If you put your mind to it, you can turn any assignment into a dress

  I made this dress in 2008 for a presentation to my history class on Victorian fashion.

This is how I covered my history book at the start of the year… I had plans.

The design came from a fashion plate and a partial pattern in the introduction to Patterns of Fashion 2 called ‘The Gainsborough Princess Dress’ and is an 1879 natural form gown. When I have a book full of complete, scaled patterns, I have to use incomplete, unscaled one. Obviously.

So, who read the introduction? (My dress is represented in plates 23 and 24 on page 8.)

The fabrics are all synthetic curtain materials because that made it possible to get the same textured fabric in different colours, but as a result the dress doesn’t breathe very well. I didn’t think a lot about fabric types at the time I made this, which is a shame, because I would wear it more often if the fabric was better. On the plus side, it doesn’t need ironing. I chose the colours based on how I imagined the dress, rather than on research, but I have since come across many fashion plates from the era using the same palette.

This dress actually has the least tenuous connection to the assignment of the other ones I’ve made.

The outfit is worn over a corset and chemise. The chemise is an inelegant combination of cotton rectangles and lace that I made up to be as simple as possible. The corset is made from Truly Victorian pattern TV110, which I found to be an excellent pattern to learn corsetry from. I’ve used its method for all the corsets I have made since.

I used cable ties for bones in the corset.

Almost all Victorian bodices I’ve seen the have been boned and had waist tapes. I would like to include such features and ‘do it properly’ but I have never really had a good enough understanding of how they work. When I first made this dress I wasn’t even sure how to do it up; originally the outer coat closed with an inward facing busk (which was very soon replaced by hooks and eyes).

I made the outfit as a ruched skirt worn with a coat that has a fake waistcoat front. Rereading the instructions on the plate to write this blog, I’m not sure that was how it was supposed to be done, but it worked. The coat has a contrast collar which was my first experience with revere collars and a fold back at the lower edge of the front opening. I also had to learn how to make cuffs.

Most fashion plates from the era show dresses as having a more decorated train, but the pattern didn’t provide any indication or means to do that for this dress, so I left it plain.  After a couple of wears I added a hook and loop so the train could be hitched up out of the way.

 

I found it a bit difficult to work out how to do the skirt ruching from the fashion plate drawing. The pattern for the ruched layer is basically the same as the skirt pattern but twice as long.  The image only has the gathering up the front, but that wasn’t going to be strong enough for this fabric. I turned to 19th Century Fashion in Detail for inspiration.  This dress from the same era had a ruched skirt but with several lines of stitching fixing the gathering. I decided that the drawing was just a drawing and went with the method from extant example.

 

I made this outfit over a two-week holiday. My mum, who taught me to sew, was working that during that time which was actually very useful in fostering my abilities to sew independently.

The hat has a hairpin through the straw under the feathers, to affix it to a hairstyle.

I made a small decorative hat to wear with it, but didn’t have time to make the chemisette from the fashion plate. The hat is probably not very historically accurate, but it served the purpose at the last minute.

The talk I presented in this dress to my history class covered how fashion changed during the 19th Century and the technological changes the affected it. The assignment required me to speak for 15-20 minutes, but I got special dispensation to go for 40 minutes. The talk ended up being on the same day as my presentation on ‘The Tempest’ in my English class, for which I wore my Venetian dress. I took a suitcase to school that day and spent lunchtime changing gowns and redoing my hair for the different eras.

It’s possibly worth mentioning at this point, that I got ‘The Anachronistic Award’ upon graduation.

I have since given this talk again, in costume, at a local church's 'Discovery Group' which hosts educational mornings for its retired members.