A Wedding Dress for a Pond Princess

For my wedding dress, I decided that the only gown for me was the green 1900 gown by Worth, currently at the Kyoto Costume Institute in Japan.  It was the most consistently breathtaking gown I had ever seen, and I knew it because it jolted me every time it came up in dress tumblrs.  At the time, there was only one picture of the gown available on the whole wide internet, and the same one was reproduced in the KCI archive book (though that dress has earned a couple of extra photos in the new edition). 

1900 Worth gown at KCI

I made my decision and started the planning process in March of 2014, preceding my wedding in July of 2015.  I knew that this was not going to be a faithful reproduction since I could not examine the gown in person, and I was okay with that; the most important thing for me was capturing the essence of the design, the heavy embellishment, the WOW factor.  This I felt was in my grasp, but I reeeeely needed more pictures. 

Enter my good friend C; costume maven and Japanophile, who was making a trip to Kyoto the summer before my wedding, and though she made an appointment to see the gown, the KCI was closed!  Never daunted, she managed to sweet-talk them into sending her a file of archival detail photographs.

With those, and with Cathy Hay’s marvelous documentation of another Worth gown, the famous Oak Leaf Dress, I had a good idea of how the pattern needed to work, and more importantly, how the bodice needed to close to accommodate the heavily embellished front and back. 

Then, of course, the question was fabric.  One of the most important aspects of the gown was the color.  It had to be green.  Or blue.  Or greeny-blue.  The ombre effect and swampy delicacy had to do with the fact that the gown is many different kinds of fabrics, each originally dyed differently but complementarily to build a cohesive palette.  I would need to work with a solid silk, a chiffon, a velvet.  And I would need to dye them myself. 

I will spare you the agony of the months that I learned to batch dye for the first time, the endless swatches, and the terror that the green would be too minty, too oversaturated, too ‘80s, too unfashionable, too bright, etc.  Everything could go wrong.  Not quite everything did. 

The dyes and the fabric came from Dharma Trading.  I used Procyon dyes in Celadon and Seafoam, and Ecru for the chiffon. I originally ordered 8 yards of silk twill, 8 yards of 10mm silk chiffon, and 5 yards of silk velvet.  I only had to re-order the twill and the velvet (ouch) and only had to redye the chiffon about 4 times to get the perfect not-quite-white that would overlay the seafoam skirt.  The velvet dyed so badly the first time that I called Dharma to get advice.  Did you know you could do that?  Do it!  They are very nice and helpful.  My main mistake was not using enough salt because I wanted a delicate color and thought that salt would make it too saturated for me.  My main lesson learned was to follow the rules before you break them.  The dyemaster calculated the exact amount of dye I needed; I discovered I had been using way too much dye since the salt was not holding it in.  The next attempt went much better, and finally I was satisfied.  (I really did spare you most of the agony). 

C rocking the dye bath