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Preserving Your Wedding Gown

9/5/2014

I was recently contacted by journalist Carrie Hayward, host of the Disney Wedding Podcast and author of PassPorter's Disney Weddings & Honeymoons. Carrie was excited to interview me on how to care for your wedding gown without being scammed by gown preservation companies. Click here to listen to the Podcast, called How to Preserve Your Wedding Gown.

Carrie and I had a nice chat about my background in textile preservation, the kinds of services Museum Textile Services offers, and where listeners could go to learn more about MTS.
I explained that in the Resources section of our web page is a brand new MTS Handout entitle How to Archive Your Wedding Gown, which anyone can download. There is also a step-by-stop slideshow called How to Pack Your Wedding Gown.

As I explain in the Podcast, beware of any gown preservation specialist who seals your dress in a box and tells you not to open it. What are they afraid you will find? Proper archival storage products are dye and acid free, made of inert plastics, and preferably opaque to protect the contents from light. Although many archival storage boxes are made of acid-free cardboard, At MTS we prefer archival polypropylene storage boxes. They are durable, opaque, pest resistant, and remain pH neutral forever. Cardboard boxes are more fragile, an easy target for pests, and they reacidify from their contents and environment.

Where you store your gown is as important as how you store it. Never keep your gown on a hanger or in a garment bag. If you want to preserve your gown for future generations, it needs to be placed in an archival box after it is cleaned. The box should be kept in the part of the house where you are comfortable living—not the basement or attic. It should be in an area where the temperature and relative humidity are stable without the highs and lows that encourage dimensional change and pest activity. A spare closet, or even under a bed, are both good places. Inspect your archival storage box every year for signs of pest activity or mildew—late spring and late summer are good times. If you notice any change in the appearance of your wedding gown, consult a textile conservator.

For these and all MTS Handouts and Slideshows, visit the Resources section of our website and follow the link for Individuals.

Camille Myers Breeze founded Museum Textile services in 1999. She is a prolific author, and educator of museum personnel and emerging conservation professionals in the US and abroad.

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A Corset Conundrum

3/17/2013

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By Jennifer Nason and Camille Myers Breeze

In last week’s blog, the Oberlin Connection, Camille wrote about a donation of clothing from Mike & Midge Burnham. While cataloging Ruth Thayer Burnham’s exquisitely preserved 1895 silk wedding dress, we came across something fascinating: alterations to the stays stitched within the bodice of the dress. Assuming one only wears one's wedding dress once, we have been curious about why this dress might have been meddled with.

Jennifer Nason working on Ruth Thayer Burnham's 1895 wedding ensemble.

Hand-stitched inside the bodice of the dress are sixteen stays. Stays, or boning, are thin strips of rigid material used to help hold the form of a corset or dress. The earliest materials used for stays were wood, ivory, baleen--also called whalebone--, and bone, hence the term boning. By the mid 19th century, steel and baleen predominated. The elongated torso popular in the 1880s to early 1890s required large amounts of corsetry but by the late 1990s a lighter, shorter style emerged. This simpler shape required much less boning than in the 1880s and permitted a greater range of movement. Ruth Thayer’s 1895 marriage to Alfred Burnham took place right while this change was taking place.

Stays sewn inside the bodice of Ruth's wedding dress.

The stays in Ruth's wedding dress were sewn in by hand and also altered to make some shorter than others. The cuts to the fabric casing of the shortened stays reveal them to be both a translucent and opaque flexible material. This is likely baleen, which comes in a range of colors that sources suggest can be used to identify the whale species from which it came.

Light and dark stays.

Their covers are identical.

But the stays tell an even more complicated story. The front four are more flexible and lack the crisscross pattern of stitching that holds the others down. Luckily, two are coming loose from the dress allowing us to see blue lettering on the back that reads, “Warren’s Featherbone.” Featherbone was the unique invention of dry-goods salesman Edward Warren. On a tour of a feather duster factory, Warren realized that the inexpensive pointer feathers being discarded could replace whale boning. Warren opened a store in 1873 to sell his new Featherbone and the compressed-feather boning quickly became popular for its light-weight, rust-proof quality. Warren’s Featherbone enjoyed its peak of success between 1873 and 1900.

The stays on either side of the front opening are made of Featherbone, and different stitching was used to attach them.

How can we explain the complex series of decisions that went into the construction and alteration of this dress? Perhaps Ruth originally wore it with a separate corset and the boning was altered for subsequent wearings. If the dress was worn only once, though, perhaps the longer stays were trimmed in the final fitting to make the bride comfortable, and Featherbone was preferred for the front of the bodice.

Ruth Thayer Burnham, c. 1905.

As an opera singer, Ruth would no doubt have sung on her wedding day, requiring an extra degree of mobility and comfort. She also had many occasions on which to wear spectacular costume, such as the gown pictured in this photograph, which appears to be Edwardian, from the first decade of the 20th century.

As cataloging and rehousing continue, we will search for other alterations in the wedding dress that could confirm that it was worn more than once. We may never know for certain, but perhaps our readers have additional insight into the story told by this particular detail of Ruth's spectacular wedding ensemble. Please weigh in if you wish to hazard a guess.

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Preserving Your Wedding Gown

A Corset Conundrum

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