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Paul Poiret designed this coat for his wife, Denise, to wear. She paired it with a short dress. It is made of black monkey fur. Poiret helped to make Orientalist fashion so popular in the West in the 1910s.

Paul Poiret, designing for the House of Paquin, created this coat that exemplifies the hobble shape and the oriental style of the time. Poiret invented the hobble shape. He has been recorded as saying that he freed women from their corsets, but he…

This newspaper article from 1916 documents the new and increasing stigma around fat bodies. As ready-to-wear clothes replaced hand-sewn clothing thanks to standardized sizing, people with larger bodies were locked out of this progress due to…