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Glove color card

The Design Center at Philadelphia University maintains a massive textile and fashion library of over 200,000 fabric samples, books, and trade cards, and they've graciously started to share the collection via Tumblr

The majority of the posts are small fabric samples sewed onto filing cards that date back over 100 years. The surprise is how modern some of the patterns look that are well over a century old. The sheer quantity of samples makes it possible to spot a few trends as well. For example, vegetable prints were apparently huge in the 1880s and 90s, and geometric patterns started making frequent appearances just after 1910. There's plenty of dated ephemera, like a color guide for choosing the right gloves and a Parisian "fashion forecast" book from 1966. 

Whether you're a designer too far from Philadelphia to explore the collection in person, or you'd just like to have some fashion history in the dashboard, you should follow The Design Center on Tumblr