The Dreamstress

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An Anne of Green Gables in New Plymouth photoshoot

Last Monday was Labour Day in New Zealand, so it was a long weekend. A couple of friends and I took advantage of the day off to have a girls weekend in Taranaki, staying in the cottages on Rachel’s farm.

How do you know when you have awesome friends? When, as soon as you have agreed on a weekend away one of them says “we get to get dressed up and wear corsets and take pictures, right?”

Yes!

We decided on a 1900s Anne of Green Gables theme, as a good look to go rambling around a park for a couple of hours in. Also, it fit in well with the outfits I just finished for the Katherine Mansfield photoshoot, and my make for the Silver Screen challenge (gee, I wonder what my inspiration is…)

Still, Miss Stella & I were up till 11 the night before we headed off, taking up tucks in a skirt for the petite Miss Priscilla, sewing her blouse in under three hours, re-shaping hats, and doing hems and buttonholes on my skirt.

And then on Sunday we did a bit of sitting around the cabin, sewing on buttons, trimming hats, and eating very restrained amounts of chocolate (our girls weekend was astonishingly lacking in gluttony and terrible food choices), before donning our finery, stopping by the Inglewood train station for “Oh my, do I see Gilbert on the next train!” pictures, and rambling around the utterly gorgeous Pukekura Park for a couple of hours having an absolutely marvellous time.

Isn’t the train station absolutely perfect? There are a few of these old stations around NZ, and it’s always a delight to see them preserved and cared for, instead of destroyed (gives Ashburton a stern look). They are such an important part of NZ’s history.

Pukekura Park (which blends into Brooklands Park, and I think a lot of our photos were technically in Brooklands, which is slightly confusing) is probably one of the most beautiful city parks in NZ – and NZ is good at parks and pretty much anything nature related.

It’s almost problematic trying to take photos in such a beautiful park, because every meter had a divine new vista that was just perfect as a backdrop. So we moved at the rate of about .7 a kilometer an hour.

And it was spring, and the trees had just leafed and everything was in bloom and there were kereru and tui and fantails and basically I was in heaven.

And one final one of us together to finish:

Oh my gosh I have the best friends!

Rate the Dress: A man in stripes, spots, lattice & lace

Published by The Dreamstress

Last week I showed you a Gilbert Adrian dress with a simple silhouette and a muted photographic print of bread and milk. Alas, quite a few of you found the colours, silhouette, and print a total dud, dragging the rating down to a disappointing 6.5 out of 10.

I think the dress lost a lot in the translation of time: for us, photographic fabric prints are common, and thus uninteresting, an the use of mundane images on fabric has been done multiple times. In 1951 photographic printing on fabric was groundbreaking, and pop art was still half a decade away. While novelty print fabrics featuring food and kitchen tools were very popular, Adrian’s use of an everyday scene in muted colours turns both the novelty trope and the classical tradition of still-lifes on its head. (Obviously I thought the dress was incredibly clever, subtle and bold, both less and more in exactly the right ways. On a tall, slightly curvy woman with Hepburn-esque colouring and attitude? Oh my! It would make every other woman at the afternoon soiree in Hollywood look cliched, common, and completely un-memorable in their hyper-pretty, hyper-feminine, skin baring, colourful floral, lace and polka dot frocks.)

This week, let’s go back in history 150 years, and look at some menswear:

Waistcoat, England, Great Britain, 1795-1800, Silk, applied ribbonwork, lined and backed with cotton, © Victoria & Albert Museum, T.14-1955

This outfit from the last years of the 18th century shows the transition between the elaborate, detailed outfits of the 18th century gentleman, and the more severe, restrained styles of the early 19th century.

Waistcoat, England, Great Britain, 1795-1800, Silk, applied ribbonwork, lined and backed with cotton, © Victoria & Albert Museum, T.14-1955

The colours and patterns used in this outfit are definitely more toned down than they would have been a couple of decades earlier, but while florals (or animal prints) have given way to stripes, and cerise to mustard and mauve, there overall look is still layers of detail and combinations of shades. From the satin striped breeches, to the gold, mustard and peach jacket, with shiny, spotted buttons, to the waistcoat, patterned with a lattice of interlocking ribbon, to the lace peeking out from the cuffs and spilling down the waistcoat, and even to the swordstick, with tromp l’oeil branch effect, the whole outfit is about combining texture and pattern.

Waistcoat, England, Great Britain, 1795-1800, Silk, applied ribbonwork, lined and backed with cotton, © Victoria & Albert Museum, T.14-1955

What do you think? Do the multiple textures and tones add up to sartorial splendour?

Rate the Dress on a Scale of 1 to 10

* I was only able to find the link to the waistcoat in this ensemble on the V&A website, so if you know the link to the other pieces, please let me know!

Afternoon tea & dress ups – of course!

Published by The Dreamstress

I have been such a busy little bee social butterfly lately*! In addition to the photoshoot at the Katherine Mansfield Museum, I had a dress up high tea with friends

The dress up theme was supposed to be tea gowns, but I realised too late that my tea gown needed to be all ready for the photoshoot, so I wore the Watteau in Paradise dress and pretended it was tea gown. It was a good choice, because it meant the wonderful Sadie who gave it to me finally got to see me in it.

There is something so lovely about sitting down to the ritual of afternoon tea: trying to pick the tea trio that best coordinates with your outfit and mood, choosing your beverage (I went with blooming tea), and then working your way through all the delicacies on the tea tray.

There were finger sandwiches, savoury tarts, tiny little quiches, scones with passionflower and raspberry jam, darling little cupcakes, custard tarts, and macarons: heaven!

We were celebrating all sorts of things: birthdays and awards and PHd’s – and mostly the chance to get together. And making sure that le Comtesse finally had a proper Kiwi afternoon tea: her first in 7 years in NZ!

In addition to enjoying the food, there was lots of outfit admiring:

Sadie went with a 1920s inspired look, with a dress by NZ designer DNA, and a vintage kimono jacket:

We talked Madame O into wearing her blue sari Regency dress again (she wore it to the Bastille day masquerade ball), and I’m so glad, because I love it!

And le Comptesse got very clever and combined a robe a la francaise with a 1900s front and petticoat, playing with the idea of historicism in tea gowns. Considering all the re-makes of 18th c fashions that appeared in the 19th c, it’s quite plausible that a real 18th c robe a la francaise was re-made as a tea gown at some point.

Sadly, we failed to get a photo of all of us together, which is a real shame because we coordinated so perfectly: red, yellow, blue and green! Alas…

Still, such a lovely afternoon, and such an important thing to make time for.

* Somewhere there is a very confused insect with a stinger and pretty wings trying to figure out what happened…