All posts tagged: 1800s

Rate the dress: Embroidered mull

So. Sigismund III. Badass or just bad? Well, between the fez, the collar, the hose, and the scimitar, almost everyone said his outfit made them giggle. And yet, for all that, it made a 7.3 out of 10. Pretty good for so many giggles! This week lets go from dark and badass to light and sweet. I find Regency frocks so appealing. They are so simple and pure and youthful in their barely-adorned whiteness. Of course the problem with Regency frocks is that they are often so similar, and simple and pure and unadorned, that they don’t make for a very interesting Rate the Dress. I’ve tried to get around this by posting really unusual examples, or portraits with accessories, but sometimes you just want to show a simple dress. So here is a Regency frock from the MFA Boston that hopefully is still a classic example of Regency fashion, without being too uninteresting. This white mull cotton evening dress from the early 19th century features a gathered bodice, short puffed sleeves, a narrow …

Regency sandals

Published by The Dreamstress

A while ago someone asked me about Regency sandals. Why do we see so many in fashion plates, but so few extent pairs? Well, I suspect the ratio is quite similar to most items seen in fashion plates vs. extent items. Fashion plates (and fashion magazines today) always show the most avant -garde and extreme fashion, and few ladies ever reached that level of modish dress. In addition, contemporary sources seem to indicate that wearing sandals was rather noteworthy, and maybe just a little bit scandalous, so there probably was a lot more talking about them than actually owning and wearing them. We can see the scandalousness conotations of sandals illustrated in the famous Boilly image of a rakish Incroyable meeting his female counterpart, the Merveilleuse. In her transparent dress even the radical Incroyable mistakes her for a prostitute and offers her money, while she shows a modesty not apparent in her attire and makes the sign of a cross with her fingers to indicate her shock and virtue. While they are hard to find, …

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 …