Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Upcoming project: Striped 1780's dress

I'm finally about to start to make a new dress. This is a gown of which I've been dreaming of since I saw a picture of a striped 1780's robe à l'anglaise in the book Fashioning fashion a few months ago. There's only a back view photo of the dress (below) in the book if I remember correctly. I tried to find the dress in LACMA digital collection but it wasn't there. Later on, I saw some pictures of the said dress on a flickr set of Fashioning Fashion exhibit and thought I'd love to sew the dress for myself because I'm absolutely crazy about stripes and purple is one of my favorite colours.

Picture via Fashion is Poison blog.
The dress instantly made me think of another very similar anglaise gown on MET.


Unfortunately I couldn't start making the dress as soon as I would have wanted to because it took me a couple of months to find the fabric. I knew I probably wouldn't find white and purple striped silk fabric but luckily I did find the fabric in cotton! It looks almost blue when photographed but it's actually purple. Here's a sketch of my version of this type of dress. I'm not yet sure whether I'll add ruffles to the petticoat like in the Met dress. I'll have to see about it later on. Changes in the design are very probable anyway.


At the moment I'm making a humongous bumpad to be worn under the petticoat because I realized my earlier bumpad was much too small. I'll post photos of the progress on the dress as I get there.

Pattern for robe à l'anglaise (1787) found via the Costumer's Manifesto. 
By the way, I started a facebook site for Rococo Atelier so that I can share interesting links with you. I'll also post links to my recent blog posts there so you can follow the blog more easily if you don't have a blogger account. Like Rococo Atelier here. 

5 comments:

  1. Lovely! I look forward to see the result.

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  2. I love that you're reproducing this! :D

    I took some photos of that dress when it was on exhibit at LACMA, you can find my flickr set of the exhibit here:
    http://www.flickr.com/photos/bauhausfrau/sets/72157625405422571/

    and a front pic of the dress here:
    http://www.flickr.com/photos/bauhausfrau/5370776552/in/set-72157625405422571

    You are welcome to use my images in your blog, I only ask that you give me photo credit. :)

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    Replies
    1. That's very kind of you! Thank you so much! :) I'll definitely remember to credit you if I use any of your photos. :)

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  3. Not sure if you ever made this, but the exhibition Fashioning Fashion is currently traveling. I saw it when it was at LACMA and it was just recently at the Deutsches Historiches Museen in Berlin and they made posters of this dress and a magazine to accompany the exhibition. I grabbed one while I was in Berlin last summer. I think it has traveled to another city now. The poster is of this photo (or one very similar) and its just great! :)

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