Making my Gown for the Grand Ball at Versailles || Sewing a Robe a la Francaise from the 1760s

Hi everyone, I'm Sostine and welcome to my channel. For those of you who follow me on Instagram, you'll know I came back recently from a whirlwind trip to Europe where my husband Matt and I went to a ball at Versailles. If you watched my last video about the ball, you'll also know that I was working on a new court suit for my husband as well as a new gown for myself. Alas, I had to give up on my husband's new court suit due to a lack of time but I did manage to finish my whole outfit including finishing it with a new set of enjambes which I digitized and stitched out myself. So this video will be all about the process of making my gown. First off, let's talk about my plans for the gown itself. Most of you probably know that 18th century fashion is my absolute favorite. I think this mostly stems from my obsessive love of ruffles and bows and lace, just super girly stuff. I also have a passion for very exaggerated silhouettes which of course is made possible with the wearing of stays and panniers. This love also comes from my childhood when I was obsessed with Japanese anime called Candy Candy and its contemporary piece Rosa Versailles. But when push comes to shove, my love of exaggerated silhouettes is probably the biggest reason I love this era. You don't really need to tight lace in order to get the right shape and size for this area by wearing these huge hoops called panniers or pocket hoops which exaggerate the width of your hips and your waist is going to look tiny no matter what size it is. In fact, if you measure my waist size with my stays and my dress, it's a good one inch bigger than without it. Yet it looks so tiny in photos and let's be real, if you like a big bum with ruffles and lace, there are a few areas that does it as much as the 18th century. The other one I love of course is the 1870s and 1880s and you know I'm all about those eras too. In particular, my favorite gown from this era is probably the robe a la francaise mostly because it combines this hugely exaggerated silhouette with ruffles and a gown that has a built-in cape in the back. Honestly, the cape really just makes it for me because when you walk around with a cape built in, you feel so regal. By the way, this cape does have a name. The folds in the back are called watteau pleats. So the characteristics of a robe a la francaise are those pleats and then a very tightly fitted waist which of course is very interesting when making. You could also contrast it with the robe a la volante that came decades before it. I just love everything about it. I love how well it's decorated. You have these ruffles and these pleats all edged with passementerie which is of course a trim as well as the lace at the neck, the lace at the sleeves, ruffles for days and days. Decorate the petticoats, the stomacher, and of course the robings which are the pieces worn over here. Now there are so many different ways to trim robe a la francaise. There's not just one way and I decided I wanted to use this example as a guide. Now the very best place to start in my opinion is the pattern since this decides the way that the dress will fit and of course fall. In my previous videos, I simply used a pattern from J.P. Ryan but truth be told this pattern is based on a fairly early robe a la francaise. As you can tell from the fact that the top and the skirt of the francaise are just cut in one piece. I wanted mine to be a little later which does separate the top from the skirts which lets the bodice cling to your frame just that much better which of course I like because I like things that are very fitted. In the end I ended up using a combination of different patterns. The lighting pattern pieces from J.P. Ryan, the pleating diagrams from Janet Arnold patterns of fashion which is of course a new version by the school of historical dress which I highly recommend. Self-drafted sleeve ruffles and the sleeve at the sign of the golden scissors. I will describe all of them here and link them below as well. Now we have a plan, some patterns, and we'll need some fabric. Finding the perfect fabric for the exterior robe a la francaise is going to be a little challenging. The inside is a little easier. Traditionally they were made with a linen lining hence the word lining sounds like linen. It comes from that and a top fabric made usually of silk for fancy occasions or cotton as well. However most linen just kind of warps a lot and those shapes really need to be pretty stiff since it holds up to hold the gown so I decided to use a really strong cotton twill instead. I did use linen for the sleeves since that was nice and soft and I didn't mind that area warping. For the outer fabric I highly recommend a really nice taffeta or satin. Silk taffeta is a particularly good choice for this since the fabric tends not to unravel at the edges so you can actually just pink it and it's very easy to work with. I like to get mine from renaissance fabrics as well as silk baron. They both have a really gorgeous collection of custom colors that were popular in history. If you can find a brocade of course you should go with that. Finding a brocade that