I have a nostalgic love affair with the 1920s and 1930s for fashion, music and design so it was natural for this period to feature heavily in the design of my wedding dress. The other key feature in the design brief that I set myself was that the dress should be adaptable to be worn again in the future. Gone are the days when dresses are handed down from generation to generation and so true to my sustainability ethos, I wanted to make sure that the dress could have another life after the big day.
To make sure that I was designing a dress that best suited my figure, I did have a bit of a trying on session in a few shops. Cue all shapes from meringue to slinky! This helped to confirm that I definitely wanted straps, and a fairly straight skirt.
I wanted a fairly low v-neck front and back (with a nod to the 1930s) with a sheer panel closest to the neckline for modesty. I also wanted to focus detail around the waist and started to explore the possibility of a weaving design. This idea seemed great on paper but would it work on a person? Out came the dressmakers dummy for some experimenting:
Encouraged by how the dummy looked, next step was to draft the pattern and make the toile. Fitting to yourself is particularly tricky but luckily I have some friends and colleagues who are talented dressmakers and were able to pin me in place.
My colourings are from a “winter” palette (more around colour analysis in a future blog!) and therefore I knew that I wanted to go with icy colours rather than warm creams or ivory. Pure white can be tricky to pull off so I decided on a pale silver for the main dress and then a range of silvers and blues for the weaving detail. Deciding on a colour in your mind is one thing, finding fabric to match is quite another!
Originally I wanted to go with organic or ethical fabrics but found it pretty impossible to find the right fibre, texture and shade. I decided to go with more natural fibres so that they would take fabric dye afterwards (as an option for transforming the dress for another day). After weeks of fruitless searching, I finally found a beautiful pale silver silk miles away in Morpeth so I snapped it up! A pre-washing issue unfortunately rendered the fabric unusable for the dress (though I do now have fabulous silk pyjamas bottoms from it and countless ribbons used on the day!) so I ended up buying a silk from London which was even more beautiful! Every cloud has a silver silk lining…!
For the weaving detail, I wanted to add some pattern as well as colour. I found some beautiful vintage lace but it was just too wide for what I wanted (though I’m sure will be perfect for a future project). Having used the fabulous organic lace from Lancaster and Cornish on Carolyn’s dress the previous year, I thought this would be ideal. The lace comes in a natural off-white colour which unfortunately looked dull against the blues and silvers. However, experimenting with different methods of bleaching the lace paid off (and it looked very pretty drying on the washing line!)
The white lace looked stunning against the pale blue of the weaving (a real Wedgewood combination of colours), and adding some beading detail to it just made it perfect. The moment I arranged the weaving bands on my desk with the lace and beads, I had that really excited feeling in my stomach that it was going to be really beautiful and just what I wanted!
The website is littered with photos of the dress so I’ve just included a few extras here (plus some of the beautiful flowers which were kindly donated from gardens in the village!)
So having said that I want the dress to have another life after the wedding, what are my plans? Well, the design lends itself very neatly to converting into a skirt and top. The top will keep all the beauty of the weaving and therefore just need hemming where it is cut. For the skirt, it will need a waistband, zip and possibly some shaping. It will also end up shorter (so possibly knee-length as calf-length really doesn’t suit me) and I would like to dye it. I haven’t done any of this yet though as I’m still admiring it in its entirety!
