All posts tagged: 19th Century

Rate the wedding dress: 1890s

Last week the first half dozen of you to rate Heather’s dress were madly in love with it. I thought we might have a perfect score! And then the dissenters arrived. One of you even flat out hated the design, colour, and cut. And a few more of you didn’t hate it, but thought it was blah, and that the bodice cut was frumpy. So balancing out those who loved, loved, loved it, those of you who were blah about it, and the one who hated it, the lavender outfit rated a solid 8. I guess most of you did like it! This week, it’s wedding dress week, so what do I have for you to rate? A wedding dress of course! This dress dates to the 1890s, a period by which most of the traditions that we have about wedding dresses had already ingrained themselves in the cultural psyche. Brides wore white, with veils, and carried roses for love, orange blossoms for purity, and myrtle for domestic bliss. Some things were very different from …

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

Published by The Dreamstress

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 …

The Museo de la Moda Costume Book

Published by The Dreamstress

I am so, so excited about what I get to show you this week. It’s something I have coveted for a long, long time, and didn’t think I would ever be able to get. It is the catalogue from the Museo de la Moda‘s first exhibition: You might not have heard of the Museo de la Moda, or the catalogue. And that wouldn’t be surprising, because it is a new museum, with very little web presence, located in Santiago, Chile – not usually the centre of costume fabulosity. But it has a fabulous collection, and a fabulous catalogue. Neither of which is available in any form except for in Santiago. Gah! I’ve been so obsessed with the catalogue that the minute the fabulous Claire of Well, I used to be a Lady mentioned that she was going to South America, I asked if she was going to Santiago. And she replied that she had a stopover of a few hours. And I very cheekily asked if she would take a taxi out to the Museo …