Happy Centenary Canberra

On display in the Celebrating the Centenary of Canberra section of the Canberra Show

It has been one hundred years since Canberra was named as the Capital of Australia. Publicity for this anniversary started a few years ago and I thought it would be good to make a dress from 1913 to go along with it. With the anniversary of the Titanic happening the year before, there were many resources online for this period, but I kept finding that teens-era dresses just didn’t appeal to me. So I decided to make a historically significant dress rather than a generic outfit from the era. At Canberra’s foundation ceremony the new city’s name was announced by Lady Denman, the Governor General’s wife. According to a newspaper report of the event she was wearing “a striking dress of green and white, and with a black hat trimmed with a white ostrich feather”. This would be my project.

To research Lady Denman’s dress I looked at photos held by the National Archive and some footage of the event. The footage was really useful to see how the dress moved, and I could take screenshots of the back.

It has been quite weird working on ‘Lady Denman’s’ dress. ‘Lady Denman’ is a phrase many Canberrans are familiar with – we travel on ‘Lady Denman Drive’ regularly but I previously had no idea who she actually was. Now, in my head, the term has been re-assigned from ‘street name’ to ‘historical-person-in-dress’ and I do a double take whenever I hear or see it.

I started with underpinnings. The corset is made from the pattern in Corsets and Crinolines. Though I didn’t make my corset exactly the same way, I found the 1911 corset Sew Along at Bridges on the Body to be a helpful reference point. This was the first time I’ve done flossing on a corset. It isn’t great, but it’s a start.

When researching petticoats I found it difficult to work out how many and what sort were worn during this era. To go with my outfit I made a princess line slip. It is my own design interpretation taking note of extant garments, period advertisements and other recreations. After scouring Canberra for two-edged lace I taught myself lace insertion using this excellent tutorial. It was easier than I expected and I think it looks very effective – I want to do more of it.

I used mother-of pearl buttons I inherited from my Great Aunt

To research how to construct the dress I arranged a visit to view some dresses in storage at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney.  I’m very thankful to Glynis and the Museum for their help. This was a very useful exercise as I found there were a variety of methods used at the time. I chose to use a fitted bodice under the pigeon-fronted crossover bodice and I based my skirt construction on one of the Museum’s dresses from the period which had central rectangular panels and shaped sides.

My dress is made from green satin and white lace. I couldn’t determine the shade of the satin as all the photos of Lady Denman are in black and white, so I chose a colour that was also used in one of the Powerhouse Museum’s dresses – so I know that I at least have a colour that was used at the time. Sadly, I couldn’t find any lace that had quite the same type of floral pattern as the original dress, so I tried to find a lace that was most closely reminiscent of the fabric shown in the photograph.

The sleeves and lace overskirt are edged in satin. The satin is decorated with a row of bullion stitch. This sort of broken-line edging on the hem was a common feature on the dresses of the period held by the Powerhouse Museum.

Hand-sewing the bullion stitch hem decoration

The hardest part of the dress to work out was the back. In the video there is clearly something flapping around the back of the sleeves, but it is hard to tell what. It seemed to be a loose blouson overlay in the lace fabric. Using this method produced a result that looked the same as the photographs.

This dress was a very interesting research exercise to do. Researching from extant dresses, guided by a curator’s expertise, gave me a level of detail I couldn’t have got from just photos or patterns.  Working from low detail pictures of the actual dress was a challenge - it’s difficult to replicate something when you can’t see it clearly enough to be certain how it was made.