Appointment availability

After a long year it seems we are going to be able to open our doors for appointments again from the 12th April onwards!*

In the first instance we are offering 2 appointment times on Saturdays on a first come basis. As such we can be more flexible with times so you can choose when you would like to come if you are first, and the second appointment will fit around that.

The first appointments are available from Saturday the 17th of April.

As lock down restrictions are eased more appointments will become available until a normal service is resumed no earlier than the 21st of June 2021.

Please get in touch via the contact us page
We are also very happy for you to call us, we like to have a chat especially as no-one has been out much recently!

*Subject to the road map as set out by the government running as predicted.

 

Wedding Dresses and COVID-19

Choosing your wedding dress is pretty much a full contact sport and involves quite a large team it turns out.
Until such time as Social Distancing measures are considerably relaxed or lifted then face to face appointments in the Atelier are simply not possible.
We are still available for telephone and email consultations, and are working on a Pret a Porter collection that will will not require fittings (which should be available by early Autumn 2020 at the latest).
Please do get in touch, we’d love to help you with your plans for a vintage wedding dress, but sadly appointments are suspended until Government restrictions are lifted.

Email us at abigail@abigailsvintagebridal.co.uk
Telephone +44(0)7729 888 751 

The thorny question of original v reproduction.

We will always see the past through the lens of our own aesthetic; just look at the prevalence of facial hair in historical dramas these days.

I have a number of issues with reproduction but the main one is that most of it is a pale inauthentic smudgy imitation of the real thing. We will always choose pieces from the past that most appeal to our modern taste: the past is not a bad taste, frump free zone. A bit of proper research is not very difficult and it is possible to choose and recreate pieces that are true to a period and that appeal to a modern audience (Peaky Blinders I’m looking at you). Production inaccuracies like invisible zips in 1940s dress also irritate me to an irrational degree, but maybe that’s just me being a pedantic kill joy: what does it matter if people love them? As I say to my clients, nobody actually wants to look like their grandmother, but they do want an essence of it.

Bespoke Edwardian lace with square neck

As someone who has been doing some reproduction of late this is an important question, if a piece is accurate down to the last stitch is that enough? After all most of my brides aren’t a size 8… However that garment, regardless of how pretty, made of authentic vintage fabric and an original patterns didn’t see the blitz. Original dresses are accidental time machines, the tiny stitches of a long dead seamstress, confetti captured in a hem, even a wedding cake crumb capture a moment in time that a reproduction cannot even aspire to. The trick is to distill the past without destroying its essence, be faithful to the essence and just a little bit of a pedant.

Green Credentials: part 3 Make-do and Mend

Many of my clients like the green credentials of vintage clothing, the lower carbon footprint and not adding to one of the most polluting industries on the planet: It takes a mind boglingly huge volume of water to make just one t-shirt.

 

Our modern world is swamped in cheaply produced clothing. In my opinion you should not be able to buy a top for £4. Neither should top flight designers damage old stock so they can’t be resold. Not that sweat shops are anything new, they’ve just moved from the Jewish East End of London to India. In the past people had fewer clothes and knew how to care for them, they had what we would now call capsule wardrobes. Only really rich people had a large choice of clothes to wear There has been a democratisation of fashion but the instagrammers who can only wear something once have gone too far.

Why do we love Vintage, notes and queries 2 of 4

Quirky originals; cut and construction.

My husband loves vintage clothing as well but has no interest in what era they come from, he just thinks they are more interesting and better made then modern clothes. He still runs in horrid modern running kit though, cotton chafes the nipples, and plimsolls are just no good. I notice that a lot of my clients also really like tattoos, is it that vintage and ink are about a form of radical self expression? For me as a super self conscious teen I loved the way 1940s dresses were both modest and sexy. I wore mine chopped short with DM boots. I felt comfortable and right in those dresses in a way I never really did in modern late 1980s clothes.

1940s Rayon satin with love knots

Mr. AVB on the right, image by Scott Choucino www.scottchoucino.com

Why do we love Vintage? a short series

Nostalgia/born in the wrong era. 1 of 4

1940s moire striped Rayon

Anyone who says the study of the history of fashion is irrelevant because it’s just frippery girl stuff is missing the point. The clothes we wear reflect who we think we are, so what does that say about those of us who love and wear vintage?

A love of vintage fashion and a passion for history grew up in tandem for me, it wasn’t enough that I liked the frocks, I wanted to understand why they were like that, how they fit into the social fabric of time.

I’m not one of those people how goes to re-enactment weekends or dresses in vintage all the time, I don’t feel I was born in the wrong decade, I like antibiotics and indoor plumbing. Re-enactors often seem to choose times of war, although WWII seems to be more popular than WWI. Is it the attraction the poignancy and urgency of those times? I’m guessing no one actually wants a full on blitz experience, but to go to a swing dance is rather fun. The fantasy of the past as conjured by the fully-fledged reenactors is just that, nostalgia. The reality is that for almost any time in the past women couldn’t easily be professionals, it was illegal to be gay and if you were black you were staff. All very odd, but I do get it too.

 

My love of the past stems from the films of the time; my heroines as a teenager were Mynra Loy, Ginger Rogers and Kathrine Hepburn. Not to mention any films by Powell and Pressburger. None of that was a real depiction of the time either, none of my favourite films were documentaries, but I was also obsessed with the history too.

 

2018 photo shoot

Winter wedding dresses from Edwardian to 1950s

Getting round to doing a Photo Shoot always takes me ages because I am a very hands on kind of a person and there are always 110 other things that need may attention. So its been a while, sorry.

For this shoot I wanted to use my home, I like the exoticism and drama we have created and I felt i wanted to make images which where rich and dark as well as whimsical.

Photo shoots are a hugely collabrative process and for this one I asked my daughter Gemma if she would run it for me, she also took the pictures.  Katy of Honeykins Vintage provided invaluable styling advice and was just fantatic to work with.We had very generous support from What Katie Did who supplied the wonderful underwear and Irregular Choice who lent us some fabulous shoes. We had enormous fun doing it.

Gorgeous vintage kimonos and Irregular Choice shoes

Abigail’s Vintage Bridal Christmas window 2016

We are delighted to unveil our window for Christmas 2016.

Huge thanks to What Katie Did  for the loan of luxury vintage style lingerie and to Miss L Fire for simply fabulous shoes.

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Kat in late 1950s/early 1960s Jean Allen strapless dress

Kat fell in love with his dress that we then leveled to Ballerina length. It is a tricky dress to date as Jean Allen worked over quite a long period, but the styling clues lead to late 1950s or just possibly into the early 1960s. Kat sourced her bolero from The Couture Company, her hair piece from Fur Coat and No Knickers and all photography by Nick Archer Photography. Hair and make up by Lulu’s Vintage Beauty Parlour, flowers by Jim Shaw at the Reuben Shaw Garden Centre and those red shoes from Phase 8.

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Amazing Victorian lace

Daniella wore this extraordinary Victorian lace dress that had been re-modeled in the 1930s. The elegant butterfly sleeve was set off by a bespoke silk slip from Abigail’s Vintage Bridal.

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