Ornament Magazine

VOL38.1 2015

Ornament is the leading magazine celebrating wearable art. Explore jewelry, fashion, beads; contemporary, ancient and ethnographic.

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could be very beautiful and becoming with an elegance that also showed both dignified feminine grace as well as sexual appeal. Not yet among the dead and very much alive, women had to balance the difficult performance of combining decorous restraint with seductive allure to show themselves as available to males. Remarriage would secure their financial protection, a vital necessity for survival in the Victorian/Edwardian eras, as with most of human history. While mourning dress was a visual symbol of grief and respect for the deceased, it also gave clues to the woman's status and taste. Wealthy women could commission apparel from the House of Worth while those less fortunate took an existing dress and dyed it black. The few menswear showed the degree to which QUEEN VICTORIA MOURNING DRESS In black: silk taffeta, silk ribbon, silk lace, silk crepe, 1894-1895. The two views of Victoria's dress show the magisterial sweep of her gown, as well as the dispensing of forms of corseting that would bind and reshape her fulsome figure. Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. males of the time mostly dressed in dark, uniformly subdued fabrics anyway, so their attire in mourning scarcely changed. The ensembles were fitted with gloves, hats, veils, and jewelry and illustrated how mourning progressed through its various prescribed phases. It was, of course, Queen Victoria who contributed so mightily to mourning practices. So over-the-top upset by her beloved husband Prince Albert's death in 1861 the queen basically retired from all public life and wore black from that day forward to the end of her long reign and life. The exhibition showed one of her silk taffeta evening dresses, and unlike the other dresses which showed the fashionable tucked wasp waists, hers has none, an acknowledgment to her corsetless zaftig figure. Black mourning dress may have been the color of sadness but when you wear something for two full years, as expected of a woman grieving the death of her husband, the concept has to take into account just how long you can tolerate keeping the visual performance static, especially since the times are always changing. They inevitably spawned sartorial nuances and the basic fashions could still be imitated and not abandoned. Women's journals, like Harper's Bazaar, reassured as to what to wear from head to toe. Therein were found what hairstyles were acceptable, which cloth to buy, where to find mourning rings and lockets, pins made of jet, onyx necklaces, handkerchiefs edged in black lace, and lovely black parasols. Stores arose catering to the death demand and some developed

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