Abstract
The objectives of this study are to select and analyze unpublished wedding dresses in the 19th century, to investigate the design characteristics and making techniques of Victorian wedding dresses, and to examine the correlation between the wedding dress style and the fashion style in those days and the influence of the wedding dress style on contemporary's styles. The materials of this study were 9 wedding dresses owned by the Historical Costume and Textile Collection at the University of Connecticut in USA. The dresses were made during the mid and late Victorian Age. As for silhouette, the bustle style was popular in the 1870s and 1880s, and the hourglass style in the 1890s, and different from contemporary dresses there were no big differences in structural pattern and details between ordinary dresses and wedding dresses. In addition, colored wedding dresses were used until the mid and late Victorian Age, but since the wedding ceremony of Queen Victoria in 1840, white wedding dress was widely accepted and settled as the tradition of today's wedding dresses. While the Western dress style had been basically a one piece style, there appeared simple two piece designs in which the upper garment was separated from the lower one, from the mid Victorian Age. This is considered the reflection of those days' pragmatic social trend in dress style. It seems around 1875 when asymmetric design was first introduced in the Western dress style, which had been mostly symmetric. The asymmetric style that pursued atypical beauty, though not common during the late Victorian Age, shows a change in the typical Western dress style. With regard to dress making techniques, sewing machines were distributed widely during the early Victorian Age but they were not used in all parts of dress. Most of details and trimming works were done manually and some parts were attached and detached by hand sewing. In addition, not like today, there were no generalized rules of making such as the form of closings and composition.
