Bellville Sassoon rang no bells for me, being American. So I did the google and ended up at the V&A, of course. They have a Bellville Sassoon evening gown, which is a lovely column of froth and beads, but not my taste.

V&A T.17-2007

This led me to gifts from David Sassoon,including this miniature dress, a quarter-scale couture reproduction of a Jean Dessès dress.

Whoa. That’s really interesting!

There’s a Madame Grès as well, and the V&A catalog record notes:

“These scaled copies use the same fabrics and show the superb craftsmanship as their full size equivalents. The V & A have four of these miniature dresses which the donor acquired from the archive of the wholesale house of Dorville. Wholesalers would buy the copyrights to couture dresses so that they could sell modified ready-to-wear copies. It is thought that these quarter-scale dresses were sold alongside the patterns to show how the dress looked when made up.” Ever see the Newman-Woodwar movie A New Kind of Love?

What I love about the the Dessès dress is how much it reminds me of these dresses:

KCI 1845 English Day Dress

V&A ca. 1895 T.17-1985

That’s one of the fun things about fashion, and about history. Details emerge and re-emerge in style and design (yes, historicism) and connect our present with the past. Museums strive to do that every day, but fashion can do it on the street and in your closet. That’s another kind of living history.