This veiled mourning dress is from a round robin (how fun!) collection featured online by Klein.  It seems like deep mourning of this kind was already beginning to fall out of fashion at the end of the century. The "modern" age had everyone looking forward, moving faster, and spending a year in black as a widow was a fading ritual in mainstream American culture. Too much sentimentality for the new era, perhaps. Advances in medicine, too, had made death a little less common (and therefore more morbid) than it had ever been.

The idea of a paper doll round robin seems like such a cool thing. OPDAG features one every quarter in their Paper Doll Studio publication (for which, sadly, my subscription has lapsed). We should have a round robin online!

I'm running late, but determined to stay on schedule!  For our first (and sadly brief) mourning post, I wanted to share with you one of Walter Plunkett's costume designs from Gone with the Wind, featuring the character of Scarlett O'Hara Hamilton dressed in deep mourning after the death of her first husband, Charles.

While a number of the costumes constructed for the film production went off the rails in terms of historicality, the mourning dress worn by various characters throughout was generally very period-appropriate (which is good since Scarlett's flaunting the mourning attire is an important part of her character and the story).

The image here (and click it to see it up close in all of its watercolor glory!) was found at Dial B for Blogger, a Spanish-language blog that features others of Plunkett's designs in a post honoring Gone with the Wind's 70th anniversary.

Check out: 19th Century Post: a mourning cover & miscellany collection. This website has a lot to offer! The miscellany part includes a great blog with a variety of interesting art & ephemera (including many painting and photographs of the fashions of the day), and the rest of the site is devoted to mourning covers (envelopes), which were an art form all their own in the 19th Century. You always knew it was bad news when you received a letter with black-trimmed edges or a black seal of wax. Click on the image at the left to see some details on this English example from 1872, then go browse the rest!

What a beautiful (if somewhat sad) collection of letters...