I shared a snippet of this fashion spread from the August 1916 issue of The Designer Magazine on Instagram, and thought you might enjoy seeing the full spread.
The Designer was the magazine issued to market Standard Patterns. It had colour and black and white fashion spreads, advertisements, articles on current events, home advice, and an agony aunt. Just about everything!
There is something for everyone in these spreads: shirtwaist and skirt combinations, full dresses, dresses in two parts. There are more streamlined numbers for the sophisticated girl; frothy, delicate numbers for the lady who likes her frills:
This week’s Rate the Dress turns from bold primary hues on black, to soft pastels overlaid with sheer black organza, and from sleek ’20s, to frothy Edwardian.
The beaded and embroidered Patou number got a range of reactions. Some of you absolutely loved it, and others thought the beading wasn’t quite resolved. One of you docked points for the moustache belt, which I am confused by. How on earth is a moustache belt a bad thing?
I was intrigued by the number of commenters who felt that some 20s dresses ‘wear heavy’, and that this was one of them.
The Total: 8.2 out of 10
A full point lower than the week before! We’re slipping!
This week: An Edwardian Evening Dress
This dress (despite its weird pin-head) has been on my Rate the Dress list for some time, and this week seemed like the perfect time to showcase it.
European dressmakers seem to get all the glory when it comes to Victorian & Edwardian fashion – but they did have rivals. The late 19th century saw the rise of a number of extremely talented American dressmakers, including Mrs C Donovan. Unlike their European counterparts, notable American dress designers were predominantly female. While they never achieved the cachet of Worth & Pingat, the top levels of American design houses made creations for wealthy Americans who also patronised the European houses. Some of their creations show workmanship and design details that easily match the more famous European houses.
Whether Mrs C Dovovan achieved that level is for you to decide, but certainly this dress, with its scrollwork cut-outs at hem and bodice, shows an astonishing level of detail and workmanship.
Can you see a society hostess reigning over her soiree in this?
Rate the Dress on a Scale of 1 to 10
(as usual, nothing more complicated than a .5. I also hugely appreciate it if you only do one rating, and set it on a line at the very end of your comment, so I can find it! Thanks in advance!)
My reproduction swimsuit was made from worsted wool serge, and consists of a jumpsuit with attached bloomers, and an overskirt. Both garments button down the front.
I chose to swim with bare legs and feet. While fashion plates generally show shoes and stockings there are enough period photographs that show wading women with swimsuits and bare lower limbs to make this equally plausible for a full swim.
For the first swim I jumped off a little dock at Hataitai/Evan’s Bay beach. It’s a popular swimming spot (as evinced by all the kids watching me), and very calm and safe, so a good place to try out the swimsuit.
My first mini swim showed:
It’s definitely possible to swim in a worsted wool Edwardian swimsuit
The swimsuit does seem to provide some additional insulation compared to a conventional modern swimsuit.
The suit does hold a reasonable amount of water, but it dried off surprisingly quickly.
Scarves do not stay on.
I would NOT want to do this in a woollen swimsuit (read about the difference between worsted and woollen fabrics here). Woollen wool would hold so much more water, which might not be an issue when in the water, but would make it much harder to get in and out of the water, particularly climbing a ladder, as I did.
I should note that I’m not a particularly good swimmer. I never took lessons: just learned by whatever sort of osmosis growing up in Hawaii does for your swimming skills. My friends who are very good swimmers have cheerfully gone into great detail about how bad my form is. If you’re ever caught in a riptide you’d better hope there is someone other than me on the beach!
After the first mini swim, I tried a longer one: jumping off the dock, and swimming around the curve of the coast to the little sandy beach. It’s a distance of a bit over 100m (very rough guess).
The longer swim I gave me a better idea of how my Edwardian swimsuit, with its bloomers and skirt, fared.
Thoughts on the longer swim:
Over the course of the swim I definitely felt the additional drag caused by all the extra fabric. I wasn’t nearly as streamlined as I would be in a modern suit, and swimming took more effort.
I also felt the constriction caused by the sleeves around my arms: it was harder to take a proper stroke.
The swimsuit definitely provided a little extra insulation. Very nice in the brisk Wellington water.
Would the extra effort and fatigue caused by the swimsuit mean I’m burning more calories in less time?
The swimsuit seemed to shrink or bind slightly at the waist as I swam (perhaps from all the water being held in the wool), and it chafed at the waistband. I’ve since washed and dried it, and tried it on again, and it doesn’t seem to have shrunk: the tighter feeling is only when wet.
Many thanks to my wonderful friend ‘Priscilla’ for taking the video and the photos (you can hear her commentary in the background), and for Mr D, who entertained Priscilla’s baby & 5 year old while we took these. (No thanks to the baby who cried when I tried to hold her, and then delightedly let Mr D hold her for a whole hour, and then cried when she had to leave him. It’s been two weeks and he’s still bragging about that…)
It’s been two weeks and he’s still bragging about that…)