BRIDES magazine writer Sarah Zlotnick interviewed me for an article on bridal history. Link to her article "Why Do Brides Wear White?" below....enjoy!!
January 13, 2021
December 16, 2020
{What 2020 Taught Us About Weddings}
From HUFFINGTON POST UK:
This Is What Weddings Will Look Like In 2021
November 29, 2020
{The Crown and "That" Dress}
 |
| Diana on the left; Emma Corrin in "The Crown" on the right |
For me, the brightest star of The Crown television series on Netflix is its head costume designer, Amy Roberts. I've written for years, including in The End of the Fairy-Tale Bride: For Better or Worse, How Princess Diana Rescued the Great White Wedding, about the design of Diana Spencer's wedding gown, so I appreciate Amy's story of re-creating the legendary gown that appeared "on screen" for only a few poignant moments.
 |
| Emma Corrin in "The Crown," left; Princess Diana, right |
When The Crown first announced "that gown" would be part of its Season Four storyline, their Twitter account posted: "Emmy award-winning costume designer Amy Roberts wanted to
capture the same spirit and style of David & Elizabeth Emanuel’s original
design, without creating a replica for Emma Corrin."
 |
| Emma Corrin on "The Crown" |
Here is what journalist Lela London wrote in Forbes:
The second Diana took her vows in a gown with a 25-foot train, it became one of the most iconic wedding dresses in history.
The silk taffeta gown was hand-crafted by David and Elizabeth Emanuel at the time, and The Crown’s costume department consulted with the Emanuels to ensure the replica dress—worn for just a few seconds in the series—was as similar as possible. The original designers even gave them its patterns.
"We were filming the scene when you first see her in the wedding dress—I think it was Lancaster House in London—and I had a team of about ten people helping me put it on, because it's massive," Corrin told British Vogue.
 |
| Emma Corrin on "The Crown" |
September 20, 2020
{The Windsor Brides}
Congratulations to the wonderful people at Paperdoll Review for the publication of their new book...Windsor Brides Paper Dolls by Norma-Lu Meehan...and thanks for inviting me to write the essay inside, "The Legacy of Windsor Brides." Enjoy....
Here come the royal brides, all from the House of Windsor—Elizabeth The Queen Mother; Queen Elizabeth II; Princess Margaret; Anne, Princess Royal; Princess Diana; Sophie Rhys-Jones; Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle. An exquisite collection meticulously illustrated by Norma Lu Meehan. Includes a lovely essay by fashion historian Cornelia Powell. A gem for paper doll collectors, fashion buffs and Anglophiles!
August 26, 2020
Second-Class Citizen {book excerpt}
In honor of the 100th anniversary of the signing of the 19th Amendment, when women won the right to vote in the United States, I'm sharing an excerpt from my book The Spiritual Mission of a Princess.
................................................
SECOND-CLASS CITIZEN
Diana Frances Spencer knew a thing or two about being a second-class citizen although she was born into a wealthy, aristocratic English family and married into perhaps the most renowned royal family in the world.
“‘In the Spencer family the gender issue is a big one,’” biographer Sarah Bradford wrote, citing a Spencer cousin, “‘women are very much second-class citizens.’” Diana’s sense of being “lesser than” began at birth. After Diana’s two older sisters were born, the pressure intensified for her mother to produce a son to inherit the family title; but when a boy was born, the malformed infant died within days.
“Diana was intended to be the replacement child, the longed-for heir,” reported Bradford. “By the time she was born, her parents’ marriage was in trouble, which the arrival of yet another girl did nothing to improve.” So, by all accounts, Diana’s feeling of being a disappointment went deep, wounding her on many levels, diminishing any self-confidence, and perhaps setting up the more suspicious and manipulative nature of her personality.
It also seems the naïve, yet headstrong
Diana felt like a “second-class citizen” in her ill-suited marriage to Prince
Charles, an older, cerebral man who was caught in his own web of deep
disappointment. She similarly felt “lesser than” in his family’s stuffy, staid
and paternalistic world where it appeared, to this heart-centered young woman,
the Palace made decisions based on duty first at all costs and desires of the
heart be damned. (That strident sense of duty may have worked in earlier
monarchic decades, maybe even served a higher purpose at times, but not in the
more open, free-spirited modern world emerging—a world Diana came to
represent.)
~~~
....in
the New Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I
desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to
them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the
husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticuilar care
and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determine to foment a Rebellion,
and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or
Representation.
