Thank goodness for Rate the Dress!  It means that I have a definite excuse to focus entirely on historical fashions  at least once a week! We were having such a good run on Rate the Dress: so many 8+ ratings in a row!  And then I posted the pink, pigeon breasted, ruffle-dy, smock-dy, totally over-the-top 1900s frock-dy last week.  Pop!  There went the high ratings bubble!  It wasn’t too terrible: there were a lot of 6s, and just enough 8s and 9s to bring it up to a nice, round 7 out of 10. For this week’s Rate the Dress, we’re looking at a period I’m not such an expert on, and going back to the mid 16th century, to a ‘Portrait of a Lady’ by Peter de Kempeneer (Pedro Campaña).  Though de Kempeneer was Flemish, he mainly worked in Spain or Italy, and this portrait probably depicts a wealthy Italian noblewoman from Ferrara The sitters gown makes striking use of gold striping to emphasise the cut of the gown, and the fashionable features.  The …

Last week I showed you an embroidered ensemble said to have belonged to Madame Élisabeth, sister to  Louis XVI.  There must be some magic in being a princess, because the full first 10 scores were perfect scores, and the frock managed an incredibly impressive 9.4 out of 10 (which is practically a perfect score these days), though some of you did make it hard for me by giving it multiple scores. Personally I wanted to love the outfit, but every time I looked at it my eye tried to tweak the motifs  and rearrange the embroidery ever so slightly, and if it isn’t perfect as it is, I really can’t give it a perfect score, so it was really only an 8.5 out of 10 from me. This week we’re downgrading from a well known princess to an unknown noblewoman, with this portrait of a wealthy Florentine woman (presumably a noblewoman) of the 1540s, possibly by Bronzino. Mid-16th century Florentine fashion can be much the same, but this woman has chosen a dress with just …