Thursday’s post was about Amanda Craig’s wonderful The Golden Rule – but one part of the book needs its own entry, and that is the spectacular party dress the heroine gets to wear.
In fact Amanda and I had discussed this before the book was published – agreeing how we loved a book in which there was an iconic dress, a big clothes moment. Think: Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, the ‘shared’ Schiaparelli dress in Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means, the green dress in Ian McEwan’s Atonement, the velvet audition dress in Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes, bought with ‘pawned’ jewellery. It’s such a great item in a book – we worry that they don’t feature so much in modern books.
So Amanda is helping to show the way, with the heroine of The Golden Rule getting to wear a ‘vintage couture’ party dress by Dior:
‘Layer upon layer of gauzy knee length petticoats belled out from a tiny bodice with a boat neck, made of almost transparent cream silk. The top layer was embroidered in a pattern of intertwining red rosebuds and pale green leaves, each stitch so minute that they could hardly be seen.’
When her daughter sees her in it, she is open-mouthed and says
‘Are you going on Strictly?’
In fact it’s for a special party – though where dress and wearer end up is very worrying for those of us who are concerned about the heroine AND important textiles.
The dress in the book is by Dior, described here as ‘the only designer ever to love and understand women’s bodies as they were, to see their curves as flowers needing petals.’ There’s been a lot of Dior on the blog… particularly recommend this post on Mrs ‘Arris goes to Paris (about to be republished I gather) with lots of Dior illos (including the one above) that might make you think of the description here.
And then I had the joy of finding a couple more dresses (on Kristine’s photostream) that I thought might fit.
The top picture shows top items from the Dior 1957 collection.
After that I decided to give some other designers a go:
Embroidered, with green sash, David Klein from 1952
Balenciaga with net skirts, 1950
Embroidered lace and satin Carven 1955
Thank you so much Moria for all this - and yes, the Dior dress my heroine wears is very much inspired by your blog. But it is also based on a real dress, that I now wish I had photographed, seen in the glorious V&A exhibition of 2019, and one of the things I found almost as moving as the clothes were the visitors, especially women of a certain vintage whom I know either yearned for a Dior dress or (in one or two cases) probably had worn, or inherited, one.
ReplyDeleteI am putting more clothes into the next novel too, thanks to you. Wait and see...
Oh something to look forward to! and the V&A do fashion exhibitions so well, I loved Dior, Mary Quant, Balenciaga...
DeleteAnd thank YOU for giving us so much pleasure with your books.
What a wonderful-sounding dress! And it's described so well I could really see it. You have a point that we don't see those big dress moments the way we used to - well, at least not in crime fiction. I wonder if that's because people don't tend to dress as formally as they did? It's funny about dresses like that. On the one hand, I generally don't wear dresses. On the other, there is something about a designer dress like that...
ReplyDeleteSometimes a dress will make you break your own rules (in more ways than one). And they can truly be works of art, appreciated by all.
DeleteLovely pictures, Moira. Yes, I think Margot's right. Even the upper classe - the kind who dress for dinner in GA novels - don't, I guess, dress formally so much any more. Yes, I can imagines all sorts of mishaps potentially befalling such a beautiful and precious garment. I don't think I'd dare to wear something so valuable myself.
ReplyDeleteYou see people quite dressed up in glossy mags - I read the Tatler in waiting rooms and such-like, and you do wonder who pays for such expensive things. As a good bolshy socialist I have to hold two views simultaneously...
DeleteYes please, more clothes in books. And none of your describing people as 'smartly dressed' or 'frumpy'. Tell us exactly what the characters wore!
ReplyDeleteAmen to that. It's my purpose in life! Occasionally an author does tell me that they thought of me when writing a scene, and it makes my day.
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