The style of Marleen: 1912: A costume from the Titanic

Hello everyone,

It´s been a very long time since I posted something, but wanna get in to it again. I figured a good way to start would be presenting the most recent costume I made.

It was inspired by a trip to Barcelona I made with a few friends. It wasn´t planned but we went to a Titanic exhibiton there, in the nautical museum. They showed some dresses from that era and I completely fell in love with one of it.

So I analyzed it a bit and figured out, that for me its not very typical for a dress from this period, or the year 1912. It was an extinct garment obviously but I did not find a lot of dresses from that period who looked like this.
What I decided to do was to adjust the design a bit, so it looks more typical for this period. And I had to make further changes to reduce price of the materials as well as the time i was willing to put in the dress.
Because this extant dress was made from a very fine mesh with handsewn decorations, that seem to be fine net tubes that were stitched on in a decorative manner. Furthermore the beading appears to be very detailed.

So I changed up the design of the main dress,but before I could get to that i had to make appropriate underwear as I was just starting out with costuming.
Only thing I already owned was a selfmade chemise in pink.

It was made from a very thin, almost sheer cotton with a pink/salmon print on it, which isn´t accurate, as the chemises were usually white to be washed easily and more roughly.

Despite it´s inaccuracies I used it for the costume.

Next thing was the corset obviously, A very decorative thing at this time. I used a pattern from Norah Waughs "Corset and Crinolines" aka the bible of costumers.

For fabric I chose a white coutil, which i didn´t had to flat line. Some salmon satin for the binding and decorative bows as well as the elastic suspenders.
I also used a white lace for decoration and some cotton thread for the flossing around the bones edges.

To cover up the corset, a corset cover and petticoat would have been worn. also many late edwardian wore something calles a bust improver. I decided to combine all of this things into a petticoat dress, which were in fashion around this time, also it was more pratical.

It was made from a plain cotton and decorated with some lace, as well as ruffles around the bust area, to kinda imitate the but improver a bit, which worked surprisingly well.
The vertical seams were falt felled seams to reduce bulk the best I could. The hem was decorated with tucks and lace. And the whole thing closes with buttons and knotted or crocheted thread loops and a small hook.

And finally the outer dress. This took way longer than expected but I adore it. 6 different fabrics, 3 laces and many, many bead went into this gown.

I won´t go in detail with this dress, as it is pretty complex and a far to big mess, to describe it logically. I just tried, tried again, ripped seams out again, inserted panels for more width etc. So all in all its full of errors, but I guess this is what helps me with learning.

But all the flaws of the gown are unseen on the pictures, which is always relieving.