This dress is an example of ‘half-mourning’. The adoption of mourning dress was a powerful way of demonstrating respectability and ‘class’ and generated much work for the dressmaking industries in the late nineteenth century. After the first weeks of wearing unrelieved black, elements of mauve or white could be introduced as a sign of time passing by. The artificial dyes including 'Mauve', discovered in the 1850s and afterwards helped to make dying large quantities of fabric easier and cheaper to achieve, and so fuelled the fashion for wearing mourning colours for personal and official bereavement.