Sleepy Hollow Peach

Peach gown from ‚Sleepy Hollow‘
(In progress, that’s why the below shown navigation doesn’t completely work yet)

One (though not the only) dress that I found interesting (though not most) since seeing the movie was this one here:

Various pictures of the peach dress from Sleepy Hollow as worn by Katrina van Tassel / Christina Ricci

Navigation for this site:
Observations on the original gown
The fabric
The patterns
Dress diary; separated in:
Material collecting
Making

Thoughts & observations on the original dress

I have also written down some general thoughts about the costumes from that particular movie down here. Please read them if you’re interested. By the way, in case you haven’t seen it yet – I’ve also made the embroidered cloak from the movie for a friend, you can find it here.

The original dress is probably made from some kind of pale golden (duchesse?) satin, painted with peach vines and roses. The dress is decorated with coral / peach trims and the bottom hem is embroidered in peach.
Furthermore, she is wearing a white neckerchief with scalloped, peach/coral and embroidered white edges with the dress.

The dress, which is cut like a Robe à la Anglaise, is basically very historical (at least if one would assume that the movie would play, let’s say, 30 years earlier than it’s supposed to – read this page for further details!) – with one exception: It has a lacing down the backside. The dress can barely be seen from the backside in the movie; however, I managed to take some screenshots where you can see (or at least guess!) the spiral lacing at the center back.

That spiral lacing (or rather ANY lacing!) down the center back is NOT historically correct on an Anglaise. They were front laced, front buttoned, front hooked, front pinned – and I mean down the center front as well as the side front(s) in case of a stomacher kind of closure – but they were never laced down the back as far as I know (if you have evidence for any back lacing Anglaises – please let me know and I will happily correct my writing here!).

The one thing I find most beautiful is the neckerchief that is worn with the gown. It wraps around the shoulders and then between the breasts around the waist, just to finally tie at the bottom back of the bodice (there must be something there to what the ends of the neckerchief are tied!). I would bet that without this neckerchief the gown will look rather boring. It is, by the way, not just ’some‘ kind of neckerchief – the scalloped edge of it are also on the sleeve flounces of the dress, so that it’s clear that both neckerchief and dress definitely belong together.

The fabrics

I have to say that peach / gold is not *exactly* my color combination. My skin is *very* light and has a pale rose / blue hue, so peach never was my color because it makes me look, well… dead.
However, when seeing Christina Ricci wear this dress, who has about the same skin color as I have, I found that the color was actually quite becoming.

Still I didn’t plan to make this dress. It was not that I would have ’needed‘ it, nor did I ever come across a fabric that would work for this gown (though I have to admit that I never really searched, either).

Accidentally, I stumbled over a fabric which I personally found absolutely perfect for the gown.
Golden beige, slightly metallic, with woven golden and pink-peach flowers in it. Here are some pictures – the fabric is not only beautiful but also *very* difficult to photograph:

The pictures show the golden / pink brocade and the taffeta with which I’m intending to decorate and line the dress.
As you can see, the brocade looks golden from the front but if you look at it from an angle the flowers turn pink-peach (best to be seen in the second and last picture).
The taffeta is shot, woven with dark coral and cream threads. This makes it match the brocade even more.

This is how my fabrics look compared directly to the original fabrics:

Left: Original fabrics; right: my fabrics
Doesn’t look bad, right? 😉
My fabrics are a little more pink than peach, but that is something I rather welcome.

And I found just enough of the brocade that I could make one dress from it (5 yards). Plus, it was affordable. So I bought it and started to think a bit about the dress, which you can read above.

Some notes before starting the diary on…:

The pattern

Searching for any evidence for a back laced Anglaise I have flipped through countless books, read a gazillion websites and looked at hundreds of paintings – to no avail.

I was biting my nails when thinking about turning the dress into something really historic by adding a front closure, but then again that would destroy the look.

I also thought of adding an ‚inverted‘ stomacher, like the black / white gown from the same movie has:

and which actually *is* historic – see this gown from the Kyoto Costume Institute which has a likely closure:

But then again I thought that this would somehow destroy the look of the original costume, if this ‚diagonal‘ closure would show anywhere below the neckerchief.

Then I was thinking realistic:
My fabric is mostly artificial, I will probably never wear the gown for any competition, and what I’m trying to make here is the reproduction of a movie costume, not an original historical dress.
I then stopped biting my nails and decided that I could also live with a back laced Anglaise.

So I took a pattern from Norah Waugh’s ‚Cut of women’s clothes‘ – Diagram XXII – Robe à L’Anglaise 1775-80, to be exact, omitted the sewn-on overskirt and enlarged just the bodice pattern to my size. I chose that particular pattern because it has that nice deep neckline.
I also changed the shape of the front a bit to be able to cut the front in one piece and to have that nice point at the bottom middle. I also had to shorten the back pieces a bit.

For the skirt I decided just to drape it on the stand without any pattern. The skirt is very simple with just few, regular inverted pleats along the waistline, which can clearly be seen in the following screenshots:

Knowing that those skirts were (historically) always constructed from straight fabric panels which were then pleated along the waist and always had a straight seam at the bottom, I knew that it shouldn’t be too difficult to drape the skirt without a pattern but just the knowledge where the pleats would have to be.

And now – here’s the dress diary.