A wedding dress worn by three generations of one family is among nearly two hundred wedding-related items housed in the LSU Textile and Costume Museum.
Made of sheer candlelight Alencon lace and worn over a satin slip, the dress features a full gored skirt ending in a chapel-length train. An Alencon lace Victorian jacket with long sleeves was worn over the sleeveless bodice.
Ida LeBlanc, ninety-three, says her mother made the dress for her in 1938. LeBlanc remembers her mother Josephine Marix as a talented seamstress who sewed for many Plaquemine residents. “But she had never made a wedding dress before.”
Undaunted, Mrs. Marix went to shops in New Orleans and studied dresses to learn how to construct the train. She had another seamstress cover the buttons to the dress and jacket—all thirty of them.
On May 21, 1938, Ida Marix walked up the aisle of St. John’s Church in Plaquemine to meet her groom, Henry LeBlanc of Port Allen. Her dress was widely admired, and soon Mrs. Marix was besieged with bridal customers. “After that she made wedding dresses for everybody,” says LeBlanc, a retired registered nurse who lives in Port Allen.
LeBlanc had five daughters, but only one of them wore the dress: Mickel (pronounced Michael), the youngest, who married Leo Blaize in Port Allen in 1978. The dress had spent the past forty years wrapped in blue tissue paper, folded into a large box from Dalton’s department store in Baton Rouge, and stuck in a closet.
“I knew it was there, but Mom said, ‘I don’t think you can fit in it,’” recalls Blaize, a school nurse in Baton Rouge. But Ida, who was five feet tall and weighed ninety-five pounds when she married, let out the sleeves so the dress would fit Mickel–a towering five-foot-three inches and 104 pounds.
The dress went back into the closet until 1997, when Toni Perdomo, who is Mickel’s niece and Ida’s granddaughter, decided to wear it. “I was the last one small enough to fit in it,” says Toni, who was five feet tall and weighed ninety-five pounds when she married Onezieme Mouton in Abbeville. (She now teaches middle school in Lafayette.)
Then it was back to the closet, where the dress stayed until the family donated it to the museum in 1998. “It just couldn’t take another wedding unless you stood there and didn’t move,” says Blaize of the nearly seventy-year-old dress. LeBlanc was happy to give it to the museum. “What else was I going to do with it?” she quips. Along with the dress and underslip, the family donated newspaper accounts of their weddings.
“Some gowns can be so dated that young women may not be interested in wearing them,” says museum curator Pam Rabalais Vinci. “But with Mickel and Toni, that did not bother them in the least. You can feel the love and closeness of the family.”
Family members often keep wedding and christening gowns for sentimental reasons. “They’re saved and passed from generation to generation,” says Vinci. “Many families have generously shared them with us, along with photos and newspaper articles. Those are a real asset to the collection, because you can see the accessories and the hairstyles, and you can read descriptions of the weddings.”
The museum’s wedding accessories include intricately laced corsets, garters, trousseau lingerie, gloves, shoes, and even pressed flowers. Wedding books and photo albums help flesh out the stories.
Another prize of the collection, and the oldest dress donated locally, was worn by Anna Barrow Davidson, who married George Leopold Plettinger in St. Francisville in 1905. The cotton batiste gown is trimmed with self-ruching and satin-ribbon rosettes. Vinci describes its “monobosom silhouette, also know as a pouter-pigeon. It looked like you were dragging an anchor in back,” giving a bustle effect. The Plettinger family also donated Anna’s gloves, her lace-trimmed cotton corset, which laces up the back, the corset cover, and her petticoat.
Scarlett O’Hara had nothing on Anna Davidson. “Nobody else could wear [the dress] because she was nineteen [inches] in the waist,” says Kay Suggs, Anna’s granddaughter. The family donated the dress after finding it among the effects of Anna’s daughter, who had tucked it away for safekeeping.
“It had been stuck in a trunk and had rust marks and little spots on it,” says Suggs. “They did a beautiful job of restoring it.” Along with the dress and accessories came the starry-eyed newspaper account of the wedding from the True Democrat:
“The bridal couple entered the church, walking together and without attendants. The bride wore a simple but exquisite gown of purest white French mull over the same with garnitures of mull ruching, satin ribbon and lace. It was made walking length and her tulle veil, most tastefully arranged off the face, fell from a coronet of orange blossoms to the hem of the skirt. She carried a trailing bouquet of asparagus fern and white roses.”
The account continued, “The groom is a young businessman of sterling worth . . . . His bride, with whom he has had a long and singularly devoted engagement, is a handsome brunette, one of the most attractive young ladies of St. Francisville. Added to [her] physical charms, she is a fine housekeeper.”
“Most early brides packed everything away,” says Vinci. “Petticoats, camisoles, corset covers made especially for that trousseau. In some cases they donated the bridal book, postcards from the honeymoon, telegrams to the bride and groom, bills from honeymoon hotels, and even ads from bridal magazines.”
