What happened to all those once-worn Worth gowns?
It’s hard for us nowadays to imagine just how grand the House of Worth really was.
So extravagantly rich were some of its patrons that they only wore their impossibly lavish Worth gowns once or twice…
So what happened to these clothes after they were cast off by the hoi polloi? Sure, a few ended up in museums, but you gotta wonder – what happened to the rest?
By chance, I tracked some of the Vanderbilts’ clothes down this week… and in the most appropriate, yet unlikely place. It seems that some of Worth’s work made it all the way back to the county of his birth – Lincolnshire, in the UK – under the most delightfully ridiculous circumstances!
A 1977 book on a dusty shelf in a Cotswolds hotel gives us the full story….
