15-year-old Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, was married to 14-year-old François, Dauphin of France, in April 1558. The wedding celebrations for the future French king and queen were magnificent, and a report of the grand ceremony and festivities was published one week later. So what does it tell us about Mary’s dress? [She] was dressed [more...]
White wedding dresses were popular in fashionable circles by the mid-19th century, even though many brides still chose other colours. The idea of a once-in-a-lifetime wedding dress was more flexible than today, and wearing white was quite a new fashion. Victorian dresses that look very “bridal” to us now were almost the same as evening [more...]
They may seem horrible to us, but feather fans with a cute dead hummingbird were a Victorian fashion for more than twenty years. Stuffed and wired into shape, the bird was posed stylishly, sometimes along with feather flowers or even insects. The fans weren’t the folding type, but the kind that was sometimes called a [more...]
Bustles were undergarments for dresses designed to swell out dramatically at the back of the skirt, in the fashion of the 1870s and 1880s. Dressmakers had various ways of providing hidden support for these curves. Bustles generally depended on cushioning, or a frame, or some combination: padding held in shape with wires, or a frame [more...]
Planning a wedding dress for a period drama is not just a question of research plus design flair. It’s true the dress must look authentic for that particular era as well as suiting the actress, her character, and the overall mood and setting. Yet at the same time, the designer has to think about the [more...]
In the late 1600s shawl was not yet an English word, though it was beginning to turn up in travellers’ descriptions of clothing they had seen in southern Asia. In the 1700s fine cashmere shawls from Kashmir and India arrived in Western Europe. At first they were not treated as clothing, but used to ornament [more...]