We owned this dress! Glad the sale pictures keep it circulating in the public long after it disappeared back into private collection. This was one of the first 20 or so pieces my mother procured for her collection, so this dress is like a family pet I had from kindergarten to college. I-touched-this dress details and ramblings about historical costume collection below the cut.
It's even more nuts in person -- the fact that the net is intact and this has whaleboning is a miracle. Normally things stored flat with sharp bits and delicate bits, they destroy each other little by little. There's no evidence of there ever being a lining material that went under the net that was later removed. The color in person is basically as shown, though itâs got more textural depth obviously. The red glows and is interestingly matte, like viscera.
It's a bit baffling who this was made for and what occasion it was made for (reception gown, tea gown, mmmmmmaybe ball gown, certainly not promenade or day gown). The petersham has a dressmaker/department tag on it (iirc it's from Pennsylvania?). The styling and color are generally perceived as for married women or demimonde, but this dress is small. There's a bias in preservation of historical garments to the smaller and fancier pieces, so it's difficult to tell if it's just that or if this was for a younger person or if the person it was created for was just unusually small at a mature age. Even as tiny as it is, the bodice is not cut for tight-lacing the corset, which would be an indication of evening wear. But people have always made different choices about how to wear corsets or supportive/aesthetic undergarments in general.
This is a lot of nonsense. But I love this dress. I love all the garments in my familyâs collection, which at its highest was around 300. Even the one I called "The Ugly Dress." Which. Early 1910s teal silk tea gown with black and pink printed floral sash, gold cord, salmon pink accents, and clashing pearly pink embroidered taffeta. And a big velvet orange rose. Beaded tassels. It was a lot. But I loved it too.
Maintaining a collection of extant historical garments is playing dolls with ghosts. You have the outfit, and the outfit in itself is the role it played in its world. Inside of it is the invisible person that caused this piece to be made, caused it to be worn or not worn, and caused it to be kept safely enough to make it to today. You look at the inside seams where it was let out at the waist, the crooked big gathering stitches because they don't show. The edges people left unfinished inside because they didn't show.
That's not always true. There were pieces that came to us with context. In particular I remember a late 1890s wedding gown of lace that came with its silk and wax and wire orange blossom crown. And a picture of the granddaughter of the original bride wearing the crown in a wedding announcement in the 50s.
But most of them are tantalizing glimpses. The immaculately hand-embroidered olive green walking suit from the 1900s, about Ÿ of the intended embroidery complete. It stopped abruptly, unsymmetrically. The waist of the bodice and skirt left raw. The whole thing lovingly saved incomplete.
Growing up, I was very much in awe of the person inside the scarlet net dress, whoever they were. Maybe more than any other person whose clothes we preserved. I think they would have loved knowing that after all this time, we still look at their dress and go, damn. What a great dress. I wonder who wore it?
