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Thoughts on Today’s Paper Doll
There’s a perception that the Regency era was all white dresses, white stockings and white shoes. Never mind the fact that there is still mud in the 1800s and there’s not the kind of laundry capacity we have now. I knew I wanted to do a richly colored day dress in patterned cotton.
Day dresses were a form of undress or half-dress (as I mentioned yesterday). This dress is a more middle class style and certainly casual. Printed cottons were very popular in the era and this color is called Turkey red. The “turkey” part of the name refers to the country of Turkey, not the bird.
Her bonnet is a bit earlier than the dress- it’s a soft sort of style that was super popular before 1810 and then seems to fall out of fashion a bit for harder stiffer styles. I have one of those bonnets for tomorrow.
Inspiration for Today’s Paper Doll
The dress’s silouhette comes from this gown from the V&A Museum. The print on the dress and the colors are from this swatch from Ackermann’s Journal. That was a fashion journal that included pasted in fabric/paper swatches.
Specific Source Images: These stockings, these shoes, this dress, this bonnet (bottom left) and this fabric.
Learn/See More
On the Blog: More Regency Fashion Paper Dolls and More Jewels & Gemstones Paper Dolls
Around the Internet: Turkey Red from Wikipedia and Another Nice Regency Dress Overview
Last Thoughts
One of the challenges though of working in historical clothing is that I don’t know what would be considered “tacky”. Would it be tacky to combine blue stockings with green shoes and a red dress? Is this too much color? How would a woman of this period actually feel about this combination? I have no idea.
I just noticed there’s a tiny coloring error in this set. How embarrassing! I’ll get it fixed when I can. Probably not this week though (this week is a bit crazy).
I’m not planning to do a mourning dress, but how cool are these mourning dress fashion plates? I always think of the obsession with mourning clothing being a Victorian thing, but here’s the early stages.
So, what do you think of today’s dress? Love it? Hate it? Wish it was white? Let me know in a comment.
This is really cute! Don’t know whether they would have liked the colors together then, but I like it now! As far as the error, if I hadn’t searched for it because you mentioned it, I never would have noticed it! 🙂
Yeah, but once I saw it than it bugged me. So, now I have to fix it. If I didn’t say anything, I probably would let it go and then it would bug me later. It an easy fix when I have a few minutes.