The Gown Made of Beetle Wings

Lady Mary wearing The Peacock Dress, William Logsdail, 1909 (posthumous)

I've had a bad mental health week, so today we're talking about a dress.

Not just any dress. The Peacock Dress.

In 1903, a Chicago heiress named Mary Curzon wore a chiffon gown covered entirely with gold and silver embroidery. Woven by an all-male team of Delhi and Agra craftsmen using the zardozi (gold wire weaving) method, the stitching was designed to resemble hundreds of peacock tail feathers. Small crystals were stitched into the gown for added sparkle, and the train was edged with white chiffon roses. Upon completion, the gown weighed nearly ten pounds.

The bodice of The Peacock Dress

The gown's real eye-catchers, however, were indeed the "eyes" of the peacock feather motifs, which were composed of 5,000 jewel beetle wings.

I know, eight-year-old bug-lover Callie is screaming. But by the 20th century, the practice of harvesting jewel beetle wings for clothing was nothing new. In India, elytra (the outer shell of beetles' wings) had been gracing garments since the 17th century. The difference was that now, at King Edward VII's Delhi Durbar, wealthy Western women watched Lady Mary's fashion statement utterly dominate what the Chicago Tribune called, "The grandest pageant in history."

Lady Mary photographed in The Peacock Dress

Indeed, the oblong, blue-green elytra glimmered and gleamed beneath the chandeliers of Delhi's Coronation Park. "You cannot conceive what a dream she [Lady Mary] looked," swears one eye witness account.

Zardozi and elytra embroidery

Forget Lady Gaga's meat dress. At King Edward VII's Delhi Durbar, Lady Mary's beetle wing gown was the talk of the town--

Talk of the continent, more like. Lady Mary's "peacock dress" was central to popularizing Indian embroidery in European women's fashion, which proliferated throughout the 20th century and, shocking though it may be to the more environmentally conscious among us, elytra embroidery is still used by some designers today! Turns out "fast fashion" isn't the only aspect of Western clothing contributing to the planet's destruction...

Still, if the use of 5k beetle wings on this single gown makes you squeamish, Lady Mary died at age thirty-six. So karma got her in the end, I suppose.

Unlike Lady Mary, however, the Peacock Dress itself is still very much alive, if not necessarily "well." Displayed behind climate controlled glass in the Curzon ancestral home, Kedlestone Hall, the silver threads have tarnished and the chiffon has yellowed with age, and while Kedlestone's historians (and I) dread the day The Peacock Dress finally bows to the will of time, for now its elytra eyes continue to mesmerize tourists, just as they once did the guests of the Delhi Dubar.

The Peacock Dress today

I could fangirl about this dress for another three blog posts, but as with the life of Lady Mary, The Peacock Dress itself, and all other good things, this blog post must come to an end.

So. With one last photo, I bid you adieu.

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Special thanks to fashion historian Bernadette Banner for making the YouTube video that introduced me to The Peacock Dress. That video's since been taken down, but if you're interested, you can watch this video by Cathy Hay, the costumer who spent ten years attempting to remake The Peacock Dress.