Yvonne Hawkins' Wedding Dress

Looking Back: Yvonne Hawkins' Wedding Dress

Wedding photography has changed a great deal over the past century. Many brides now opt for informal poses and outdoor settings, but formal photographs taken in a photographer’s studio were once routine. Before the advent of colour photography, trained colourists tinted black-and-white photographs to make images more lifelike. Rather than colouring the entire image, they mostly picked out a few details—flowers, cheeks, hair, floor coverings . . .

Yvonne Hawkins had been working as a colourist at Whitehead’s Photographic Studio in Brisbane Street for seven years in 1954 when she was planning her wedding. She had hand coloured hundreds of wedding photographs. ‘I wanted something different for my wedding. Every pay day I bought something for my glory box, and I was looking around a shop called Money Savers in Nicholas Street when I saw an ice-blue heavy satin material. It was just right, and the price was right too at 12/-11 ($1.30] a yard. If I had bought the fabric at Gardham’s in Brisbane—the only place you could buy anything special for weddings—it would have cost two or three times as much. And we worked a five-and-a-half-day week, so the only chance you got to shop in Brisbane was Ipswich Show day. Shops didn’t open at night or on Sundays.

Yvonne took a sample of the fabric back to work. Many of the girls were horrified, expecting white or cream for a wedding gown. But not her best friend, Lyn, who designed a dress for her. Yvonne bought fourteen yards of the ice-blue satin. ‘I went to see Miss Myfanwy Perry on Blackstone Road. At that time, she made most of the bridal outfits for Ipswich.’ Yvonne rode her pushbike from North Ipswich to the far end of Blackstone Road for fittings. ‘I was lucky to get my dress on the Friday before the wedding, as most of the girls didn’t get theirs till a couple of hours before.

Since the dress would be ice-blue, Yvonne envisaged a bouquet of blue water lilies, but she had never seen these used in a bouquet. Would they survive? She went to visit Mr Fox, the chemist in Brisbane Street, was also a horticulturist. He had exotic plants in a big hot house, and ponds with waterlilies. ‘Mr Fox said water lilies would be very unlikely to last for hours. But he did have some Cattleya orchids just coming into flower and was happy to give them to me.’

It was Yvonne’s belief that she was the first bride in Ipswich to have an ice-blue dress, and the first to carry orchids, since orchids were expensive and quite rare at that time. But it was not only a blue dress and orchids that turned heads. ‘While I was being photographed, Mr Wilson Whitehead said to me, “Hold it, don’t move.” I had my back to the camera, looking at my bouquet. It was a different pose from the usual smiling bride.’

After a week-long honeymoon Yvonne returned to work, and her first job was to colour her wedding photo. ‘Everyone in Ipswich looked at the photo display in Whitehead’s. Most brides were put in. It was a way of keeping up with what was happening in town.’ After Yvonne’s photograph was put on display in Whitehead’s window, many brides chose blue gowns, much to the annoyance of the colour artists. ‘It was much harder, and a lot more work than putting a few shadows on a white dress,’ said Yvonne. ‘And every second bride after that asked for “that pose in the window with the bride in the blue frock”.’

Daphne Gadd was another colourist at Whitehead’s at the time. Hand colourists were usually female. They applied photographic watercolour with fine paintbrushes, and brides and bridesmaids usually supplied fabric samples for them to match. Hand-coloured photographs were common between 1900 and 1940, and many are still as clear and as the day the work was done. Whitehead’s was still recruiting hand colourists in the 1970s.