All posts filed under: 19th Century

Rate the dress: ruffles, flounces, puffs & bows in the late 1860s

Published by The Dreamstress

Last week I presented the pseudo Roman ‘Julius Ceasar’ costume worn by Fritz Lieber in the 1917 version of Cleopatra.  Despite the respectable official rating of 6.8 out of 10, I think the real rating should be much, much lower, because most of you were so bored by the outfit that you couldn’t even be bothered to comment on it.  As Daniel said “Eh’. Ouch.  Sorry. I’ll try to be more interesting! This week I present a dress that I’ve been interested in for months and months, but haven’t found the right time to show you. This dress is the antithesis of anything even slightly manly that might have been going on last week.  When it comes to girly, this dress from the MFA Boston has it all: tiers of stiff, ribbon edged ruffles down the front of the skirt, a pleated flounce at the bottom, a wrapped lace and ribbon trimmed bertha with bows catching up the ruffled sleeves, a pleated sash, and three tiers of graduated poofs descending down the back of the …

Rate the Dress: Regency furbelows

Published by The Dreamstress

Last week most of you loved the Victoroco (or should that be Rococtorian?) fantasy dress.  There were some slight quibbles about the colour, and the bow on the front bodice, or the skirt draping (btw, as the grand queen of this blog I’ve decided that those of you who suggested it needed to be pulled up on both sides were  wrong.  If you did that it would make her look too much like a porcelain shepherdess, and the fantasy would become cliche and would be utterly ruined), but the dress managed a very impressive 9.5 out of 10. For all its popularity, Andreotti’s painting left me with a bit of a dilemma.  Where do you go from a rate the dress that included both the 18th and 19th centuries, and that had so many colours and details in it? How about a compromise?  Regency – halfway between the dates.  Something with lots of colours and details, but with all the details agains a simple backdrop. So I present this unknown woman.  She’s got a lot …

Friday (don’t) Reads: My Theodosia

Published by The Dreamstress

I’ve already mentioned my inclination to pick up old books at op shops just because they have pretty covers, and interesting titles.  Sometimes it pays off, and sometimes…it doesn’t. Alas, this week’s review, My Theodosia by Anya Seton, is the latter. It looked like a promising book.  It’s about the mysteriously tragic Theodosia Burr Alston, who was the only child of the fascinating and controversial Aaron Burr. Now, if you aren’t American, you’ve probably never heard of Aaron Burr, and if you are, you probably remember some school lesson about a duel where he cowardly murdered Alexander Hamilton, making himself one of the most loathed figures in early American history. The truth, as always, is far more complicated.  What we don’t generally recall from the school lesson is that Burr was Vice President of the US under Thomas Jefferson, and that he is credited with instituting the modern American presidential campaigning system.  I’m not sure that fact is to his credit, and neither are the (possibly completely unfounded and spurious) charges that he attempted to …