Historical

Bella Swan’s Anne of Green Gables Inspired Wedding Gown with White Satin and Rose Lace from Breaking Dawn

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In the final book of the Twilight series, Breaking Dawn, Bella and Edward get married. Bella, whose parents are divorced, has never really seen marriage as a desirable life goal, doesn’t want people to think she’s pregnant and she worries about branding herself a desperate, vapid girl insistent on getting married right out of high school. Certainly nothing says “commitment” like forsaking humanity and spending eternity with someone, so what’s the point of a wedding? Old-fashioned Edward, however, wants to be married, and Bella comes around to his point of view, starting to consider it natural and happy for two people in love to be married, and to heck with the gossips and disapproval of society and her family. She keeps thinking of Anne of Green Gables, of the simpler time she associates with when Edward would have been young, of the high-necked blouse and long skirt she would wear.

Bella guesses that the inspiration was from 1918 when she sees her dress, Alice replies more or less and Liana tears her hair out. Here I thought we were using an Anne-centric timeline, but only in the miniseries did Anne get married during the First World War — in the books, Anne got married in 1890, according to this page, and WWI was her daughter Rilla’s turn as a heroine. So what does Bella’s dress look like? Victorian-style clothes play a large role in her fantasy of simple romance, and she says, looking at the dress, that it’s just what she imagined. Yet, a dress from 1918 probably wouldn’t have that Victorian high neck, or maybe not even the long skirt. It must also be noted that 1918 is when Edward was transformed into a vampire at the age of 17, so a dress from this age would probably appeal to him more than something his mom would have worn. 1918 would also be about right, if Bella’s mother, who thought the gown looked like something from a Jane Austen novel, was a hundred years off. Then Alice was stage-managing the whole thing, and I have a really hard time seeing her send Bella out in an unfashionable wedding dress. No one does high necks anymore, not even LDS members going for modesty, and long sleeves seem to be relegated to the Éowyn look. So what exactly do we have here? An Anne-style 1890 gown with puffed sleeves? A streamlined, more fashionable but still modest 1918 gown? A modern dress with vintage touches? I’ve been trying to decide for the last week.

So yeah, at this point I think I may have pondered the dress — possibly overthought the dress — more than the author, and it’s been maddening. Maybe it’s like the prom dress: however you see it is right. (Witness the range of Twilight wedding dresses on deviantart.) That means I’m going to stop trying to come up with something perfect and just go with a pseudo-1890s gown, taking Bella at her word that she wanted to dress like Anne and got her wish. But you could just as easily assume that Bella only saw the miniseries, so maybe I’ll draw a 1918 gown too, another day. Trying to combine the two — yeah, I got some pretty funny sketches out of the idea, but I think I’ll pass. In my sketches of this dress, she has her hair down and even though it’s old-fashioned, it’s still romantic and sweet.

1780s White Chemise à la Reine with Blue Silk Sash and Flower Ornament

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Well, now, it looks like the readers of this blog have what you could call a slight preference for The Duchess’ costumes (a lovely gallery of which can be found at the Costumer’s Guide to Movie Costumes); as I write this it’s garnered 66% of the vote, with the other four neatly splitting the remainder. Not much of a surprise, we do like our fancy gowns around this joint after all. The possible list of leaked Oscar winners would be against us, preferring Benjamin Button instead, but that has all the authenticity of, well, a random list on the Internet.

I didn’t see The Duchess, or, sadly, any of the other Best Costume nominees, but I wanted to draw something inspired by its main character, Georgiana Cavendish, not the least because I recently discovered the The Duchess of Devonshire’s Gossip Guide to the 18th Century (and its counterpart concerned with Marie Antoinette) and since I’ve never been much into 1700s fashion before (I love the 1800s, everything before that I’m real vague on) I’ve been enjoying it. Well, lo and behold there is a style of dress that Marie Antoinette started and Georgiana introduced to England, so that seemed to be the right thing to draw tonight. It’s called the chemise à la reine, and it was quite scandalous when it was introduced in the mid-1780s because it was essentially like wearing one’s underwear out in public, not what one expects from one’s queen. A very simple garment, it was really the precursor of the Regency gowns as the waistline inched upwards.

