The 1920s Lime-Green Flapper Dress
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Oh, how the young woman loved this dress. It was one of four made by the same dressmaker – the latest additions to her wardrobe – and perhaps her favourite.
Once the young woman asked her husband why he was so interested in her clothes and he said, ‘You are divine and I love to see divine creatures appropriately attired.’
She clung on to that as one year passed, then another, then another, without her becoming pregnant. They both wanted children desperately. Her husband was fifteen years older than her and blamed his age as the reason there were no babies yet – but she could never blame him.
The clothes were a distraction, of sorts. She spent a fair amount of time being fitted for them, going to the dressmaker for small adjustments while they were being finished – and both she and her husband loved beautiful things, so the clothes gave them a lift.
As time went on, the lifts were harder to come by, but they persisted.
‘There is no point being glum, my love,’ he told her. ‘This world has survived the Great War, we have our health and each other. Come what may, we shall make a wonderful life.’
Her new dresses came in various lovely hues: purple, caramel, soft pink – and this lime green, which caused her to gasp the first time she saw it.
Made of silk, the dress had a simple rounded neckline and fell straight to the hips, as was the style, while the skirt’s hemline sat below her knees at the front before graduating to a lower point at the back.
But it was the beading that took her breath away: flowers climbing up the sides of the bodice, unobtrusive until one looked more closely, and meeting at the hips in a profusion of leaves and blooms before trailing down the skirt almost to the hem.
The beads were grey and a subtle white that filled in the flowers.
The young woman could have spent hours looking at this dress, but instead she wore it the day it arrived, to a dinner in the city not far from the dressmaker’s studio.
‘How wonderful,’ her husband said when he saw her in it. ‘How extraordinary.’ He kissed her on the lips, and lingered. ‘You look like a goddess.’
In those heady days there were parties and dinners most nights of the week. The dress was so distinctive, however, that she had to be careful where she wore it next, lest some of their friends remark on its reappearance.
In 1929 she became pregnant at last. It was a difficult pregnancy and their son was born prematurely. But he survived, and spent his early years blissfully unaware that the economy had collapsed and men – including his father – were out of work.
The woman, her husband and child moved in with her parents, who had a large house on a large block in the hills of Sydney’s northwest. She put her dresses into storage, wrapping them carefully so they wouldn’t be damaged.
But she never wore them again. By the time the Depression was over and social life had resumed, fashion had moved on.
Besides, she had two more children by then and her social life was confined to afternoon gatherings rather than dinners and parties.
Many years later, after her husband had died and she was planning to sell their house and move into far smaller accommodation, she went through her collection of clothes with her granddaughter, who exclaimed over the dresses.
‘You should sell these, Granny,’ she said, but the woman wouldn’t hear of it. How could she put a price on the joy and memories these garments held?
‘Donate them, please,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you know somewhere appropriate.’
The granddaughter frequented a charity shop in her local area, where there was a woman not quite her grandmother’s age who knew a lot about clothes.
The granddaughter had bought a formal dress there.
So she took the dresses in, and the more subtle outfits were snapped up by those who knew to visit the shop regularly to find treasures.
The lime-green dress, however, was of a shade that the regulars found too audacious.
‘It takes courage to wear colour in this country,’ the woman once told her granddaughter. She had never minded standing out, but so many others did, for reasons she didn’t understand.
The woman didn’t know about the fate of the lime-green dress, of course. She would never know, because she died before she moved into her new, smaller accommodation. Although her joy and her memories live on.