V39: 1920s Beaded Flapper Dress Design

Today Lady Carolyn invited me to participate in a presentation on 1920s fashion coming up at Reno’s National Automobile Museum at the end of March.  How could I resist!

I have a decent selection of 1920s dresses…unless, of course, we’re talking about evening attire, of which I have none.  No flapper dresses, which is pretty lame when I love the 20s so much.

This presents the perfect opportunity, though, to work that 1990s beaded slip dress I snagged for $15 at a thrift store into a beaded flapper frock worthy of the Charleston.  Here’s the plan (or three):

Which one do you think?

The neckline decoration is coming straight off the dress as-is, but the question is what to do with the rest of the dress.  I would like to use as much of the remaining vermicularly beaded fabric as I can, but I will have to supplement the re-fashion with some additional fabric, either black crepe, some kind of skirt material like metallic drapey-netty-stuff, or fringe.

Fringe almost seems too cliche, though, doesn’t it? …despite it being totally period accurate, like on this dress:

The Frock

I looked at a large cross-section of flapper dresses, but feel quite limited in how to use that heavily beaded neckline and also balance it on the lower half.  Here are the two other inspo pieces:

Met
Callot Soeurs
And a third, for the cool paneled skirt like this:
Don’t I wish I could afford one of these reproductions from LeLuxe!
Help! Which re-fashion would you go with?

37 Comments

Leave a Reply

Discover more from American Duchess Blog

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading