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  • This is Rose.

  • You know her from Titanic.

  • You know this outfit and this one.

  • But are they accurate?

  • We got this fashion historian Hi, I'm Rice Britannia and I'm a fashion historian to walk us through what the movie got right and what they got wrong Books.

  • First, let's establish the setting.

  • Titanic was based on actual historical events that took place in April of 1912 on Route to America.

  • Here were at the height of Gilded Age Society, but also at the beginning of modern fashion.

  • This film was meticulously researched, and the costume designer made sure that Rose had the latest style straight from parents.

  • Costume designer Deborah Lynn Scott actually won the Oscar for best costume design for this movie.

  • To research this film, she looks at extent garments in museum collections but also fashion publications.

  • From that time period, let's start with roses.

  • Iconic suit.

  • Titanic set sail at noon, and we see Rose wearing this cream striped afternoon suit roses.

  • Afternoon suit looks almost exactly like a suit that appears in a French magazine in 1912.

  • This is absolutely accurate, the perfect ensemble to be boarding a ship in the afternoon so this is actually accurate.

  • Let's draw Rose's Day dress from the undergarments out anyway.

  • First up, the underwear for the underwear Rose would have been wearing a shimmies, drawers and stockings.

  • The armies of 1912 is a little bit different from ones that we've previously looked at.

  • This one has a lot of delicate lace and a ruffled edge of the neckline.

  • The drawers were less voluminous, and they were in previous years, mostly because of the changing silhouette.

  • You can see that she's wearing stockings here.

  • Stockings were made of knitted cotton or silk, and we usually light colored for day, sometimes even with inset lakes.

  • Next the corset we see Rose being laced into a corset in one scene of the movie, where she has a really important discussion with her mom.

  • You know, to see that the year 1912 specifically, it was a really interesting time for women and corsets because they were evolving and shaping with the silhouette.

  • But the most modern women started to abandon the course it all together this scene perfectly illustrates this push and pull between this more tight laced, passed and more modern future.

  • This is really the beginning of the straight on silhouette that we will see in the 19 twenties, just 10 years before the dramatic silhouette was called an S curve.

  • And you can see that in this picture here, even though the most modern women were already abandoning courses in 1912 the really rigid traditions of the society in which Rose lived really demanded that she wear one next layer over the course that she would have worn a camisole and a petty coat.

  • A camisole would have been warned to soften that rigid line at the top.

  • The petty coats of this time period We're a pretty narrow as we can see in this ad.

  • This exists somewhere between the full Victorian petty coat and the modern slip thes.

  • Two garments were typically cotton for the day theme.

  • Next layer is the top.

  • We can see the roses wearing a really high colored shirt, waist and accessorized with a neck time.

  • The women's shirt waist was derived from the man's buttoned and collard shirt and was the first truly modern garment of the 20th century.

  • Men's fashions started to influence women's wear beginning in the late 19th century, but buying 1912 it was the norm.

  • The shirt waist was also an egalitarian garment worn by both upper and lower classes.

  • When women's wear started to take influence from menswear, we got garments like this which were more comfortable and casual.

  • And now the suit.

  • We know that this is the most up to date fashion because it appeared in the January 1912 issue of Le Mode, which was a popular French fashion publication.

  • This particular example is made by the couture house Linker and company.

  • Rose would have gone to a couture house to be fit and had this garment made specifically for her.

  • The tailor made was the name for women's walking suit.

  • Much like this one.

  • The tailor made was often worn for travel, which makes this entirely appropriate.

  • But there were other afternoon styles for different activities you can see in this deck seen that there are other women promenading showing off similar ensembles.

  • A very important part of ocean liner culture was showing off the latest fashions that you probably just bought in Paris.

  • This costume hints at a very short lived fad from this time period called the hobble skirt.

  • As you can see the circumference of the skirt kind of narrows at the ankle, and it was said that it really restricted the strides of women, and they had toe hobble around next layer for shoes.

  • You can see her shoes right here when she steps out of the car and they look like the's.

  • And then there's the gloves.

  • The very first thing we see of Rose is her white glove gloves completed any Gilded Age ensemble and women wore gloves any time they were seen in public.

  • Women would have coordinating gloves with each outfit.

  • And, as you can see, her white gloves perfectly match her cream suit, moving on to the hair.

  • When Rose removes her hat later indoors, we get a good look at her hair.

  • She wears her hair up, which is accurate for her age, and station.

  • Hair was really only worn down by adolescents and young girls.

  • After one's debutante ball, you would wear your hair up.

  • We do see Rose with her hair down at other points of the movie.

  • This could be anachronistic, but it was likely a character choice to really illustrate that Rose was an independent spirit, and she really desired to break out of this constricting society over her hair would be the hat.

  • This hat is the most iconic feature of this costume, and it really facilitates this dramatic reveal of her character.

  • This style of hat was extremely fashionable for the time period.

  • Hats actually reached their whitest around 1910 when the broom would extend past the shoulders.

  • At that time, it was called a Merry Widow hat, which is after a Broadway play called The Merry Widow.

