Seeing the Downton Abbey costumes in person!

FINALLY! I got to see a bunch of the Downton Abbey costumes, in person.  I live fairly close (2 hour drive) from Winterthur, the estate and mansion of the Dupont family (think chemicals).  This was turned into a museum in the 1950's. The house is wonderful to visit. It is filled with Mr. Dupont's huge collection of early American art and furnishings and the extensive gardens are also quite famous. There is now a special building just next to the mansion for special exhibits and this is where the Downton Abbey exhibit was displayed.

As you can see, all the costumes were accompanied by photographs of the actors wearing the costumes. It is so interesting to see the sizes of the actors and realize they actually wore these clothes.

The first thing you see when you walk through the doors is this display of the call board and some of the servants clothing. I really liked seeing the green printed fabric that the house maid's dresses were made in, up close.  Mrs. Hughes' second season dress is on the right. It has some tiny subtle bead work that brings out the design of the fabric and dress. They explained that a real house keeper wouldn't have embellishments like that but on TV, details get lost on an all black dress otherwise.

These are the dresses the Crawley sister's wore to Edith's wedding. On TV you never see all the beautiful embroidery and beading at the waist and on the train of her wedding dress, and you can see some more neat detailing in the back by looking in the mirror.
Sybil's dress on the left above amazed me by how shapeless it was.  I didn't notice that when it was actually being worn on TV.
Mary's dress in the middle was made from scratch, first as as white dress which was then gradually dyed to the shade of blue desired.

What I found most interesting about seeing these costumes in person, was how many of them were interpretations of period clothing. The designer, Susannah Buxton, gets just 7 weeks to make, borrow and procure all the costumes for each season. I am in awe of her sense of style, creativity and especially her ingenuity to do this. Many of the elegant evening wear is cobbled together with bits of vintage fabrics and bead work with new fabrics, often skillfully dyed to match. 
To learn about her design philosophy directly read this interview with Susannah Buxton at the Time website.

This dress of Cora's is a good example of one of these cobbled together dresses. The vintage patch of embellished fabric is plain to see on the front of the dress.

The green dress on the left is new velvet fabric, dyed to match the vintage skirt and sleeve cuffs. I think Maggie Smith's dress on the right is all new, but the dress I really want you to look at is Cora's in the middle.  This one is a total made-up creation out of the designer's head. She found a panel of vintage fabric with beautiful beadwork and just played around with it, letting it fold and drape over the bosom, until she was happy with it and then built the rest of the dress around that.

OH ... I forgot to mention! Martha McCain was with me. She lives in New York, so we met half way to see this together.  Most of you know how much Martha knows about fashion history, so you can imagine her comments about some of these dress interpretations.  But, don't forget Martha worked for years as a theatrical costumer.  So, after observing the historical squishiness of some of the costumes, Martha said to me how the costumes worked fine on TV. The costumes should help the actor's do their job, not become the focal point of the show.

A little more about using vintage fabrics. Here is Sybil's famous harem pants ensemble.  Well, apparently the fragile bodice fabric split during filming. They had extra and replaced the part that was damaged, but it split some more. If you look closely you can see the upper part of the sleeve on the left side is split.

At the end of the show were the costumes Mary and Matthew wore when he proposed to her AND they had the video clip of that scene running on a continuos loop behind them.

It was SO romantic!!!!

Can't wait for season 5 coming so soon.