Wedding dress

Mme. Fréderique

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

While a "proper" coat-like bodice with buttoning at center front has supplanted the accustomed deep décolletage of the previous century, every other aspect of this 1872 wedding dress emulates the eighteenth century. Self-trims, lace, ribbon, and even orange blossoms re-create the repertoire of dress techniques from a century earlier. As the technology and techniques emerged in the 1860s and 1870s that could make any dressmaker a virtuoso of eighteenth-century style, fashions such as these could be created. Would this have been a poor person's version of the eighteenth century? In a sense, the bourgeois access to the old forms of aristocracy in dress had to wait until the Second Empire and then, abetted by technology, arrived with a vengeance. Of course, the truism is that wedding dresses tend to be conservative and even retardataire; but the gap is not often the full century or more that it is here.

The Costume Institute

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Costume Institute's collection of more than thirty-three thousand objects represents seven centuries of fashionable dress and accessories for men, women, and children, from the fifteenth century to the present.

Metropolitan Museum of Art