The Dreamstress

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Rate the Dress: Regency evening madness

Last week I showed you a ca. 1910 evening dress in pale gold and ocean blue, with a fringed floral lei around the bodice. Your reactions were all over the place: love, hate, meh, so un-moved you couldn’t think of anything to say, likes with caveats – everything! And you liked and disliked totally different bits from person to person! A very interesting reaction – I’d love to have been in the room when it was first worn, to see what everyone thought of it then! As it was, more liked than didn’t, so it rated an impressive round 8 out of 10. It’s just hard to find a 1910s evening dress you don’t like!

This week I’m sticking with the theme of rather mad evening wear, but going back in time almost exactly a century. This 1809 Regency fashion plate for Evening Full Dress is full of quirky details: the horizontal bodice trim, the double layered sleeves. The van-dyked peplum, and mirrored van-dyking with tassels on the skirt. All accessorised with impressive ostrich feather hair plumes in a tiara, large earrings and a statement necklace, upper-arm bracelets, and the requisite long gloves and fan.

Full evening dress, June 1809, La Belle Assemblee

What do you think? Just quirky enough to be fabulous and interesting, or totally mad, and more suited to a costume ball than a dress ball?

Rate the Dress on a Scale of 1 to 10.

Henrietta Maria in Paradise

Published by The Dreamstress

Mr D and I are taking a long overdue and much deserved holiday someplace warm and exotic (Mr D is of the firm belief that it doesn’t count as a holiday unless it’s warm) where the beach is wonderful and the hammocks are inviting, but where internet is erratic and expensive. So I apologise for the lack of postings.

I didn’t even have time to get any posts together to auto-publish beforehand, as I’ve been so frantically busy for the last few months. Getting ready for the trip involved carefully arranging all my teaching, and planning class schedules for as soon as I come back, taking all my university marking with me to do on planes and in airports, and getting a ton of sewing done, or prepped to do by hand on the trip.

One of the funner bits of sewing I did was for the trip (nothing like sewing for the tropics to make you love your sewing): a version of the Henrietta Maria dress to wear over swimsuits as a beach cover in a silk cotton voile.

I picked up the voile for $5 a metre at a Fabric Warehouse pop up sale last year, and finally got around to sewing it, just before the FW did their next pop up sale!

I love the dye pattern on the silk, and as I was figuring out the layout, I realised I could subvert the normal rules of where you lay patterning, and instead make the darker blue areas fall like a bikini on me, which seemed appropriate for a beach dress.

The benefit to the layout is that I’ve realised I can wear normal underclothes under it, and they don’t show through, so it’s more versatile. And in summer in Wellington I’ll probably still be wearing a cami and tap pants under any dress anyway, so my modesty will be well preserved.

The wonderful benefit to a holiday is guaranteed stunning photo ops. Mr D helpfully trailed around the resort after me, taking photographs as I bounced in and out of hammocks and up and down stairs and down to the beach. And the photos turned out very well (or at least I think so), so I’ll just let the rest of them speak for themselves.

Rate the dress: girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes

Published by The Dreamstress

This week’s Rate the Dress is going to be slightly truncated, because I’m away on a long overdue holiday, and (as per usual) I had a million things to do in the run-up to leaving, and didn’t get everything sorted. And I have very limited internet while away.

So no add-up of last week’s Rate the Dress for now.

This week, I’m showing you a dress that takes a romantic classic: white dresses with blue sashes, and gives it a twist in white & ecru, with a bright ocean blue sash, and fringed neck ornamentation that reminds me of a flower lei. The sea and sand colours and garland of flowers seems quite appropriate given my holiday (can’t tell you where yet, but there are going to be lots of exciting photos to show you!)!

Evening dress, ca. 1910, via Kerry Taylor Auctions

The beaded fringe amuses me, because it’s such a (mostly misplaced) cliche of ’20s fashion, but here we see it a decade earlier. What do you think? Would it sway and sparkle and add a bit of difference to gown? Or is it just a bit ridiculous?

Rate the Dress on a Scale of 1 to 10