A 90-year-old wedding dress has been meticulously conserved and will take centre stage once more this December at Subiaco Museum at some special events.
The dress once belonged to local resident Marion Sparkes, who married Frederick Sims on 3 February 1934. Their wedding was featured in the Sunday Times at the time with a detailed account of the bride’s outfit:
‘…gracefully attired in a charming gown of cream French macrame lace reaching to her feet and a shoulder train of finest cream crepe de chine lined with pale blue georgette and a beautifully embroidered veil and a Russian coronet of tulle and orange blossom buds and diamante trimmings...’
Marion made the dress herself, which is a great representation of the fashion of the time, and later donated it to the Subiaco Museum, along with the headdress she wore on her big day.
Victoria Canova has been part of the Embroiderers Guild for a decade now and is working towards becoming a textile conservator. She has been lovingly conserving the dress for two months now putting in over 100 hours work on this special piece.
Victoria said she loved doing this sort of work because textiles allow you to learn about someone’s life; they are a small snapshot of who they were.
“Sometimes there can be imperfections, like she's got a slight stain on the hem but, you know, it shows that on her wedding day, she had champagne or something, and someone got overexcited and bumped into her...it tells a story,” she said.
After 90 years, this wedding dress was getting very fragile so Victoria focussed on stabilising it so that it could be on display without tearing the fabric.
“I had to go with a very fine thread around each flower [to hold it],” she said. “I spent at least a week going round each flower…it was like working with cobwebs.”
Subiaco Museum Coordinator Jessica Marantelli said conservation of items like this was so important.
“It is easy for us to interpret and create histories from photographs, but when you have the physical item in front of you, you can read so much more into the person; what fabric was used, how it was made, the size and scale of the person,” she said.
“The objects in our collection, like this dress allow us to tell strong stories about the history of people who lived in Subiaco. They are our strongest link to the past and that was why it was so important we had this dress conserved.”
