- I have wanted to do a reconstruction of the Mary Poppins "Jolly Holiday" gown for Quite Some Time. Primarily because the design
that we see in the film in all its white, floofy, ruffly glory, along with the outdoor
setting of the scene just screams Edwardian lingerie dress, which in itself has been a project on my own personal
reconstruction to do list for... pretty much since
the dawn of my interest in historical costumes. Unfortunately this project has
been well on the back burner of my #projectgoals purely because these dresses just, in the images, looked so
complicated, so labor intensive, and honestly, really quite
delicate in outcomes, so this has been a
wonderful "one day" project, not really in the forefront
of my existence, until now. Before you see it, I just so
happen to be in possession of two extent examples of
Edwardian lingerie dresses which I have been able to
study and it turns out, these gowns are not nearly as complicated as I thought they were,
which, quite honestly, tends to be the case with
a lot of historical dress. The first gown I just recently purchased earlier this year from
witchyvintage on Instagram, the second gown was actually given to me by one of my wonderful theater colleagues. So in the process of
researching and designing for my own interpretation
of the Mary Poppins gown, I have had a fantastic time
examining these two gowns to give me some, not only
design, but also construction insight into how to
recreate one for myself. As is my method, I will be
endeavoring to reconstruct this gown to the best of my ability as it would have been done in the period, and despite the fact that this is turn of the century Edwardian and they did have access
to sewing machines, there is still a lot of handwork evident on extent lingerie dresses and due to my current circumstances, that is being that I have
zero of my sewing supplies or my studio at my disposal at the moment, I will be reconstructing
this gown primarily by hand. While I will be, of course, endeavoring to incorporate
only the design details and the techniques that
I can find evidenced within the period, there may or may not be a
couple of little details that I just borrow from the film design just to nod to that. I'm thinking most primarily,
in terms of the placement of the little orange ribbons, which I'm not sure we can
specifically pin point in history. I'm going to do a little bit of digging and see what I can find. This, as with any of my
reconstruction projects, is going to take a little bit of time, so today we will just be
focusing on the research and design and then I'll
probably see you back here in a couple of weeks with the actual finished
reconstruction process of the gown. The lingerie dress, as it
is called in the period, starts to gain popularity
in fashion by the 1890's and continues through to the 19-teens with the height of its popularity occurring during the Edwardian period, between 1901 and 1910. It's classified as being a
lightweight, often white gown made from fine cotton lawn,
batiste or voile, linen, or net, and in most cases, is
embellished with insertion lace, pin tucks and no shortage of frills. These gowns were intended
for warmer summer wear, due to their lighter weight and color and were very popular
choices for outdoor events such as garden parties, Darby's and yes, magical strolls through chalk paintings. (gentle plucky music) One of the most exciting
things about these gowns is that there isn't one
specific defining style and in fact, the lingerie
dress as a concept, remains a popular garment throughout the drastic silhouette changes between the 1890's and the 19-teens. So we get to see an infinite variation in cut, skirt, and sleeve shape, as well as of materials, lace placement and amount of lace used. Simpler versions can be made
with minimal insertion lace or very rich and complex gowns can be made from very large quantities
of more expensive lace. More labor can be put into
stitching it all together by hand, whereas, these gowns
could also be machine sewn entirely by professional dressmakers, as well as by the home sewer. (gentle music) Mary Poppins, in the original novels, takes her clothing very seriously and is quite in the
habit of proudly admiring various new garments in her reflection as she passes shop windows. So it makes sense that her
dream sequence fantasy gown would be on the slightly
more elaborate side. Which is precisely the excuse I need to be supremely extra
with my reinterpretation. (anticipatory of extraness music) (dramatic plucky music) So here just with these two gowns alone we can already see what a diverse
selection of possibilities there are with this style of gown. So this lady's actually upside down, so this is the back of her with
buttons going down the back. This one here is just made
out of some plain cotton with a little bit of lace insertion, but otherwise, as you can see, there's actually a little print to it, which I think it quite
whimsical and adorable. This one's actually made
entirely of a cotton net and because of that, it's two layers. So just a layer of the
finest silk underneath it, which again is also
borderline translucent. Keep in mind they would have been wearing a lot of under things underneath this so she would have been
wearing a petticoat, as well as a corset,
chemise, corset cover, so you're not seeing anything indecent with these sorts of dresses,
but they are meant to be very light and ethereal. I really love this sleeve shape, this I think it's earlier just
because we're still coming out of the 1890's a little bit with the large, large, large sleeve. I should say this is an
earlier sleeve shape, not that this dress is
the earlier of the two, because this one is actually
the later of the two and we'll talk about that in a minute. But I really love the
idea of the sleeve shape and that the top of it is very full and comes down to this
more fitted cuff thing. I've seen this detail
on a few of the dresses that I've been looking at online. I really love it, I really