is thin enough and light enough yet has a convincing historical pattern is honestly very difficult but I actually managed to find my beautiful silk brocade from Scalamandre a few years back. This design is named Louis XV and is from a time period of Madame du Pompadour and Louis XV appropriately and originally cost around $300 a yard. I actually got it at closeout when they were discontinuing the fabric at a whopping $35 a yard. I regret only buying 12 yards at the time. I really should have bought more but I love it so much. For the passamentary I have woven it before like when I made my robe a la francaise back in 2017. In fact if weaving your own trim sounds really fun I highly recommend the passamentary class by Romantic Recollections which I will also link below because it's amazing. But if you don't really like the idea of weaving your own and this time I didn't because I mostly ran out of time, I ended up using this that I got from Ichimai Love on Etsy. I actually ended up purchasing 75 yards of this gorgeous trim and did only end up using 65 yards but I do like that I have 10 extra on me for the future. There's also a lot of lace involved and I ended up making some of my own and getting the rest from Farmhouse Fabrics. Now that we've gathered the materials let's actually make the dress. The very first step and probably the most important step is actually making a lining and making sure that it fits perfectly. I used the pieces from JP Ryan for this and ended up taking mine a little bit at the sides and the back to make it a little snugger. I adjusted this on my master pattern so that it would be perfect for all the future patterns as well. I then cut out the cotton pill pieces and sewed it together. Now one of the reasons I love robe a la francaise so much is that they're adjustable in the back under the cape portion and because it's under the cape portion the Watteau pleats will actually hide how much you bring it in or out. So you can really go in or out one to six inches as your waist expands or contracts naturally with time and the gowns will still fit perfectly depending on how you tie it up. Now you can lace it up with eyelets or you can tie it and both are historically accurate. I decided to tie mine like the example at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. To do this I cut out 10 piece of cotton tape a quarter of an inch wide and 20 inches long and sewed it onto the lining. The lining here has some boating on it as well to give it some more structure and this is all stitched together on my Baby Luxe Prano machine because this will not be seen and I also hemmed the bottom edge. I do want to mention that a lot of XS gowns that I studied do not have the bottom edge of the lining hemmed which of course is very emotionally satisfying to see that they also took shortcuts. Of course I did take time to hem mine though. After the lining was done I tried it on and it fit perfectly so then I moved on to the next step which of course is my favorite. This is making the Watteau pleat. This time instead of just using the pattern I decided to use the instructions from the School of Historical Dress. So I sat down and counted up tiny little squares to figure out how many inches to make each pleat and then used a ruler and some glass head silk pins to mark the rows and then pin them down. I'm also a full believer in using the full width of fabrics normally granted back in the 18th century most fabric widths are about 20 to 22 inches wide, selvedge to selvedge. This actually makes sense their looms probably weren't that wide as today. Modern day fabrics of course run somewhere between 45 inches to 60 inches with about 54 seeming to be the most common for silks and taffetas these days. However robala franceses seem to run around 120 inches total or about 16 edges wide and I decided to do the same for mine cutting off some excess fabrics on each side of the silk so that each Watteau pleat would be closer to about 40 inches instead of the actual 54 inches that it was. I did that so that there wouldn't be so much excess fabric which would only add to the heaviness and the weight of the dress. This is why I mentioned that a brocade of fabric shouldn't be all that thick because it there are so many different pleats. In fact while investigating fabrics and feeling extant garments at the Rijksmuseum I found that most silks were in fact quite thin and crisp more taffeta like weight than an actual brocade that you see today which are much thicker than they used to be back then. The Watteau pleats are so so cool. You get one wider pleat in the middle with two thinner pleats beside it. This is done on both the right and the left of the center and you also have a secret pleat inside of the gown underneath the other pleats which of course is then covered by the main pleat. This actually lets the cape fan backwards and the orange gown I was lucky enough to study at the Rijksmuseum actually had a second hidden pleat under the bigger hidden pleat that was maybe one inch across. This of course gives you more fabric so that the dress actually fans behind you even more. So I really love this little hidden pleat. So after I pinned these down I then pinned this to the