Extravagance is Everything : I dearly love to laugh

A while ago I posted about my plans for new dresses for the Jane Austen Festival. I didn’t finish either of the dresses in time but I did get one of them complete enough to be wearable. I wore it to the ball sans trims and safety-pinned up the back. The open robe conveniently hid the safety pins.

photo by Steven Shaw

I don’t care for regency era fashions so, even though I had spent the year leading up to the festival looking at fashion plates and extant clothing because I wanted new dresses to wear this year, I hadn’t come across much that interested me. I eventually found a ball gown that I liked, but no dinner/evening gown.

A while ago I had read this Jane Austen/The Dark Knight pastiche and shortly after had gone on a boring bus trip where I had passed the time with the mental exercise of designing a kind of regency Joker-themed dress.

As JAFA got closer, that design kept re-occurring to me. It was an evening gown… but it was also a Ridiculous Idea(TM).

In the end no better idea occurred to me. So to justify doing something so unnecessary I then went and found a bunch of historical references for each of the design features. (If I'm going to be ridiculous I want to feel smug about it.)

Bright orange - Centraal Museum

Bright purple

Sheer undersleeve and velvet ribbon

Back lacing - Chateau de Malmaison Costume Collection

Gathered sheer at the neckline - Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

Buttoned tab at centre back - Habit Spencer worn by Queen Louise of Prussia

Front design for open robe

I couldn’t find any open robes that could represent tails so I made do with short and shaped towards the back.

Contrast lining

I didn’t bother to make sure the references were all from the same time period, so I may have, uh, introduced a little anachronism.

I like the seam shapes at the back of some regency dresses but the pattern I was using (evolved from diagram 37 in The Cut of Women’s Clothes) didn’t have them so I had to modify it. I tend to redo the bodice every time I make a regency dress but the skirt is perfect and it’s such a relief to be only adjusting the smaller pattern pieces; the skirt piece is exactly right and doesn’t even need to be trimmed to length for hemming.

The sleeves and hem of the dress are trimmed with gathered chiffon.The gathering on the hem of the skirt is topped with green velvet ribbon. I was planning to pink the edges of the chiffon – since that seems to be the historical thing to do – however my chiffon didn’t last very well pinked. It is not particularly susceptible to fraying but the threads that pull out don’t snap very easily and pose a tripping hazard. I nearly caved in and used the very non-historical method of flame-melting the edge of the fabric but I finally decided on doing a rolled hem. My last attempt at a rolled hem had been on an overlocker in a high school textiles class and it had not turned out well (the stitching refused to stay attached to the fabric and nothing rolled anywhere). But I discovered, quite by accident, that my new machine can do nice ones (albeit very visibly machine sewn).

The chiffon on the puffed sleeves I left un-edged and trimmed with green satin ribbon. At the cuffs I used the satin ribbon as a drawstring. The open robe is lined with green satin.

The neckline is trimmed with gathered chiffon - I’ve been wanting to use this technique on a dress for ages. I gathered the fabric by sewing a channel near the edge and running some green ribbon through it. I like how it looks, but I think if I did it again I would not use so much fabric. I had meant for it to still be a bit transparent and for the ribbon to be visible.

I considered several different closures for the dress. I didn’t want to use buttons because they would disturb the smoothness of the open robe. Instead I decided on spiral lacing. I did the eyelets by hand, even though I now have a sewing machine that can do them, because the hand-bound ones look nicer and don’t require cutting the fabric. The deciding factor between hand and machine for me is how easy the fabric is to sew through, and the orange fabric was on the easy end of the spectrum.

The open robe closes with hooks and eyes, which I have mixed feelings about. The tab at the back is attached with shell buttons. The buttons are mother of pearl on the other side, but that wasn’t degraded enough to be a Joker reference.