want to try and incorporate this into my edition. So as we can see, the front of this dress, so there was this fabulous
trend within the very beginning of the turn of the
century Edwardian period where there's all this
gathering going on at the front because they love the little
belly pooch at the front, which I think, it sounds really weird especially to our modern
aesthetic sensibilities, but it actually, I mean it
really helps to give that pigeon fronted Edwardian classic look, so when you see the dresses,
it looks really funny but when you see it on a body it looks supremely Edwardian. That fad started to disappear
by the middle of the 1900's. So this dress, I would put this
dress probably around 1909, maybe 1910, 1907ish, the
later part of the 1900's, maybe even a little bit into the teens. We can actually see, this
is why I say this dress is the earlier of the two
because as we can see, I mean, it's got gathering
all across the waist, but as we can see, there's
actually more gathering going on at the front here, we can see how the front of the bodice, it wants to come out like
that because it's gathered into the front quite significantly there, to give it that puffy Edwardian shape. I love that shape, I think it's so cool. So I may try and do just
a little bit of that on my edition because you
can always backdate things a couple of years, it's
more difficult to get away with looking forward. We're making a sincere attempt
at historical reproduction whilst, of course, dealing
with the source material of what is effectively fantasy. So, I have turned her over. This is the front of her. The one thing that I
find really interesting about these two gowns, these two gowns are really
interesting to study side by side, but this dress is pretty much entirely machine sewn and I don't want to say
that this is done in a shop by manufacturers, I have a suspicion that this is done by a home dressmaker. This is not unusual because, especially amongst middle
and lower class women, home sewing was very common
because clothes are expensive. By the late 19th century, well this is actually into
the turn of the 20th century, the sewing machine was widely available. People could have them in their houses and a lot of people did. In fact, Luca Costigliolo, who is one of the reigning experts in 19th century dress
currently, out there, he claims, and there is
evidence to back this up, the prevalence of hand
sewing actually increases towards the 1890's into the
turn of the 20th century because the machine, it stopped
becoming novel at this point and people are
re-appreciating hand sewing, so there is a lot more hand
work within dressmaking towards the end of the 19th century. So we can hypothesis what we will about what that means in
regards to these two dresses. I think this entire thing is machine sewn, I don't think there's
any hand sewing on this whatsoever, except for maybe
the buttons on the back might be hand worked. There may be some finishing
work that's done by hand, but as you can see,
even the insertion lace is put in by machine and not very well. I have a suspicion that
this dress was made by somebody who had a lot
of other things to be doing and wanted this dress, wanted just a nice stylish
dress done relatively quickly within her given amount of spare time. I won't say it's lazily or hastily done because as we can see, there
is still all this pin tuck work up here, which, it's done by machine so it would have been done fairly quickly. I mean, as you can see, I know
people are always on about, oh, aren't they hot in
the Victorian period, aren't they hot in all those layers? But I mean, you can
literally see how lightweight this dress is. This basically, it weighs nothing, but again, you've got
your shaping to this gown. You would have had that classic, I shouldn't use the word Edwardian because that is obviously specific to the reign of King Edward in Britain and I bought this from a
vintage seller in America, who knows where this came from, so you know, early 20th century. Just design wise, I
love this little detail of the doubled cuffs, the
double lace ruffles here. We'll see how much lace I have because I did buy an edging lace. I'm fairly sure I bought 15 yards of it, but I wanna see if I can
duplicate some of this detail on my gown because I love the floof effect that this gives. This is a
little design note for me, you see, as I'm studying these, I'm not only making note of the techniques that I should employ in my own thing, but also getting some design inspiration because this is, I mean, it's
not a direct reconstruction of an existing garment, obviously because it's just not, it is an interpretation of an existing, not historical garment, so there is a little
bit of design involved but I'm trying to make
all of my design decisions within the realm of actual
historical evidence. So, let's have a look inside the cuff. As we can see, I love this detail here. This freaks out my 21st
century brain a little bit, just in the amount of raw edges that exist all throughout history. It makes us cringe a little bit today because our fabrics are not
as tightly woven nowadays and are more just
naturally prone to fraying. That's why we are
particularly hyper obsessive about finishing edges today. Here are is a little bit of hand sewing, it looks like there is a gathering thread having been put into there within the sewing instruction manuals, most of them, incidentally,
the ones that I read don't mention machines at all. I have a sense that a lot of
the straight froward techniques such as gathering would
have been just naturally, intrinsically, instinctually done by hand. We can also see there is another little visible gathering thread, she never took that one out, but as we can see, this front
bit was also gathered by hand. The hem on this is quite wide. There's no additional
stiffening in it though, it's just turned up on itself and pressed and stitched into place. It does feel, this whole dress
feels very crisp, I guess. I have a suspicion that this dress would have been starched, 'cause it's still got
some stiffness to it. So this dress, it doesn't
