The Bowes Museum Blog

1829

Before lockdown the Textile Conservation department at The Bowes Museum was working on The Tullie House fashion project, which includes several wedding dresses.. These dresses are so interesting as they span a hundred years from 1820 to 1920 and are so different from what I’m sure a lot of us have in our heads when it comes to wedding dresses.

If you are anything like me (an overly sappy woman addicted to rom coms) you’ll have seen countless videos on the internet exploring ‘100 years of wedding dresses’, showing you a parade of white dresses in the most popular style for each decade. Perhaps you watch The Crown or Downton Abbey and love the big over the top ceremonies with the lavish cakes and centerpieces to the ever so slightly modern feeling wedding gowns.

However, hardly any of these dresses are actually from the time period they represent; wedding dresses from TV shows are designed to appeal to the modern day audiences who will be watching. Even if the dresses are accurate to the time they portray, the hair, makeup and accessories tend to be anything but. Real wedding dresses of the time also aren’t restricted by the need to fit every trend from the past decade. The dresses we work with leave room for the woman’s own personality to shine through.

Our first dress takes us back 200 years to 1820. King George had just been crowned and this was the first year to have a labour party on the ballot. Although this dress was made two hundred years ago there are a lot of similarities between what we see before us and the modern wedding dress; there are lace details, the dress is white and it is a full length gown. These are all aspects which fit in with the most popular styles of wedding dresses to this day. The lace in this dress comes from Ayrshire in Scotland and the lace inserts are called Ayrshire lace. The lace design creates flower and leaf patterns which are very popular in wedding dresses. I would say the place this dress differs most from modern dresses is in the sleeves; the full leg of mutton sleeves are very uncommon in modern dresses but they were very fashionable at the time. The fabric of the dress is very thin and there would have been an underdress worn with this gown. It was a trend at the time to mirror the look of a house coat, or as we might call it a dressing gown, with evening wear. Ladies would design elaborate housecoats to wear when guests were coming over to seem as though they had just slipped something on quickly; although this dress is a wedding dress so it is obviously much more elaborate than a housecoat, there are some design crossovers which can be seen with the dress and the housecoat image below.

1840

In 1840 a royal wedding wowed the nation and influenced wedding dress style so much it created a tradition. Although now it is almost a given that women wear white on their wedding day, this tradition started with Queen Victoria’s influential wedding dress in 1840. She was reportedly so excited about her white dress she made sure none of the guests would be wearing white so as not to distract from her.  Now it is so commonplace that 82% of brides wear it and even if you choose not to wear it, almost everyone has heard of the tradition.

Orange blossom also became a common floral element for weddings, again popularised by Queen Victoria. Before this, wedding dresses were not traditionally white and were not worn only for the wedding to be packed away.  These dresses were kept and reworn for other formal occasions. Popular colours included blue due to the connection with The Virgin Mary, black was also a traditional colour in Spain but dresses came in many different colours and styles.

1840

One brilliant example of alterations in wedding dresses is this 1856 Crinoline wedding dress from the Tullie House fashion gallery. The dress is an unusual fawn and chocolate colour with a silver and brown fringe and because of how complicated crinoline dresses were, they were often made in two separate pieces.

This dress had been altered for pregnancy which caused the skirt to splay out even more than it did before. It was a hard decision when mounting this dress on how best it would be displayed, the skirt had been edited but the blouse accompanying it had not, which caused some ethical issues. My fellow ICON intern, Charlotte Cameron, was in charge of mounting this and ultimately decided that the skirt could be pinned in such a way as to make it appear the way it would have been before alterations were carried out, so it could be displayed with the blouse. This won’t cause any permanent changes to the skirt so if anyone wanted to swap the way it is displayed in the future they would be able to. If you would like to read up further about the work Charlotte did on this dress she has written her own blog post on costume mounting for the Tullie House project.

1870

The next dress from the Tullie House collection is this Fawn Wedding dress from 1870. It has an unusual brown/green colour with brown trim and round brown buttons. In the 1870’s the waist of most dresses moved back down from under the bust to mirror the natural waist.  Unfortunately because of lockdown we only have photos of the top of this dress on a mannequin. The skirt for this dress is the most remarkable part of it as it has a full bustle in the back. Bustles came into fashion in the 1870’s with a more natural shape than the crinoline of the 1850’s. Later in the 1880’s the bustle came into fashion again in a more exaggerated fashion. In these dresses the back of the skirt juts out, almost creating a flat surface. 

1900

By the turn of the century, the Industrial Revolution made it possible for more brides to buy a new dress for their wedding day. This made the wedding dress more likely to be a one time look rather than something which would be kept and reworn. Thanks in part to Queen Victoria, more elaborate purpose made white dresses began appearing even in peoples’ wardrobes. In the early 1900’s, dress styles with a narrow waist, achieved by using a corset and puffed sleeves were popular. Details like frills, high collars and long trains were also seen in this timeframe because thanks to machinery, complex fabrics such as lace were much quicker and cheaper to produce.

1920

This silver lamé wedding dress is from the 1920’s. The fabric along with it’s long train makes a very heavy dress which usually takes 3 people to move around the studio. Upon first inspection it comes off as rather outlandish and unusual but it actually encapsulates quite a few different trends of wedding dresses in the 1920’s. The silver colour was a style which was extremely popular, although very expensive, as the only way to make this fabric back then was by weaving actual silver into the dress. This trend for silver and metallics at weddings lasted into the 1930’s. Another quite surprising style inspiration in the 1920’s was medieval costume; braided rope waist ties and celtic knot designs sprang up on a lot of evening wear, so the medieval box cut of the neckline or the rope tie isn’t as out of place as it may first seem. The stand out piece of the bow design made from pearls embroidered on to the train is also a 1920’s statement, as graphic designs like bows were often sewn into evening wear by embroidering beads or sequins. The 1920’s was about busting out of that prim Edwardian framework for women and being sparkly, shiny and the centre of attention. The clothes were looser and less restrictive than the previous generations of corsets, and women were allowed to care more about their appearance, using cosmetics and wearing more eye catching clothing without the strict rules they once had to follow.

This is also the first decade in the Tullie House collection which has two dresses in it. The second dress is from a very different economic background than the first. This dress was owned by a Lady’s maid from Newcastle. It is a crepe peach dress with beaded embellishments in wave patterns, including little cotton beads creating the shape of flowers. The dress is the first none full length one in the collection and hits just before the knees. This was probably a dress which was not made for the occasion and just the nicest dress that was owned. Because it is made from thin material it would have had an underdress, probably made in a tan material to imitate skin. By the time this dress was worn, 1925, the idea of knee length dresses and short sleeves had become normal for evening wear and special occasions like weddings but was still considered immodest in everyday wear.

I hope you enjoyed this look back in time with me at some of the more influential periods on wedding dresses and this look at the beautiful dresses in the collection. I will be writing a part two to this blog in the coming weeks looking at the 1920’s to the 2020’s through some of my family wedding photographs, so if you found this interesting please check back for that one. The Tullie house collection will be opening to the public later this year and if you found any of these dresses interesting I would urge you to go visit. I am also writing another blog on how we prepare these dresses for display as part of the Tullie house project as a lot of backstage work goes into making them look like they are being worn.

Blog by: Kezia Cosson, Textile Conservation Intern at The Bowes Museum

With thanks to: The Institute of Conservation & Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery Trust.