11/3/2014
Baby was very excited for today, as I had booked tickets to the Victoria and Albert Museum's Wedding Dress exhibit. These are temporary exhibits--we'd come here before for their Hollywood costumes exhibit and the Grace Kelly exhibit. This year, the theme was wedding dresses 1775-2014. Displayed in chronological order, there were gorgeous satin and silk gowns, some in faded white, others in ivories, reds, and flowery patterns, as it was not always the case that white was "traditional."
It wasn't until Queen Victoria wore a white wedding dress when she married Prince Albert that white became en vogue.
Right off that bat, when you enter, you see a very wide ivory dress with panniers from the 1700s. The exhibit explained that before the 19th century, most women chose their wedding dresses with practicality in mind--as in, they'd wear the dress more than once, unlike today, where after you get married, you pack up the dress for moths to eat.
As always with these 1700-1900 dresses, the waists were impossibly small. It seemed they kept getting narrower and narrower. Either the women weren't eating or technology improved with the corset boning? Their shoes were also tiny. I would need the width of two shoes just to stuff my foot inside!
During WWII, when supplies were scarce and fabrics needed to be rationed, women got clever on their wedding clothes. One woman used upholstery material for her dress, as she'd used up her fabric ration coupons and upholstery was not subject to rationing. Some women used parachute silk for their dresses! That's awesome!
Also during WWII, the British fashion industry hoped that the war would reduce Paris's dominance on the international fashion market. Really? That's not very nice. France is getting bombed and you're hoping to take advantage? The Brits didn't get what they hoped for, though. Christian Dior burst on the scene with his "New Look" (aaaah, remember Musee Galliera?) and Paris once again topped the fashion scene. The British government went so far as to condemn the New Look for its extravagant use of fabric, but British women didn't care. They were captivated with Dior.
This isn't the first time the government has intervened on behalf of British merchants. In 1766, the government banned all foreign woven silk (especially French silks) from being imported into the country to protect the British silk industry. In 1699, they outlawed Indian silks from being imported and in 1721, they forbade the use and wear of printed calico. Printed calico was very popular during this time, and was infringing on the silk industry's profits.
Indeed, when Queen Elizabeth got married in the 1940s, she chose to wear only British designers to encourage all women to buy British goods. It's funny, because as we're grocery shopping, we see lots of tags of British-made stuff. British cheddar (fair enough, that's famous), British strawberries, British chicken (hunh? I guess they don't eat Foster Farms here), British fortified wheat flour (now I'm really scratching my head. Is the wheat flour different here?). Very into national pride, these Brits.
There were dresses from prominent British couture designers, such as Charles James, Norman Hartnell, and Isobel. Norman Hartnell designed Queen Elizabeth's wedding dress and headgear. There were dresses from prominent heiresses and socialites on display, such as Margaret Wingham and Baba Beaton. I'd noticed that Baba Beaton was a bridesmaid in Margaret Wingham's wedding, and lo and behold, the next display over is Baba's wedding dress. Her name was catchy, which is why she caught my eye. She commissioned her wedding dress--a very simple silk affair--from Charles James. And then, down in the little corner explanation, it says that she's the sister of Cecil Beaton.
Angel freaked.
If Cecil Beaton's her brother, why didn't he design her wedding dress??? she demanded to know.
I replied, "Maybe she thought he was passe. But I don't think you're passe, so you should get a move on it with my wedding dress. You know, it'll take a lot of hours to sew all the sequins on."
Cecil Beaton is the awesome, awesome designer of all those beautiful My Fair Lady costumes.
In the upstairs gallery, the gowns displayed are contemporary. As in, 1950s onwards. Angel fell in love with an Ian Stuart creation, the Flower Bomb. The picture doesn't really do it justice, as there's so many varying shades of pastels--pinks, purples, whites, silver--and so many different fabrics used for the dress. But V&A doesn't allow photography and they don't allow sketching! That's a new one! No sketching???
We saw Kate Moss's pink and gold sequined wedding dress on display, as well as her husband's tux. Her dress took 701 hours to embroider, the veil took 253 hours to embroider, and all in all there were over 270,000 gold sequins, 120,000 foil paillons, and 2800 pearls used. See, Angel? You really need to get a move on it! The dress ain't gonna sew itself! 253 hours = 8 hours of sewing per day for 30 days. I'm being generous here, I could make you do it in 10 days at 24 hours/day. ;P
Also, Dita von Teese's purple taffeta was there, as well as Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale's wedding garments.
All in all, we spent 3.5 hours in the exhibit, oohing and aahing about every dress. We realized it was pouring outside (it wasn't when we left our hotel this morning). Drat. Hate the rain. Thank God the tube station for the V&A museum is via an underground tunnel, so at least we didn't have to walk this portion in the rain.
We rode to Covent Garden, where I'd read that the Jubilee Market here on Mondays is antiques. The Covent Garden metro station is usually not open on weekends due to engineering works (sounds familiar?). So it was a good thing we booked the V&A tickets for a Monday. On the way out of the station, you have to wait for the elevator, as:
15 floors below ground?? Crazy! Angel joked that she'd make me take the stairs, but ha! The authorities even said don't use the stairs except in case of emergency. Also, when the station is open, it's an exit only station, as in you can't hop on the metro here. The engineering works are supposed to end sometime mid-November, but to me, it seems like they're a long ways off as construction's everywhere.
It seems that a lot of metro stations are getting complete face lifts. Tottenham Court station has blocked off an entire street to renovate. We tried to walk across Charring Cross Road, but nope. All blocked off due to engineering works.
