In her journal in July 1905, Montgomery talked about looking back at the dresses of 1895 in her scrapbook: "An old-time fashion plate with big sleeves! The big puffed sleeves are in again now. When I put on a new dress the other day with big sleeves it gave me the oddest sense of being a Dalhousie girl again--for that was the year they came to their fullest balloon-like inflation, stiffened out with 'fibre-chamois' etc. 'Stuff me in' was an inelegant phrase constantly heard when one girl wanted another to poke the huge sleeves of her dress into the sleeves of her coat" (SJ,I,309). Perhaps Montgomery was writing about Anne Shirley's longing for puffed sleeves when she looked over the fashion plates on her own scrapbook pages.

Twenty-one years later, in 1926, Montgomery talked even more nostalgically about those early fashion plates in her scrapbook, comparing the young women of the 1890's with the current flappers: "Many obsolete fashions are very laughable and ugly but this did not strike me as being so. Indeed, compared to the fashions of today it seemed to me dignified, beautiful and becoming. . . . No, I do not think the girls of '93 needed the rather scornful pity that is sometimes meted out to them by the scantily-garbed damsels of today. We were just as pretty, just as graceful, just as well-pleased with ourselves" (SJ,III,315).

On 6 August 1927, a year after writing so approvingly about fashion in her past, Montgomery went to a garden party at Government House in Toronto to meet the Prince of Wales and British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and Mrs. Baldwin. She made a special trip to Toronto to buy a new hat to go with her "cocoa-colored lace and georgette" (SJ,III,351). Though she may have lamented the changes in fashion, she was certainly not going to wear anything but the latest style herself! Note the floppy hat, string of beads, low-slung waist, and draped hemline.