Day Dresses

[18thVirginia]

In the hills North Georgia or Eastern Tennessee, living above a store in Arkansas, or along the Red River in Texas where my great great grandmothers lived, there may not have been much call for evening gowns copied from an illustration in Godey's Lady's Book. But no doubt women in those communities wanted a fashionable dress to wear every day and especially to church on Sundays. For many women, a wedding dress was also a day dress, especially when a wedding was a hurried up event when her beau had been recruited or conscripted into the Union or Confederate armies. Again, we'll look at some Godey's fashions, some dresses which have survived in museums, and those worn by reenact ors.

Brown silk ribbed dress
www.charlestonmuseum.org/threads-of-war

Indigo dyed cotton w/ yellow printed leaf & stem pattern & white resist leaf veins; mandarin collar, bodice gathered from F & B yoke to wide waistband, CF opening w/ hand buttonholes, side pan- els, L shaped sleeves, very full gathered ankle length skirt; bodiced lined in natural linen; CB 55.5" Kent State University Museum.

 

[18thVirginia]

If you have a photo of your great grandmother in day dress, please feel free to post it in this thread.

Here are a couple of reenactor's interpretations of the Civil War era day dresses.

http://maggiemayfashions.com/sewingblog/

 

[donna]

Lovely Day Dresses. I like the purple (lavender) one best.

 

[18thVirginia]

Here's a rather elegant one in pink, not a color you see all the time in period photos.

metmuseum.org

 

[18thVirginia]

This one is 1862, from metmuseum.org

 

[John Winn]

Very cool 18th. Thanks !

Along with photos, I find clothing to be the most interesting artifacts. Somehow it just seems so much more personal and provides clues as to what folks back then actually looked like out on the street.

 

[18thVirginia]

Thanks, John Winn. I've done a lot of work with old photographs of our family and I guess I just want to see how people looked--as you do. It was also a time consuming process to make these garments, one didn't just pop out to the Dillard's to grab a dress for a special occasion.

Here's one of Brady's elegant women in a day dress (my slight colorization so that we can compare dresses more easily):

Mrs. Thouron, Mathew Brady, LOC flickr.com

 

[18thVirginia]

Wool plaid day dress
http://whitakerauction.smugmug.com/Fall2011-4/Clothing-DAY-2/ID-329/i-99DnQjt

Here's a Godey's design of a similarly colored day dress:

 

[18thVirginia]

I said we'd include some reenactors who are recreating fashions just as the women of our great grandmothers' era were doing in their dressmaking. Found this interpretation of a Godey's Lady's Book dress by Andrea Schewe, a commercial pattern designer.

First the page from Godey's--check out the dress on the right.

And as interpreted by Andrea Schewe

http://www.andreaschewedesign.com/blog/civil-war-day-dresses-pattern-1818

 

[donna]

Really like the pink one and the wool plaid dress. This is a wonderful thread.

 

[MaryDee]

Pink and purple dyes in the mid-19th century tended to fade to brown--perhaps one reason why there are so many browns. Brown was popular in the 1860s, though, even though not all currently surviving brown originals started out that way. It's interesting to see originals that have kept their original color! It's really unfortunate that the many beautiful printed wool fabrics of Civil War days can no longer can be found! That's my chief regret after attending a recent 3-day workshop in Oregon City, during which we got to examine and handle a lot of original dresses.

 

[18thVirginia]

Thanks for the information, MaryDee.

 

[Allie]

View attachment 68795

This one is 1862, from metmuseum.org

Is that taffeta? Does it say?

@MaryDee mentioned printed wools. The other thing that's not as common today is various glazed fabrics. Although you still find glazed cotton sometimes.

 

[18thVirginia]

This is a dress that Nathanb1 says is postwar of one of her ancestresses, but I had to include it in this thread because of the reenactor dress that looks very similar.

