This dress is an reproduction of an original 1827-29 wedding dress held in Gloucester Museum and studied by Janet Arnold in the Patterns of Fashion book 2. The top images show the original dress and the drawing of it by Janet Arnold in the book. My reproduction is as close to the original as it possible, being completely hand sewn and being made only from materials which were used in the original garment, including silk thread treated with beeswax and natural wool for the padding. It is being entered into the Costume Society's Janet Arnold Patterns of Fashion competition to be judged in July. The lace is hand made bobbin lace replicating the same design as the original dress, made jointly between myself and lace maker, Louise Wilson.

Costume in Hereford

As part of my Final Major Project at the University of Glamorgan I am working with the View+ project in Hereford to reconstruct an 1889 costume from an original photograph. For this project I am doing a great deal of primary research including taking pattern from original garments and taking detailed drawings of them.  I am using the collections at Hereford Museum Resource and Learning Centre as my main source. This research will be ongoing for the next few months, below are a few of the items I've looked at so far.

1) Drawing the interior of a grey and black 1883 day dress.

 2) Dawing an 1880s maroon and grey bustle dress on the stand. This dress would be worn with a bustle support underneath which would make the skirt stand out more at the back.

3) Drawing 1870s bustles

4) Taking a pattern from an 1877 bustle.

5) Taking a pattern from the skirt of the c.1880s dress drawn in photo 2.



Reconstructing historical metal embroidery

Last year I made a costume for the queen's ghost in a reimagining of The Three Little Men in the Wood by the Brothers Grimm. I designed the costume myself and it is loosely based on 16th century fashion with elements taken from the 18th century. Whilst the dress itself is not strictly historical, the stomacher was embroidered using traditional techniques. The silver which is embroidered down is actually very fine tubes formed of wire like a spring, these can either be cut as beads and sewn down with a very fine thead through the middle or stretched out into a spiral and couched down in lines. To create the three dimensional effect of the borders embroidery threads are couched down first before the tubes of silver are sewn over the top, the thread underneath push them into a nice curved shape. The sequins were known as spangles and these would have originally been made from real silver stamped out of a sheet but I had to use plastic ones.

Gorgeous French Silk Dress c.1865

This dress is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. There's very little information about it on the museums website except that it bears a lable reading 'Marguerite Robes, Paris'. Worn over a crinoline, the fabric of the skirt itself is actually very fine, so much so that when worn without a peticoat, as in some of these images, the crinoline can be seen through the cream panels. The dress has an evening bodice with a bertha and a day bodice with long sleeves as well as a net fichu.  I love how much detail there is in this dress, the amount of workmanship in it is amazing. You can view more pictures of this dress on the Met Museum's website.

Welcome

Welcome to my Emma R. Wilson historical costume blog. Here I will post any or my historical reconstruction costumes and occasionally historically inspired costumes along with little tit bits about historical costume in general and things which have inspired me.More of my general costume work can be found on my costume blog.