1950s Inspired Dress
As with many people who have seen Amazon’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, I looked at the titular character’s clothes and thought, ‘I want all of those dresses’. This dress was my attempt at that, and was made in winter 2018. I wore it to a ballroom dance performance, where the full circle skirt was perfect for spins like the one I’m doing in the photo to the left.
It’s definitely not historically accurate - like most things I’ve done that are historical, they’re based more on the look than keeping things entirely the way they would have been, and so much of this dress is just my own improvisation to get the design I wanted. However, I’m really happy with how it turned out, and it’s one of the few dresses I’ve made that I’ve been able to wear as normal formal wear, rather than exclusively as a costume.
Sketches and Design
As usual, the first thing I had to do when making this dress is sketch out what I wanted it to look like. For this particular costume, though, I wasn’t really sure what that would be. I had the fabric already, which I’ll talk about below, and I knew I wanted it to be 1950s inspired, but other than that, I didn’t have any concrete ideas.
Because of that, I printed out a bunch of pages with the outline of a body, and drew up six different ideas, which I then refined down to one single design. To the right are all the various designs I made, and below is the final design I landed on, based on what I thought I could do with the fabric I had, as well as what I felt looked the best.
The final sketch did get altered, but not by much; the only difference between it and the dress is that I decided against the overskirt, since I was happy with the dress as it was and didn’t think it would be necessary. The dress ended up being off the shoulder, with a pleated belt and a sash that draped down across the back, as well as a full circle skirt for maximum spin effect.
Fabric
The fabric for this dress is actually really interesting. It’s something called ‘shot cotton’, which means that the threads of the weft and the warp are two different colors. In this case, one is blue and one is red. Far away, the two colors blend together to make it look like normal purple fabric, but when the light hits it, it will catch one of the two colors depending on the angle. This gives it a really beautiful three dimensional effect, in which shadows are a slightly different color than the better lit areas. It’s a tricky effect to get a picture of, so I’ve done my best to show it in these two examples.
Jewelry
In the front of the dress, the pleated belt narrows until both sides meet at the center. In my sketches, I just left it there, but during the process of making this dress, I found a silver broach that an older relative gave me, and decided to add that to the dress as well. I’d guess it’s from the 1960s or 70s, based on the style, but as it’s a historically inspired dress, I didn’t see any reason to not include it.
I also wore a string of pearls and simple pearl earrings.
Acknowledgments
Thank you so much to my mom, who took the photos and was a great sounding board for tricky problems!