The latest Melbourne Bride magazine features one of our vintage wedding gowns on the front cover! How fabulous is that? I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen a vintage dress on the cover of any mainstream magazine apart from Frankie and Peppermint.
Best of all, there’s only one gown and it can be yours!
And – they’ve done a great job with the vintage styling so the frock looks fabulous – and inside there are more pics of two of our ’50s wedding dresses: have a sneak peek. Here’s the gown on the cover…click on either image to see details on the webshop, it’s in the salon for you to try on.
Photo courtesy Jackie Henshaw and Melbourne Bride magazine.
And here’s another beautiful ’50s gown: I really love the first photo – her hairstyle and camellia are so beautiful and who can resist the charming tea cup? This one is also available from the webshop, or at the Circa Vintage salon.
Photo courtesy Jackie Henshaw and Melbourne Bride magazine.
Thank you to Bride magazine for featuring our gowns in such a gorgeous vintage style wedding shoot – and if you’d like one of these or another style, you can see more of our vintage wedding gowns here.
The Circa vintage gowns look lovely and are so beautifully styled.
Although the gowns are beuatiful, I was immediately struck by the tea cup, a pre-world War II Royal Albert design called “Lady Carlisle”. I inherited a partial tea set similar to this from my late mother – with missing plates and cups, and several cups with their broken handles carefully wrapped in paper tucked inside them. Things had been tough for my Mum – an austerity wedding in depressed economic conditions, my father sent abroad to fight in the war a couple of years later leaving her with two tiny children to care for by herself.
As a child – a lone little girl with a large number of brothers – I always loved the pretty colours of these cups – relegated to a china cabinet out of the reach of rambunctious kids. The cups came to represent my mother’s struggles – the grind of relentless domestic work and a household dominated by men, with this battered but still delicate shina trying to quietly survive amidst the mayhem.
I always loved the way these cups had a little secret – the loveliest part of the design is on the inside of the cup, so as you sip your tea you gaze down into it – a private pleasure – like a beautiful silk lining in a plain jacket.
This china set came to represent my mother’s life to me – battered by difficult times but representing a hopeful nature in the carefully kept broken handles so lovingly wrapped and kept for so many years waiting for better times to reinstate them to their original glory.
It became my quest to restore the set.
I had the broken cups carefully (and expensively) restored, and went on the long hunt for replacement cups. Although this particular Royal Albert design is still being made and the modern saucers and plates are very similar to the originals, the cups are much smaller, less bowl-like (more efficient in keeping the tea warm for the longer) and the cup pattern reversed with the heaviest pattern on the outside to boost its shelf appeal to buyers. I bought a few, but they weren’t in the same spirit – they look quite sad next to the glorious originals. Ever since I have been scouring antique shops and have picked up a couple more originals.
It makes me so happy to see another of these beautiful cups looking so breathtakingly pretty in the hands of a would be bride, just as I imagine my young mother so many years ago.
Hi Sandy – thank you for sharing your beautiful story! How beautiful and lovely is the porcelain?
You’ve reminded me that my mother too, kept precious a few pieces of broken crockery, this time from Enoch Wedgwood. I have them now, I think there are five pieces left, one of them a broken plate. I must get that restored too! I should honour her through the small sentimental things she left behind.
My brother was named Enoch, and I’ve often wondered if the crockery was part of the reason – it’s a family name too, so hard to know but I’m sure that my mum would have viewed the name favourably as a result.
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