Instructor Profile:

Penny Ladnier

I am the owner of The Costume Gallery and its sister website, the Costume Classroom.

I grew up in a small town in southern Mississippi, and began my interest in fashion and costume when my mother, a talented seamstress, taught me at the age of four. During my school years, I continued to improve my skills taking six years of sewing classes.

I started college locally first majoring in drafting, then art, and finally graduating with an associate's degree in Fashion Merchandising and Marketing in 1978. I worked in retail menswear and did some local modeling jobs while putting my husband through his last years of college.

In 1995, after our sixth child was old enough to go to school, I went back to college, Virginia Commonwealth University to obtain my bachelor's degree in Fashion Merchandising. While at school, I took courses in everything that interested me. A professor insisted that all his students learned to research retailers' profiles on the Internet (a new concept then). I was also required to take three computer classes and finished school nine classes. I also had a passion for the costume history classes in the theatre department, so I took as many of those classes as I could. A large part of my required courses were in the school of business, marketing department.

While a student, in 1996, I created a website called Historic Costume Research (HCR). It was a place students could go to find reliable costume information. At the time, there were only four historic fashion websites. HCR turned into my present day Research Library with individuals, businesses, schools, designers, and curators subscribing. In 1996, I developed a method on computer to clean and restore antique fashion plates to their glory of when originally printed. These restorations have been the cornerstone of our online Library.

In 1996, when I did my summer internship at the Valentine Museum, Richmond, Virginia, working in the Costume and Textile Collection, was my first big break in the fashion industry. Then the curator was the President of the Costume Society of America. The costume collection was the largest in the southern U.S. and contained the largest historic bridal collection in the U.S. I learned to catalog, date, and write descriptions of the historic fashions in the collection. The curator taught me the importance of networking in the industry and introduced me to a number of influential people. After the completion of my internship, I continued to volunteer to work on four historic fashion exhibits at the museum.

Education:

Also at this time, I joined an email list called h-costume. There I meet people from all over the world, in all types of professions in fashion / costume. It was like having an interactive encyclopedia of costuming only a click away.

In 1997, three decades after completing my Associates degree, I received my B.A. in Fashion from Virginia Commonwealth University.

After graduating, I opened my website professionally as The Costume Gallery in Nov. 1997. I am so proud to say that we have had over thirty-three million visitors have been to The Gallery in ten years. Currently, my websites receive visitors from over 140 countries monthly. My main objective is to educate people about fashion history through my online Library and the Costume Classroom. The Library contains over 3,200 webpages from vintage fashion publications from 1800 - 1923. We have had over 3,500 students from all over the world take online fashion classes with us. Overall, The Costume Gallery websites, Online Costume Ball, Costume Classroom, Costume Encyclopedia, Fashion Color Database, and Costume Research Library, house one of the web's largest collection of educational fashion history resources... over 10,000 webpages and 35,000 images.

During 1997, I researched historic fashions for Reader's Digest Book author, Deborah Harding. The book, Crafting with Flea Market Fabrics, included a section on handkerchiefs from the 1920-1940s, that I researched.

1998, I worked on an exhibit of a Princess Diana's ball gown designed by British fashion designer, David Emanuel. Mr. Emanuel was one of the designers for Princess Diana's wedding dress. From 1998 - 2000, I was a dresser for some of the Diana auction dresses that were being exhibited at charity benefits in Virginia. In 2000, I worked at a ball as a stylist for David Emanuel's models wearing his latest designs.

Also, in 2000, I consulted with the BBC television network on their series, I Love the 70s. Irony, as it may, in 2003, VH-1 contacted me when they were developing the American TV version of I Love the 70s.

In 2002, I researched and was quoted in an Associated Press (AP) article, Patriotic Beauties. This article was about World War II ladies' fashions.

In June 2002, I was awarded the Costume Society of America's Region VI Professional Development Grant to expand my series A Year in Fashion: 1920 - 1923 of our Library.

During 2003, I researched again for the same AP journalist for the article Liberating Pants. I provided details of the history of women wearing pants from 1885 to 1900.

From 2000 - 2004 I have republished on my website hundreds of antique fashion articles, ten catalogs, and nine books, including three etiquette books from 1877 - 1921, one 1899 hairdressers textbook, and one 1911 sewing manual. Nov. 2004, we will be republishing a 1911 hairdressers manual.

Areas of Fashion that I have been researching for the past ten years and publishing in my Online Library.