1960s Wedding Dress & Shoes Adapted for Disabled Bride | Inclusive Vintage Bridal Fashion

Hi, my name's Natalie and I'm going to show you an adaptive wedding dress made for a disabled bride called Janet Jones from South London. This dress would have been bought ready-made or off the shelf, maybe from a boutique, but it also might have been bought from a catalogue because it was quite popular at the time. But it's quite unique in the sense that it was adapted for Janet's body. In many ways this is a classic 1960s wedding dress. A lot of brides are inspired by Princess Margaret's wedding, with the lace overlay and the satin underneath. But rather than being made of natural materials, this is synthetic, so it brings the cost down. Many objects in our collection are haute couture or a designer or tailor-made. And it's really important for us to be able to show the everyday bride and reflect a more broad experience. So what makes this dress unique and different to other dresses at the time is that Janet was born with one dislocated hip joint and one missing hip joint. And it's meant that dresses that she bought off the shelf sat slightly off-balance. So it meant that she had to work with tailors throughout most of her life to make sure her clothes sat straight. So when we were originally looking for signs of adaptation by Janet's tailor, we found some at the bottom of the skirt. There's some signs of where the original fabric has been folded and starched, just at the bottom here. And the trimming has been pulled just underneath and then pinned and sewn just at the bottom. This shows, obviously, one how a lot of the extra fabric had to be pulled up just in the waistline here to adapt for the shorter panels that you'll see when we come around to the back of the dress. But also because of Janet's height as well, she was quite a short bride. You can really see Janet's personality come through with these bright and sparkly plastic flowers and this plastic trim that just runs across the front. She was a really bright and sparkly individual. You can tell this by talking to her daughters and reading about her life. She got a life-saving certificate in swimming and she also was an award-winning ballroom dancer with her husband. So we don't actually know, sadly, who was a tailor for Janet's wedding dress. We've looked through records and so have Janet's daughters to try and find out who she worked with. We do know they were really sympathetic to Janet's body and what she wanted for her special day. So we originally thought the adaptation had taken place in the skirt but we found that this panel on the left was two centimetres shorter than the one on the right. It's very subtle in that you wouldn't be able to see it from the back and it still gives that really beautiful silhouette because it's obviously giving that brilliant curve that's so kind of important for the time. So from this back view, you can see this beautiful synthetic lace train that sort of sweeps out from the bottom here. But on the very end, there's this loop that you put through your middle finger sort of elegantly to hold it out of the mud or the dirt as you're walking up to the chapel. And we can imagine that Janet had a really good time on her wedding day because it's very well worn at the end. These are Janet Jones's wedding shoes and they're a little bit different to your average wedding shoe in that Janet Jones wore orthopaedics. One of her legs was shorter than the other so as you can see, one side is taller than the other. And what's really great about these is that they were customised by Janet herself. She couldn't go out and buy a pair of white wedding shoes that would be for someone like herself. So she painted them with a tin of white leather paint. You can see evidence of this on the inner rim just where there's a little bit of brown just peeking through on the inside. We have a really great photograph of Janet from her wedding day which shows how pleased she was with these shoes. It was really difficult for Bryce to get a hold of good orthopaedic or even any adaptive shoes for their wedding day during this period and things haven't changed that much even now. They're still kind of not the best choice and maybe we'll have to get them custom made, often at high cost. There's some really beautiful details on these shoes. We've got her maiden name just stamped inside that show they were made before she was married. So Miss Powell is just stamped on the inside of those shoes there with a little identifying number probably from the orthopaedics lab that they were made by. These are the original laces as well so they're just slightly yellow but they've held up pretty well I think. And just on the bottom is this really beautiful little moment just from the day that shows kind of how much fun she would have had. It's this pink crush of confetti. In our collection we want to be able to represent as much about everyday life as possible and that includes disabled history. And the really unique thing about this dress is that it was a collaboration between Janet and her tailor particularly because at the time it wasn't so easy to buy adapted wear off of the shelf. You had to work with someone to make that possible. Disabled people's history is often lost to obscurity and it's not because it's not there it's just because it's in our wardrobes. It's those loops that you make on your clothes to make them easier to get on or it's the proportions that you change to make jeans fit better for you. And so it's great to be able to tell Janet's story and to welcome more disabled narratives into the museum.