Kate's grandmother's gown: a 1950s Capri silk reconstruction
Kate Johnson’s Restored Vintage Gown
Photography: @hannahredman_images
Kate came in with her grandmother's wedding dress. A 1950s Capri silk, lined with silk organza, ankle length, with a lace cape sewn into the construction. She wanted to wear it to her own wedding.
It didn't fit.
With a vintage dress, you can't approach the seams the way you would a modern gown. Everything has to be treated carefully. The fabric is aged, the thread is often brittle, and there's no replacement fabric if something goes wrong. We took our measurements and let the seams out gently, stitch by stitch, working our way around the entire dress, using cotton thread and silk organza for reinforcement so the aged silk had something stable to sit against.
Kate’s grandma’s wedding photo and the gown before wedding dress clean and restoration.
Once Kate could actually get into it and we could do a proper fitting, we could see the waist needed to come up to sit at her natural waist. That wasn't something we could have predicted beforehand. She hadn't been able to get into the dress prior to alterations, so there was simply no way to know until we got there. Getting it done meant removing the skirt from the bodice, reinstalling half the zipper, and raising the waist using silk thread throughout.
We cleaned the dress with Eucalan silk wash, which is gentle enough for aged silk and organza, and got most of the staining out. Not all of it, but for a dress that age, that's a reasonable result. Then we pressed it carefully.
Kate also wanted to add length for the wedding without permanently altering the original silhouette, so we made a detachable floor-length overskirt in matching silk, connected with thread eyes on the dress and hooks on the skirt. The idea was that it could come off after the ceremony and the original dress could breathe again, which is exactly what happened.
Getting her into it on the wedding day was genuinely an operation. The lace cape is inset into the construction and the zipper closes at both the top and the bottom, so there's a very particular sequence involved. But she looked absolutely stunning. After the wedding, the gown was cleaned, preserved, and boxed ready to return to her grandmother, who had been asking when she'd get it back almost from the day Kate borrowed it.
There's something about handing a dress like that back. Restored, altered, worn generations late ragain, with a new story added to it. That doesn't get old no matter how many times you do this work.
Thinking about wearing a family heirloom to your wedding?
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