Le Costume historique, with 500 plates (300 in full color), was issued in parts from 1876 to 1886 and published in volumes in 1888. In 1987 Dover published 92 of the color plates in its volume Racinet’s Full-Color Pictorial History of Western Costume (ISBN 0-486-25464-X).
The third edition, used for this Dover volume, bears no date. As Racinet himself pointed out, no loss of plate quality could occur from one edition to another because of the chromolithographic technology employed: the proofs were pulled by a transfer method that caused no wear and tear to the original lithographic stones.
In the present Dover edition, all the French text has been omitted. In its place are new English captions, a new list of illustrations and this Publisher’s Note. In addition, Arabic numerals here replace the Roman numerals of the original in the plate numbers.