All posts tagged: 1840s

Queen Victoria’s wedding dress: the one that started it all

When the question “Why do brides wear white” is asked, the most frequent answer is “Because Queen Victoria did”, or “to show that they are virgins.” The first answer is more or less accurate, but glosses over centuries of white wedding dresses worn before Queen Victoria’s wedding, and decades of coloured wedding dresses after her wedding, and also doesn’t explain why Victoria wore a white wedding dress. The 2nd answer is mostly rubbish and dates to the mid-20th century. Long before Victoria, white was a popular choice for wedding dresses, at least among the wealthy nobility. Weddings were usually more about political alliances and transfers of wealth than they were about romance, and so the wedding dress was just another excuse to show the wealth and culture of the brides family. Wealth could be demonstrated with jewelry (brides in some parts of Renaissance Italy, for example, wore their dowry sewn onto their dress as jewels), but textiles were also an important means to display wealth, and the more elaborate the weave of the fabric, and …

1840s stays

Published by The Dreamstress

Hana-Marmota asked to see 1840s corsets (or stays, as they were still called by all but the most genteel), so here are some I have found. It’s not quite the hundreds I mentioned, but that would make for a very long post! 1840s corsets/stays (see this post for more information on the history of the terms and what to call what when) are probably relatively hard to find in museum collections because the 1840s was a period of transition in styles in corsets. Many corsets that were made or worn in the 1840s are probably identified as earlier, if they follow earlier fashions and techniques, or slightly later, if they use just-introduced cuts and materials. The style of corsets that would have been on its way out in the 1840s is based on the so-called ‘longline’ corsets of the 1810s and 20s, with a solid front busk, bust gussets, hip gussets or princess seams (well, what we would come to call princess seams) and shoulder straps. The waist suppression for these corsets is fairly minimal, …

Rate the Dress – Rose Atherton’s 1845 fantasty

Published by The Dreamstress

Last week Wallis Simpson’s Yves Saint Laurent frock showed us that while the question of whether you can ever be too rich or too thin is still up for debate, having too many bows will drop your score in ‘Rate the Dress’. The dress just missed out on a 7 out of 10 – coming in at 6.94 out of 10. I wonder if knowing that Wallis wore the dress coloured it in your mind, so this week, we look at a frock that doesn’t belong to a particular person. Rose Atherton isn’t a woman – it’s a song about a woman. In 1845 the songsheet was illustrated by a most interesting sketch of artist A. Newsam’s idea of a ‘Rose Atherton’. Newman depicts his Rose in a simple dark skirt, and an off-the-shoulder military inspired bodice and an off-the-head straw hat. You can see a larger, mirror image, of the same drawing here. I find the mix of mid-Victorian fashion and fantasy fascinating. But attractive? That part is up to you to decide. Rate …