If last week’s patterned fabric wasn’t to your taste, never fear, there is no print to worry about this week! Or, for that matter, colour, because this week’s Rate the Dress looks at an all-white wedding dress. Last Week: a Française in chine silk Not everyone was a fan of the fabric, and the compere front didn’t win any awards, but the overall response to the française was very positive. 18th century prettiness and pattern matching are always popular! The Total: 8.7 out of 10 A definite improvement on the last few weeks.   This week:  a ca. 1880 wedding dress We don’t know the name of the bride who wore this week’s wedding dress, but we can assume she was a woman of some means (or, at least came from a wealthy family). The dress is impeccably made, beautifully fitted, very fashionable, and totally impractical. White wedding dresses had gone from fashionable, but by no means required, to practically mandatory for wealthy brides following Queen Victoria’s choice of a white wedding dress almost 50 …

This week’s Rate the Dress stays in the same general time-period as last week’s tea gown, but goes from silliness and swoosh to severity, straight lines and tailoring. Last Week: an almost-certainly-a-tea-gown in warm yellow Sometimes the ratings for a Rate the Dress are all over the place. Sometimes there are a few clear blocks of opinions and ratings. And every once in a while there is an almost unanimous agreement – or at least a substantially cohesive verdict. A few of you did really like last week’s dress. And an even smaller few (well, single, not even few) of you didn’t. But more than 2/3rds of you fell into the 6-7.5 range and thought that the dress just had too much trim, but not enough of it in some places, and would have looked much better shorn of its fringe and beading and lace. The Total: 7 out of 10 The total for last week was so obvious I didn’t need a calculator! This week:  a tailored walking dress This week’s Rate the Dress …

I had one goal choosing this week’s Rate the Dress: it had to be orange. Which is why it’s yellow. Close enough? Life right now is about accepting compromise and imperfection, and being OK with what you have. So we have yellow. Last Week: a late Victorian dress in muted pink Last week’s Rate the Dress definitely had its fan club, but it also had its naysayers. Those fell into the category of people who liked everything about the dress except the lace, or maybe the sleeve ruffles, or the category of people who liked pretty much nothing about the dress. The resulting total? The Total: 7.4 out of 10 A whole point down from last week! And very representative of all the people who liked the dress except for one or two elements. This week:  an almost-certainly-a-tea-gown in warm yellow This week’s Rate the Dress is from the Helen Larson Private Collection that was sold by Whitakers a couple of years ago. The unusual train of this dress, which spills from between the shoulder …