Unveiled – The Exhibition

Whlist on my trip to Wellington a few weeks ago I went to see this exhibition. I mean how could I not? It was in the same building as the conference – literally accross the landing. I mean really – HOW COULD I NOT? So I dutifully waited until the end of the day and raced over to the exhibition.

The exhibiton included Dita Von Tesse’s wedding dress designed by Vivienne Westwood:

There were also dresses by Christian Lacroix, Charles Fredrick Worth and Norman Hartnell. Basically it was amazing.

And all sorts of other delightful dresses. I was enchanted and pleasantly surprised to note that white has only been the colour of choice in the last 200 years – and even that was subject to availability, finances (to name a few) and prior to that women expected to wear their wedding dresses again and again (I hope to be one of these women). And some, like Moncia Maurice, just liked to flout the rules:

And why not? It is your day

Some of the dresses at the exhibition were made of patterned fabric. One I particularly enjoyed was made out of upholstery material as in WWII one needed to collect stamps to buy fabric, however, for reasons unknown to me, this did not include upholstery fabric (unfortunately I cannot find a photo of this dress but I’ll let your imaginations run wild!)

And of course there were classics like this one:

 

An absolutely gorgeous dress worn in 1946 and, appropriately, made out of parachute slik which the bride’s husband-to-be had brought home from the war in the Pacific.

I would highly recommend going to this show.