“What has become of the ‘best dresses?” Rose Wilder Lane asked her mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder, in 1919. “What was your ‘best dress’ like? Describe it in detail—a muslin, bought at the store, made with a basque and a sash—or a woolen one—how was it made? how many season[s] did you wear it?” Lane was plying Wilder with questions to illustrate the power of details. At the time, Wilder was writing an article describing “the contrast between girls today and girls in [her] youth,”1 but the lessons she learned would be apparent in her Little House novels over a decade later. The first example occurs in Little House in the Big Woods, when Caroline (“Ma”) Ingalls learns of a sugaring-off dance to be held at Grandpa Ingalls’s home. She smiles and says, “I’ll wear my delaine.” Made of a lightweight wool, Ma’s dress is dark green “with a little pattern all over it that looked like ripe strawberries.” A dressmaker in the East had constructed this fashionable garment, which Ma keeps packed away for special occasions. The fact that the dress is brought out for the event at Grandpa’s “showed how important a dance was” and heightens the excitement for Laura and Mary (Big Woods, pp. 128–29). As they become teenagers and prepare to move from their father and mother’s house, Mary and Laura also acquire best dresses, which, like their mother, they wrap carefully and store until the right occasions arrive.
From left: Caroline, Carrie, Laura, Charles, Grace, and Mary. South Dakota State Historical Society
In Little Town on the Prairie, Ma and Laura make Mary’s best winter dress as Mary prepares to attend the college for the blind in Vinton, Iowa. Made of brown cashmere with brown cambric lining, the dress is trimmed with “a narrow, shirred strip of brown-and-blue plaid, with red threads and golden threads running through it.” Ma lines the high plaid collar with white machine-made lace. “Oh, Mary, it’s beautiful,” Laura tells her, and it fits “without a wrinkle.” But as they try it on for the last time, it is suddenly too tight, the buttons straining at the buttonholes. Ma is perplexed, but Laura notices that Mary’s corset strings are too loose. Tightening them, Laura tells her sister: “You look exactly as if you’d stepped out of a fashion plate. There won’t be, there just can’t be, one single girl in college who can hold a candle to you” (Little Town, pp. 92–93, 96).
Laura Ingalls Wilder wearing the pin and ribbon described by Lane in On the Way Home. Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Home and Museum, Mansfield, Mo.
Laura acquires her own best dress a couple years later as she prepares for her wedding to Almanzo Wilder in These Happy Golden Years. “I think every woman should have one nice black dress,” Ma tells Laura, and they make it together before designing Laura’s wedding dress. Ma chooses “sooty black cashmere,” which she carefully cuts out with “newspaper pattern pieces . . . so that none would be wasted” (pp. 266–67). Laura bastes the cambric lining to the cashmere pieces. The dress is nearing completion when Almanzo asks that they be married by the end of the week to prevent his mother and sister from planning a big wedding. Although she and Ma cannot make a wedding dress in that time, Laura figures that they can finish the black cashmere. Ma is not happy. “I do not like to think of your being married in black,” she tells Laura, quoting the old saying, “Married in black, you’ll wish yourself back.” Laura says that she can wear something old, “her sage-green poke bonnet with the blue silk lining,” and substitute one adage for another. Laura will borrow her mother’s gold pin with the strawberry so that she will “be wearing something old and something new, something borrowed and something blue” for the wedding (p. 270).
Wilder’s black wedding dress, on which this description was based, functioned as her best dress for many seasons. Her daughter remembered her bringing it out in 1894 in Missouri: “Standing in her bleached muslin petticoats and corset cover trimmed with crocheted lace, she took her best dress, her black cloth wedding dress, out of the box in which it had traveled from Dakota.” Coaxing her arms “into the basque’s tight sleeves [she] carefully buttoned all the glittery jet buttons up its front to her chin. With her gold pin she pinned the fold of ribbon, robin’s egg blue, to the front of the stand-up collar.” She and Almanzo were going to the bank to buy their Missouri farm. “She looked lovely,” Lane wrote, and her father thought so too.2 As Lane had taught her mother all those years earlier, best dresses could play a role in describing the lives of those who made and wore them, saying much about the time, place, and fashions of an era.
―Nancy Tystad Koupal
- Lane to Wilder, Apr. 11, 1919, file 185, Box 13, Rose Wilder Lane Papers, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa.
- Lane, section III (afterword), in Wilder, On the Way Home: The Diary of a Trip from South Dakota to Mansfield, Missouri, in 1894 (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), pp. 78–79.