The
notion of “second-class citizen” was so ingrained in the patriarchal mindset at
the time (not only about women, but about Native Americans, all people of
color, and anyone else considered “lesser than” because of some prejudice
against them) that Abigail Adams’ request fell on deaf ears. No one “remembered
the ladies”! Moreover, according to Gail Collins’ book America’s Women: “John’s answer was, ‘As to your extraordinary code
of laws, I cannot but laugh.’”
This revolutionary spirit was brewing in England at the time as well. Another “uppity woman,” Mary Wollstonecraft—novelist, philosopher, mother of author Mary Shelley, and advocate for women—was writing “A Vindication of Women’s Rights.” Regarded as one of the founding philosophers of feminism, Wollstonecraft’s work inspired generations of women, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the mothers of the suffrage movement in the United States and one who wrote passionately to expose the numerous ways women were considered “second-class citizens.”
When Susan B. Anthony met Stanton a few years later, a chance meeting that changed the world, they formed a lifelong partnership of political activism and organizing. “Elizabeth and Susan were a perfect complement to each other,” continued Eileen Tannich Gose and Kathy Wiederstein DeHerrera in Reflecting Freedom. “Elizabeth had bold and radical ideas and Susan possessed independence and self-discipline. Together, they worked better than they did alone and they made a formidable team—Susan supplied the facts and Elizabeth wrote the speeches.” Elizabeth Cady Stanton became known for her radical, sometimes incendiary, writings; but Susan B. Anthony didn’t mince her words either: “It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union.... Men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less.”
Around the time of this first Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, Harriet Tubman was planning her escape from a Maryland plantation. Born a slave (records mark the date around 1825), Tubman grew into a barely five-foot-tall, fiercely determined abolitionist leader and political activist. She escaped from slavery, found her way to freedom above the Mason Dixon Line, yet returned south and, using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad, guided many slaves to their freedom. This Moses of her people said: “I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.”
The new century brought many “uppity, contrary women” into the public sphere! One of those groundbreakers was Margaret Sanger. Sanger, a “nurse who had watched her own mother die from the strain of too many childbirths, promoted birth control,” explained Gose and DeHerrera. “In 1914 she was arrested for obscenity charges for mailing birth control literature, and two years later she was jailed for opening a birth control clinic in the Brooklyn slums.” The authors write how this was a time when “many women wanted to control the number of children they bore. Also, pregnancy was risky; during World War I the U.S. women who died in childbirth outnumbered the men who died in battle.” Margaret Sanger continued her work for women of all classes and became even more effective in saving women’s lives after 1921 when she founded the organization later known as Planned Parenthood.
Once the 19th Amendment was signed into law in 1920, Alice Paul, and hundreds of other women, didn’t stop there—especially since it took decades more for women of color to be allowed to exercise their right to vote. Paul knew that the fight for gender equality was not over and in 1923, on the 75th anniversary of the original Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York, she organized a second meeting to introduce and launch the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. And in 2020, we were still working on it!
All
of these revolutionary women were not only guides to freedom for others—and
many did not live to enjoy the freedoms they fought for—but they also acted as
clarion calls of courage for us today, to awaken us all, so we demand our “unalienable rights.” ~
May 12, 2020
{Wonder Woman}
Here's another bit from my ongoing and long-in-the-making book...tentatively titled The Spiritual Mission of a Princess. Enjoy!
CHAPTER SIX
Fear and Loathing of Women
{Part Two:}
WONDER WOMAN
WONDER WOMAN
In her 1998 essay in When a Princess Dies, analytical psychologist and Amazon scholar
Elizabeth Gordon wrote that as she watched “that lonely gun carriage carry
Princess Diana’s coffin through the silent streets of London,” she was reminded
of Penthesilea, the legendary Amazon queen. This warrior queen, whose name
means “making men to mourn,” was “so fierce and dangerous on the battlefield
that only Achilles, the greatest soldier of them all, could overcome her.” Yet
the tale goes that mighty Achilles, broken hearted and full of remorse at
Penthesilea’s death (because he, like others before him, fell victim to the
Amazon’s charms) honored his slain adversary with “a funeral fit for a queen.”
Gordon considered that “Diana, too, had become in her death the fallen heroine,
mourned by friend and foe alike.”
In Gordon's study of the Amazon archetype, she believes the Amazons were a source of inspiration for the women’s movement of
the twentieth century, “particularly in the way in which the fighting spirit of
the feminine has been constellated” and that Diana, in the last years of her
life, “clearly demonstrated something of this spirit”—as groups and clusters of
supporters formed around her. Gordon drew attention to the “loose cannon”
aspect of how both Penthesilia, taking on the power of ancient Greece (or so goes
the legend), and Diana, taking on the power grid of the British monarchy,
fought the establishment. First, in the BBC Panorama interview where Diana
“vowed publicly that she ‘would not go quietly’” and again when she joined the
effort against the deployment of land mines with her famous promenade dangereuse in Angola. “In
intervening here she was, of course, also entering into a political minefield,”
explained Gordon. “She was challenging, as a woman and on feeling terms, the
very masculine power complex of the international armaments industry.”
