1861 Day Dress (Part 1)

A fashion dress from Paris or London would certainly be made out of silk, but Americans often took more liberties with styles and cotton would have probably been perfectly acceptable - especially for a Summer dress.

This is an excerpt from another historical pattern in my collection:

Sarah Josepha Buell Hale, later to become editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, claimed that, as American women know no ruling or royal class, “even the poor must be in fashion” and thus, it was wrong to slavishly follow the dictates of the wealthier society in foreign countries.

She wrote: “An engraving of the newest ladies’ dresses is a new thing in the Ladies’ Magazine, as all our fair readers know. The latest in English and French fashions! We have no American fashions to exhibit; and in order to have something we can call our own, we shall instead of explanation of the plate, extracted from the millinery literature of the foreign magazines, venture to express our humble ideas respecting fashions in general as now adopted by our countrywomen.”

Modest interpretations of fashion, less elegant in fabric and decoration, were worn by the bulk of the feminine population, and the general lines of popular style were followed by city, village, and cocuntry persons with surprising rapidity.

Severa, Joan, "1835 Period Notes," Patterns Of History (1975): 1.

So I've chosen cotton for this dress. It's more affordable and even if there's less empirical evidence to support it, I think it would have been an historically acceptable choice. And if I wanted to, I'd have even used polyester! ;)