Interview Topics in Depth

What Gilded Age fashion reveals about wealth and power

Behind the showstopper gowns of the Gilded Age were women making deliberate choices. Elizabeth looks beyond couture’s creators to its patrons—including the Astors, Vanderbilts, Goelets, Schermerhorns, and Goulds—to explore how wealthy American women spent family money with intention, and sometimes surprising practicality and frugality.

How women used clothing to navigate society

American women used their knowledge of social norms and fabrics to influence French couture, local dressmaking, and department stores. As consumers and influencers, they could shape reputations and affect major industries on their own terms. Elizabeth explores this often-overlooked economic power behind their fashion choices.

The history of corsets, bustles, and beauty ideals

The nineteenth-century hourglass silhouette depended on a complex combination of undergarments, including corsets and bustles. Elizabeth explores this long, technically fascinating history and the layers used to achieve an era’s ideal shape.

The evolution of hairdressing as an industry

Hairdressing changed dramatically during the nineteenth century, moving from care shared at home among female relatives to a growing salon industry. Elizabeth examines how women entrepreneurs helped shape that business and how hairdressing offered women agency, economic opportunity, and influence.

Listen: The Gilded Age Art of Hairdressing

Inside the Signature Presentations

Gilded Age Fashion: Iconic Looks and the Stories Behind Them

Based on Elizabeth’s latest book, this presentation explores fifty showstopper gowns and accessories worn by elite American society. Alongside the garments and their wearers, Elizabeth considers the wider world of French couture: how fashion was made, sold, and brought across the Atlantic, and the people whose work sustained it.

Related conversation: The House of Worth and Beyond

Beyond Vanity: The History of Hairdressing

Hairdressing and the business of hair offered many nineteenth-century women of different ethnicities a path to empowerment. Drawing on Beyond Vanity, Elizabeth explores hair as both an expression of individuality and the foundation of an industry that supported generations of women entrepreneurs.

Underneath it All: A History of Underclothing

What lay beneath the gowns of the Gilded Age? Elizabeth explores corsets, bustles, stockings, and the other layers that shaped nineteenth-century dress. Looking at how these garments were made and worn, she reveals the practical construction behind fashionable silhouettes—and the surprising wearability of some undergarments.

Listen: Gilded Age Undergarments

In-Person, Virtual, and International Programs

Elizabeth is an international speaker available for in-person and virtual museum and university lectures, historical society programs, conferences, panels, book talks, podcasts, radio, television, and expert media interviews. Programs can be tailored for general or specialist audiences. International engagements are welcome; host venues are responsible for all travel expenses.

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