From the Dirty Room, with Love

    Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone! Yesterday was pretty busy with pre-Valentine’s activities and other things, and I completely forgot to post. So sorry!

    This week’s post is actually pretty relevant to the holiday, as my newest big find was a wedding ensemble.

    We have a lot of wedding dresses. For this reason, I often skip over any wedding outfit I see in the Dirty Room when I’m thinking about things to bring into the main collection. If I had done that this week, however, I would have been making a huge mistake. While showing Clare (our curator, and my boss) photos of something I had been considering bringing in, she swiped through the rest of my pictures and got very excited over a pair of shoes. I’m still pretty green, so I didn’t truly understand what she was so happy about. She got even more excited when I told her that the shoes were part of a whole wedding ensemble we found in a box.

    As it turns out, there are two things that make this set special.

1.     The bride who wore this was from a prominent family (We were able to find the exact date of the wedding in 1790, too!).

2.     This is the oldest full ensemble we have in the collection, as of now. It includes an open-robe dress and skirt, a jabot bodice piece, and matching shoes with the original buckles tucked inside. The collection has shoes from this time, but this is the first pair that we’ve come across to still have its matching buckles included.

    

On one hand, I was thrilled to be able to say that I found it. On the other hand, I immediately got nervous about what would have happened if Clare hadn’t flipped through my photos!

    Also in the same Valentine’s vein, I found a candy-colored wedding dress from a later decade. Until I started working here, it didn’t really occur to me that the tradition of a white dress had a beginning, and that before then a wedding dress was simply a nice gown. If you can’t quite tell from the photo, the dress is a dusty purple color, with a cream mesh overlay and pink details. I asked Clare if she thought the purple was faded at all, and she told me that the purple was probably always a sort of muted shade. It’s definitely a very confectionery-esque color palette.

     In more general news, we have 69 boxes left to go through, and roughly 150 have already been looked at so far (with me being present for the vast majority). I’m pretty over-the-moon at the idea that I really will be the person who looks at the last box in the Dirty Room. Coming in more days during the week is absolutely paying off!

                                         More assorted photos from this week: