Mourning ensembles in silk, moiré, taffeta, and other fine fabrics are on display at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute as part of the exhibit, Death Becomes Her: A Century of Mourning Attire. Some 30 outfits, in addition to jewelry, accessories, and contemporaneous fashion plates, allow visitors to discover how mourning fashion evolved over the course of a century, from 1815 to 1915.
The act of mourning during this era was as much a public performance of bereavement as it was a time of private heartache. Mourning dress adhered to the silhouettes de rigueur, their style and shape evolving with the changing times.
Garments of “restrained simplicity are shown alongside those with ostentatious ornamentation,” states the exhibit website. Indeed, the types of fabrics, details in trimmings, and use of other embellishments not only indicated a family’s wealth and status but also followed the strict sartorial codes reserved for each stage of grief.
The garments on display, mostly women’s dress with a sprinkle of men’s looks, include examples of appropriate attire for the first year and a day of bereavement known as “full mourning”, the second year known as “half mourning”, and as many subsequent months which was left to the discretion of a widow, known as “ordinary” or “light” mourning. Men, on the contrary, could come out of mourning, and remarry, in as short a time as a month.
Fabrics such as matte wools and flat silks, or their combination known as Bombazine, retain the deep shades of black dyes, and were preferred for the immediate stages of mourning. Fabrics with luster, such as nap fabrics or moiré silk, were considered appropriate only for lighter mourning. Eventually, color would resurface in the palette of a woman’s wardrobe, with greys and purples indicating a widow’s recovery.
The developments brought forth in the twentieth century were visible in the shifting contours of mourning etiquette. Fashionable mourning wear became more accessible to the masses with the growing circulation of women’s magazines and the rise of fashion retail.
Similarly, two evening gowns worn by Queen Alexandra of Great Britain after the death of Queen Victoria illustrate the fading adherence to strict and subdued mourning decorum.
One of the dresses, dating back to 1902, is made of black ethereal tulle generously embellished with sequins in shades of mauve that allow for its wearer to glisten with gusto while still paying her respects.
An adjacent gallery features delicate pieces of mourning jewelry and accessories, as well as examples of fashion plates depicting chic mourning outfit inspirations. Visitors will find a ring with a miniature portrait of a young man and a brooch with the initials of two brothers, both objects dating from the early nineteenth century (and which belong to Vogue contributing fashion editor Lynn Yaeger). Mourning hats, parasols, and fans are among the accessories on display.
Death Becomes Her puts a spotlight and the subtle nuances behind mourning attire. Though we may find the sartorial codes that governed nineteenth and twentieth century bereavement fashion a hindrance on self-expression, this exhibit demonstrates the multifarious ways in which women personalized their mourning attire.