Something blue: The 1920s wedding dress that changed colour

Earlier this year we acquired a somewhat unusual wedding dress worn in 1925 and donated by bride’s family, via her granddaughter Caroline. Unsurprisingly, wedding dresses are the type of object most offered to the Dress & Textile collection.

So, what was unusual about this dress?

In her initial email, Caroline mentioned that her grandmother’s gown was “of blue silk, with vibrant red and orange painted flowers on the skirt”. This seemed unusual for a wedding dress, although painted silks appear to have been in vogue during the inter-war years. We have another mid-blue painted dress from the 1920s, and an evening gown from 1932 designed and painted by the sister of the wearer.

Of course, wedding dresses have not always been white and are not always white now. We already own a blue wedding dress, but that was worn in 1885 when not wearing white was less unusual. We have a wedding dress made of a gold sari given to the bride’s family from 1931 and another gold creation worn in 1937 by a bride who refused to wear white as the groom wasn’t prepared to put on a morning suit.

From the 1920s, the decade of the offered gown, we hold wedding dresses in colours including oyster, pink and lilac. And some of them might not have been worn in church, which was the main thing that puzzled me.

This is not the actual mystery, though. I get to that in a moment, but first a bit about the bride and groom.

The dress was worn by Ethel Florence Silvina Jarman, born 1905 in Pimlico, just north of the Thames. She was the only child of decorator Robert Lewis Jarman and his wife Emily Frances Neale. Sometime before 1911, the family moved south of the river to Battersea. In 1923, Emily died and 18-year-old Ethel took on her mother’s housekeeping duties.

Ethel’s husband-to-be, Harold Victor ‘Jack’ Hoare was born in 1900 on the Isle of Dogs. His father Jacob worked for His Master’s Voice (HMV), one of the labels of the Gramophone Company. He electroplated the master discs used to produce phonograph records. By 1918, the Hoare family had moved to Wandsworth right next to Battersea. Jack followed his father, becoming a process engraver, producing printing plates using a large camera.

By the early 1920s, Ethel lived in Shelgate Road and Jack in Chivalry Road – around the corner from each other. They might have seen each other in the street, or they might have met at church socials. St Mark’s Church on Battersea Rise, where Ethel and Jack married on 27 June 1925, was only a few minutes’ walk from either of their homes.

This is where we get to the mystery. Seeing the dress myself emphasised the vibrancy of the blue colour, the iridescence of the gold accents and also the brightness of the red, yellow and green paint used for the flowers, which are almost encrusted onto the dress. Our conservator Emily wondered whether crushed glass was involved.

Caroline also showed me two photographs of Ethel and Jack. The family assumed they were taken on the wedding day, one with the date handwritten on the back. Sure enough, Ethel is wearing the dress, BUT – it looks white, and the flowers appear black and monochrome, rather than shaded.

Now, in some respects it made much more sense for Ethel to have worn a white dress, but why is it blue now? What happened?

Before I’d seen the photos, I assumed the blue dress might have been a ‘going-away’ outfit. That’s still a possibility but doesn’t explain why the dress appears white. Did Ethel have two versions of the dress? There’s of course the possibility that someone put the wrong date on the photo. But Caroline assured me that her “aunt and cousin (who my grandmother used to live with) have always said the blue dress was the wedding dress”. Ethel had also kept it all these years, which suggests that it was important for her.

Caroline proposed: Could it have been dyed after the wedding? That seemed plausible. Judging from the trade directories covering the King’s Road (a subject I knew well), drycleaners often offered dyeing services until the early 1970s at least. The thread visible on the hem of the garment could support this hypothesis.

It seems an odd colour to use. Maybe it didn’t take the dye in the same way as the main fabric. But what about the flowers? If they had been black before, they’d have had to be overpainted after the dyeing. Or maybe it is just the low quality of the black-and-white print that makes the flowers appear to be monochrome? Zooming in on a digital reproduction of the print suggests the flowers had been shaded all along.

Perhaps some of you remember the white and gold or black and blue dress phenomenon that occupied so much internet space in 2015? Ours is obviously a different situation. All who looked at the actual dress saw it as blue, and everyone perceived the dress in the wedding photo as white. I hoped photographing the dress might reveal some strange reaction to lighting. But it did nothing of the sort.

Our photographer Richard had another idea: “It may have been that the original photo was taken with a blue filter, which would filter out the blue and make it appear lighter. Doing the same thing in Photoshop gave a similar result when I applied a blue filter to the modern photo.”

This theory takes us back to the ‘white/gold, black/blue dress’. It seems that the colour of the lighting affected how it was perceived.

I wish I could tell you that we worked it all out, but I can’t. Currently, I would put my money on a combination of sunlight, film stock and, perhaps, also film processing that together produced this effect. If you have any ideas or know about the film used in the 1920s for photography, please get in touch.

And what of Ethel and Jack? After they married, the couple stayed with Ethel’s father in the family home at 20 Shelgate Street, where the photo was taken, raising one son and one daughter. Jack died in 1965, and Ethel moved a few streets south, where she lived until her death in 1982.

Beatrice Behlen is Senior Curator, Fashion and Decorative Arts at London Museum.