How Queen Alexandra Influenced Late Victorian Fashion

I'm here to show you this very special dress worn by Queen Alexandra in 1894 to the christening of her grandson, the future Edward VIII. Queen Alexandra was a Danish princess who married the future Edward VII in 1863 when she was 18 years old. Her appearance was constantly commented on at the time and has been ever since, so it's important to understand the role clothes played in her life and the way other people saw her. The dress was passed to one of Queen Alexandra's dressers, Bessie Sinclair, and entered our collection in 1994. I had the privilege of mounting this beautiful outfit and in order to do so, a bespoke acrylic mannequin is the foundation that had to be shaped to accommodate this wonderful cinched in waist. So we use polyester wadding which creates a soft almost like flesh foundation for the garment to sit on. I then made net skirts and a petticoat with ridgeline at the bottom to hold the skirt out and by layering with net we can get this really wonderful shape but it's also safe and supports the object whilst it's on display. When Alexandra married the future Edward VII in 1863 his mother Queen Victoria was still in deep mourning for her husband Prince Albert who died less than a year and a half before. Victoria's reclusiveness in the 1860s made her increasingly unpopular and Alexandra provided a welcome contrast. We could see that it has lots of trademark things that were made very fashionable by Queen Alexandra. These wonderful leg of mutton sleeves, the beautiful high collar and this very cinched in waist. The front is made from this lovely ivory silk satin. We had to carry out conservation of the central front panel here and we have inserted a silk habit patch behind which is dyed in-house to colour match the original ivory silk. The fibres were then stitched in place using laid couching with a thread that we call hair silk and then as a protective layer we have applied a net overlay which will hold the fibres all in place. This dress dates to later in her life when she was almost 50. Only two years earlier her eldest son Prince Albert Victor had died aged only 28. The pale mauve, white and black are the colours of half mourning and she wore these colours for the rest of her life. We discovered that this dress is actually dyed with methyl violet and these dyes were known to be notoriously unstable but purple was such a fashionable colour that ladies didn't really care about that. It's incredibly rare to be able to match a garment of this age with an image of somebody wearing it so we're incredibly lucky that an official photograph was taken on the day of the christening showing Alexandra in this dress. The dress was made in Paris by a dressmaker called Madame Fromont. This is interesting because it shows how Alexandra used fashionable foreign supplies as well as British makers for her wardrobe. The shape of the dress is significant. Alexandra often wore high-necked garments or used chokers and necklaces to conceal her neck and we think this may have been to hide scars which she was self-conscious about. When people see this dress they often comment on how small the waist is and people at the time commented on how slim Alexandra was. Records show she had a waist of only 18 inches in the year of her marriage. The distinctive shape of this dress came through wearing a corset which helped Alexandra achieve a fashionable silhouette. Queen Alexandra was 50 when she wore this dress. To think that she had gone through six pregnancies and still has this incredible cinched in waist I think is truly remarkable. Her third pregnancy and the birth of her daughter Princess Louise in 1867 gave Alexandra a serious rheumatic fever. It contributed to the deafness that worsened as she got older and also left her with a permanent limp. The bodice of this dress isn't symmetrical suggesting that the limp gave her a curvature of the spine which her dressmaker accommodated. The bodice has an internal bodice which is boned and lined with silk and this silk is tid-weighted. This is where the fabric, the silk, was actually dipped into a solution of tin salts because it gave it a wonderful luster and it made a lovely rustling sound as the wearer moved around but unfortunately tin-weighting was very damaging to the silk and this silk is very prone to shattering and splitting. Historic clothing is one of our most intimate sources for understanding people in the past. By caring for this dress Historic Royal Palaces can help people now and in the future learn about Queen Alexandra.