Like the Amazons of Greek mythology, Diana also
thought herself an “outsider.” Was this why “she had such tremendous sympathy for
the marginal and the marginalized—all those whom her brother so movingly
described as ‘her constituency of the rejected’”? The type of royalty and power
the Amazons and Princess Diana claimed was “of a different, ‘upside down’ and
ultimately subversive kind.” Diana, as Gordon stated, said her “authority came
not from the established order but from the feelings people had for her, from
her position as queen of peoples’ hearts.”
By this time, the powers-that-be had learned never to discount the influence of
this “loose cannon.” (Similar to the Amazons, it was this trait that made Diana
“dangerous.”)
 |
| Olympe de Gouges |
Elizabeth Gordon questioned whether Diana stirred up
the “same fear and unease” that caused patriarchal unrest in earlier
situations. Like when sixteenth-century Protestant theologian John Knox
denounced the “monstrous regiment of women”—referring to the two female
monarchs of the day (Mary, Queen of Scots and Queen Elizabeth of England),
contending that rule by females was contrary to the Bible. Or during the height
of the French Revolution, when what were called “Amazon bands” of women
protesting in the streets were ordered back to their homes (women were
considered “passive citizens” beholden to men); then their leaders, including
playwright Olympe de Gouges who wrote the famous “Declaration of the Rights of
Women,” were sent to the guillotine. Or the backlash in 1990s America against
what was called “bitch power” when several women were advisers to the President
of the United States, Bill Clinton: his wife, an outspoken First Lady; the
first woman appointed as Secretary of the Air Force; and two strong-willed
female cabinet appointees—the Secretary of State and Attorney General. Making
the patriarchal forces even crankier, a second woman had been nominated and
seated on the Supreme Court. (And a couple years before this, Anita Hill
testified about a male nominee who had sexually harassed her in the
workplace—there were other women who were not allowed to testify—but he still
won his seat on the highest court in the land.) Uppity women were getting in
the way of men’s power and privilege!
Is it that the “fear and unease” created when women
came/come into power “suggest something unpredictable and unknown”? In the
world of Princess Diana “no one knew what she might do next,” shared Gordon.
“And no one knew the power of those whose causes she espoused.” Is the
narrow-minded fear and loathing of powerful women just as much about women
shaking up the seat of power and man’s place in it as it is about fear of “the
other”? “We do not know how to cope with those whom we reject,” Elizabeth
Gordon continued, “the shadow elements at whom we dare not look too closely.”
The “making men to mourn” funerals of both the beautiful Amazon warrior
Penthesilia and Princess Diana—ceremonies fit for queens—forced their opponents
to look closely until they not only saw their own shadow side, but the light of
their own humanity.
The death of both women awakened something in the
world—yet the degree of light ignited by such a spark depended on what we did
next. How courageous could we dare be? It would take courage to keep living in
that open-hearted vulnerability many experienced at Diana’s death.
We could now see that Diana’s life example “may have
been inspiring and at the same time both uncomfortable and conscience
provoking,” Gordon remarked in 1998. “At the very least it changed, perhaps
forever, the way that many of us now feel about so-called charity work”—Diana
reached out to touch, embrace and make direct eye contact with those many
didn’t want to see. Almost a thousand years before, Saint Francis of Assisi
said: “Where there is charity and wisdom, there is neither fear nor ignorance.”
As a woman passionate about her study of the
Amazons, author Elizabeth Gordon revealed that in the image of Princess Diana
“something of the Amazon archetype stirred us to consciousness, the harbinger
of change and of a new value system.” It is within this new awakening
consciousness we are living today.
~~~
After the Amazons marched in victory with Dionysus,
they were nearly annihilated (not in battle, but by Dionysus’ own men when the
women “demanded their share in the spoils of battle”), the story of the Amazons
takes a different turn. The story goes that those who survived Dionysus’ bloody
fury took refuge at the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus. (Goddess Artemis to the
Greeks, Diana to the Romans.) Gordon tells of their transformation after a
wild, exhaustive holy rite of a “war-dance” circled around the image of the
goddess. “It enabled them to turn their swords into ploughshares, to sacrifice
their power in service of the sacred”—and they never fought another war.
