what makes a dress an evening dress?

[kamikat]

Right now I am working on a black cotton dress. It's a very simple design, using a couple different vintage patterns to copy a pattern that went for too much on eBay. When I pinned it together and tried it on, my first thought was "this is a little black dress, I can't wear this during the day". So, I'm wondering what you think makes a dress an evening or cocktail dress vs. a day dress. Nothing about this dress is fancy or posh. It's black, but it's cotton broadcloth, v-neck but no cleavage, typical 50's length. I can't find my camera, so I can't take pics, but here's the pattern I am trying to copy. Imagine view A in solid black.

 

[Miss_Bella_Hell]

Well, the seams on that make it look somewhat like an evening dress because it isn't simple. Add that to the sophisticated black color and you have something that looks dressy, I guess. Maybe try a tiny dot pattern, or a more daytime fabric?

 

[Sunny]

I guess it really is the pattern, as well as the time, as both you ladies have said. Yours sounds like a borderline one, since it uses a sophisticated pattern but a simpler, more casual material. In that case, it's really the accessories that would make it clearly an evening/cocktail versus a day dress. With casual flats or wedges, big casual jewelry, and maybe an ordinary cardigan, it could just be a nice dress. With glitzy jewelry and killer shoes, it's absolutely for evening. Petticoats, too - fewer for a daytime look, whole hog for evening.

For that pattern in particular, it's the bust emphasis that makes it a more formal design. Without that, with princess seams and the same neckline, it'd be easier to make it casual.

 

[Lady Day]

I always feel comfortable for darker valued dresses to be after five/cocktail; dark reds, burgundies, forrest greens, black of corse. I feel these can be at the knee to mid calf. I think the cut of the dress is subjective as I have worn a day dress as a cocktail number because it was darker. I reserve lighter colored dresses for day, no matter their cut.

As for length, I try not to do anything below mid calf for day, as that suggests a more evening length to me.

Formal I think would hit the ankle or floor, no matter the fabric, altho I feel more luxurious fabrics (silk crapes, taffetas etc) are a given if long and such.

But I dont think formal gowns all have to be dark. I think that length allows the gown to be considered formal as a given, so a cream or pink evening gown is lovely.

LD

 

[kamikat]

hmm, this has given me lots to think about. Considering that I was a goth teen, then bought into the line of "black makes you look slimmer", I tend to gravitate towards black and darker colors for all my clothing. I might have to break that habit.

 

[Sunny]

But...

The majority of the formal dresses I've seen from the 1930s and 1940s are light-colored or bright-colored, including metallics. Dark-colored dresses are seen as elegant now, but then they were dull and drab and their wearers disappeared into the background. Darker colors were more practical and business-like. I think this is another reversal in aesthetics from vintage times to now, but it's fueled by technology. Until electric lights came around, evening lighting was candles, oil lamps, or gas. It wasn't terribly bright, and it was yellow. Light colors were necessary! The 1990s Persuasion (Amanda Root and Ciaran Hinds) shows how darned dark candlelight is and how weird it makes colors look. When electric lights came around, I guess gradually people came to like the dramatic effect of dark colors. It helps when they're actually visible. (I don't know as much about the 1950s, but from movies and TV it still doesn't seem that black and dark colors were nearly as uniform as they are now.) Dark colors read "evening" now, but back in the day it wasn't always so.

 

[Decobelle]

I think you are right, Sunny, that there were a lot of color options for evening gowns in the 30s-40s. I gather also though that many women wore a lot of black in the Depression years because they had to for economy. A 1937 book that I have written for women who were trying to live elegantly on a budget, had this to say about black:

The Little Black Evening Dress is, of course, the great stand-by of nine-tenths of the economically minded women in the country, and it has done its part nobly for a couple of decades. It doesn’t soil easily, isn’t remembered like a color, is appropriate everywhere, and can be varied by contrasting jackets, jewels, flowers, scarves, and slippers till it dies on its feet. The idea may not excite you, but if you’re really going in for saving money, you’d better get one anyway. In a few short months, you’ll probably love it like a sister, though you would be heartily sick of anything else.


She also touches on weather/season appropriate fabrics:

Beware the velvet and organdie evening frocks…or any others that you can’t wear year round in a pinch. They may be enchanting, but they are extravagances in a budgeted wardrobe.

 

[Miss 1929]

I think you are right, Sunny, that there were a lot of color options for evening gowns in the 30s-40s. I gather also though that many women wore a lot of black in the Depression years because they had to for economy. A 1937 book that I have written for women who were trying to live elegantly on a budget, had this to say about black:

The Little Black Evening Dress is, of course, the great stand-by of nine-tenths of the economically minded women in the country, and it has done its part nobly for a couple of decades. It doesn’t soil easily, isn’t remembered like a color, is appropriate everywhere, and can be varied by contrasting jackets, jewels, flowers, scarves, and slippers till it dies on its feet. The idea may not excite you, but if you’re really going in for saving money, you’d better get one anyway. In a few short months, you’ll probably love it like a sister, though you would be heartily sick of anything else.


She also touches on weather/season appropriate fabrics:

Beware the velvet and organdie evening frocks…or any others that you can’t wear year round in a pinch. They may be enchanting, but they are extravagances in a budgeted wardrobe.

Is that from "Orchids on Your Budget"? I think that's the title...same author also wrote something like "How to Live Alone and Like It"...

 

[Decobelle]

Yes, by the writer for Vogue, Marjorie Hillis. It was the follow up to her best seller of 1936, Live Alone and Like It. I think she has a cute writing style. Another book in the series is 1938's Corned Beef and Caviar which covers entertaining. My copy of that one is inscribed "For my BELOVED daughter MABEL who has forgotten more about COOKING than the writer of this book will ever know" lol