devoted to the linen clothes of the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods, a companion to her previous volume on tailored clothes of the same era.Planned and partly prepared by Janet herself, and completed by Jenny Tiramani, Janet's last pupil, no other book exists that is dedicated to the linen clothes that covered the body from the skin outwards. It contains full colour portraits and photographs of details of garments in the explanatory section, as well as patterns for 86 items of linen clothing, which range from men's shirts and women's smocks, from superb ruffs and collars to boot hose and children's stomachers. Beautifully produced, it is an invaluable guide to both the history and the recreation of these wonderful garments.