Making Marie Antoinette's Strawberry Dress from the 2006 Sofia Coppola movie || 18th Century Cosplay

Hi everyone, I'm Sewstine. Welcome to my channel. I'm here to talk to you today about how I remade the Marie Antoinette Strawberry or Chapel Dress from the 2006 movie Marie Antoinette by Sofia Coppola. This is honestly one of my favorite costume films of all time being up there in ranks with such masterful pieces like the 2020 Emma, Dangerous Liaisons, and The Duchess as well as of course Sleepy Hollow. Random aside, I love Dangerous Liaisons so much that I actually had the dressmaker from that movie Gwen Russell of Gwen Russell Couture make my wedding gown. So huge fan. In any case, Marie Antoinette is a fantastic costume piece with the award-winning costume designer Milena Cananero combining beautiful 18th century with modern hints here and there. Like if you want to intersperse modern items into a costume drama, that's how you do it. You have converse shoes alongside gorgeous 18th century pieces or you make your lead wear a brilliant robe a la francaise made out of exquisite silk organza. I thought the whole movie was absolutely brilliant and definitely deserved the Academy Awards for best costume that it won. Of note, there is a certain costume in there that absolutely took my breath away and rumor has it that it was Sofia Coppola's favorite costume in the movie as well. The strawberry dress that Marie Antoinette wears as a newly minted queen. She wears it when she goes to sit in the chapel and then at the actual breakfast with the king and it's like 15 seconds but it's so beautiful. So let's get into this fabric. I'd like to thank Lori Tavin, a brilliant costume maker, as well as Costumer's Guide for doing a lot of research into this fabric. It was originally made by Rubelli based off an extant 1780s men's waistcoat. This actual fabric retails for now about 260 to 290 euros per meter. For me personally it was completely unattainable at that price though I did buy a yard here or there on ebay when I thought for 50 or 60 percent off. Note that when I got it on ebay it was labeled as a Scalamandre piece so I'm not sure if Scalamandre did their own version a few years later or if it was just mislabeled. Either way I was able to procure some very convincing fabric. Of note I could only find my fabric in pink and green while the original gown that Princess Kirsten Dunst wears is clearly the blue pink colorway. As of January 13th 2021 the Rubelli site now offers this in the pink green, purple green, and the blue green colorways but it is not available in the pink blue colorway and I have not seen it actually on sale anywhere. I did keep my eyes peeled for this fabric for about six years now but I never found a piece large enough to make a gown out of it. One day a really historical customer and shopper at Little Bit German messaged me to tell me that she found a lookalike on Etsy. The Royal Fashion Center on Etsy carried this fabric for a fraction of the original price and in a hundred percent silk too. I bought 10 yards immediately. Now normally I would buy a sample first and I highly recommend that people do as I say and not as I do and buy a sample first but they really didn't have that much yardage of it and I didn't want to lose out so I just got 10 yards immediately. Of note the original Rubelli fabric is a rayon silk blend and this is a hundred percent silk so it's going to be slightly different. Once I got the fabric in the mail I was able to compare it to the original Scalamande or Rubelli whatever mine is. It appears to be woven the same way with loose threads in the back. The color of the ground is very similar it's like a light taupe. It's really a taupe rather than ivory rather than what is suggested in the movie but the knockoff that I have definitely shows more weaving flaws. The red thread sticks out here and there and there are definitely clearer horizontal lines so it's not as if the Rubelli and this are identical for very different price ranges. The fabric weight is very close. Of note the biggest difference is that the Royal Fashion Center version has a vertical line in the strawberries that is much more obvious than the version in the original Rubelli that I have or Scalamande. Nonetheless I still love it. I'm so proud to work with it and I'm really glad that I could work at it with the price that I could actually afford. Now for those of you wondering I got my fabric while it was still on sale on from Black Friday. As I understand it the price has gone up significantly from when I bought it. Even when I bought this it was definitely a splurge and I was only able to afford it because I had some very like nice emergency fabric money that I'd saved and also thanks to today's sponsor. So I do want to give you guys a warning so that you don't get a sticker shock when you go on the website it's still very expensive. Of note I did end up using about eight yards out of the ten. I had a feeling this would happen but I always buy about an extra yard and a half or two if in case I make a mistake. I actually gave this fabric away on my Instagram so yeah and none of it went to waste. I swear like every last one inch square went into something amazing. Now I do want to talk about the back of this fabric. To put it as mildly as possible it is a frogging disaster frog nightmare to work with it. The