Fragile Peacock Dress to dazzle for just a few more days before it leaves Derbyshire home
THE public has a fascination with eye-catching dresses worn by style icons.
Who can forget Princess Diana’s gorgeous wedding dress, including that amazing 25ft train, from 1981, or the flesh-coloured dress Marilyn Monroe wore when she sang for John F Kennedy at a birthday celebration for the US president in 1962, just three months before her death?
In 2016, the figure-hugging Jean Louis gown, complete with 2,500 crystals, was sold at auction for just under £4 million. That is a lot of money, but not even the richest person on Earth could afford a dress that can be found a few miles from Burton. However, unlike the dress Monroe wore for JFK, it is not sale.
If you want to see the Peacock Dress at the National Trust’s Kedleston Hall, however, you’ll have to hurry. In just a few days it will be taken out of its display cabinet before heading next month to the Trust’s textile conservation team in Norfolk. There, it will be laid flat and every stitch will be meticulously checked and conserved.
The work is expected to last for several years, after which the dress will return to Derbyshire, to be re-displayed on a custom-designed mannequin to protect it for years to come.
I discussed the dress with Dr Ella Kilgallon, property curator at Kedleston Hall. What impresses her most about it is its intricate zardozi embroidery. Zardozi comes from the Persian words “zar”, meaning gold, and “dozi”, for embroidery.
The Peacock Dress is so called because the zardozi embroiderers in India painstakingly hand-stitched gold and silver thread through the fabric to create a peacock feather pattern. By appropriating the motif of a peacock feather, the dress aligned itself with an important Hindu symbol, particularly associated with Lord Krishna and
the goddess Saraswati.
The dress shimmers with what appear to be emeralds. In fact, they are lots of beetle-wing cases that were meticulously shaped and threaded into the fabric by the craftsmen. After the work in India was done, the dress was sent to the House of Worth in Paris and made into a two-piece dress of a bodice top and skirt. The bodice was embellished with lace and the trained skirt (champagne-coloured silk satin, lined with densely woven cotton muslin) was trimmed with white silk flowers. The finished dress, weighing over 4.5kg (10lb), was then sent back to India for the important social occasion that would be the one and only time it was worn. Its wearer was Mary Curzon (1870– 1906), the American-born wife of George Curzon, then Viceroy of India and owner of Kedleston Hall (1859– 1925) at the grand Delhi Durbar Coronation Ball on January 6, 1903, to mark the coronation of King Edward VII as Emperor of India.
The event was full of pageantry and royal ceremony, to entertain and impress Indian princes and dignitaries. But the dress was not simply meant to make Mary look beautiful: it was a subtle way for her adopted country to make a statement about its Empire and to underline the power of British rule.
Photographs of Mary in the dress put her on the front pages across the world. Like Princess Diana, it marked her as a leader of style.
Maria Jordan, the Trust’s textile conservation studio manager, said earlier this year that although the zardozi embroidery was what made the dress so striking, it also emphasised its fragility.
Being displayed upright, gravity has put a strain on the fabric, although, as Maria pointed out, the environment the dress is kept in has also had to be carefully monitored for temperature and humidity, to prevent the threads tarnishing or mould developing on the fabric.
So what of Mary? Ella tells me she was “charismatic, charming woman” but, sadly, she did not enjoy good health. The years spent in India by her husband’s side in the hot climate must have been particularly taxing, and she died young in 1906, with one of her daughters inheriting the dress.
Visitors to Kedleston Hall will no doubt miss it while it is away, but this cultural icon will be back one day, looking better than ever and ready to delight our eyes once more.
The dress can be viewed at Kedleston Hall until Monday, December 20.