Two Antique Victorian Dresses

And what do we have today? Two victorian dresses from the Antique and Vintage Dress Gallery website.

Cocoa Dress
First we have the cocoa dress, main page found here.
This doesn't look like "cocoa" to me, but whatever. The key cool things on this dress I think are:
  1. the lace trim - good idea to trim a Victorian bodice you might be making that is looking plain...
  2. those cool bits over the hips that look like they might be joined onto the bodice. Unfortunately we don't have a straight-on front view to see what they look like from that perspective
  3. the interesting pull-through puff sleeve tops
  4. the funny folded pleat-like add-ons around the bottom of the skirt. I think it's a bow box-pleat or something
We also get to see what one type of Victorian buttons look like, which is useful.

Interlude
Looking at antique clothes in auctions seems to be useful for two main reasons. One, most other sources of information seem to only give a very general average of what was worn in a particular time or place, whereas when you look at the auctions and sources of extant items, rather that collated information or even period fashion plates, you tend to find interesting things that are completely different to everything else you've seen described or pictured. The second reason is that you can also get information on things that no one ever seems to mention, like what did the Victorian ladies where OVER their dresses? I saw little, if any, information about this and no pictures when I was reading about Victorian clothing last year.

Blue Dress
This dress, found here, is blue.
Very blue.
Which is pretty cool to start with.

The best elements of this dress are:
  1. the blue
  2. the wee bag. I didn't see any examples of this either when reading about Victorian clothing in general, but very useful information because you have to have somewhere to put things
  3. the cuffs. I like cuffs
  4. seeing how they did the gathered ruffles, and also the decorative bows, which look a bit like flowers
  5. we get some hints about a cool way of doing the overskirt - by gathering the material at the side
And there are different buttons once again, with much wider spacing than you usually see, which is useful if you hate doing buttons and button holes.

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