Empress Elisabeth's summer dress

Empress Elisabeth’s summer dress

Summer is back in the Sisi Museum. Empress Elisabeth’s dress is on view in the Sisi Museum from 1 July 2011.

The dress dates from the 1880s, and is made of light beige silk chiffon with pastel borders and Brussels lace. This three-piece ensemble, consisting of a bodice, an upper part with a band collar and three-quarter-length puff sleeves, and a skirt, is an outstanding hand-made item. As so often with the Empress’s clothes, there are also embroideries of a dolphin and the Imperial Crown.

The dolphin symbol

All the Empress’s clothes intended for Corfu bore the symbol of the dolphin. Elisabeth’s love of the sea, Greek philosophy and mythology and her interest in spiritualism is widely known. The fact that she had the dolphin embroidered on her clothing could be related to all of these interests – the dolphin, regarded as almost godlike by the Greeks and Romans, was also described as an extremely intelligent, agile animal with a certain affinity for humans. In antiquity, it was admired for its speed, its leaps into the air and its mental abilities, and was regarded as the king of the sea-dwellers. In mythology, the dolphin is said to have accompanied many a soul of the departed safely into the realm of the dead.

Ladies fashions in the mid-19th century

Crinoline reached its widest spread of around 2 m diameter around the middle of the 19th century, after which ladies fashions began to move back to a more slender outline, a style that made its appearance around 1880 and, although of only short duration, is an interesting example of a fashion that emphasised the figure.

A bustle was used to accentuate the backside, the skirt spreading mostly at the back. The previous broad hem of the crinoline dress was reduced, the skirt as a whole became flatter with only the spread at the back. Various bustle designs were used with a framework made of whalebone, bamboo or rattan. Another method was to use cushions stuffed with horsehair together with a stiffened fabric.

By the middle of the century most dresses were made up of two separate pieces, an upper part and the skirt, and at this time were decorated with a wide variety of ornamentation such as ribbons, flounces, frills and finely gathered pleats. This richness of ornamentation was to be found not only on evening gowns but also on daytime dresses.

The front of Elisabeth's summer dress

A bustle was used to accentuate the backside

Embroideries of a dolphin and the Imperial Crown