Une Robe Fée pour Versailles

Now, I really hope no one will ever copy and paste the first lines as reference. In case you did not get it from the talk of fairies, this is a made up story to make you dream a little, to lighten your day, and to make you understand how I came to the design of this dress.

The event

If you do 18th century costumes, or if you simply dream about wearing one, you probably know that once a year (more often, actually, i f we consider the other events as well) there is a costume event held in the Chateau de Versailles. THE palace. The one people keep comparing other palaces and gardens to, just like every pretty city with canals gets compared to Venice. And let me tell you, I have visited Caserta and Villa Pisani, and Linderhof. All those “the versailles of this place”. And no, nothing really can compare to the grandeur and the scale of the one and only. And as a proud Italian, I would really love to say that we have something just like V.

Whether you admire the grandeur of the Sun King and his patronage of the arts, or if you are a fan of Coppola’s Marie Antoinette movie, this event will be one of a kind for you. In no other place in the world you get the chance to celebrate your passion for history in one of its most emblematic homes, in an event that is open to anyone able to pay the ticket and present themselves in a historically inspired dress.

While the ghost of Louis XIV may frown upon us commoners stepping foot in his temple of glory and feeling part of its sparkling light, I prefer to think of Madame de Pompadour and Madame Du Barry smiling in seeing the palace finally opening its doors to anyone, while in their time they were often rejected due to their lacking pedigree.

This is Fetes Galantes: a magical night where you can dress up in 17th and 18th century inspired gowns and enjoy walking in one of the greatest things ever built by men.

Open to anyone, really?

Yes. I mean, yes and no. It kind of mimics the way once you could enter the palace if you had an appropriate dress, and so very few could afford to adhere to the dress code. In a similar way, today you “just need to pay”.

There are several tiers, with several activities. You are able to see them in the website of the event. Each year prices may differ, and you have to be ready to purchase yours within a very short amount of time. Ready or not for the new price.

For the 2024 event, tickets got sold out in a matter of hours. We got to the website and started refreshing when the clock struck the hour, and after one hour we got our hands on a couple of tickets. You usually get to pick a couple of activities, but the website was not able to withstand the amount of requests, so when we got in, we got the activities that were left.

There were issues with the website, and more tickets were released later. Some people also resell their tickets, when unable to go as planned. Anyway, I suggest you to think of these tickets as those for a concert that goes sold out very quickly, if you want to attend. And be prepared to spend more than you planned, for a different tier ticket. When we got in only the Marquis-Marquise ones were available (how fitting for someone who did the Mme de Pompadour dress, right?).

Our ticket was 190 euros per person, and it included access to the main rooms, a very short baroque music concert that was not very well advertised on the place, so we got there five minutes late and lost half of it, and a historical dance lesson on the hall of mirrors. A glass of champagne upon arrival, and free wardrobe service. There is no dressing room, you need to get there ready!

Higher tiers have access to private tours of rooms that are not available for everyone to see during the party, some have more entertainment and activities, some have an open bar and a buffet. If I remember correctly, prices go up to 700 euros and more. But as I have not been interested in purchasing the higher end tickets, I really do not remember. It could be more.

So yes, you just need to get your hands on a ticket and a dress. But there is also the matter of the cost of traveling to Paris, with your costume in a huge suitcase, and then reaching Versailles, and finding a place to sleep. We kind of did everything on a budget this time. If I do not count the cost of the dress and the wig and the shoes and the accessories, that 190 euros ticket is accompanied by 160 euros of economy flight and two suitcases (from northern Italy), 129,25 euros for three nights in a very unpleasant and small airBnB in the area (half of the total, as we were in two). Roughly 50 euros more for traveling from and to the airports. I am not including the tickets of the activities we did during the other days, nor the food.

So my Fetes Galantes on a budget were around 530 euros, not counting the costume. If we think of the price of costume rental on a budget, we get at least to 750 euros. If you are making the dress yourself and want a pretty thing, the budget starts from that. So it’s not as cheap as one would think.

So while the ticket by itself was as expensive as one of the parties in Venice (where you do get to dine, have an open bar and places to seat as well, but it’s not Versailles), when I think if I want to go back, the real question is not if I want to spend an other 200 euros for a party in Versailles, but if it is worth to spend at least 750 for a five hours event where you do not get either to drink or sit, unless you get higher tiers. And you do end up feeling exhausted. Your feet will hurt, and you will be thankful for my suggestion to get a pair of ballet flats in your pockets.

Is it worth it?

Is it worth it to pay at least 750 euros for a 5 hours event where you may not get to sit or have water to hydrate yourself?

I do not have a straightforward answer yet. I am not sure I am interested in going back. But I am happy I went and I saw what goes on, how it is. I have had my answers to what it feels like. And though I am not sure the final price tag is completely worth it, it is worth having done the experience once, and being able to choose knowing what it is like.

I know, you are not liking this answer. It does not complete the image of the event, and I should be doing the influencer thing and say “it was just perfect, magnificent, how special and happy and lucky I am”. Being this honest will really not help me in getting any collaborations from this article, I know. But I value your trust more. And I do believe in telling people the bad things too, so they won’t get disappointed and blame me for creating unrealistic expectations. I hate when that happens to me.

So my advice is to go, if you have been daydreaming about it. At least once.

How do you design something for Fetes Galantes?

I do not take all the trouble of making the gowns I make, spend time and money on them, just to fade in the crowd. So my first focus was on what I needed to do to make sure I was very visible.

Though my first intention was to go with the Madame de Pompadour dress, I felt it was not the right thing to make an impression the way I wanted. It is pretty? Yes. It looks very good in comparison to most other attempts at replicating it? It does. BUT it has two colors, one of which is quite dark, and it does not go with high hair. In a place where everyone has a grand panier or skyscrapers on their heads, I wanted something that could make an impression from afar as well. It is also an evening event, and it is a huge mix of many saturated colors.

