Evening dress, French, About 1893, Charles Frederick Worth, MFA Boston
Evening dress, French, About 1893, Charles Frederick Worth, MFA Boston
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Evening dress, French, About 1893, Charles Frederick Worth, MFA Boston
I think this dress is earlier, because of the asymmetrical bodice trimming and the slight sideways draping across the front of the underskirt. These features are typical in middle-class American dresses in 1890 and 1891. In addition, the scale of the repeat on the pink fabric looks more like the second half of the 1880s rather than the 1890s. The all-over mechanically repeated circular motif on the border of the underskirt is also typical of the late 1880s. By the early 1890s, long, vertical motifs are more typical in borders. Given that this is a Worth, who was setting fashions, not trailing them, the date needs to go back at least to 1889 and possibly a year earlier.