Sunday Salon: What to Wear? How the Bride Decides at The Lockwood-Mathews Mansion Museum

Legendary Textile Conservator and FIT Professor June Burns Bové will present, What to wear? How the Bride Decides, a talk on the fashion and social history of the wedding dress on July 16, 2017 from 2:30-4:30pm at The Lockwood-Mathews Mansion Museum .

“Museum catalogers are usually happy to be assigned a wedding dress; the date is very certain,” Ms. Bové said, “But that is the only certainty, for the very act of saving the dress is proof of its value to the woman who wore it.  It tells about her sense of style, her economic circumstances, and her social environment.”

There may be great differences between the attire of two brides married on the same day; one may wear French couture and the other, her best day dress, but the fashion lines are discernible.   During the times between two great wars, American women looked to a number of sources for fashion news, starting with the colored engraving and then the photograph.  Magazines directed to women were important, but so were newspapers with pictures of actresses and the social elite.  Not all dresses were saved, nor are all dresses saved today.  Brides often wore their dresses as reception dresses after the wedding or made children’s clothing from the fabric.  Nowadays, dresses may be resold on eBay and Craigslist. We have the ones that were kept to tell us about that “one special day” and the world of the woman who wore it.

 

July 16, 2017

2:30-4:30pm

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Submitted by Westport, CT

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