A journey through fashion decades: LSU Textile & Costume Museum spotlights wedding gowns

Remove the glitz of satin, lace and the seemingly thousands of seed pearls, and it’s easy to see how wedding gowns have never dictated street fashion.

No, it’s really the other way around. Street fashion’s influence is powerful, so much that it has influenced bridal gown couture since, well, at least the 1800s.

Proof? Step into the LSU Textile & Costume Museum’s exhibit, “‘Til Trends Do Us Part: A Retrospective of Changing Fashion in Bridal Wear,” and see for yourself.

The gamut of wedding dresses covers the changing fashions from the 1830s through the early 2000s. The exhibit runs through Aug. 31, allowing plenty of time for you to test this street fashion theory in between all of the weddings you’ll surely be attending this summer.

You’ll find it all here, from the Roaring ’20s flapper style to Golden Age of Hollywood satin glamor to the 1960s mini dress to the padded, puffy shoulders of the 1980s.

But the gowns aren’t just for show. Each has its own story of being marched down the aisle, most of them by the Louisiana brides who donated their dresses to the museum. Each also represents an era.

There’s Ellen Lancaster Harriet looking like a movie star in the LSU Gumbo photo next to her wedding dress, and even more so in her wedding day photo when she married U.S. Army Air Corps Lt. John Stewart “Sonny” Slack on Sept. 5, 1941, at First Presbyterian Church in Shreveport. The wedding photo is on display in the museum lobby, along with those of such other brides as Carolyn Bennett, Betty Moyse Simmons, Ruth Jordan Williams and Ruth Laney.

Even the museum’s director, Pam Rabalais Vinci, is represented in the show.

“That’s my wedding dress,” she said, pointing a high-waisted dress with a bodice covered in pearls.

The day was June 17, 1970, when Pamela Ann Pace married Zachary orthopedist Robert Roy Rabalais Jr. She lost her husband to cancer years later and has since remarried retired Zachary dentist Richard Vinci.

Looking at it now, Vinci sees her dress in a different way.

“That was in the 1970s, when granny dresses started coming into fashion,” she said. “Granny and caftan dresses. So, the street fashion also spilled over into the wedding fashion.”

She pauses, glancing at photos of her younger self wearing the wedding gown positioned at the dress’ hemline.

“This gown was on the cover of Bride’s Magazine, but I never knew that,” she said. “I loved all the pearl work on it. I bought it from Maison Blanche on Canal Street in New Orleans for $250 on a teacher’s salary. My goal was to grow my hair long and part it down the middle, but as you can tell from the pictures, I didn’t quite make my goal of growing it long.”

The display of Vinci’s wedding gown seems more than appropriate with this exhibit being her last as museum director. She retired on May 31, but she’s still going to volunteer at the museum, helping to curate exhibits such as this one, whose journey begins with a bronze tinted dress from the 1830s.

Exhibit labels offer up the fashion trends of the decade, specifically “expansive width at shoulders shifting to hips” and “sleeve supports necessary and often filled with feathers.”

Notice, again, that these are that era’s trends in women’s fashion. The fashion of the day dictated the style of the wedding gown, just as it did for the 1960s mini wedding dress worn by Ruth Laney in her 1968 wedding to Nicholas Joseph Calvert.

Trending in that era were “empire waisted, straight cut, A-line silhouettes,” “miniskirts and pantyhose introduction” and “space age looks.”

Museum labels also discuss what was happening in history at the time, along with those events’ influence not only on fashion but culture.

Though most of the dresses here tell the story of Louisiana weddings, designs and fashion, the 19th century gowns were gifted to LSU by the Valentine Museum in Richmond, Virginia. One of these dresses is particularly valuable in the fashion world.

The dress was designed and made in the 1860s by the House of Worth in Paris, founded in 1858 by Charles Frederick Worth, who specialized in haute couture. It features the fitted bodice, high neckline, dropped shoulders and hoop skirts that were popular at that time.

Think of the dress worn by Scarlett O’Hara while surrounded by all of her beaus at the Twin Oaks picnic. Yes, this was the antebellum fashion worn not only in the South but by Isabelle Fautoute McCready in her 1865 wedding in New York City.

“It was worn again by her great-granddaughter in 1948,” Vinci said. “The museum in Virginia was deaccessioning its artifacts, and this dress didn’t have any exact provenance to Richmond.”

But that didn’t matter to the LSU Textile & Costume Museum. The mission of its collection and exhibits is educational, offering not only interesting stories of textiles, fashion and design to the public but also resource materials for the students of the Department of Human Ecology, to which the museum is attached.

So, having an accessible item of true Paris haute couture is more than special.

“We obviously were delighted to get a Charles Frederick Worth gown, and one of his earliest,” Vinci said. “He moved to Paris about eight years before he made this dress. This is the only haute couture dress of this type in our collection, and we are fortunate to have it.”

Fashion changes quickly from there, transitioning to bustles with trains, the puffy “powder pigeon” insertions on the bodices of the early 1900s, the rising hemline of the Roaring ’20s and the classic Hollywood satin of the 1930s.

The 1940s and ’50s are mostly showcased in glass cases in the center, again, each reflecting the day’s fashioning while combining to create a magical fairyland in tulle, satin and lace.

Dresses are accompanied by accessories, included a hand-painted, cardboard storage box; a collapsible, plastic hoop for the return of hoop skirts in the 1950s and lots of wedding day photographs.

Near the doorway, a case contains accessories from the late 1800s and early 1900s, including pairs of narrow, stained shoes; a lacy bandeau bra; a cap with a short, lacy veil; and silk stockings.

“If you look closely at one pair of shoes, you’ll see the same detailed beadwork and crystals that are on the gowns,” Vinci said.

In the end, fashion is simply fashion.

“You can see the progression of it here,” Vinci said. “We’re not just learning about wedding dresses here but also history, and how the street fashion does dictate the look of these dresses, which makes it even more interesting.”