Vinci, who has a master’s degree in Textiles, Apparel Design, and Merchandising, began her museum work with a graduate assistantship in 1983. Although the current museum in the Human Ecology Building dates to 1992, its history goes back much further.
“The collection started in the nineteen-thirties,” says Vinci. “Faculty members brought back samples from Europe and other places for the Textile Science course. We had several hundred items listed, but no real documentation. One item was labeled ‘Mussolini’s jute,’ another was ‘Queen Victoria’s toweling,’ but we have no information on them. The collection was kept in the climate-controlled textile-testing lab, in a closet in acid-free boxes.
“In 1992 the Board of Regents gave us funding to build the gallery, and we started mounting exhibits. Calls and donations increased drastically. Now we have almost fifteen thousand pieces.”
Except for the past year when the museum has undergone renovation to add storage space, it has mounted an exhibit every year–including aprons, feed-sack clothing, fans, quilts, and Acadian textiles.
The museum houses more than just wedding apparel. The Baton Rouge Collection recently acquired two buckskin suits worn by Bill Black on his TV show Buckskin Bill’s Storyland as well as Senor Puppet from the popular children’s show, which ran from 1955 through the early ‘nineties. Bell-bottom jeans and double-knit leisure suits also have their place.
Vinci loves sorting through relics of the past. She recalls the thrill of opening a trunk full of antebellum items. “The Butler family sold The Cottage Plantation in St. Francisville in the nineteen-fifties. Trunks found in the attic were distributed among the family. One woman later donated the contents of her trunk to the museum. I fell in love with opening these boxes and finding this quite large collection, of Louisiana provenance.”
The Butler Collection includes a child’s dress from 1800 and a woman’s cotton dress from 1817. “It has wonderful style details,” she says. “It’s plain except for puffs and eyelet at the hem and cuffs. Even in a rural setting, Louisiana women followed fashion.”
Wedding dresses (and some male items, such as tuxedoes) will always be an important part of the collection. Among the museum’s many treasures is the silk satin gown worn in 1949 by Ann Monget, who had been a model in New York, where she had the dress made. When Lloyd Carville donated his late wife’s dress, he included the photo album, with photos of the bride and groom smoking. The bride’s mother, who had admonished her daughter, “Brides don’t smoke” was shocked when she saw the pictures, he told Vinci.
Another prize of the collection is the dress Betty Moyse wore when she married Joseph Simmons in 1947–silk taffeta with elaborate back draping and a long cathedral train. Her daughter Becky Simmons donated her wedding dress from 1975, and Betty Simmons gave the museum the gown her grandmother Rebecca Hahn wore to marry Joe Gottlieb in 1891.
Marcia Guissinger, who married Roger Moser in 1952, donated her patio-length dress of antique bridal satin, which she made herself. “She bought the fabric from Dalton’s and had Singer’s [sewing store] cover the buttons,” says Vinci. “The donation includes her garter, handkerchief, and going-away outfit. We even have the dress pattern.” She pulls out Vogue Special Design S-4171, the bride’s dress pattern, and McCall’s 1490, the wedding veil pattern.
Another favorite of Vinci’s is the vintage nineteen-thirties dress that Ashley Zollinger bought on Magazine Street in New Orleans for her 1995 wedding to Sean Prokasy. And there’s a beautiful voile dress worn by Wynona Eidson for her wedding to Lewis Peters in June 1952. “She told me it was so hot in the church that the candles melted,” says Vinci with a chuckle.
Vinci says the wedding collection ranges from the turn of the century through the nineteen-seventies. The latter decade is represented by the dress Vinci herself wore when she married Robert Rabalais in 1970. A floor-length chiffon dress with an empire-style bodice decorated with pearl beadwork over Alencon lace, it has a standup collar. “That was the silhouette of that period,” she says.
“I was teaching home economics in New Orleans, and I went to Maison Blanche on Canal Street,” Vinci recalls. “This was the second or third dress I looked at, and I just knew it was the one.”
When she discovered it years later in its Kean’s preservation box at her mother’s house in Baton Rouge, says Vinci, “It was in beautiful condition, and I wanted it to be preserved.” Now it is part of the museum. “It brings back loving memories of a very special event,” she says.
But time marches on, and Vinci is always on the lookout for the next item. “It’s time to start working on the 1980s and ‘90s weddings,” she says. “The big [Princess] Diana dresses and the strapless dresses.”
Ruth Laney can be reached at ruthlaney@cox.net. She donated her own wedding dress to the Textile Museum, as well as items worn by her mother, uncle, and grandmother. To learn more about the Textile Museum, go to www.textilemuseum.huec.lsu.edu or email textile@lsu.edu.
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