COSTLY GARMENTS | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Oct 8, 1902

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 28, No. 41.

COSTLY GARMENTS.

The great costumer, George Pilotelle, said that he once designed $200,000 worth of dresses for one lady, while Worth confessed that a Peruvian heiress paid him $24,400 for a single frock. After this the price paid for the coronation train of the present Empress of Russia seems hardly worth mentioning. It was a mass of silver embroidery, upon which eight girls were at work, in relays, night and day for six weeks, and the bill came to just $45,000.

For lace a lady may, of course, pay anything she pleases. Good lace is not valued by its weight in gold, but rather by its weight in diamonds; $23,000, of the $24,400 mentioned above as being paid for a single dress, was the price of the lace upon it. As a further example of lace prices, it may be added that the lace handkerchiefs made at Saint Gall, Switzerland, are charged for at the rate of $11 apiece, and these are, of course, of modern make. Lace, like wine, increases in value with age. The Queen Dowager of Italy is said to be the possessor of a lace handkerchief 300 years old, and valued at $10,000. “Point Tresse” lace, which was made from threads of flax mixed with human hair, is also immensely valuable. A French collector owns a tiny square made from the gray hair of Margaret, Countess of Lennox, mother of the unhappy Darnley. This is valued at $6,000.

Now and then one hears of garments so unique in material that they are not thrown aside as are even the most expensive of silks or satins, but are preserved as wonderful specimens of what the art of man can accomplish. Of this type is the beetle-wing dress, which made a fortune for its lucky owner, and is still worth a fortune to-day. Mrs. Sam Edwards, the wife of an actor, is the possessor of this wonderful garment, which was sent to her as a wedding present by an Indian rajah in return for a service done him by her husband.

Fifteen thousand of the wing-cases of an Indian beetle are sown upon the material, and lend a shimmering green iridescence to its flowing folds. The lady has worn it on the stage, where it created a perfect furor. Many fashionable ladies wished to duplicate it, but found it impossible, both from the rareness of the insect and the difficulty of affixing the delicate wing-cases to the material. As for cost, it can only be guessed at, but $15,000 would be well within the limit.

Certain races of people we are pleased to call savages are famous for the production of most expensive garments. Women of the Cheyenne Indians wear on festal occasions dresses which would tax the purses of even our own fashionable dames. They are made of beautiful white buckskin, so tanned as to be soft as cotton. They are trimmed, not with lace or jewels, but with elk teeth. A first-class robe of this kind is priced at $1,500. None can be bought under $300.

The most costly garment in the world was exhibited at the Fisheries Exhibition in London in 1883. It is one of the Royal cloaks from the Sandwich Islands. It is made of red, black, and yellow feathers, and the bird which supplied the yellow feathers is now extinct. It was always so rare that it took a century and a half to collect enough to make a cloak, and each bird produced but three or four feathers of the requisite delicacy. The cloak is valued at $500,000.—Pittsburg Bulletin.