Don’t forget — livedolling the Oscars here, tomorrow! Stick around the comments section and help me decide what to draw. I’ll be looking frantically for streaming video of the red carpet show (more interesting than reloading Getty Images all the time), let me know if you know where to find it.

poll by twiigs.com

Powder Blue Airship Hostess Jumper with White Blouse via A Dress A Day

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So I saw this pattern on A Dress A Day and thought it was just beyond cute and it needed paperdolling. Seriously, look at the little collar and the pointy shoulders. Adorable. Erin thought it made a good airship hostess uniform, so I added a little cap and little airships around the hem. (Yes, that’s what they’re supposed to be…) Check out the original post and a post about a version of the dress being auctioned off.

I don’t have too much else to say about this dress other than that drawing tiny airships is fun and that my scanner is starting to annoy me (see the banding? It’s been doing that recently, plus the blue is cuter in person), so please go create a dress for me on my dress wiki.

1778 Light Blue Robe a la Polonaise with Rose and Flower Trim Inspired by Fanny Burney’s Evelina

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So I recently finished listening to the Librivox recording of Evelina by Fanny Burney, which is not a book I knew of before browsing the Librivox catalog but I’m quite glad I put in the sixteen hours necessary to listen to it. I don’t recall Evelina being referenced in any of the Jane Austen novels, but I believe a couple of Fanny Burney’s other novels are mentioned in Northanger Abbey. Certainly Austen would have read Evelina, and her characters might have secretly wished for a Lord Orville like everyone seems to wish for a Mr. Darcy these days. It’s about a timid and innocent girl, who is overly both, I think, for modern sensibilities, but still a sympathetic main character. Her situation was so precarious (she has a “mysterious” background and no powerful friends looking out for her interests) and she always seemed to be getting into so many misunderstandings that I had to look the ending up on Wikipedia to make myself less nervous about the possibility of her being deceived by a rake or exposed to ridicule in a way that would destroy her reputation forever. (Having recently come off of The Age of Innocence, and having abandoned Ruth after skimming its Wikipedia page and finding out that things didn’t end well, I couldn’t sink hours into listening to another depressing novel.) I think, though, that it’s a very fun novel even if I fretted over the heroine and her perils. Sir Clement Willoughby is a tremendous bounder and it’s quite satisfying to despise him, and Evelina’s family and acquaintances are all colorful even if they’re mortifying to her. It might remind a modern reader of Austen, but the feeling that something is always about to go wrong makes it more salacious. Elizabeth Bennett was never caught by Mr. Darcy in the company of disreputable women, that’s for sure.

The book was published in 1778, and there aren’t any time references inside the book that meant anything to me, so I’m just going to go with what its readers might have worn although the book perhaps was set a couple years earlier. Corbis has, for some reason, a great number of fashion plates from 1778 (just search “1778 dress”) and I was struck by how different many of them appeared from what I think of from the late 1700s, the robe á la française and the robe à l’anglaise. The style that struck me is apparently the robe à la Polonaise, and even if perhaps Evelina is supposed to be set a couple years earlier than 1778, I will comfort myself with the thought of her wearing many of these dresses after the novel ends. Don’t ask me about the hat. It didn’t quite work out, but the first draft ended up with antennae and a windmill so this is sort of an improvement.

Incidentally, I was a little surprised to find Evelina mentioned in a recent article about the movie Confessions of a Shopaholic, as it boasts “literature’s first shopping spree”. Yeah, I’m probably not going to see that movie, even if it has clothes like this unholy concoction of neon ribbon and dalmatian fur that beg for paperdolling. I was reading an article a while back (couldn’t find it, sadly) talking about how in this economic climate, over-the-top chick flicks like Shopaholic might be edited so that the protagonists learn a couple convenient lessons before the end, which made me think, yeah, I’d probably fork over $8 to watch a movie like “Confessions of a Shopaholic” if the main character ended up like Lily Bart.

By the way, mark your calendars for the 22nd, a week from now: I’m going to be liveblogging (livedrawing?) the Oscars. I don’t know precisely how that will work, but it’s going to be fun.