Silver Screen

This month’s Historical Sew Monthly challenge is Silver Screen,
"Be inspired by period fashions as shown onscreen (film or TV), and recreate your favourite historical costume as a historically accurate period piece."

(Now at this point you may be wondering why I’m posting about a Historical Sew Monthly challenge when it is nowhere near the end of the month. Well, for reasons which will become apparent, I actually finished this challenge . . . early!)

For my film I chose the 1997 Henry James adaptation The Wings of the Dove. A number of clearly Fortuny-inspired dresses appear in the Venice section of the film; mostly based on the Delphos dress. Don’t get me wrong, I mostly love the costumes in this film (we'll just not talk about the corset-without-a-chemise horror at the end, shall we?), but there are a few details missing in those dresses.

Milly (Alison Elliot) and Kate (Helena Bonham-Carter) in Fortuny-esque dresses

Sleeveless Delphos dresses always have more of a shoulder seam than is apparent on the red dress above. The round necklines are usually on a drawstring, whereas this one appears to have a narrow facing round it.

Delphos dresses came with a belt. While there are plenty of images of the dresses being worn without a belt, it was always made from narrow printed silk in either a matching or toning colour.

Delphos dress and matching belt

Drawstring neckline - yes, wider shoulders - yes, and the belt . . ?

It certainly wasn’t a wide sash like this.

. . . - no

However the thing which really bugged my inner costume nerd was the side seams. Delphos dresses, certainly the sleeveless ones, have a cord threaded with Venetian glass beads down the side seams, to add some weight to the light silk.

Beaded cord detail on a Delphos dress

If any of the dresses in The Wings of the Dove had this, it wasn’t apparent.

If this dress had a beaded seam, surely it should be visible in this shot?

I’d always thought that trying to recreate a Delphos dress would be great fun, but nigh-on impossible as the secret of achieving the tightly-pleated fabric was lost when Fortuny died. However at about the same time as the 2015 HSM challenges were issued I came across some amazing blue and silver crinkly fabric (which I used for my Fortuny shoe clips), and decided that this was as close as I was going to get.

The dress is simplicity itself; just a length of fabric folded in half and sewn down the sides, with a hole cut for the head. Originally I planned to have all the gathering in the shoulders. Then I studied the originals properly, and realised that the neckline needed to be wider, and gathered on a drawstring.

Original neckline (bottom) redrafted for gathering

Using the main fabric for the drawstring casing would make it too bulky, so I used a bias strip of fine silk from my stash instead.

Attaching the neck casing. I secured the drawstring at the centre back

The shoulders are gathered onto a narrow strip of the same silk, cut on the straight grain.

Shoulder, gathered neckline and beaded armhole of a Fortuny original

My shoulders, in progress

Finding beads of the right size with a large enough hole for a cord proved impossible, so instead I made a twisted cord from embroidery floss; DMC 923 was the perfect shade. As each cord had to go from the floor to my shoulder and back down the other side of the armhole, they were long, tricky to make, and took a lot of twisting!

My beaded cord

The belt was made from a length of plain grey silk, painted with a motif which I adapted from an Indian wooden printing block I own. Painting the silver directly onto the silk didn’t show up very well, so I had to paint the design in white first, and then go over it with the silver.

Belt painting in progress; white to the left, silver to the right

When it came to taking pictures, I wasn’t quite sure what to do my hair, as I really don’t look good without my non-period-appropriate fringe. Fortunately while researching Delphos dresses I found this 1910 photograph of the French actress Régine Flory.

Régine Flory, with Delphos dress and fringe

So finally we come to the reason why this challenge was completed so early (well, early for me), and other challenges were put back to next month’s ‘Re-do’ in order to accommodate it. Last month Mum and I went back to Venice! So of course, the dress (and the shoe clips and shoes) came with us.

We visited the Palazzo Fortuny - it's huge

We stayed away from the main tourist spots, but it was still surprisingly difficult to avoid modern life sneaking into the images (although apparently the makers of The Wings of the Dove had the same problem – if you look at the top right of the first image in this post, you can clearly see a modern motorboat!). So a massive thank you to Karen Iuppa for removing the 21st century from the pictures taken on the bridge.

The small print:
The Challenge: Silver Screen
What's your onscreen inspiration?: The Wings of the Dove
Fabric: Unknown synthetic with metallic weft for dress, silk for belt
Pattern: Doesn't really have one as it's essentially just a length of fabric
Year: Early 20th century
Notions: Glass beads, embroidery floss for cords, fabric paint.
How historically accurate is it? Delphos dresses were made from silk so the man-made fabrics let it down, I'd say 70%
Hours to complete:I always forget to count
First worn: In Venice, to take the photos
Total cost: Dress fabric £30, silk for belt £11.25 (with a lot left), beads £2.99, embroidery floss £2.85, fabric paint £5.40 everything else from stash, so £52.49

Accessorize, at last!

My shoulder is getting better, but is still not right, so I've had to abandon my planned entry for the Historical Sew Monthly July challenge; Accessorize. It fits into a later challenge though, so is not abandoned altogether. Instead I've gone for something nice and simple and easy to sew, some shoe clips.

The inspiration came from this pair of Fortuny shoes. Unfortunately I've not been able to find out anything about them.

Brocade Fortuny shoes with metal buckles

To make my clips, I started with some jewellery findings, snipped off the loops, and filed down the raw edges.

Jewellery findings, before and after

I have some fabric which I am planning to use for a later Historical Sew Monthly challenge, which has a blue warp and a metallic silver weft. I cut narrow strips of this, and frayed one long edge so that the blue threads would show. The strip was then gathered to make a rosette. I had planned to use grey satin under the finding, but I decided that it was too much of a contrast with the outer frill, so used a scrap of the blue/silver fabric instead.

