Last week’s Rate the Dress was an extremely mauve 1860s extravaganza with gold straw embroidery.  Some things you all agreed on.  By and large, everyone was very impressed by the straw embroidery, but not everyone liked the way it worked with the mauve, or the combination of motifs in the embroidery.  Some things split you into two groups.  Generally you were either very pro-bow, or very anti-bow when it came to the evening bodice, and very pro-mauve, or anti-mauve when it came to the colour.  The trickiest thing divided you into more opinions than I could count.  Was the day bodice cut for a fuller figure, or for a fashionably shapeless silhouette? (I lean towards the former, because as a dressmaker, I don’t think you could get the shape to stay without a body’s curves under it to support it).  And, whichever you believed, was the shape a nice change, or frumpy? The shape was very tricky indeed, because it brought up the issue of body shapes, and how we talk about them.  In Rate …

Oh dear…last week’s late 1860s Rate the Dress… OK, some of you did like it!  But it came in for some harsh criticism, and some pretty bad analogies: tongues, teeth & Daleks for starts!  And even most of you who did like it liked it in spite of itself.  Kit promised to “enter therapy and bind 40 half ovals as a penance” for her high score.  I’m kind of in the same boat.  I know it was awful, and yet, I felt it could have been really effective on the right person – if it only weren’t for the mess happening at the bottom of the bodice.  I can forgive ugly (as long as it’s effective) but I can’t forgive bad construction, so my rating would only have been a 5 – lower than your average score, which was just a tiny bit below the average of 5.9 out of 10 that it came out at. I’ve kept within the same colour scheme this week: black and ivory, with just a touch of another colour. …