have the maximum amount of insertion lace that I
have seen on some examples of these dresses, but this
one has got significantly more lace detail than the other one. This dress, contrarily
to the previous one, is actually, I would say in
the majority stitched by hand. The seam for this is stitched with a very, very long running stitch. Nope, I lied, this looks
like a back stitch. So you would have to use
probably a back stitch or some sort of strong stitch
on a loose net like this otherwise the whole thread's
just gonna pull right out, but it's a very quick seam, they're not taking their
time taking up two threads and passing over four, whatever
Bertha Banner says to do. She's not doin this. Ain't nobody got time for that. To be quite honest, what
these books tell you to do is #goals of sewing, I should say. In reality, does everybody have
time to do all those things? Probably not. So even the lace at the
hem is stitched on by hand. They're, once again, very large and I think these are actually
for reals running stitches. I think, we can see again
that the silk side seam is once again, done by hand and this is a running stitch. I don't think there is any
back stitching to this. However, as we will notice, this hem is done by machine. So, clearly, she did not have time to be doing the entire hem
by hand and does it matter? No, no one's gonna see this and I do imagine that
you would want to do, because this dress does have
a little bit of a train to it so as we can see, if we
look at it from above, this is where her feet would be, this is the front of the dress
and then this is the train. So this bit would have been on the floor, which means that this
underside is quite vulnerable. I imagine you don't want to be
putting a significant amount of your time and energy
into hand-doing the hem that you'll probably
have to take up and redo at some point in the future. #piecingisperiod. We can see there is some
piecing excitement happening on the hem of this. I kind of love how in this
period there is no expectation, just from what I'm observing
on extant garments, there is no expectation
for machine stitching to be perfectly neat. So as we can see, I suspect that this too is a homemade garment. This one is just done by someone who has a little bit more time and is willing to do more lace work, hand stitching and stuff. Even she's not worrying about, I mean, this hem is never gonna be seen. It's not perfectly perfect. Also, I will give her credit because this silk is the most unstable. Not the most, but one of the
most unstable silk fabrics. This would have been just
sliding all over the place, I do not envy her this task and quite frankly, I'm impressed that it even looks this good. Even in the, for example on
the Symington bust bodice that I went to go and study last year, there's a fair bit of wonky
machine stitching on that and that was a machine
manufactured garment. Obviously they did not
have those super fast, super precise industrial machines that are used in garment
construction today, they had manually operated sewing machines that were a little bit imperfect, just as everything sort of is. One of my colleagues said once, and this is a phrase that
I like to keep in my head, "period imperfection, before the days of everything being
standardized and mechanized and automated, everything's
done by humans, by human hands, nothing is perfect and imperfection is part of history" and I think that's one
of the magical things that brings an element of
humanity to the objects that survive to us today. So we will have to have a little think about the closure method. This gown here, because it's got this, I mean, what happened on the
front is the same on the back, so it's got this center panel. It doesn't have the little
lace bit in the middle, however, in order not to interrupt that, they have done a little side closure. So we have, certainly this option, which I think is really clever
and I will keep this in mind. See one of the things I
am seeing very frequently in the design styles
of these sorts of gowns are this vertical lace bit happening here. In an overwhelming
majority of the lace gowns that I'm looking at, there
are right next to the neck, a wide strip coming down and
a wide strip coming down, sometimes they get cut
into a waist seam here, sometimes obviously they go
all the way down to the hem and then oftentimes, there
are secondary lace strips. These only emphasize the shoulders, but I will have a play
with this on the dress form and just poke around and play
with the laces that I have. This dress over here, this one doesn't have
the lace configuration for that sort of thing. As I like to say, there is no such thing as an always in history, there is no one specific way that everything was definitively done. This one closes with buttons, which I also really like the idea of and these buttons are a statement,
they're meant to be seen. They're really beautiful. So these are thread wrapped rings, as you can see there's a
little bit of the metal peeking through on some of these, but they're just rings basically that have been thread woven. I love these so much, I
think they're so clever. I do already have some buttons. They are beautiful, tiny shell buttons which, I don't have a lot of them, but I may have enough either
to do one center back seam, or I may, we'll see, if
I end up needing buttons at the inside cuffs of
the sleeve, I may not. We're gonna get to some drawing and we will make all
these decisions on paper when we actually start to
map out what we want to do. (uplifting music) So one thing that is
particularly different about this project that is different from my previous project is that I don't actually know what this is going to look
like before I go into it. So there is a little bit
of improvisation going on. Basically what I did is, because there is a lot of
lace design configuration, I may or may not have done a thing where I just was on Etsy
at 11 o'clock at night and just bought a bunch of lace and thought, you know what,
I will just play with it and make something nice. So, I bought lots of
