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As you know, if you’ve been following long since December, I’ve been drawing a series of 1830s dresses, trying to draw one dress from each year of the decade. So, today’s gown is an 1830s paper doll evening dress, specifically from 1835. You can see all the gowns I’ve done up to this point and chose your favorite. Don’t worry if you’re not as into 1830s fashion as I am these days, I do have some other non-1830s paper doll things in the works.
In general, the basic rules of dressing in the 1830s: High-necklines for day, lower necklines for evening. Long sleeves are usually less formal than short sleeves. Given these guidelines, what we’re looking at here is an evening dress intended for dinner wear. Not a ballgown, but something worn to a nice dinner party. As the 1830s continued, you begin to see slightly longer skirts as you can tell from today’s 1835 evening dress.
Fun fact: This was actually the first dress I drew for this whole project.
In choosing colors, I did my best to color match the original plate, because I found the deep maroonish-purple a really interesting color. Not one I would normally be attracted too. Wig got slightly edited to accommodate the paper dolls ringlet curls.
So, this design comes from a fashion plate in Ladies Pocket Magazine. The magazine was in print from 1824 until 1839. It published inferior copies of plates from other magazines, so the quality is sometimes lesser than what you see in higher end publications.
What’s interesting about Ladies’ Pocket Magazine is that it shows how fashion information spread, because magazines would simply copy each other. The cheaper the magazine, the more likely it contained copies from more expensive magazines. This information transmission pattern illustrates one way fashion spread from those creating trends to those following them.
It’s important to never forget that fashion magazines were aspirational. They didn’t always illustrate what people were wearing in a time period, as much as they illustrated what people aspired towards wearing. By the way, social media plays a similar role today. It’s going to be really interesting to see in the future how the fashion information landscape evolves.
I digress. Get me talking about fashion history and information ecosystems and you know, I will happily go on and on.
I hope you’re enjoying the 1830s as much as I am. Next up after this 1830s paper doll evening dress is a morning dress from 1836.