1780's striped robe à l'anglaise at Kuninkaan päivä

This post is mostly about photos of the gown because I already explained the construction and other detailed stuff about it in the earlier post. For once I got some pretty nice photos of the outfit from the day, which was really great because usually I end up having only a couple of blurry photos as I get back home from events and I really don't feel like posting those on the blog.

Photo: Mika Seidler

The next few shots were taken during the 18th century fashion show...

Photo: Teemu Laukkarinen

You can see the front quite well in the picture below. The zone front with tabs was inspired by the striped robe à l'anglaise at Met.

Photo: Teemu Laukkarinen

I didn't wear many accessories with the gown. I really wanted to have a red ribbon round my neck but unfortunately I left it at home or lost it at the dressing room, which wouldn't be a surprise as the dressing room was so full of everyone's costume parts and other things.

I was moving so some parts are a bit blurry...

Photo: Mika Seidler

I definitely should have had a huge and poofy neckerchief to complete the pigeon profile but I'll make one some other time. I'm thinking about something with ruffles like the neckerchief on the Met gown...

Photo: Teemu Laukkarinen

After the show...

Photo: Mika Seidler

Then I went out for a short stroll because it got really hot inside after the show. Thanks to Mika Seidler I also got some photos of the dress outdoors. First off, here are a couple of shots I took from outdoors. The only decent photos I got from the event anyway... Below, musketeers with mamaselli Tirpukka (from Tirbuck) and Gouvernante Astrid (from Pohjan sodasta Suomen sotaan - elämää 1700-luvulla) wearing an early 18th century mantua with fontange headdress.

Katariina Augustintytär (from Before the Automobile), wearing her beautiful riding habit. It was so nice to meet her again. 

And then, some more shots of my striped robe à l'anglaise...

The huge bum pad gives the dress a very nice swayback profile at the back.

The hem is trailing...

The hedgehog hairstyle is all my own hair. Credits to baroness von Mannheim (from Couture Mayah) who made my hair look good and thanks to her I also learned how to do this hairdo on my own.

For the evening I wore the dress with white petticoat with small stripes, added a few feathers to my hair and tied a belt with buckle round my waist. As you can see, the attempt to lift the train with strings failed because the hem is so long. However, I'll fix that with a third string and loop.

Photo: Jarno Manninen

Final thoughts:

Overall, I'm happy with this dress and it has to be my favorite from my own gowns so far. However, looking back at the photos of the original gown I realize there are many differences between the original(s) and my dress. The differences don't bother me but I'd still like to point some of them out. Firstly, the stripes of the original dress are probably a couple of millimeters wider than the stripes of my dress which are about 1 cm wide.

Photo by Rebecca Thelin, via Flickr.

The purple stripe color is definitely of different shade. The purple of the museum dress seems more reddish than the stripe color of my gown which is a purple much more towards blue. It's really hard to tell what kind of purple the original is because it's quite different in different photos I've seen of it. When it comes to colors of photos, so much depends on several things, such as the lighting of the surroundings. And I assume some of the photos are probably edited - for example, take this photo and compare with this.

Photo by Loren Dearborn, via Flickr.

Also, the back side of my dress is quite different from the original. Firstly, the stripes form a slightly different pattern. In order to imitate the pattern of the original I probably should have draped the gown. However, I don't have a dress dummy so I couldn't do that. Secondly, I now realize the curve of the waistline at the back of the dress is much more radical in the original dress, whereas my dress has a more smooth line there. Also, the pleats at the waist are probably even tinier than the pleats of my gown.

Photo via Flickr.

There are probably a lot more differences but I'm not so keen on listing everything here. These were just the obvious ones. Again, I'm not so bothered by them anyway. :) What I'm still slightly bothered about is that the dress doesn't fit perfectly next to the armscye at the backside. It still wrinkles for a bit even if I tried to alter the fit during the mock-up fitting and bodice fitting. I suppose there's still some extra space at the armscye and that I'll have to pinch in a little at the armscye where the wrinkles appear before I make a new dress with the pattern. Or lower the armscye for a bit. Or do both. You'll hear more about it some time in the future. Until then...

Sources:

Fashioning Fashion, European fashion in detail, 1700-1915 by Sharon Takeda, Kay Spilker and Kimberly Chrisman-Cambell
Fashioning Fashion exhibit video
Fashioning Fashion exhibit virtual panorama
Fashioning Fashion exhibit photos by Loren Dearborn
Fashioning Fashion exhibit photos by Rebecca Thelin
Robe à l'anglaise (LACMA) photo I from Fashion is poison blog

Robe à l'anglaise (LACMA) photo II from Romancing the Tome blog

Robe à l'anglaise (1787) pattern via Costumer's Manifesto 

Robe à l'anglaise (1785-87) from MET digital collections

Other striped gowns:

A lady's open robe of silk taffeta from Christie's

Open robe from National Museums Northern Ireland

Thanks to everyone who allowed me to post their photos on the blog! I'm ever so grateful! :) Special thanks to Maria Nordback for arranging the Kuninkaan päivä event and to baron and baroness von Mannheim for hosting me during the weekend.