"A Woman's Best Dress" features three dresses ranging in date from about 1800 to 1836. The pieces in this gallery show not only the evolving fashion silhouette, shifting from vertical to horizontal emphasis, but upon close examination, we also see evidence that textiles were highly valued, and thus important to save and reuse.

Block-printed dress, ca. 1800 - 1805 click to enlarge click for close-ups This dress began its life in the 18th century and was taken apart and reconstructed in the early 19th century. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, all textiles were valued, especially so during political upheavals when the importation of goods was restricted; therefore it was unquestionably worth the time to unpick a garment in order to refashion it into another style or type of garment. In this case, the alteration has been extreme, since the 18th century dress would have had a more naturally defined waistline and full skirt, rather than the very high waist and slim lines of the Empire period. Piecing in odd places and indications of former pleats and stitching lines suggest that the fabric was originally made up in the 1780s, when printed cotton textiles were very desirable. The floral design was achieved by means of wood block printing, evidenced by small black dots used to "register" the blocks. Since each color required a separate block, it was important to align the successive printing blocks using these tiny marks; five blocks were needed to create this design. The painstaking and time-consuming nature of the process makes it clear why printed textiles in particular were so precious before the development of roller printing techniques in the early 19th century.

Changeable silk dress, ca. 1820 click to enlarge click for close-ups The iridescent taffeta used to make this dress is of a kind variously known as "changeable," "chameleon," or "shot" silk because it appears to change color. By using one color for the warp yarns, and another color for the weft yarns, in this case black and red, a shimmering multi-color effect was achieved in the textile. The "apron-front" style of this dress was popular in the late 1810s and early 1820s, as were the very long sleeves extending over the top of the hand. Belying the fashionable exterior of the dress, the inner bodice was made with a section of a homespun linen bedsheet, on which one can still see the embroidered initials of the owner, "C W," and the number assigned to the sheet as part of the household linens, "3." Because textiles were so valuable, they were almost always reused or recycled in some manner, and here we see evidence of the continuing "life" of a bedsheet too worn out to continue serving that purpose. The CHS collection also contains a girl's dress made of identical taffeta, though it did not come from the same family; the style dates to the 1840s with a later modification to the sleeves, but the dress was obviously re-made from another garment, probably a dress such as this, worn by the girl's mother or grandmother.

Silk redingote, ca. 1836-1838 click to enlarge click for close-ups Drabs and muted gold colors were popular for women's silk dresses in the 1830s, as were small floral motifs woven in the fabric. Worn by Connecticut native Anna Frisbie Marshall, this dress was made in a style called a redingote–essentially a coat-dress-in which wool or cotton wadding was used to interline the gown (like a quilt). Lightweight and warm, the redingote would have been a perfect winter garment for the inadequately heated homes of the period. The dressmaker's skill is evident both in the thoughtful placement of the floral design and careful construction so that wadding in the skirt ended a few inches below the waistband, eliminating bulk. Brown velvet was used to accent the fashionably wide collar and shoulderline. Fashion "extremes" are not new, and dresses of the 1830s reflect the pendulum swing from one exaggerated style to its opposite. It is not unusual to discover that dresses of the 1830s have undergone alterations to their sleeves. Extremely large, "gigot" (leg-of-mutton) sleeves were the fashion focus from about 1830 to 1835, after which the fullness was controlled by pleating the upper sleeves, the pleats held in place with rows of chainstitching. The oversized – some thought ridiculous-looking – sleeves of the early 1830s were thus "tamed" by pushing the fullness down to the elbow, where it eventually disappeared in the 1840s.