threads are all in the back and if you pull on it it pulls on the design and destroys the front. If you accidentally catch the strawberry design in the front it pulls the fabric in the back and you can't pull it back because the threads are loose you can't figure out what it is. It's just oh it is really really hard to even work with. I had to literally stain the tips of my fingers so that there'd be no bumps on my fingers I would like pull on it. So again it is a very difficult fabric to work with and I wanted to warn all of you. But on the other hand I believe that this is exactly how the original was woven and I also believe that you know this is the way that it looks the best. For those of you who are about to windmill slam their keyboards to buy this fabric please don't say that I didn't warn you. Now that I've discussed the history of this fabric before I get into the making of this gown I'd like to take a moment to thank today's sponsor for footing the bill for this stunning fabric HelloFresh. I think the single most common question I get is how do you balance your job, your child, and your life? And honestly it's by hiring out the parts of my life that I really don't enjoy doing. I've been using meal kits since I was a resident physician because even though a lot of people presume they're expensive that's assuming that your time going to the grocery store, designing a menu, picking up the ingredients, and getting too much of each ingredient doesn't really cost anything. A study by the Time Institute calculated that the average person spent 41 minutes at the grocery store per trip with 1.5 trips per year which is approximately 53 hours a year. I think that the time actually comes out to about an hour to an hour and a half for me if you include the drive there, the drive home, and plotting all the different ingredients I need. But honestly being able to save myself the prep and planning time gives me a lot of time to do the things I actually enjoy doing be it sewing or playing with my young son. I also love how sustainable meal kits are. Last time I spoke about how the studies showed that meal prep kits have a lower carbon footprint than your local grocery store and I'll link that study below. But on top of that I particularly like how HelloFresh's packaging is completely recyclable which at least eases my guilt as a millennial. Also did I mention that it's delicious and honestly one of the few meal kits I can reliably expect my two-year-old to eat? They even have extra add-ins like the delicious garlic bread that me and my family are completely addicted to. So if you'd like to try them go to hellofresh.com and use code SOSTEIN10 to get 10 free meals including free shipping. So as usual I started with internet research. Luckily for me Maggie of Customers Guide already did most of it for me for this particular gown. This dress is under 18th century Marie Antoinette and she calls it the church gown. She shows all the pictures you can find as well as the history of this fabric. Of note this exact fabric does show up in a lot of other stuff. Most recently I've gotten about 50 messages from people letting me know that it's also in Bridgerton. I know it's amazing like it has Marina in a dressing gown in this fabric in the second episode and it shows up again and again and it's so beautiful as a dressing gown and if you guys want to make it as a dressing gown I really hope you do it's wonderful. Granted it is again a nightmare to work with. I also found this fantastic site that has a lot of close-ups of this gown from when it was in an exhibit. This is a particularly helpful thing when I was looking for a convincing trim. The first step as usual was to draft a pattern. I used the photos of the original gown to make a muslin pattern. As usual for a lot of my movie costumes I didn't use a commercial pattern since they don't generally tend to be available but I did draft my own using the drafting method. To do so I initially draw the lines of the dress onto my fabric dress form using a 1 8 inch tape. For my base dress form I use a Beatrice dress form which is basically a faux model of me wearing an 18th century corset and it was custom made for me based on a scan that I did. I actually draw it with tape and be sure to put in reasonable lines where you want the seams to be. Then I use pieces of cotton muslin to pin pieces onto the dress form and then a pencil to copy the lines onto the cotton. I then cleaned up these lines and then added seam allowances and made a pattern and a muslin to try on. Please don't be too impressed with me. I ended up being like Golda Bodice and having to draft three different versions of this bodice until I was finally happy with it. I'm embarrassed to say that this is fairly normal for me. The first bodice had a back neckline that was just too low and the corset line was visible. The second one worked just fine in that way but to be honest I initially planned on having the dress fall one inch above my natural waist to give the illusion of longer legs. While fast forward to the future this worked to a very nice degree. It also made me look impossibly and stupidly short-waisted which I guess makes sense since if I increase my decrease increase my legs I decrease my waist. It just looked really awful. So after I did this I hated that dress so much. I ended up tearing out all the stitches