Fashion Expert Fact Checks Titanic's Costumes | Glamour

this is rose you know her from Titanic you know this outfit and this one but are they accurate we got this fashion historian hi I'm Raisa Britannia and I'm a fashion historian to walk us through what the movie got right and what they got wrong with my three socks first let's establish the setting Titanic was based on actual historical events that took place in April of 1912 enroute to America here were at the height of Gilded Age Society but also at the beginning of modern fashion this film was meticulously researched and the costume designer made sure that Rose had the latest styles straight from Paris costume designer Deborah Lynn Scott actually won the Oscar for best costume design for this movie to research this film she looked at extant garments and museum collections but also fashion publications from that time period let's start with roses iconic suit the Titanic set sail at noon and we see Rose wearing this cream striped afternoon suit roses afternoon suit looks almost exactly like a suit that appears in a French magazine in 1912 this is absolutely accurate the perfect ensemble to be boarding a ship in the afternoon so this is actually accurate but let's draw roses Day dress from the undergarments out anyway first up the underwear for the underwear Rose would have been wearing a chemise drawers and stockings the chemise of 1912 is a little bit different from ones that we've previously looked at this one has a lot of delicate lace and a ruffled edge at the neckline the drawers were less voluminous and they were in previous years mostly because of the changing silhouette you can see that she's wearing stockings here stockings were made of knitted cotton or silk and were usually light-colored for day sometimes even with inset lace next the corset we see Rose being laced into a corset and one scene of the movie where she has a really important discussion with her mom you know to see that boom the year 1912 specifically it was a really interesting time for women and corsets because they were evolving and shaping with a silhouette but the most modern women started to abandon the corset altogether this scene perfectly illustrates this push and pull between this more tight laced past and a more modern future this is really the beginning of the straightened silhouette that we will see in the 1920s just ten years before the dramatic silhouette was called an s-curve and you can see that in this picture here even though the most modern women were already abandoning corsets in 1912 the really rigid traditions of the society in which rose lives really demanded that she wear one next layer over the corset she would have worn a camisole and a petticoat a camisole would have been worn to soften that rigid line at the top the petticoats at this time period were pretty narrow as we can see in this ad this exists somewhere between the full Victorian petticoat and the modern slip these two garments were typically cotton for the day the next layer is the top we can see that Rose is wearing a really high collared shirt waste and accessorized with a necktie the woman's shirt waist was derived from the man's buttoned and collared shirt and was the first truly modern garment of the 20th century men's fashions started to influence women's wear beginning in the late 19th century but by 1912 it was the norm the Shirtwaist was also an egalitarian garment worn by both upper and lower classes when women's wear started to take influence from men's wear we got garments like this which were more comfortable and casual and now the suit we know that this is the most up-to-date fashion because it appeared in the January 1912 issue of lamode which was a popular French fashion publication this particular example is made by the couture house linker and company Bros would have gone to a couture house to be fit and had this garment made specifically for her the tailor made was the name for a women's walking suit much like this one the tailor made was often warned Travel which makes this entirely appropriate but there were other afternoon styles for different activities you can see in this deck seen that there are other women promenade anxia off similar ensembles a very important part of ocean liner culture was showing off the latest fashions that you probably just bought in Paris this costume hints at a very short-lived fad from this time period called the hobble skirt as you can see the circumference of the skirt kind of narrows at the ankle and it was said that it really restricted the strides of women and they had to hobble around the next layer her shoes you can see her shoes right here when she steps out of the car and they look like these and then there's the gloves the very first thing we see of Rose is her white glove gloves completed any gilded age ensemble and women wore gloves any time they were seen in public women would have coordinating gloves with each outfit and as you can see her white gloves perfectly match her cream suit moving on to the hair when Rose removes her hat later indoors we get a good look at her hair she wears her hair up which is accurate for her age and station hair was really only worn down by adolescence and young girls after Wednesday Butte on Baum you would wear your hair up we do see Rose with her hair down at other points at the movie this could be anachronistic but it was likely a character choice to really illustrate that Rose was an independent spirit and she really desired to break out of this constricting society over her hair would be the Hat this hat is the most iconic feature of this costume and it really facilitates this dramatic reveal it for character this style of hat was extremely fashionable for the time period hats actually reached their widest around 1910 when the brim would extend past the shoulders at that time it was called a merry widow hat which is after a Broadway play called The Merry Widow we can see the Rosa's hat is made out of a heavily stiffened straw and decorated with a wide taffeta here you can see another kind of decoration used on hats at the time and yes that is a taxidermied bird there was this trend of having taxidermy birds atop women's hats this was so fashionable that it eventually depleted bird populations and some species were even driven to endangerment or extinction