Label Type
Cultural/Historical ContextLabel
In the mid-1860s, the fullness of the wide skirts started to move towards the back, causing the sides to draw in and creating an elongated narrow profile from the front—a radically different silhouette from that of the previous decade. In the 1870s, the back fabric was held up by a pad of fabric or a frame, known as a bustle. This garment exhibits all of the elements of a fashionable day dress at mid-decade: it is composed of two complementary colored and patterned silk fabrics, has an apron-like overskirt at the front, a poufy bustle ending in a short train in the back, and is decorated with ruching and rows of small knife-pleated trim. The intense shade of peacock blue in this garment was achieved using one of the new aniline dyes, first discovered in 1856. Silk took the bright colors especially well, with an intense, glossy sheen as the end result. According to a hand-written note sewn inside the bodice, this dress was made in the spring of 1875 for Susan Hawthorne Flitner while she was living on Beacon Street in Boston. She states that the dress was to be “kept in the family and never to be cut or changed in any way.”Label Type
Cultural/Historical ContextLabel
Susan Ellen Hawthorne was born in 1845 in either Richmond or Pittston, Maine, daughter of a storekeeper. She married Pittston-born Francis W. Flitner, who seems to have been from a comfortably well-off family, in Boston in January of 1869. Francis was a merchant and the couple lived in Boston boarding houses for most of their married lives. Susan had this dress made for herself in 1875 while they lived on Beacon Street, and it was so special to her that she sewed a note to its lining requiring that the dress be “kept in the family and never to be cut or changed in any way.”
The dress is the height of fashion for 1875, with its double skirts drawn close against the body in front and lifted into a bustle in back. The patterned silk of the main dress is set off by a vibrant peacock silk used to finish hems with tight knife-pleated ruffles. It also forms ruched elements on the sleeves and center back of the bodice, and flows down the bustle into the train in a large stylized bow. The patterned silk also plays a role in embellishing the dress, used along the bodice, cuffs, and skirt hems in a bias-cut bound edge that is itself outlined with piping made of the peacock silk. The fullness of the overskirt is drawn in with vertical ruches that gently gather up the fabric as it approaches the bustle in back.