lining itself. Sewed about three inches down on all the pleats using a tiny space backstitch around eight to the inch using a heavyweight silk thread from Tire Silk. All the materials I used will be linked down below as normal. So as you can see I pinned this to the lining and I put this drew this line here and I actually did a row of stitches on this side so you can see it a little better here. You can see this row of stitches right down here and then that actually makes the bodice nice and taut against the body so it's not just a sack all the way around and only a sack in the very very back. I then added in the front side panels which I cut using instructions from the book that Abby Cox wrote 18th Century Sewing. Now the skirt is then pleated. I usually find that there are about three to four pleats on each side about six to ten inches deep on the skirts portion. This is very important because this actually lets the skirt fit over the width of the pannier so there's actually quite a bit of fabric hidden right here at the waist here and here. I used to love putting extra fabric in there for some extra draping and pleating on top of the panniers but in actual museum pieces I don't see that happening. I decided to make the skirt with just wide enough to go comfortably around my pocket hoop. By the way you definitely need some really strong pocket hoops to carry around the heaviness of the skirts. I personally dislike making all sorts of underwear which includes panniers. It's not really pretty or fun to make and you don't even see it at the end so I tend to buy mine. I bought mine from this Etsy store. You'll notice that they cleverly added to the lines of the pocket hoops and you're less likely to see the wires through the petticoat. A very clever detail in my opinion. In any case I want to give some credit where credit is due. My corset which are also called stays were purchased from Redthreaded. They were custom made for me hence the pink color. Highly recommended as they have the most incredible fit and shape. Now back to the waist pleats. These pleats were then sewn down to the strength of the cotton twill. Now you're seeing why I chose to use such a strong fabric as a base to the gown since this cotton has to hold up the weight of all this fabric. I then cut out a copy of the lining for the front and the silk fabric, ironed in all the seam allowances on all the sides, and then sewed that on by hand to the gown over everything but the sleeve heads. Now it was time to add in the sleeves. The sleeves were done by hand using the instructions from At The Sound Of The Golden Scissors. This involves getting the pieces, ironing down the seam allowances along the top and the sides for the lining and the exterior, pinning them wrong sides together, and then stitching it by hand using a tiny space backstitch. It does come out beautifully and if you're ever in the mood to sew a whole gown by hand I highly recommend that pattern. Incidentally it's the same pattern I use to make my Felicity Surprise dress. The hand-stitched sleeves are then added onto the bodice of the gown along the bottom six inches of the armhole. I stitched this partly by machine using my Baby Lock Soprano. This is the part where I needed help. I needed my husband to fit my sleeves for me, something that I really can't do myself. He smoothed the fabric over my shoulder and then pushed the excess fabric to the back. He's gotten really really good at it since he's done it about 15 times for every single dress. So he was quite smug about the whole thing but to be fair he's really good at it. Afterwards I put in a few pleats in the back. This extra fabric right here is what gives your arm that ability to move. I sewed this down and covered up the shoulder using the front panel piece by hand. Afterwards it was time to put in the rovings. FYI some gowns don't actually cover the sleeve head but instead just have a really wide roving maybe two or three inches wide. Mine is only two inches. Made by getting a five inch piece of fabric, ironing down half an inch seam allowance all the way down and then folding it over quite. This is then stitched down in the back by hand and then sewn to the back and neck edge of the gown. I left the bottom free so that I could make the gown a little bit more adjustable since then these can be used to hide any gas between the stomacher and the gown if there is one. I then cut out the train and then hemmed the bottom of the skirt. This part was tedious but I did that by hand since of course it does show up a lot. If you're curious what I was watching during this time I was watching all of Netflix making my way through an awesome Korean drama called Hospital Playlist while I did. Now the base gown was done. It was time to sew together the trim. Let's take a quick look at the trim on the inspiration gown. You have this thin ruffle here that gets wider and wider as it gets to the bottom of the skirt. I decided to start mine at 1.5 inches wide for the ruffle at the bodice and then have that skirt ruffle start at 1.5 inches and then go to about 3.5 inches wide. Now I've made a lot of dresses before and I can say for sure that making one skirt design is easy but making that skirt