“We made her dress out of silver lamé and iridescent rainbow paper, overlaid with lace and jewels on the bodice,” recalls Ellis Flyte. “We had costume breakdowns and a color chart on every character, and in this scene, her silver and mint color pallet set her apart from the others in the ballroom. Lovely young Jennifer suddenly was a beautiful princess. Her hair was dressed with jeweled glue particles. It all took a great deal of work, but she did look otherworldly!”
“Oh, that enormous hair!” Connelly gasps today. “Who can forget that?” The hairdressers opted not to give her an elegant updo; instead they wove delicate tendrils of silver through her dark hair, like enchanted spiderwebs. She looked older and more mature that a fourteen-year-old–yet younger and far more innocent that the other guests at the ball. “It was such a nice change from the blue jeans that I wore in almost every other scene,” she says. “It was really fun at the time. I’d never had an experience like that before, where I’d been dressed like that. It was kind of magical.”
Monster fucker this, monster fucker that. What if I want a monster RELATIONSHIP huh?! Monster HAND HOLDING, monster INTIMATE CONVERSATIONS, monster COMFORTABLE SILENCE??
Speaking of sheer fabric, let’s hang out in 1830 today. The 1830s are one of my favorite decades for the absolute bonkers direction things went in. Skirt hems went up, waistlines dropped, crinolines puffed, sleeves swelled, and hair went miles high with every kind of adornment you could imagine. For a truly exciting experience, search for hairstyles of the period and you’ll see that the whimsical designs in Bridgerton weren’t far off from the truth (just in the wrong decade).
This delightful dress employs aerophane in the construction of the flowers. Aerophane is unusual sheer, made of silk, and was only used until around the 1870s–but it had a lot of ideal qualities for the time. First, it had a beautiful shimmer, which caught the light of ballrooms for lovely effect. Secondly, it was ideal for embroidering and shaping, as it had an elasticity other sheers and nets did not have. Lastly, it held shapes, pleats, twists, and rosettes very well, so you could achieve remarkably artistic whimsy in borders and embellishments.
Here, the silhouette is absolutely darling. The pleats at the top of the bodice and that swooping neck hearken to the next two decades of peak Young Victoria.
