During the Belle Epoque, there was no such thing as an off-the-rack dress. Clothes shopping was a luxury reserved for the wealthy elite.

These collection printed in 1910 for Les Createurs de la Mode (the creators of fashion) take us into the great fashion salons of Paris…

Fashion was made by hand from start to finish with high quality, expensive, often unusual fabrics, sewn with extreme attention to detail and finished by the most experienced and capable sewers.

The Paris ateliers, workshops and showrooms were very often all housed in the same building. Seamstresses were hard at work on the top floor under the very same roof where society ladies were choosing their new season’s wardrobe on the ground floor.

The salons had their own in-house models who were on call all day long for potential customers, ready to stand motionless for hours on end, wearing corsets and dresses their could likely never afford themselves.

H/T Les Createurs de la Mode | Philadelphia Museum of Art, Library