All posts tagged: 1910s

Harpers Bazaar 1916 evening dress fabric thedreamstress.com

A romance & roses 1916 evening dress: the under-bodice

Published by The Dreamstress

I am in the midst of madly sewing for Costume College, and madly getting another pattern ready for launch, and juggling the Indie Pattern Month sale for the Monthly Stitch, and cleaning up the mess left by the low-key cyclone (that’s a hurricane to those of you in NA) that hit last week, so it’s all go, all the time in my life. For the CoCo Gala I’m making a dress that has been on my long- time wishlist, and which is one of those garments that definitely seems like it comes with an expiration date in terms of how old I can be while still pulling it off, so it’s now or never! This uber-romantic confection, as shown in Harpers Bazaar in April 1916, is a delicious example of brief fad for 1850s/60s inspired historicism of 1916, with bell-shaped skirts, sometimes supported by hoops, and other elements lifted from mid-19th century styles.  The fashions was hugely inspired by 1915’s The Birth of a Nation, which was a smash hit in the US. For obvious …

Rate the Dress – Bright blue late Edwardian

Published by The Dreamstress

Yay!  Hooray!  Last week’s green velvet 1718 Rate the Dress was extremely popular, and I always love it when people love a dress.  The only poor-ish ratings it got (and they still weren’t that bad) were people who like a bit more embellished OTTness in their costuming, or those who just couldn’t love velvet in the middle of a heatwave! The dress swept in to the Rate the Dress royal court with a scale of 9.2 out of 10. Today’s choice for Rate the Dress has been sitting in my RtD inspiration folder for ages, but this week it seems like the perfect pick, because I finally managed to go see Wonder Woman, and, in case you haven’t heard, Wonder Woman’s bright blue WWIish evening dress has the costuming internet in a tizzy, either because they are trying to figure out if you can shove a sword down the back (answer, yes, but your dance partner is definitely going to notice that your spine is a little more rigid than usual), or are tsking over …

1917 combinations and petti-slips thedreamstress.com

Combination-a-thon, or how I came to have more wearable combinations than anyone else alive in 2017…

Published by The Dreamstress

When I was planning my wardrobe for the Fortnight in 1916 I knew I needed lots of combinations to wear under corsets: enough to have a reasonable week’s wearing before I did laundry. I was using Wearing History’s fantastic 1917  combination pattern.  Mid-1910s combinations are serious fabric hogs,  so I rummaged around in my stack of vintage sheets, and unearthed half-a-dozen of the thinnest and most seamed. On my first round of cutting I cut out three, carefully folded them all in one parcel, and set them aside for sewing. (who can guess where this is going?) The next night I cut out another 4, which would give me 8 in total (I already had a completed one): near the upper end of what my research suggested was a normal amount of first-layer undergarments for a middle class woman to have in any single season. A few days later I sat down to sew all the combinations. My first three?  Nowhere to be found!  Determined searching and re-organising failed to unearth them, so I persevered …