Party style frocks, looks inspired by Mary Pickford, the cult of youth: the gowns worn by, what I assume were, society ladies that year were all on consistent lines. I want to think a bit more about these dresses and what they signified or what the wearer sought to communicate by wearing them.
The author of the column ‘Lady of the House’, which was illustrated by the above photo, repeatedly used the word ‘pretty’ to describe the current style of dress, saying ‘summer fashions are very practical this year’ and that such ‘frocks can be worn even when the weather is uncertain’. It’s funny that an article called ‘Fashions of the Hour’ should be accompanied by a wedding photograph.
The wedding dresses featured were informal looking by today’s standards, knee-length, tiered, and some had scalloped hems. They seemed to represent the style of the flapper, having more of an eye to fashion than timelessness. Yes, they were ‘the fashions of the hour’, at a time when the zeitgeist seemed to be a sort of rushing, electric, scintillating and thrilling uncertainty, when living in the moment was the only option; after the ‘Great War’ – young people dead or never returned – dull internal anxiety about the future, inflation rising, technology developing too fast to keep track of it, social mobility, too many cocktails!
These dresses look as though they were designed for parties, cocktails, liberated behaviour, dancing and showing off.
I bought a book on art deco dress precisely because of these photos. I found the consistency of the style of dress across the society wedding pages interesting. I imagined that only a high society bride could indulge in a flapper style dress and get away with it. The dresses don’t indicate the sobre seriousness that such an occasion might seem to warrant… The scalloped hem stood out for me as it was only in fashion for a short time and these photos capture the fleeting trend. A memoir I have from the 1930s records the fact: an impoverished girl borrows her neighbour’s wedding dress for her confirmation day and, although she luxuriates in the crisp beauty of it, she notes immediately the presence of a scalloped hem which was in fashion a decade earlier.
Short skirts came into fashion in 1925, according to art deco historian Martin Battersby, and such was the dramatic shift that many Parisian fashion magazines went out of publication and were replaced by new ones. So these 1928 wedding dresses may still have caused a bit of a stir with their short lengths (which was possibly what the bride desired). The Gazette de Bon Ton featured tiered dresses in 1920, so that trend had been around for a while. Summer day wear by 1928 was short-hemmed and flimsy, with tiered fabric that wafted as the wearer moved, displaying silk stockings and pretty high heeled shoes.
The other thought that struck me was a Cinderella impression. These are little girls’ dresses, not terribly ostentatious, very different to the tightly bound costumes of the wearer’s mother or grandmother. They look like they wouldn’t require a ‘dresser’ particularly, in order to get into them, and they are above all youthful and girlish. Mary Pickford represented this ‘cult of youth’ in Hollywood beginning around 1915 and this spirit developed a special currency in the twenties when people wanted only the reassurance of youth and vitality, newness, freshness, ‘a kicking over of the traces’, as Bevis Hillier described living in the era of art deco.
My research here has not been very thorough, and I would like to follow up on it, but for now I will leave you with these evocative photographs and the fleeting fashion of an era that they illustrated.
nova: vintage treasure 