and then making a third muslin and that one was like just right. So I was finally happy. It was finally good. Seriously though it was good enough. The second time around I was actually really frustrated and I completely forgot to film it. So I'll be showing sewing shots of the original too short bodice but please note that I'm going to be describing what I did on the final bodice. So after I had the muslin I do what I normally do and I started by making the lining. I used a cotton twill for it. I use a cotton twill for this lining so we'll have some strength and not much stretch. So I added boning to the front and the back so four pieces of boning total. After the lining was done I started by seaming the back of the gown together. Now the original gown's back is never shown in any movie or special or promotional shot that I know of. If I had to guess the gown would be in quote unquote Italian style where the skirt and the bodice are two separate entities sewn together. However we all know I have a slight obsession with a style of the gown where the top and the bodice of the skirt I made in one long piece like a low sleepy hollow dress. So or they're also called enfereau and now that's a modern terminology but still it makes the most sense to me. So to make this unglized back I sewed two pieces of the selvedge to selvedge pieces of fabric together 61 inches long or the length from the back of my neck to the floor. I ironed this open then four inches inward from the seam. I did a second seam about 14 inches long or the length of my neck to a finch few inches below my waist. This may be shorter or longer on you by the way from the top down. I cut off the excess fabric ironed the seam open and then pleated the back the way I wanted to look on my lining. I sewed this down onto the lining using tiny spaced back stitches maybe about eight to the inch. After this I made the very scary cut into the fabric which cuts the gown where the waistline will be holding my breath all the while while I did it. Now most 18th century gowns have a skirt circumference of 120 to 160 inches. I usually go for the larger ones 60 inches because in my humble opinion fuller skirts are just prettier. So since two fabric widths of this fabric are is only about 120 I had to add the other 40. To do this I cut two pieces of fabric 20 inches wide 43 inches long and then I took out two wedges to decrease the width in the waist and add it to the bottom and thus make it fuller then turn it upside down and sewed it by machine. Note that the upside down wedge is completely historically accurate for this period and it's just it doesn't it's not really all that noticeable. All of these edges have to be serged on my baby lock victory because let's be honest this fabric is already a nightmare to work with moreover without serging it. So once these wedges were all serged sewn and ironed I sewed these to the front edges of the skirt leaving an 8 inch gap at the top for pockets such as my bernie pocket which will be worn underneath this gown. I then pleated this in place and machine sewed it in. This hot mess at the top was covered by the bodice front. To add the bodice front I cut out the pieces on a bias ironed in the seam allowances and then sewed it onto the lining by hand. This is where I tried it on realized the bodice was way too short and then had to redo the whole thing. So a couple of things that I did after redrafting the bodice was I cut off all the fabric bits from the first version and then sewed it back onto the newest lining. Nonetheless I love the third version so much that it was entirely worth it and I highly recommend doing that if you guys really hate something don't just go on fix it. I really loved how it came out. After that was done I then sewed in the front panels using tiny back stitches. I could probably have machined it since it would be trimming the gown but let's face it the fabric was way too pretty and I could totally see myself in a few years removing the trim and just wearing it as an untrimmed gown which is a little bit more typical for the 1780s anyway so I did all that by hand. Besides I love hand sewing this part and like it's more really fun for me so I just did it by hand. Then I added the sleeves which I allotted a thin soft linen. I usually line the bodice with the thick cotton twill and the sleeves with the softest linen I can possibly find so that the arms have better movement and my suggestion is hem your sleeves before adding them on. Hemming sleeves is always easier before actually sewing it onto the gown. I then cleaned up the area where the sleeves were added with the pieces for the shoulders. To add these I ironed all four sides of the piece and pinned it in place then sewed it on using a spaced back stitch. A quick aside you'll notice that from the movie that the original sleeve is actually quite long more of a three-quarter length than the more typical elbow length. While this length is as far as I know quite historically inaccurate I was more against using it for my version because I didn't like how it looked so I chose to make mine a more typical 1780s elbow length. I also chose to omit the elbow ruffle and a more typical 1780s decoration. Then I sat and listened to my audiobook while I hemmed the whole skirt. Due to the nature of the inside of the fabric I knew the stress needed a facing. Historically