Restoring a one-hundred-year-old party dress… for the heck of it!

Mildew. Mothballs. Powdered Rouge.

The crowded rack isn’t much to look at and it certainly doesn’t smell like roses, but there are fewer places I would rather be than the “antique” section of my favorite vintage clothing store.

A perk of my job as a bridal designer and seamstress is that I get to dress however I want and people just expect it. If I want to show up to a dress fitting in a magenta pillbox cap and bellbottoms or an 1880s pirate blouse, no one bats an eye.

I’m always on the hunt for unusual pieces, but sometimes I buy vintage clothing just because I know the odds of anyone appreciating it as much as I will are slim. I’m a head shorter than the average American woman, and clothes that don’t fit the majority of the population work for me. I snatch up pieces that are too small and also too damaged for most people to wear — I can fit them or at least alter them to fit and I can usually fix or tolerate damages. It breaks my heart to picture these pieces wasting away in a box somewhere where they can’t be loved and appreciated!

I feel a sense of obligation to the makers of these beauties to preserve their creations and allow them to keep living the best I can. In my very young and still ignorant knowledge of dressmaking, I do have a picture of what kind of blood, sweat, and tears went into making these garments and I can almost hear them speaking to me from the rack, telling the stories of the women who made, wore, and re-wore these dresses for decades.

Such was the case for this complete hand sewn 100% silk frock from the late teens over a century ago. I saw the gossamer ruffles poking out of the rack between a tweed jacket and a velvet cloak and I knew that whatever those silk tulle ruffles belonged to was going to be a work of art.

I slipped the dress over my shoulders in the dressing room and knew that it was going to be one of the most treasured items in my collection. It’s a boxy shape and shouldn’t have made me feel particularly “pretty” the way most of my favorite pieces do, but something about the combination of textures and dainty details in this dress just made me feel so feminine.

The tulle was in tough shape and I foresaw dozens of hours in my future repairing it, but It wasn’t a choice. It was my duty to the woman who made this dress 100+ years ago to save this poor creature and wear her!

It’s my busy season, so I haven’t exactly had dozens of hours to spare, but 20-minute “smoke breaks” here and there allowed me to get the project done in time for my 24th birthday. The dress is exceptionally fragile and I know that regardless of care she probably only has so many wears left in her, so I decided the only way to do her justice and fulfill my duty to her was to document her with a photoshoot so I can wear and love her to smithereens and also preserve her character and likeness for centuries to come.

This dress is light, delicate, feminine, and made for natural sunlight. I knew Rebekah would be the perfect photographer to capture her integrity, so I hired her to come early on a weekday before my rush of dress fittings to squeeze me in for a quick session.

I never knew my paternal grandfather’s mother, Roberta, but there was something about this dress that reminded me of her. She was a frontier woman and far from frilly, but I know there’s something to this dress that makes me feel close to her when I wear it. Roberta planted about fifty lilac bushes around the home we were both raised in, so I wanted to incorporate white lilacs into the photo shoot to honor her.

I never knew Roberta, but her legacy has been strong in our family. She was the definition of grit, surviving as a single mother on the high desert with a disabled daughter and a farm to maintain. From the clothes they wore to the soap they bathed with, Roberta made it all from scratch, and from something she coaxed life into under harsh circumstances. She had a baseball bat next to her bedside and no one in Lake County had to wonder if she could do some damage with it.

But she loved flowers and she had an eye for finding beauty where there wasn’t otherwise. She could coax lilacs, irises, peonies, and poppies to grow in the desert, and to this day the trees she planted on our family farm are some of the only deciduous trees in North Lake County. I have always looked to her legacy as a strong definition of how I view womanhood. She could do anything a man could do and then some, but she did it in a dress.

I know that my value and skill for resourcefulness has trikled down the gene pool into my blood from her, and it’s a value that shapes a great portion of my identity. I thank her or it.

I haven’t every thought I looked like Roberta before, but for some reason when I stepped into that dress on my 24th birthday I looked in the mirror and saw the woman who could pour a cup of tea for her guests in the same breath that she broke the neck of a farm hen that would become dinner. It was an honor to find her likeness somewhere in me, and it make me feel more grown up than I ever have.

I love this little antique treasure of a party dress. I have no idea what it was originally worn for or why it makes me think of Roberta. The time invested in restoring this dress isn’t something many would budget for, but sometimes you just have to listen to your gut and indulge in these frivolous “duties” that somehow, I truly believe, make the world a brighter and better place.