Title: Wallflower
Collection: The Regency Wardrobe
Garment: Woman’s dress
Size- Life-sized
Materials: FSC accredited paper tablecloth, tissue paper, quilling paper strips, rice paper, embroidery thread, card 
 
The embroidered and applied decoration on this dress is inspired by the decorative shapes in the red and gold silk that hangs on the walls of the Saloon in the Royal Pavilion, Brighton (with special permission). The shape of this dress reflects the fact that sleeves which were short and puffed became more enlarged toward 1829 when they might be cut in a circular shape and were sometimes extended with whalebones. 
 
This piece is also inspired by: Lady Grace Gore (1772-1866), the matriarch of an imagined gathering created to inform The Regency Wardrobe collection. She would have been 59 in 1831 when all the women from our gathering attended a ball at The Brighton Pavilion held in honour of the birthday of the Duke of Sussex. Grace married Sir Ralph Gore (7th Baronet) in 1802. They lived at number 26, Brunswick square, Hove, Sussex. The Gores attended and hosted many social events. There is a record of one in particular, on Monday 30th December 1833, that included Maria Cunnyngham, one of the 4 other women to whom one of the silhouette dresses is attributed.
 
*Please note: Part of the concept of The Regency Wardrobe is that the colour of many of the pieces risks fading over time. This is to reflect: 
- research done by The House of Embroidered Paper into Regency era garments and the observation that the colures of their surfaces have faded overtime (as evidenced by looking under seams and inside material crevices).
- how historical events and people fade in the collective memory
- how the power and prestige of civilizations and empires fades overtime.
- how the surfaces of most items we find left to us from history have faded.
Areas of this piece therefore risk changing colour/fading over-time. That is, they may effectively, noticeably, age just as we do.