Elizabeth L. Block, PhD
Historian, Author, and Speaker
Award-winning art and culture historian
Elizabeth L. Block, PhD is an award-winning author and speaker specializing in Gilded Age fashion, the history and cultural power of women’s hair, and American women’s influence on French couture. Explore her books, lectures, interviews, and research illuminating women’s lives through dress, art, and material culture.
Books by Elizabeth L. Block
-
![Cover of Gilded Age Fashion by Elizabeth L. Block, featuring an ornate gold Gilded Age gown]()
Gilded Age Fashion
ELIZABETH L. BLOCK
Explore more than fifty remarkable gowns from the 1870s through the 1890s—and the women, couturiers, museum collections, and social customs behind them. Gilded Age Fashion reveals what clothing communicated about wealth, identity, etiquette, and power in elite American society.
-
![Cover of Beyond Vanity: The History and Power of Hairdressing by Elizabeth L. Block]()
Beyond Vanity
ELIZABETH L. BLOCK
Beyond Vanity uncovers the overlooked cultural power of women’s hair and hairdressing in nineteenth-century America. Through stories of salons, entrepreneurs, beauty standards, and public life, Elizabeth examines how hair intersected with gender, race, class, labor, commerce, and identity.
-
![Cover of Dressing Up: The Women Who Influenced French Fashion by Elizabeth L. Block]()
Dressing Up
ELIZABETH L. BLOCK
Dressing Up reveals how wealthy American women helped shape French couture as influential clients, consumers, and cultural tastemakers. Elizabeth reframes fashion history by showing how these women actively participated in the transatlantic system of commerce, creativity, and power behind late nineteenth-century dress.