pieces of plain white silk taffeta were frequently sewn to the bottom of the dress to protect the silk from getting dirty on the floor. I usually cheat on this part and use iron on horsehair stabilizer but with the free-flowing threads of the fabric I had no idea if iron on horsehair interfacing would even stick to the fabric so I chose to sew it on myself. I picked the cheapest silk taffeta I could possibly find, a fittingly strawberry red silk. I stitched this in with relatively large stitches about three to four stitches per inch being careful to make sure that the stitches on the outside of the fabric were tiny if not completely invisible. This honestly took about six hours to do all of it including for the petticoat and an hour and a half a day for four days went really quickly. After that it was time to trim it. The original Marie Antoinette gown has a distressed silk organza with the edges frayed and then a row of the original fabric ruffled on top with a pre-made rococo trim in the center. I found a few suppliers of people who had the original trim which apparently was a rayon made in the 1980s however I couldn't find a color way that would work for me either pink or green or even an ivory that I could then dye so I bought a bunch of others from various Etsy stores and waited. I got them and pinned them all to the practice trim at the neck and I selected the one that I thought worked the best. To be honest I was really on the fence so I actually did an Instagram vote and went with the one that got the most votes it wasn't really close so that was helpful. If it were close I think I would still have like tormented myself for another week. To trim this I cut and tore organza trim and frayed the edges by pulling the excess threads. I gathered the organza by machine. I used pinking shears to cut pieces of the strawberry fabric 1.25 inches wide and also sewing a row of large five millimeter stitches in the middle and then cutting it and gathering it and tying it off. Afterwards I sewed the silk to the organza and pinned it to the dress. I realized then that the original organza was probably much wider than I had made it. I made my organza trim about two inches wide but realized it was probably better to go with the three inches so I did this again with three inch wide organza and I really like this look better. So then after doing all that again I pinned it all over the front edge of the skirt around the bottom of the bodice up the center front of the bodice and around the neck and then all the way back again pinning this all to the center. I back stitched this in being sure to put one back stitch in the center of each flower and thus the dress was done. Of course now that I was done it was time to put the dress on and test it out. For this dress I'm going to go with my 1780s undergarments. As usual I start with a corset, technically stays from Red Threaded, my 1780s bum pad, a petticoat, stocking and shoes. The links for the items that I bought and are still available are down below in my description. If you're wondering about the lack of shift and are scandalized it's on purpose. My current shift is actually rather small necked so if I wore it the top of the shift would be a bit visible above the line of the gown. Luckily I have a jean that keeps me from sweating a lot so shifts are rather optional for me but random aside it's the same jean that makes your ear gunk super dry or wet called ATP binding cassette transporter subfamily C member 11 or ABCC 11 also MRP 8. If you're curious about it I'll link the wikipedia article below so you can read more about cool jeans. After that I put on the petticoat being super careful not to catch the loose threads of the fabric on my clothing or hair or furniture. Then I tied the back of the skirt first and then the front. Afterwards I slip the gown on clipping it closed in the front. Even though I had sewn in nine hooks and eyes I really only needed five of them so be bored at the chapel in Versailles. In fact let's try it out. As a recap I would like to say that I completely love this gown and how it turned out. It's something I've dreamt about making for years and I really love everything about it. It's really comfortable and fun to wear and once it's on I found that the silk facing of the inside really did its job and the fabric really didn't catch on anything for the half an hour I wore it. I'm now wondering if I want to make four more gowns in this particular fabric possibly a little Amalia jacket using the new screw pattern or how lovely would it look as a robe a la francaise. Believe it or not I think my favorite part is actually the accessories so I'm so glad that it took the extra time to make the mitts my own and I'm going to wear those with absolutely everything. So many other movie costumes I want to make right now. I'm thinking about doing something completely different and making the black signature dress from Breakfast at Tiffany's. Also I'm working on a historically inspired Disney princess outfit for the 1890s and you can follow along with that on Instagram although I think it'll be a few months till I finish that one since it's such an ambitious project. Thank you so much for joining me on this adventure to remake the Marie Antoinette outfit. If you're interested in more sewing adventures please remember to hit subscribe. Have a great day!