A 1920s garden party dress

Well, this has been one hell of a week!

I picked up some extra work assisting a costume designer for a school production of The Little Mermaid. It's been a whole ton of fun, but seeing as this is job #3 by now, it hasn't left me a lot of my own sewing time. I hope to rectify that on my day off tomorrow, but in the mean time I figured I share a cute project from last summer.

Spadina House museum in Toronto has been having  Gatsby Picnic in June for the past few years, and last spring I was finally able to get an outfit ready in time to go. It was an absolutely stunning day - warm and sunny and perfect. I played croquet and drank lemonade and did a tour of the house (Which is GORGEOUS and well worth the trip, if you're in Southern Ontario) and solved a mystery of who stole the booze.

 My friend Leah accompanied me in a dress I made for her the night before (yes, I am a speed demon when it comes to costuming.) It's a pretty basic shape with no waist seam and kimono sleeves, but I jazzed it up with a sailor collar and a tucked inset in the front.

The dress I based on this design from Past Patterns, which is a recreated 1926 McCalls pattern. I would have saved myself the time and effort of drafting and ordered myself the damn thing, but I was working on a tight schedule for this thing and didn't think the pattern would arrive in time. So instead I pretty much draped the whole project on my dress form. I started trying to draft it, but this style of dress works a lot better being draped.

A progress pic of a draping process. I went for short, flutter sleeves instead of the long ones on the pattern, since I knew it was going to be a hot day.

The contrast fabric is plain old pink quilting-weight cotton, and I made matching bias to trim the neckline and cross-over. I went back and forth on making the contrast pink a sort of attached slip with straps that would sit inside the wrap dress, but finally just made my life easy and cut out one piece of cotton the same size as the gap and just sewed it in. The underskirt is just two rectangles, very slightly gathered into the waistband.

The hat, shoes, and rose quartz bead necklace are all very lucky thrift store finds, and the gloves were my great-grandmothers.

I had a LOT of fun in this dress. Twenties styles are so comfy and breezy! I was worried about what such an unfitted dress was going to look like on my very hippy figure, but I think the trick with the 20s is just to embrace it. You're not going to look like the svelt boyish figures of the illustrations, so don't worry about it! If you look up photographs of real people from the time, they seemed completely unconcerned with a little belly poking out, or how wide their hips look with low-slung sashes. The 1920s was all about rolling your stockings down and not caring what people thought!

This article on Reconstructing History has some great things to say about the perceived ideal figure of the 1920s. I recommend reading it if you're nervous about trying out the 20s in your wardrobe.

I will say the dress became INFINITELY more flattering when I added the proper lingerie with it. (a post about which should be coming soon.) You can see the difference when I wore the dress again at Costume College over my recreated 1920s brassiere and tap pants.

Excuse the fact that my fingerwaves were falling out by then.

Underthings pics coming soon!