completely mirrored on the other side is a pain in the ass. So I decided to make a pattern. I traced the skirt onto a piece of paper and drew out the swirls and the puffs putting them exactly where I wanted them to go. I then cut this out and traced this design onto the silk. For light colored silks like this one I like to mark everything with a pilot friction marker. No they are not sponsoring this. This is not brand loyalty. I like these pens because afterwards you can iron them and the marks basically go away. I feel that the felt tip markers are the way to go with these pens because the tips generally don't hurt the fabric unlike the harder metal ones. I then cut out the ruffle. For my felicity gown I had used a gathering ratio of about 1 to 2.5 to about 1 to 3 meaning that for every finished one inch of ruffle I would gather about 2.5 to 3 inches of base fabric. Now this fabric is much much thicker than that silk taffeta so I ended up using a ratio of 1 to 2. Knowing this I measured out the design. I decided to start at 1.5 inches and then go to 2 inches and about 6 inches of ruffle which of course was about 12 inches of the unfinished. And then it would go up by about another 0.5 every 6 inches or 12 inches thereafter. So this meant that I ended up cutting a strip of fabric that started at 2.5 inches wide 1.5 inches with half an inch on each side for hemming and it increased to 3 inches at the 12 inch mark 3.5 inches at the 24 inch mark and so forth. Afterwards I ironed down the half inch seam allowance on each side. I used a machine zigzag stitch to sew on my trim onto this. This was absolutely essential to finishing the costume on time since I think I mentioned that I ended up using around 65 yards of trim sewn on. This trim was pinned on and sewn by hand initially but I realized this had to be done by machine at some point. I gathered it up and then sewed it on. For the sleeve ruffles I cut out the ruffles three for each sleeve six in total. I carefully put a 1 fourth inch hem twice on each edge and then sewed it down by machine. The trim was also sewn to the edge and this was gathered at the top using a gathering stitch and then sewn on by hand using really strong thread. The third ruffle or the topmost ruffle also has a band that goes all the way around to hide all the edges. I did two gathering stitches all the way around for this one and pinned it down in such a way to hide all the edges of the other two layers and stitched it down. For the stomacher I got two pieces of linen and put channels in for boning. This was stitched the silk brocade right side down along the bottom and then flipped inside out. I put some synthetic whalebone into the channels and added some lace from farmhouse fabrics and then stitched them down. Since the original had a piece of trim along the top mine also had the same. For the trim on top of the stomacher I got three yards of 1.5 inch trim finished hemmed and then edged with the gold trim. I gathered it every three inches horizontally by machine and then pinned it down in a design that looked pretty close to the original I thought. I pushed each puff backwards as I pinned it. This way I would hide all the machine gathering stitches. This was of course also sewn by hand using a space back stitch. Now a few years back I saw this actual 18th century gorgeous silver piece and garnet piece at an antique shop and purchased it. It normally sits in my display case but I took it out and stitched it onto my gown for the evening. The matching petticoat was also made and then decorated but I really won't go into too much. Now for some finishing touches. For the enchants I had digitized this gorgeous museum piece a few years back. I embroidered onto silk organza. Now confession I have never seen enchants embroidered on anything other than silk netting or fine cotton gauze. However I thought this would be pretty so I stitched that I stitched out two pairs of this using a dissolvable stabilizer to help it. The stabilizer was then melted away with warm water after I stitched out the whole thing using a hundred of fine 100 weight silk thread. This took a good 25 hours of stitching on my baby log venture but honestly it was worth it. I gathered it up and added it to the gown and it really did tie the whole look together. Lace was also added to the neckline and I put in some lace bows at the sleeves and the whole gown was done. 130 hours of work but oh my god I loved how it came out. I'm gonna have to do a whole video about how to put it on including a hair and makeup and feather video but suffice to say once it was on I loved the whole outfit and I felt so beautiful going out to the ball and I had a great time drinking champagne and spending the night with other people who are passionate about 18th century freshman costumes and that's the story. I can only say that I am so so hopeful to get to go to the ball again next year and if you're curious about the gorgeous woman I went with please check out my friend Nami Sparrow's channel to hear all about how she made her gown. Thank you so much for watching. I'll be back again soon with more sewing and costuming and general dress adventures. 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