With the grey satin backing (left) and without

For the backs I cut circles the same size as the finding out of thin card, and covered them with the grey satin. Then I sewed on the shoe clip. Finally I sewed the finding, frill and back together.

The finished clips, front and back

I may trim the edges of the shoes at some point, to make them more like the Fortuny pair, but for now here they are with the clips on.

The clips in use

The small print:
The Challenge: Accessorize
Fabric: Satin, and unknown fabric with metal thread – all synthetic
Pattern: My own
Year: Early twentieth century?
Notions: Jewellery findings, shoe clips
How historically accurate is it? Not at all. This is just trying to get the look, and not at all accurate.
Hours to complete: Two
First worn: Not yet
Total cost: Findings £1.50 everything else from stash or already bought for another project.

Fortuny and the Delphos dress

Venice appears to be one place where my fabric-and-costume radar doesn’t work. Not only did I not know that it possesses a costume museum until our last visit, I have never been to the Fortuny Museum, either. (Although to be fair, in our numerous visits there we have been to almost no museums; we prefer to stroll round the city and explore instead).

Mariano Fortuny was born in Grenada, Spain, in 1871. His father, a successful artist, died when Fortuny was very young, and the family (Fortuny, his sister and their mother) moved to Paris, where his maternal uncle lived. When he was eighteen the family moved again, this time to Venice; partly because his mother felt that Paris had become too expensive, and partly because Fortuny suffered from an allergy to horses. In Venice the family lived in an eighteenth century palazzo, surrounded by Fortuny senior’s vast collection of objets d’art. From his father Fortuny inherited a love of the East, and never lost his fondness for dressing up, as seen in this photograph of him wearing a turban and a Moroccan striped djellaba. (Looks familiar, where have I seen one of those recently?)

Mariano Fortuny in the late 1930s

Fortuny began painting while still a small boy, guided by his uncle, a celebrated portrait painter. He also learned to etch, and after the family’s move to Venice he developed a keen interest in photography, eventually amassing a collection of over 10,000 negatives. He was also at various times in his life a sculptor, a stage lighting engineer and a set designer, but it is for his textiles that he is best known.

The first reference to him working with textiles appears in 1906 and around a year later his most famous garment made its first appearance; the Delphos dress. The dress was derived from the draped clothing of the Classical world, and took its name from the Charioteer of Delphi; a bronze, life-size statue of a chariot driver from ancient Greece.

The Charioteer of Delphi

Its simple shape, a cylinder of tightly pleated silk hanging from the shoulders, was unlike anything else of the time, and had more in common with the images of Romantic painters such as Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema than current fashion.

Silver Favorites (detail) by Alma-Tadema, 1903

Lillian Gish in a Delphos dress

Indeed the dress was so different that Fortuny regarded it as in invention, and patented it in Paris in 1909. The diagram which accompanied the patent registration shows how the dress was constructed, with fastens along the shoulders, and a gathering ribbon inside (item f) which altered the line of the sleeve.

Patent diagram of the Delphos dress

1930s Delphos dress, showing shoulder fasten and internal gathering (from Whitaker Auction)

Although shown in the diagram as a loose, straight dress, some later versions were worn with a belt at the waist, or gathered under the bust.

The dresses were made of fine silk, with small beads of Venetian glass down the sides, for decoration and to add some weight so that dress would cling to the body. Although there were numerous variations of the dress over time, and no two Delphos dresses were exactly the same, the basic design never changed.

1930s dress with overblouse

Dress with printed chiffon tunic

When not being worn, the dresses were to be stored rolled up to preserve the pleats.

Rolled dresses, © Victoria and Albert Museum

They were sold in small boxes, and must have been far easier to pack than most dresses of the time!

Delphos dress in its original box

The 1920s were the heyday of the Delphos dress. In an article in the Sunday Times Magazine in 1976 Lady Bonham-Carter recalled buying a Delphos dress in Venice in 1920, and added that, “Everybody went to Fortuny then. I think everyone I knew had a Fortuny dress”.

Natasha Rambova, wife of Rudolph Valentino, in a Delphos dress c 1924

While everybody may have gone to Fortuny, whether everyone looked good in a Fortuny dress might have been a different matter altogether. According to Lady Diana Cooper the dresses, “Clung like mermaid’s scales”. Nowadays Delphos dresses tend to be displayed on tall, slim dress forms, sometimes with the dress pooling on the floor, which is how Fortuny intended them to look. This setting shows the dresses to their best advantage.

A selection of Delphos dresses

Equally, when worn by someone like Lillian Gish in the photograph above, the clinging nature of the dress worked well. However I can’t help feeling that not all the photographs of Delphos dresses being worn look entirely flattering.

Back view of a model wearing a Delphos dress. Hmm.

Three of Isadora Duncan's adoptive daughters, looking oddly short, in Delphos dresses

That the narrow dresses only suited the very slim seems to have been recognized by some people. The dresses were originally made from three or four widths of fabric and Elsie Lee, who sold Fortuny’s goods in the United States, suggested that an extra width of fabric should be put into the dresses so that more women could wear them.

However I think that the worst ever photograph of the Delphos dress was taken early in its life. In 1907 Mrs Selma Shubart was photographed by her brother, Alfred Stieglitz, wearing a Delphos dress. The dress is a beautiful colour; a rich gold, achieved like all of Fortuny's colours by dying the fabric several times. The Cromwell shoes are a bit quirky, but given that the dress was quirky by the standards of the time, not a problem. The flowers at the waist are no doubt an addition of Mrs Shubart's, but to me they work. But the cardigan??! Even if it is a matching colour, a nice comfy cardi over a Delphos dress is, without a doubt, a crime against a costume icon.

Nooooooo!