All posts tagged: 1880s

Rate the Dress: An 1887 Wedding Dress Two Ways

This week’s Rate the Dress is an extremely practical wedding ensemble, for an the bride of an extremely wealthy fabric-weavers son. How will it compare to last week’s anything-but-practical 1920s dress? Last week: a ca. 1925 playing card themed evening dress, possibly by Poiret Mixed reactions to that one. A few of you loved it. A few of you loved it because it was awesomely tacky. Some of you just saw the awkwardness (not helped by presentation, but hey, an auction house isn’t a museum photographing items for display or a book), and some of you just saw the tackiness. The Total: 7.8 out of 10 Not quite a full house… This week: A Wedding Ensemble from 1887 This wedding ensemble was worn by Louise Whitfield for her marriage to business magnate & philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie was one of the richest men in the US, and at 51 to her 30, was 21 years Whitfield’s senior. He’d refused to marry while his mother was still alive, and the wedding was held six months after …

1870s, 1880s, natural form, Victorian dress

Rate the Dress: the Mademoiselles Giroux do natural form, ca 1880

Published by The Dreamstress

There was a really fascinating range of reactions to Madame Houbigant’s all-white (excepting her vivid red shawl) 1810s ensemble last week. Some of you felt it flattered her more in the portrait than in real life, and some of you felt the combination of fashionably relaxed lounging didn’t pair with the heavy silk, and just made it look like she had poor posture, and that in real life, standing up straight, she would have looked much nicer. You were fairly universally not in favour of her extremely ruffled chemisette. All those ruffles are just one of those aspects of this era’s fashions that are hard to love with modern eyes! Madame Houbigant came in at 7 out of 10, and while not a winner in the sartorial sense, the topics of discussion that came out of the post definitely make it a winner in my books! This week’s 1880s natural form dress reminds me of last week’s, in the expanses of smooth silk, and the way it plays with proportions, only with the ruffles and …

Rate the dress: Red bow redux

Published by The Dreamstress

Last week we took a break from Rate the Dress to take a look at suffragist fashion in New Zealand. The last Rate the Dress was an embroidered 1880s dress which received two main reactions: love, because it looked like a film costume in all the right ways, and ‘nice, but somehow not exciting’. Still, it came in at 8.6 out of 10, so the fans were in the majority! I posted an 1880s House of Worth dress in pale stone with red bows 7 weeks ago, and it didn’t do particularly well. So I was fascinated when I found this 1880s dress from the MFA Boston with the same general design scheme: It’s so similar, but in cotton rather than heavy silk, with soft ruffles and scallops rather than crisp pleats, and as a day dress rather than a reception gown, the overall effect is quite different. Is it different enough to get a significantly improved (or reduced!) rating? Would you like it more or less if I hadn’t pointed out the similarities to …