So here is my personal recipe:

• when everything is dark and saturated, do something light and add some shine;
• when everything is tiring to the eye and in too many colors, do something monochrome, with subtle variations that appear only when getting close;
• when everything looks straight from the costume shop and too new, age the dress to make it look like a real piece of clothing rather than a costume;
• when the location is huge, you need big hair to be seen from afar;
• when most costumes will look heavy and too loaded, add textures keeping the focus on lightness.

So my goal was for something in a pale pastel color, with lots of texture, some shine, some focused contrat visible only when close, and a good silhouette.

The inspiration and the fabrics

The palette was inspired by this dress, from a cut scene in the Marie Antoinette movie. The combination between pale green and gunmetal/dark silver caught my mind to the point that one of my color obsessions was born. And I just had to do something with that color pairing.

So the fabric hunt began. And when people tell me they want a color in that exact shade, they usually do not understand that gathering the right supplies is the most time consuming part of the whole process. If you fixate on a color, you may need years to get the right fabric for the project! So when you commission a dress that needs to be ready in less than six months, you can’t be picky with the shade.

And true to be told, this dress is not in the shade I originally planned. I wanted a very light green taffeta. Where warp and weft were one white, the other a very diluted emerald green.

I started looking for this chimera of a fabric in June 2023. And the fabric gods said no. I had something like fifteen different samples.

In the end I settled for a silk dupion with very few slubs, in a pale seafoam color. Warp and weft in the same shade. It is a bit more gray than I wanted. And not iridescent.

How to adjust and get to the palette I wanted? Dyeing almost 20 meters of fabric was not possible. So I chose to overlay it with silk organza, dyed in the color I wanted.

I dyed it with a special technique to make it marbled. I then purchased metal spangles in dark silver, and plenty of very thin gunmetal lace trims. Modern and in lurex, but with the weathering they worked pretty well.

The silhouette

You know me, I have three main focus elements of a dress:

• the silhouette
• the texture
• the fabric

And if you’ve been following me for a while… you know I am always looking for the next update I can do to my shaping undergarments.

I also added a petticoat of course. I preferred a synthetic fabric to keep a high volume and low weight for the suitcase.

Textures

The next step was to make the aqua, the mint green and the gunmetal resonate with each other and vibrate. To combine them while keeping the final result light and eerie and almost monochrome. And to add a few elements of weird.

One of these is the lower row of pleated organza at the bottom of the petticoat. At the time it would not have been concealed by the top flounce. I chose to do it like this to create those texture details you can see only when getting closer, those things that make a gown appear detailed and rich, while keeping it light. My fear was to end up with one of those dresses where there’s too much going on.

For this reason, I opted for some brooches and elements of jewelry attached to the dress, but hidden at the same time. They’re small, here and there. Like the spangles or the bullion embellishment.

I then pulled threads to create fringes and blurred edges, highlighted certain other things using the lurex trims, pleated in several different ways all the fabrics to adjust and tune exactly to the desired level of depth.

Aging and weathering

I wanted a dress that looked like something used in a movie. A bit Miss Havisham, a bit of the old hag in the forest in Sleepy Hollow, a bit of Helena Bonham Carter as Frankenstein Bride. Those things where colors bleed and blur edges. I wanted to be an apparition, a ghost, a dream. Something dusty and shiny at the same time.

This process helped mix the colors of the two fabrics better, creating more three dimensionality and enhancing textures. It is not heavy weathering, the dress has not been sanded, or pinked, or grated. It is just a work of colors. And in real life it does not appear straight away, despite it being almost completely covered in paint. I used silvers, greens, whites and blacks. And in the end it had lived stories and adventures before being worn. It was the right garment for the character I wanted to embody.

To the side yopu can see the dress without weathering. In the photos at the beginning of the post you can see the result!

Want this for one of your dresses? I offer this service! It is ideal to get that extra push to a new garment, or new life to an old one. Do you want to be told too that your dress looks like it came out of a dream? Email to [email protected]

The hair

It needed to be light in color, and high. And I wanted to decorate it with tinkerbells because when I got the idea… it clicked. It felt so incredibly right that I just had to do it. It just makes sense, for a fairy.

I styled this wig two times. I will not share how I did the base, the thing that keeps it high. If you want to know, you will need to purchase one of my wigs, sorry.

What I can say is that I styled mine with shea butter and talcum powder, to keep it historical. At least the starting wig, not the extensions. And I had to keep it in my cabin suitcase, as it is very fragile. This is why I do not ship wigs styled historically, when it comes to this style. because packages and suitcases can be thrown and hit and treated in the less appropriate way, no matter how much care you take to pack.

So If you get one of my wigs, they will be styled with modern products, and powdered at the4 end.

I wanted the style and the shape to be clearly historical, because the correct shape and distribution of the rolls is very rarely seen nowadays. High hair was not just high and covered with random curls, it had specifics, and I wanted to show that I know exactly how to achieve it.

In the end, I am very happy with the result.

Footwear

I also did the shoes, meaning I painted a pair of Harr satin shoes to make them look old, added some taffeta, two pearl buckles and weathered it all. I am not entirely happy with the fit of the shoes, I can not ever get a pair that is true to size by them, and their European sizes are quite off from what I normally wear. These were half a number too small and quite uncomfortable. I asked them the size for my foot length (I do not have a wide foot, quite the opposite) and the suggested size is too small. Half a number more was still too small. In the end the right number for me is probably a 38. I usually wear 36,5 or 37.

At the same time, despite me having tried several other brands, these are just as uncomfortable as all others, but are cheaper, and artisan made in Europe.