unsurprisingly these large hats were the subject of satire at the time because these hats were so large the pins used to secure them were equally large at this time some women would use these really long hat pins as weapons to fend off predatory men and these especially long hat pins could prove quite dangerous and this phenomenon was so widespread that the media termed it the hat pin peril here's what roses day suit would have looked like compared to the movie so this is entirely accurate but let's add a bird let's move on to Rosa's evening wear another aspect of oceanliner culture were these lavish nightly dinners onboard because this is a nightly affair we see a couple different dinner dresses on rows this was the height of gilded age society and these women were spending more money than ever before on their clothes so much so that they would have a different dinner dress for every night these costumes were modeled off of real dresses so these are also accurate now we're going to draw every layer of the evening dress first up the underwear the underwear would be the same but it would probably be silk instead of cotton for evening she would be wearing stockings and we do see that she wears black ones in the scene when she's dancing with Jack for both of these evening dresses darker stockings would be appropriate and then the corset when dressing for dinner Rose might switch out her corset for a finer one made out of silk rose would have likely purchased her corset from a specialty shop in Paris if she was already there shopping and then the next layer an alternative to the camisole and petticoat was this single garment called the princess petticoat which is similar to what would later be called the slip for an evening dress this fine a princess petticoat made out of a coordinating colored fabric would be standard and then the main event the dress you can see the inspiration behind roses costumes in the designs from these very prominent designers from 1912 as you can see in these examples a lot of these dresses incorporated layers of sheer fabric that were then embellished with beading the fashionable silhouette of 1912 was actually remarkably similar to that of 1812 you can see a high waistline with a narrow skirt both here and here this is an era in which Parisian designers were really creating the most forward-thinking designs one of the most modern of modern designers was lady duff-gordon who went by the name lucille when she was a designer and actually she is a character in this film you can see Rose introducing her here lucy lady duff-gordon she designs naughty lingerie among her many talents but she wasn't just a lingerie designer she was actually a pioneer in the fashion field she actually instituted the practice of draping fabric on a model instead of flat patterning which is standard practice now but she really pioneered it and now the shoes we get a close look at Rosa's shoes when she steps onto the railing here we see that they're made of satin and dyed to match the color of her dress then her jewelry we can see in this scene that the necklace and earrings that Rose wear match and that's because they were likely part of a set called a pair or but we all know that the most important piece of jewelry in this film is the heart of the ocean this necklace was designed by director James Cameron and based on the Hope Diamond the Hope Diamond was the biggest and most famous diamond in the world and also a similar blue color and then her gloves we see all of the women in the scene wearing over the elbow or opera length gloves just before going into the dining room women were expected to wear gloves any time they were in public but they were allowed to take them off when dining and then her hair her hair is down and loose and this scene but at dinner we see that it's properly done roses hair is adorned with bits of jewelry very similar to this image of actress Lillie Elsie because the fashionable hairstyle was so voluminous you needed a lot of hair sometimes you would even use hair pieces to create additional volume so when brushing their hair women would save the hair that was on their hairbrush and put it into a little receptacle on their table and then use that to create these hair pieces finally her makeup every single aspect of this costume is accurate until we get to the makeup if I'm going to fact-check this I'm going to say that this makeup is extremely 1990s in the early 20th century women actually wore very little visible makeup and that's because to do so would align them with what society called painted ladies and those were really women that were not considered respectable like actresses or courtesans it wouldn't be until the following decade that cosmetics would really become socially acceptable we can see that rose has the darkened eyebrows eyeliner and darker lipstick much like Kate Winslet would wear off-camera makeup is often the least historically accurate aspect of period films and that's because actors and characters have to be appealing to modern audiences so here's what roses evening dress would have looked like compared to the movie version pretty much the same Titanic is as historically accurate as period films get it's really only the makeup that betrays the period in which the film was made the historical accuracy of this film is really owed to the meticulous research done and that was out of respect for the trout they did their research and it shows and that's probably why this is an enduring classic [Music]

Channel: Glamour

Views: 1,998,993

Rating: 4.9466896 out of 5

Keywords: titanic, would they wear that, fashion, fashion history, glamour fashion history, fashion historian, fashion expert, fashion expert fact checks, costume fact check, raissa bretana, titanic costume, titanic costumes, titanic kate winslet, titanic historical accuracy, rose dewitt bukater, rose titanic, rose in titanic, rose dress in titanic, rose's dress in titanic, the heart of the sea titanic, titanic white suit, white suit in titanic, glamour, glamour magazine

Id: kxqg26-6nXs

Length: 13min 7sec (787 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 27 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/DynastyFan85]

Pretty much the makeup was not accurate. I always felt Roses lips were way too bold and dark, especially at the staircase when Jack kisses her hand