“Transformation is a word that has been used also
about Diana,” Elizabeth Gordon wrote, seeing Diana transform her personal
suffering into devoted service to others—and bringing those “loose cannon
energies” of the Amazon to rest, “channeled into some kind of service to the
sacred.” When human beings wake into a higher consciousness, do they naturally
put down their swords and pick up “ploughshares”—tools of a peaceful society?
In her mythical art exhibition of The Dinner Party, created in the 1970s,
feminist artist Judy Chicago depicted a symbolic Amazon representing the
“mother cults” rather than a particular woman (although the names of many
warrior queens were known, mostly through stories from the ancient Greeks.) Not
unlike Mary Beard and other historians, Judy Chicago questions this history and
the “evidence of warrior queendoms.” Perhaps “matriarchal societies fought in
battles only when their power was being challenged in a vain effort to turn the
tide.” Perhaps it’s all part of the patriarchy’s long attempt at controlling
the narrative, therefore controlling women, and pitching women as “the
other”—along with any group they considered inferior to them.
This isn’t to say that there were no women trained
as warriors throughout history. We have proof of “nomadic women who trained,
hunted and battled alongside their male counterparts on the Eurasian steppes,”
reported Derek Hawkins for the Washington Post in late 2019. “In a
landmark discovery, archeologists unearthed the remains of four female warriors
buried with a cache of arrowheads, spears and horseback-riding equipment in a
tomb in western Russia—right where Ancient Greek stories placed the Amazons.”
There have been other excavations, but this was magnificent for its detail. The
burial site is dated some 2500 years ago; the women were identified as Scythian
nomads; one in her early teens, two in their 20s, and one aged 40 to 50—she was
“found wearing a golden ceremonial headdress, a calathus, engraved with floral
ornaments—an indication of stature.” Hawkins cited Adrienne Mayor, author of The
Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women Across the Ancient World, who
felt that the find not only proved they existed, but “‘the lives of those women
warriors really did influence the Ancient Greek ideas and visions of what they
said about the Amazons.’”
Real, imagined, mythological—whatever the truth of
the Amazons and warrior queens, there is a “wonder woman” spirit brewing in the
world today. ~
MORE TO COME
February 20, 2020
{That Downton Magic}
I recently
visited Biltmore Estate, the latest host of DOWNTON ABBEY: THE EXHIBITION…called
an “immersive
exhibition that offers a chance to relive the story of the beloved television
series—complete with set recreations, exclusive multimedia elements, and an
up-close look at more than 50 official costumes.”
In the area showcasing the set recreations, in
Biltmore’s new Amherst facility, the
exhibition provides a fascinating look at the post-Edwardian era in which the
popular TV series was set as well as insights into the remarkable events that
shaped the world during this time, such as World War I.
Of
course, as a fashion historian, I headed straight to the costume exhibition at a
second location in Biltmore Legacy in Antler Hill Village! A display of more
than 50 costumes from the series’ six-season run, but also for the first time, costumes
from the 2019 Downton Abbey: The Movie were on display—three ensembles worn
by the Royal Family.
It was especially wonderful to see the extraordinary “up
close” details of Princess Mary’s evening gown (on the right in photo below)—perhaps
now my favorite design by costume designer Anna Mary Scott Robbins! (Wish I taken some up close photos!)
However,
it was a bit of a disappointment for me that the labels identifying who wore
each costume and for what occasion did not include more details of its design—or
its designer! (Downton Abbey had four unique costume designers during
the various seasons.) So with that in mind, I’ve shared details below about another favorite
Anna Robbins design from the finale of the series which was featured at the exhibition—Lady
Edith’s wedding gown! (The script is taken from my talk “Vintage Inspiration: The Brides
of Downton Abbey”…enjoy!)
……………………………….
For Lady Edith’s gown for her 1925
New Year’s Eve wedding to Bertie (who went from being his aristocratic cousin’s
land manager to Marquess of Hexham practically overnight), Downton Abbey's season six costume designer, Anna Mary Scott Robbins, created a custom-made gown from lacy
vintage “parts.”
The designer said that Edith's
dress started out as an original Brussels lace dress she found. Then she merged
it with Brussels lace yardage found in vintage fairs with two other pieces that
had a different, more light, gauzier weight to it. These were cleverly used to
create this transparent sheer drop-down to give the dress more length. She created the sleeves and the neck out of another
piece of vintage lace.
Anna wanted the finished dress
to be much more delicate, so they cut away the heavier neckline on the original
dress. And with attention to such detail, she even wanted to create a soft
transition when you see Edith in the dress….“something almost light as
air as it came up on her skin and neck."
……………………………..
Downton
Abbey: The Exhibition
runs through April 7, 2020 at Biltmore Estate…unless 'tis held over like it has been at the other venues during its run!
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