different patterns and widths and styles of lace that I
will be playing around with on the dress form just to have a look and to see what looks right
and what looks not right and figure out the design
and the pattern from there. This is not how I typically work, it's a little bit stressful,
but I think it's gonna be fun. I think it's gonna be a nice
little breath of fresh air. So I've just played around with some stuff and got some ideas and all
of these laces, by the way, are labeled with letters. I have done a little bit
of pre-requisite sketching, I guess, just based on some of the laces that I think go nicely together and that I like the widths
of next to each other and wear on the garment. I've planned out some stuff already, so I've planned out my
sleeve configuration, I have planned out a skirt configuration, this I will take and I will translate onto the actual garment sketch, just so that I have
something that I can see in full color and, drawing things, I mean, it forces you
to make decisions really because, oh wait, I
guess I need to fill in this bit of space, so
what's gonna go here? It's decision making
and it's a lot of work, but I find that going into a project having drawn it all out first, it just helps me have a
little bit more purpose going forward in the project, so, I really like the drawing stage for stuff that's not reconstruction work because when it's a reconstruction, obviously you have your original garment or your original reference
is basically your sketch. These are the buttons, by the
way, that I was talking about. So we'll see what the rest of the closure situation looks like. Let us take our thoughts
and our inspiration and our newfound research knowledge, let's go draw this out and
let's see what we come up with. (mystical art witchcraft music) So this is going to be a
particularly interesting project, I think, because although
all the design elements are based in history, to
the best of my capability, I do still get to have
some personal opinion here and personal opinion states
that I love a poofy sleeve. So naturally the first
decision that I made here was to give this gown that
fabulous turn of the century fitted forearm with the
gloriously drapy upper bit. Yes, fitted sleeves were also common on Edwardian lingerie dresses and the sleeve on the
film "Jolly Holiday" dress is a slim one, but I don't really care. As with all of my projects, I do like for them to
have more than one purpose and on projects such as this, that aren't meant to be direct
historical reproductions, I like for them not to be just a costume, so I do think I will potentially be able to get some real world wear out of this and this I will be
entirely more tempted to do if the dress has gloriously poofy sleeves. (eldritch arts music) Self justification
complete, the skirt design is going to be an alternating
pattern of insertion lace, pin tucks and gathers. The two gowns I've looked at in person are actually relatively simple at the hem, but a lot of the examples
I've seen online, especially the particularly schmancy ones listed on old auction pages, could be super, super
elaborate at the hem. So I'm going to give this a bit of a go. I did see one gown that
had scalloped a row of insertion lace which
I think I'm going to try and replicate here so that I have a nice, verifiably period detail
to make the placement of the little orange skirt
bows on the film dress actually make sense. (fairies descending
from the heavens music) I've replaced the waist cinch
thing on the dress in the film with a wide satin sash here since we do see these
sashes very frequently on existing lingerie dresses. The sort of Swiss waist
thing she wears in the film was common in the 1860's, but I personally haven't
seen evidence of these remaining in popular fashion, much into the second
part of the 19th century, let alone into the Edwardian period, so as nice as it looks in theory, we're going to opt instead for something with a little bit more
contemporary documentation. (uplifting music) In addition to the insertion lace, since I'm not making the whole entire gown out of just pieces of lace, although that's not a terrible idea, I've also bought some nice cotton voile, which is slightly heavier than
the super sheer cotton lawn I've used in previous
chemise a la reine endeavors. It's lightweight enough just
to be barely translucent without being completely transparent, similar to the cotton gown example. (uplifting music) Now that we've got the design settled, I'm feeling pretty confident
in knowing how to move forward with this project. There is about to be a whole
lot of fiddly lace sewing going on in the next few weeks. So I shall see you back here sometime around the beginning of April with a video on the reconstruction process and of course, a reveal of the final gown. In the meantime, we shall be here with regularly scheduled
historical dress investigations and light hearted tomfoolery, so I shall surely be seeing you, anon. (the fairies hath descended music) (uptempo music) For projects such as this
"Jolly Holiday" dress, or this entire channel as a whole, the sewing is just the
surface of the iceberg. As you've seen in this video, drawing and painting skills were integral in helping me to solidify
my ideas and to make a plan. The fact that we are
sitting here together at all is a result of the
cocktail of cinematography, story telling, editing,
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Stoicism for Modern Times, by Ali Abdaal featuring Sam Ahmed. This course is perhaps
single handedly responsible for helping me to learn to face my work with a much healthier outlook. In this introduction to
the ancient philosophy of Greek Stoicism, the
most important thing I came out with is learning to identify what it is I can control in my life, that is, only my own thoughts and actions, and not the traffic outside the window. Not my subscriber count,
not how other people choose to consume and respond to my work, but I can control the effort
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