All posts tagged: 1820s

Rate the Dress: Subtle stripes and purple pops in the 1820s

Last week’s 1920s fashion plate got some interesting reactions that divided into three distinct categories: Oooh!, Meh and Blech. Balanced out, the resulting rating was 6 out of 10 – just above Meh, and not a rating that anyone gave the dress! To my surprise, many of you liked the orange dress better than the blue and green one – I should have done a Dress Off! This fortnight’s theme in the HSF is ‘Re-do’, which leaves the field wide open for me to pick Rate the Dress garments to go along with it. I’ve been feeling like it was time to post something 1820s for a while now (not sure why, it just felt like the right thing to do), and since Stripes is one of the HSF themes I’ll be ‘re-doing’ over the next fortnight, a striped 1820s frock it is: In addition to the fascinating use of stripes (and is that fabric a very simple warp-printed taffeta? I think so!), this dress attracted me because of its under-sleeves of gauzy wool in …

Rate the Dress: Sunny yellow Romance

Published by The Dreamstress

Last week some of you though the ’50s coat dress was awesome, and some of you thought it an awful, impractical mish-mash, giving it a score of 8 out of 10. It was an interesting exercise in knowledge altering perception, as before we knew what the dress was people marked it down for being in an incongruous wool fabric (it was a silk) or for having decorative buttons (they were functional). If I had been able to post all the information about the dress, and all the images of it from the get-go would you have liked it more, or less? The thing that was undeniable awesome is that Daniel managed to identify the dress as a Lacesse creation from 1955. Yay! Thank you Daniel! I’ve been looking over the last few Rate the Dresses and have noticed a real dearth of colour. Colour is fabulous, so that must be remedied. It’s a pretty well known fact that the colour I am currently obsessed with is yellow. Well, this dress is really yellow. It also …

Rate the dress: Regency to Romantic era plum pudding

Published by The Dreamstress

Last week’s 1750s lollie dress wasn’t quite as much to your taste as the week’s before, mostly because of the lace capelet, but you still thought it a quite yummy 8 out of 10. This week I’m sticking with the food theme. In celebration of the Northern Hemisphere winter, and of the holidays, how about a warm wool evening gown in colours that remind me of a plum pudding? This late Regency-early Romance era plum pink wool with gold satin trimmings evening frock is from the MFA Boston. What do you think? Good enough to eat? Does it take the cake? Does the plum pink and gold palette please your palate? Is the blend of simplicity with a few elaborate trimmings divinely delicious or an odd mix of flavours? (OK, I’ll stop now!) Rate the Dress on a Scale of 1 to 10.