I don't know why we never visited this area during our previous trips to London. Covent Garden is very posh now, with a lot of streets closed off to cars, so pedestrian-only. Back in the 1800s, Covent Garden used to be a pleasure garden area where women plied their trade. You can't even imagine that now, cuz every remnant of that is gone. It's a beautiful outdoors shopping area, provided, of course, that it's not raining.
Christmas tree's up!
Covent Garden market and Jubilee Market are connected, roofed (thank God) market halls. Covent Garden sells primarily food and Jubilee today is antiques. Right when we entered Jubilee, our eyes caught on a gilded brass finger plate that we immediately fell in love with. I've been searching during this whole trip for door handles for our new sewing room and I really, really, really wanted these finger plates. Baby's been very good and behaved so far, as I drag her into antique store after antique store, looking for the perfect door handles.
And Baby loved these finger plates too! I'm sooooo happy! The lady behind the booth said the plates were 19th century gilded brass and that you could clean up the dirty bits with qtips and diluted ammonia. The plates were 25 pounds each. And we needed 4 of them. Yikes. I only had a 20 pound note in my wallet. So we walked across the street to the nearest bank to get cash, came back, and I asked if she'd accept 80 pounds for the 4. Miraculously, she said yes. She completely made my day...and what a day it'd turn out to be, too.
We wanted to take a last gander around Primark so we walked from Covent Garden there. As we were walking, we passed by Seven Dials, which I remembered from reading books as a place of murder and mayhem in the early 19th century. Charles Dickens wrote detailed descriptions of the Seven Dials, and Agatha Christie featured it in one of her novels. At one point in time, it was the most notorious slum in London.
As with Covent Garden, Seven Dials has cleaned up a lot and is very posh now. They have posts with signs of Seven Dials on them:
We went to Primark primarily to ask about the VAT tax refund, as their explanations are really confusing. The clerk said that we could go to the Primark in our last UK location to get all the receipts processed in one go. He said there's a Primark in Edinburgh, so we'll try to get it processed there.
It was early (3pm), so we bought Chicken Tikka Masala and naan and came back to our hotel to eat an early dinner. We had tickets to the Book of Mormon at 7:30pm, so the scheduling today turned out to be great.
Angel: At first Jen was griping a bit about the tickets costing ~70 pounds, but it turns out she thought we had balcony seats for that price. Ha! We were 2nd row center! And we were really glad that we had "splurged" on the seats, because the actors were all really amazing and it was worth it to see their facial expressions (they were all so animated). The show is about Mormon missionaries who are sent to Uganda to convert the local people to Mormonism, and a lot of the humor pokes fun at religion and race.
Jen: I was very wary going into the show because I'm not a fan of the vulgar humor of South Park. The creators of the Book of Mormon are the same creators as South Park, but Baby really wanted to see this show, so of course, I bought the tickets. The show is AMAZING. Seriously. I haven't been so entertained for a long time. Everyone in the audience was laughing the whole way through and at intermission, Angel said I gained 20 new wrinkles. >.< Mean.
I loved the actors and what Angel said is true. Our seats were awesome--we were like 8 feet away from them. I could see the actors' spit as they sang, that's how close we were. Elder Price (Billy Harrigan Tighe), Elder Cunningham (A.J. Holmes), Elder McKinley (Stephen Ashfield) were perfectly cast--hell, they are were.
After the show we wanted to take pictures outside of the theater but found that the police had roped off most of the surrounding streets and were quickly herding people out of the theater. Dude, even the ushers inside the theater were herding us out, their voices kinda panicked. We wondered why there wasn't an encore for the cast, and I think it was because they were notified that something was up and wanted to get everyone out of the theater in a timely manner. So this was the best shot we could do:
It turns out there was a "suspicious vehicle" parked somewhere near the theater that needed to be investigated. While we were glad that the show wasn't stopped mid-way, we also found it a bit odd that there could have been a "suspicious vehicle" (aka potential terrorist threat? bomb?) nearby and the police were mainly preventing people from entering rather than evacuating.
They didn't evacuate all the people eating at restaurants nearby, which was confusing. If this was so important, you'd think they'd notify the diners.
A lot of police cars surrounded the block:
Here's a shot of Jen with the musical's poster in the tube station. We both loved the show a lot and next time we're in London we definitely want to try to win some 20 pound lottery tickets that open up a couple hours before the show (similar to what we did for Wicked when it was in San Francisco).
So that's it for London. :T See you next year, London! I stayed up til like 3am some months ago to buy tickets to Hamlet in fall 2015. Benedict Cumberbatch will be starring in it, so I figured we'd make it a Sherlock trip next year. Visit Trafalgar Square, Baker Street, all the touristy stuff that we didn't have time for this time. We'll probably need a whole week in London.
These tickets were harder to get than the newly released iPhones. I clicked "buy" the second it went on sale and got into the online "queue" (yeah, they have a special system). Once it's your turn, you go in and click the date you want and the seats you want. Well, I clicked every day until I could find a date that still had 2 seats left. Most dates only had 1 seat left. PER SHOWING. Crazy!
I snagged 2 seats, but they aren't even remotely close to each other. Boooo. I paid, left the system, and then thought I'd try to enter again to see if I could find something better (yeah, I tend to second-guess myself). Well, I couldn't get in. There were 20,000 people in line ahead of me by then, though there definitely aren't 20,000 seats left to spare. I counted like only 10 seats available across all the show dates when I left.
I then called Visa Signature's concierge to help me procure better seats, but the guy helping me never heard of the event. After much research on his end, he said he was sorry he couldn't help, but he'd never seen something so hard to get.
Can't wait til fall 2015. Hamlet's my favorite Shakespeare play and moreover, I love you, Benedict Cumberbatch!
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