Dress 1935 - 1942

This is a watercolor and graphite dress design by Dorothy Gernon. The dress is a showstopper. Gernon focuses on the garment’s materiality, the sheen and drape of the fabric. It seems almost inflated by the volume of material. You can imagine how this must have felt to wear, constrained at the waist but otherwise ballooning. A fashion plate like this represented aspirations, but also real opportunities for skilled makers. Dressmaking in this period was transforming, from a bespoke, craft-based system to industrial production. And while a dress like this would still have required hand-finishing, its overall design would probably have been achieved by machine. We can think about the value that was placed on both the handmade and the machine-made, and about how people at the time would have seen the dress in relation to these different worlds of production. What we now call "fashion" was then a cutting-edge negotiation between craft and industry.