Gallery Title
Gallery Title
paper dress
Accession Number NWHCM : 1986.190
Description
Paper summer dress, sleeveless, high neck back and front, 'A' line style, made of vilene printed with bold Art Nouveau pattern in orange and lavender, label reading 'Dispo, London'; mini dress, with low neck back and front and printed with a bold orange and lavender abstract Op Art pattern ; machine stitched, possibly worn by donor who says they had a brief vogue but they never caught on, 1967.
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This summer dress surprisingly represents an offshoot of the space industry, which requires fabrics that can be worn for a short time. This is because the amount of water needed to wash clothes in space is a poor use of the resource, and so clothes worn by astronauts are thrown away, to be burnt up in the atmosphere upon re-entry. This dress is made from vilene, an interfacing fabric, not woven or knitted, but instead held together by a web of fibres. Much of the early fabrics used for space travel used the same technique.
This dress is so rare that despite being relatively recent in make, the reasons of its origin are unknown; it's possible that this dress was produced to be a disposable, similar to the limited edition products we see today, or perhaps it is a representation of a test run to consider the design for full manufacture. The information we do have for this dress came from the donor, who told us that such dresses had a brief vogue during the year of manufacture (1967) but never caught on beyond the fashion-forward.