The Dorothy L Sayers Society – & Harriet Vane’s wedding dress

The Dorothy L Sayers Society

&

Busman's Honeymoon by Dorothy L Sayers

published 1937

 

 

 

This is a screenshot of the homepage of the Dorothy LSayers Society, and explains its purpose better than I could.

The lovely people there invited me to give a talk to them about Clothes in Dorothy L Sayers – specifically, in the Lord Peter Wimsey novels, particular attention to Harriet Vane (but not only her).

It was an absolute delight to do so: I greatly enjoyed giving the talk to the warm, welcoming members who assembled via Zoom on St Valentine’s Day. We looked at many of the key clothes scenes in the books, and I had assembled a slideshow of ideas of how the characters might have dressed. Then we all engaged in a lively conversation – these people were really well-informed and had such interesting things to say.

A major topic was Harriet D Vane’s wedding dress – a subject of great fascination to fans. The wedding occurs in the 1937 book Busman’s Honeymoon: I have blogged on it before but did not try to show The Dress. Now the time has come – I will use a section of my talk:

Harriet and Lord Peter get married in St Cross church in Oxford. But what did she wear?

New sister-in-law Helen says:  A plain costume would have been more suitable than cloth of gold

Peter’s man Bunter: ‘very well she looked, all in gold, with a beautiful bouquet of chrysanthemums’

Letitia martin, the Dean of Harriet's Oxford College:

She looked like a renaissance portrait stepped out of its frame. I put it down first of all to the effect of gold lame, but, on consideration, I think it was  probably due to ‘lerve’.

Peter’s mother, the Dowager says: Fierce bustle [NB not an actual bustle on the dress],  about wedding dress,– Worth’s – [NB also - not Worth’s, - never known as that, always just Worth, which the Dowager would have known] period gown in stiff gold brocade, long sleeves, square neck, off-the-face head-dress, no jewels except my long earrings.

Now Janet Hitchman, in her 1975 Such a Strange Lady, the first biography of Sayers, reckons gold lame had just been invented, and that Sayers liked to be uptodate. And gold lame is specifically mentioned.

[Janet Hitchman, and to some extent her Sayers biography, feature in this post here, on King of the Barbareens, Hitchman's memoir of childhood]

I had a dear blogging friend (the much-missed Noah Stewart) who used this picture, as being Marilyn Monroe in gold lame, while accepting that Harriet probably didn’t look like this. 

Although we tend to think of gold lame being this kind of material, with this look, it can be used to describe any cloth which has gold thread twisted into it.

One can only conclude that DLS didn’t want us to know exactly?

So I’m just going to show some ideas:

Lame as we think of it – I like this one, designed by Paquin

This is by Fortuny. Could be seen as the specified renaissance portrait, but not fitted enough I think – it looks quite pre-raphaelite.

This is a teasing backview which certainly fits the Dowagers description, and an all-purpose beautiful gold dress.

Now to me this one is the closest: it is on display at Hampton Court – (photo copyright the Historic royal palaces) and was a 1927 wedding dress for a very well-connected young woman, Ursula Mary Lawley. It’s described as gold lame damask, and was designed by Elizabeth Handley-Seymour, who had earlier designed the wedding dress of the Duchess of York – she who became first Queen and then, how most of us know her, the Queen Mother.

But -  I do not claim to have a definitive answer, because I don’t think that’s what the author wanted: we can each choose our own. This is mine.

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We all discussed this at length after my talk, and Society members had excellent pictures to offer, suggestions, even reminiscences from previous generations of their own families… it was all such fun.

Thanks so much to the Dorothy L Sayers Society for inviting me.

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