18. 1913 Wedding Dress of Beulah May Christ Hummel

ID#: HH2013001
Date: 1913
Culture: American
Materials: silk, lace, glass beads
on loan from Holly Hummel

This dress was worn one hundred years ago by Beulah May Christ, for her marriage to Lyman Hummel in the little town of Ravine, Pennsylvania on November 23, 1913.  Miss Christ was the grandmother of Holly Hummel, Vassar College Drama Department costume designer and faculty member emerita, and founder of the Vassar College Costume Collection.  Because she lived in a “Pennsylvania-Dutch” farming and coal-mining region with little access to “fine shops”, Beulah May’s dress was ordered from a catalogue.  Historian Jason Ripper, in his book American Stories, talks about the popularity of the “wish books”: “ Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck offered the mail order catalogue with color photos (starting in 1897) of…bicycles, wedding gowns, jewelery, vials of cocaine…and everything else being manufactured in or imported into the States…Within little more than a week, a trip to the nearest train depot rewarded the store-starved consumers.”

By 1909 the Edwardian silhouette, seen in Ellen Suydam Lott Rapelje’s dress (#10), had begun to change.  Influential in all areas of design until WW I, the flowing lines and curves of the Art Nouveau style can be seen in the soft drape of the bodice lace at the waistline of Beulah May’s dress and in the curve of the asymmetrical tunic overskirt, emphasized by the bugle bead trim. The corset worn beneath had by this time expanded into a long “tubular” shape ending well below the hips.

- Holly Hummel (Vassar Drama Department faculty emerita)