Francis Powers

Reenactor Dress
https://www.etsy.com/listing/192451328/civil-war-beige-brown-and-blue-summer?ref=market

 

[18thVirginia]

"Grenadine dress, one of the most elegant designs of the season, has a white ground powdered with pansies of the natural colors and light leaves. The bordering at the edge of the skirt is a deep sea-green, headed by bands of black resembling velvet. The corsage is in the Pompadour style, with rich muslin guimpe and sleeves." Godey's 1863

illus http://archive.org/stream/godeysladysbook67phil#page/n9/mode/2up

dress, ca. 1865, sheer with beaded embroidery, Kent State Museum Collection

http://fripperiesandfobs.tumblr.com/post/77745857004/dress-ca-1865-from-the-kent-state-university

 

[18thVirginia]

pinterest.com

reenactor dress - https://sewingbyelizabeth.wordpress.com/reenacting-clothing/page-1/

 

[unionblue]

I once read (somewhere, long ago) that the majority of women had two dresses.

One day dress they wore when working around the home or farm six days of the week, and one dress for Sunday to go to church in.

Any truth to that?

Sincerely,
Unionblue

 

[FarawayFriend]

Thank you for this thread, really interesting!!

Pink and purple dyes in the mid-19th century tended to fade to brown--perhaps one reason why there are so many browns. Brown was popular in the 1860s, though, even though not all currently surviving brown originals started out that way. It's interesting to see originals that have kept their original color! It's really unfortunate that the many beautiful printed wool fabrics of Civil War days can no longer can be found! That's my chief regret after attending a recent 3-day workshop in Oregon City, during which we got to examine and handle a lot of original dresses.

I like to look at dresses in museums and was surprised to hear the other day that violet was a most expensive dye in the 18th century, so that only the wealthiest people could afford violet clothing. Only in 1856 an artificial dye was invented. Actually, the inventor tried to invent artificial quinine and the color mauve was kind of a by-product.
Here is a quote from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Violet_(color)&oldid=663000290

"In 1856, a young British chemist named William Henry Perkin was trying to make a synthetic quinine. His experiments produced instead an unexpected residue, which turned out to be the first synthetic aniline dye, a deep violet color called mauveine, or abbreviated simply to mauve (the dye being named after the lighter color of the mallow [mauve] flower). Used to dye clothes, it became extremely fashionable among the nobility and upper classes in Europe, particularly after Queen Victoria wore a silk gown dyed with mauveine to the Royal Exhibition of 1862. Prior to Perkin's discovery, mauve was a color which only the aristocracy and rich could afford to wear. Perkin developed an industrial process, built a factory, and produced the dye by the ton, so almost anyone could wear mauve. It was the first of a series of modern industrial dyes which completely transformed both the chemical industry and fashion."

From:
Garfield, S. (2000). Mauve: How One Man Invented a Colour That Changed the World. Faber and Faber, London, UK. ISBN 978-0-571-20197-6.

 

[JPK Huson 1863]

Yes, very nice! You do read of day dresses, morning dresses, mourning dresses, visiting dressed, ball gowns..... and wonder how on earth they contrived to own so many? And who had what anyway?

Very nice thread 18th thanks very much! SO interesting. Had forgotten that thing about pink fading like I does, I just though our women had a weird predilection for brown!

 

[FarawayFriend]

I once read (somewhere, long ago) that the majority of women had two dresses.

One day dress they wore when working around the home or farm six days of the week, and one dress for Sunday to go to church in.

Any truth to that?

Sincerely,
Unionblue

Yes, I think this is true. And moreover, the "good" or Sunday dress could not be cleaned by washing, usually only dust was removed with a brush. Therefore they had so called "Wash dresses" , mostly made from cotton, which they wore everyday, and if they were lucky, then they had two of them to change, so that they could wear one while the other was drying after doing the laundry.

I have a book "Westering women" which cites from diaries the pioneer women had written. It has a wonderful picture on the cover, named "Before the railroad came" and shows a young lady visiting friends or relatives. That lady had come by stage coach and look at the tiny bag she is bringing. No room for a second dress!

From: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008MB8D4Y/?tag=civilwartalkc-20

(Btw, a very good book!)