Conserve

The Yellow Dress

BY HILARY DAVIDSON, DRESS AND TEXTILE HISTORIAN

Dress historian and curator Hilary Davidson explains how she worked with costume students from NIDA to restore a mysterious silk dress found in fragments amongst the National Trust’s collections, revealing rich layers of history stretching over some 270 years.

The yellow dress was a mystery. A pile of resplendent silk damask pieces with no provenance or history, it was found in a bag amongst the National Trust’s collections. Part of it was constructed as a small bodice; the rest comprised scraps and lengths. The textile was clearly eighteenth century and had been a gown at one point, but when and in what form?

Australian dress collections contain very few pre-nineteenth-century pieces. To find even a partial early garment is important for the nation’s broader clothing story, so several experts tried to work out just what was going on with the textile pieces and start to reconstruct the original object.

Recognising that it offered a leading resource in costume construction, the National Trust approached the National Institute for Dramatic Art (NIDA) for assistance. Working collaboratively, the two organisations devised a project to reconstruct the original dress by re-stitching it, and to make replicas of the garment and historically appropriate underwear. Two NIDA costume students, Lucy Francis and Jasmin Gray, were mentored through the process as part of their final-year independent research project. It was an exciting chance to deep-dive into the history and cultural context of a rare artefact.

Our aims were to bring back to life a whole version of the dress using the original material; create a replica dress showing an alternative

version of the garment, which has been refashioned several times over the past 270 years; contribute to a display for the National Trust; and find out where the dress came from and how it arrived in Australia. We had some background information to draw on from previous analysis of the garment carried out between 2017 and 2019 by National Trust costume curator Eleanor Keene and volunteer Thelma Scanes. They realised the bodice element was twentieth-century fancy dress and that the original eighteenth-century gown had two different forms, with potentially another altered version made in the late nineteenth century. They unpicked contemporary alterations to release the flat textile shapes from crude and hasty stitching, then made a template of the pieces. Armed with these details, we set to work seeking definitive answers. First, we spent a long time looking at the scraps and lengths found in the bag. These leftovers were crumpled, folded, dirty and confused, with myriad strange cuts and layers of stitching lines. They offered both too many and too few clues as to how they once connected. We ended up taking five full days, with three researchers, to trace the paths these remains had taken through time – the most difficult object study I have encountered in twenty years! By creating detailed patterns, experimenting and making toiles to test construction, and using the silk’s repeating weave as a guide, we finally worked out the dress’s history. Through it all, the beauty of the silk still shone, with its stylised foliage forms and elegant flowers.

The dress began life as a piece of silk woven in England circa 1745–1752. The first dress

“Using the silk’s repeating weave as a guide, we finally worked out the dress’s history.”

Opposite The original silk restored to the 1770 version of the dress (photo by Jacquie Manning).

Clockwise from top left Making a template from an original fabric piece; working on the 1770 version of the dress; stays, chemise, petticoat and panniers constructed by Lucy Francis in a style accurate to the later 18th century (photo by Jacquie Manning).

was made at this time in a popular style of the day, with wide, full skirts, an open bodice with a stomacher, and folded ‘robings’ down each side at the front. The back of this original dress survived – it had pleats running into the skirt in a l’Anglaise style, with the lower half removed. Jasmin made a cotton-sateen replica of this dress, using detailed research to decide how it would have looked originally and working back from the existing pieces to recreate the missing parts.

The second incarnation of the dress was a renovation of the first version. In the 1770s, someone removed two panels of silk, making the skirt narrower and changed the cut so the bodice ended in a deep V at the back and the skirt gathered densely all the way round. Although still opening at the front, the style was changed to have a solid front instead of a removable stomacher. This version contained the most original stitching, so the team decided that I should conserve it by re-sewing it and filling in the missing parts using a silk faille fabric, period-accurate thread and conservation stitching techniques. Meanwhile, Lucy made a pair of stays (like a corset) accurate to the later eighteenth century and in period materials to give shape to the dress. She also constructed a chemise and petticoat and two sets of panniers to give the skirts a fashionable fullness.

The Yellow Dress project provided the students with an invaluable opportunity to work on a unique, complex process of interpretation. Working together, we created a rich set of objects exploring how this dress once looked and was worn. Each stage required group discussion, decision-making and testing many theories. We conducted far-reaching research and learned new (old) ways of making and thinking about clothing. Unfortunately, we did not learn how the dress came to Australia. However, the final results are a huge achievement, transforming a pile of scrap material into a window into the world of clothing past. We are deeply grateful to the National Trust for making the project possible through its generous support and ongoing collaboration.

Above Jasmin Gray (left) with the replica dress made to the 1740 version and Lucy Francis with the original silk restored to the 1770 version (photo by Jacquie Manning).

The National Trust would like to thank the Copland Foundation for funding this conservation project. Special thanks also to Eleanor Keene and Lindie Ward who assisted with the project, Suzanne Osmond, and NIDA course coordinators, Annette Ribbons and Corinne Heskett.

Stories of the Yellow Silk Dresses

The replica dress will join the National Trust’s permanent collection for education and public programs. The yellow dress will be on display at Grossmann House in Maitland from 12 February. See pg 18. Check opening hours and plan your visit at nationaltrust.org.au/nsw