Side Characters
An Outlander dress
A while ago a friend of mine announced that he was going to throw a party with the very intriguing motto “side characters”. A motto that at first glance seems to hold almost infinite possibilities but upon closer inspection also includes way to many potential ideas to be simple. I thought about this mottoparty for a long time. Almost too long honestly which meant that roughly three weeks before the party I still had no plan, what to do.
And then we went to Italy and I stumbled across a fabric that sparked a maybe slightly ridicolous idea in my head. But I guess ridicolous is my thing, so why not?
For this motto party I decided to recreate a dress from the show “Outlander”. A dress worn by the character Louise in the second season of said show. Outlander takes place in the mid 18th century mostly in Scottland but for the second season we follow our protagonists to France.
The gown in question is a heavily decorated blue-green dress worn by a lady of the aristoracy. The stlye of the overgown seems to be that of an “italian gown”, meaning the upper part of the dress is constructed seperately from the skirt and with a fitted back made up of seperate pattern pieces. It closes in the front over a stomacher that is decorated with several big bows. The sleeves of the dress feature volants that are made up of at least two layers of fabric and one layer of lace. There is some decoration on the skrit part of the gown but it mostly shines thanks to the printed floral pattern. The gown itself is worn over a petticoat that once again features the golden lace and some pleated trim.
A dress you can make in two weeks? Probably not really but let’s try it anyway.
I’ve also compiled a little pinterest board with reference pictures of the dress in question.
Since I have made 18th century dresses before, and several italian gowns at that, I didn’t need to concern myself with creating the undergarments or making much of a mockup. The dress is worn over a simple pair of 18th century stays, a false rump and a plain white underskirtk/petticoat.
For the pattern I turned to my stripey linen italian gown. The only adjustments I needed to make were the sleeve volants and the front closure. My sriped dress, as most historical examples of italian gowns I could find, closes edge to edge in the center front. I have never come across an italian gown that closes over a stomacher. But then again, this is a movie costume so we’re not going for historical accuracy anyway. This (and the very tight timeframe) also meant I threw any ideas of handsewing out of the window and proceded to wrestle the quite heavy polyester fabric under my sewing machine.
As with every sewing project I had the most fun adding all the decoration to the dress. And there is quite a lot of those in this particular gown. First: the sleeve volants - I don’t know if they quite count as decoration but gathering and pleating lots of lace and fabric certainly felt like it. I endet up stacking four layers on top for each sleeve, two fabric and two different laces.
For the trim on the gown and petticoat I added some lace to a strip of fabric by machine. The ruffles itself were then gathered and tacked down by hand. That was just too much fabric for my machine too handle and sewing them onto the dress had to be done by hand anyway. Next I added the large piece of gathered golden lace to the bottom of the petticoat. As was quite common for historical dresses of that era, the trim doesn’t go all the way around the skirt but is in fact only placed on the front where it can be seen through the gap of the overdress. I added another, smaller ruffle trim at the upper edge of that lace panel. Finally I finished the skirt decorations by sewing some fake pink cherryblossoms on top of the trim.
Lastly the stomacher needed some decoration as well. For this I made 4 bows in decreasing size out of my fashion fabric and again tacked them onto the plain stomacher by hand.
All in all it definitely was an ambitious project that did cost me quite a bit of sleep but I am glad I went for it and took this opportunity to make something historical again even though that might not have been the intention behind the motto. This dress was a bit of a showstopper that evening if I may say so. And of course I didn’t take a single picture. Very happy that a friend and me could use a perfect spring day to capture the dress some time later.
