With the Christmas holidays just around the corner, this dress from the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art seems particularly appropriate to share.
It's also a rare pleasure to see a dress like this in person. Several years ago, it was on display as part of the Masterworks: Unpacking Fashion exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of art, and it made everyone who entered the gallery smile. The detailed embellishments - poufs, red silk stuffed cording, and polychrome wool embroidery - add wonderful color and dimension to an otherwise plain white dress. (My friend, writer, and fellow-history-nerd Loretta Chase and I also marveled at how the wearer managed to keep a snow-white dinner dress so perfectly clean, without a single spot of gravy or spilled claret-cup - though that may be revealing more about us at Christmas parties than the unknown wearer.)
Holiday-themed clothing was rare in the past. No one in the 18thc was wearing a t-shirt with a dancing Santa print or an ugly Christmas sweater in the month of December. Clothing was too costly and too valued to be reserved for a single special occasion or holiday. Even brides of the past were expected to rewear their wedding dresses; the dresses would become their “best.”. Yet with its festive holly and red trim, this dress was clearly made for the winter holiday season, and it’s impossible to imagine it being worn at any other time of the year.
The museum's exhibition information is worth repeating:
"Fashionable British dress from the early decades of the nineteenth century reveals a fascination with historical styles. Drawing inspiration from literature, theater costumes and history paintings of medieval and Renaissance subjects, dressmakers incorporated stylistic details from twelfth-through seventeenth-century dress into contemporary fashions. The decoratively slashed sleeves of the sixteenth century, through which linen undershirts were loosely drawn, inspired puffed trimmings such as the bouillons of fine white lawn that encircle the hem of this 1820s dress. Historicized elements such as these reflect a nostalgia for Britain's past, evoking romantic notions of the chivalry or patriotism of earlier eras. The wool crewel-embroidered holly boughs at the hem indicate that the dress was worn in winter, when the plant's berries and foliage provided welcome color and featured prominently in Christmas decorations."
Above: Dinner Dress, maker unknown, British, 1824-26. White cotton lawn embroidered with holly motifs in red and green wool, trimmed with red silk taffeta. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photographs ©2016 Susan Holloway Scott.
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