Slight disappointment in the bride’s dress – concept fine, but there was too much of a hint of one of Madonna’s coned bras about the fit of the bodice. Difficult to say whether this was the designer’s intent, or a slight failure in the dressmaker’s art.
In my day, when the bride’s dress would most likely be made by the bride’s mother, auntie or neighbour or the local dressmaker, the sewer would almost always be present when the bride dressed, in order to make last minute adjustments to cater for the bride’s inevitable loss of weight.
We could not have anything like the modern affordable clothing industry if dresses still had to fit in the style of the New Look – snug & close, apparently, to the woman’s own contours. Fortuny pleats, elastic shirring or rouching might sometimes be employed to perform the function that lycra performs today, but the major change, since the 60s, in modern design has been a relaxation of silhouette, to cover a multitude of sins & allow a relatively small range of sizes to fit huge numbers of women.
Back-to-basics in dressmaking requires skills in cutting & sewing that overlap with those of the tailor, a combination of bespoke fit & disguising imperfections such as asymmetry or inconvenient folds of flesh.
Even amateur dressmakers learned the rudimentary skills of adjusting a mass-market paper pattern to fit. If you could afford it you had a dressmakers dummy as an aid otherwise you had to have someone else to help with the intricate pinning, pinching & tacking adjustments.
And the simpler the dress- fewer frills, plainer fabric, less to hide the multitude of sins - the more crucial it was to have a perfect fit.
The royal maid of honour’s dress could hardly have been simpler – except for the draped décolletage. And it took a genius to design that all-important view from the back
And more genius to adjust all the darts & seams to give it that perfect silky satin fit – which makes the illusion of a perfect body underneath, even though there are of course limits to illusion, silk purses & sows ears.
The final touch of genius – that row of buttons – depended on minute attention to size & placement to avoid vulgarity.
Demure can truly be dynamite