  • Waken See that roses hat is made out of a heavily stiff and straw and decorated with a wide taffeta bow.

  • Here, you can see another kind of decoration used on hats at the time.

  • And, yes, that is a taxidermy birds.

  • There was this trend of having taxidermy birds, a top women's hats.

  • This was so fashionable that it eventually depleted bird populations, and some species were even driven thio, endangerment or extinction.

  • Unsurprisingly, these large hats were the subject of satire at the time.

  • Because these hats were so large, the pin's used to secure them were equally large at this time.

  • Some women would use thes really long hat pins as weapons to fend off predatory men, and these especially long hat pins could prove quite dangerous, and this phenomenon was so widespread that the media termed it the hat pin peril.

  • Here's what Rose's Day suit would have looked like compared to the movie, so this is entirely accurate.

  • But let's add a bird.

  • Let's move on to Rose's Evening.

  • Wear another aspect of ocean liner culture.

  • Were these lavish nightly dinner's on board?

  • Because this is a nightly affair, we see a couple different dinner dresses on Rose.

  • This was the height of Gilded Age society, and these women were spending more money than ever before on their clothes, so much so that they would have a different inner dress for every night.

  • Thes costumes were modeled off of real dresses, so these are also after it.

  • Now we're going to draw every layer of the evening dress first up the underwear.

  • The underwear would be the same, but it would probably be silk instead of cotton.

  • For evening, she would be wearing stockings, and we do see that she wears black ones in the scene when she's dancing with Jack.

  • For both of these evening dresses, darker stockings would be appropriate and then the corset.

  • When dressing for dinner.

  • Rose might switch out her corset for a finer one made out of silk.

  • Rose would have likely purchased her course it from a specialty shop in Paris if she was already there shopping.

  • And then the next layer on alternative to the camisole and petty coat was this single garment called the Princess Petty Code, which is similar to what would later be called the slip for an evening dress.

  • This fine, a princess petticoat made out of a coordinating colored fabric would be standards.

  • And then the main event, the dress.

  • You can see the inspiration behind roses costumes in the designs from thes very prominent designers from 1912.

  • As you can see in these examples, a lot of these dresses incorporated layers of sheer fabric that were then embellished with beating.

  • The fashionable silhouette of 1912 was actually remarkably similar to that of 18 12.

  • You can see a high waistline with a narrow skirt, both here and here.

  • This is an era in which Parisians designers were really creating the most forward thinking designs.

  • One of the most modern of modern designers was Lady Duff Gordon, who went by the name Lucille when she was a designer.

  • And actually, she is a character in this film.

  • You can see Rose introducing her here, you see.

  • Elated of Gordon.

  • She designs naughty lingerie among her many talents.

  • But she wasn't just a lingerie designer.

  • She was actually a pioneer in the fashion fields.

  • She actually instituted the practice of draping fabric on a model instead of flat patterning, which is standard practice now.

  • But she really pioneered it.

  • And now the shoes.

  • We get a close look at Rose's shoes when she steps onto the railing.

  • Here we see that they're made of satin and dyed to match the color of her dress thin.

  • Her jewelry's waken see in this scene that the necklace and earrings that rose where match.

  • And that's because they were likely part of a set called a Parore.

  • But we all know that the most important piece of jewelry in this film is the heart of the ocean.

  • This necklace was designed by director James Cameron and based on the Hope Diamond, the Hope Diamond was the biggest and most famous diamond in the world and also a similar blue color and then her gloves.

  • We see all of the women in the scene wearing over the elbow or opera length gloves just before going into the dining room.

  • Women were expected to wear gloves any time they were in public, but they were allowed to take them off when dining and then her hair.

  • Her hair is down and loose in this scene, but at dinner we see that it's properly done.

  • Rose's hair is adorned with bits of jewellery very similar to this image of actress Lillie Elsie.

  • Because the fashionable hairstyle was so voluminous, you needed a lot of hair.

  • Sometimes you would even use hairpieces to create additional volume.

  • So when brushing their hair, women would save the hair that was on their hair brush and put it into a little receptacle on their table and then use that to create these hairpieces.

  • Finally, her makeup.

  • Every single aspect of this costume is accurate until we get to the makeup.

  • If I'm going to fact check this, I'm going to say that this makeup is extremely 19 nineties.

  • In the early 20th century, women actually wore very little visible makeup, and that's because to do so would align them with what society called painted ladies, and those were really women that were not considered respectable like actresses or court is Sands.

  • It wouldn't be until the following decade that cosmetics would really become socially acceptable.

  • Weaken.

  • See that Rose has the darkened eyebrows, eyeliner and darker lipstick, much like Kate Winslet would wear off.

  • Camera makeup is often the least historically accurate aspect of period films, and that's because actors and characters have to be appealing to modern audiences.

  • So here's what Rose's Evening dress would have looked like.

  • Compared to the movie version, pretty much the same Titanic is as historically accurate as period films get.

  • It's really only the makeup that betrays the period in which the film was made.

  • The historical accuracy of this film is really owed to the meticulous research done, and that was out of respect for the tragedy.

This is Rose.

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