Here's How People From 1893 Imagined What We Would Be Wearing From Every Decade Up To the 1990s

These illustrations from a delightful piece called the “Future Dictates of Fashion” by W. Cade Gall and published in the January 1893 issue of The Strand magazine.

On the premise that a book from a hundred years in the future (published in 1993) called The Past Dictates of Fashion has been inexplicably found in a library, the article proceeds to divulge this book’s contents – namely, a look back at the last century of fashion, which, of course, for the reader in 1893, would be looking forward across the next hundred years into the future.

In this imagined future, fashion has become a much respected science (studied in University from the 1950s onwards) and is seen to be “governed by immutable laws”.

1900s

1910s

1920s

1930s

1940s

1950s

1960s

1970s

1980s

1993

(via The Public Domain Review)