Women’s patchwork dressing gown with a silk velvet collar and five brass buttons. Made in the 1940s by Natalia Mary Levett (1914 – 2014), using a variety of repurposed household fabrics.
This patchwork dressing gown was meticulously hand-stitched in the 1940s by Natalia Mary Levett (1914 – 2014), known as Molly. She worked on it during the long and lonely days of World War II, while looking after her first child, who was born in 1943.
Molly apparently ‘begged, borrowed and stole’ the materials for the dressing gown from curtains, jumble sales and old clothes. The gown even features a white patch of parachute silk, which came from a German fighter pilot who had jumped from his burning aircraft and landed on her father’s farm. Her family has said that she deliberately and defiantly sewed this patch on the back so she would always sit on it.
Molly’s childhood was spent on her father’s hop farm in Bodiam, East Sussex, and she went to school in Hastings. Upon leaving school in 1933, she trained at Rachel McMillan College in Deptford as a nursery schoolteacher and spent six years there, first as a student and later as Head of the college’s nursery school.
With the outbreak of the war in 1939, she moved to Luton to be the head of a new nursery school, where she met her husband, Dr Noel Pearson, a local doctor. They were married in 1942 and came to live in Shaftesbury, Dorset. Molly’s husband was called for service in the RAMC and spent three years in India, before being demobilized, and on his return, they both settled permanently in Marnhull, Dorset.
This patchwork dressing gown was highlighted by practitioners involved with the Fashioning our World project and the volunteer team who look after the textiles collection at Dorset Museum & Art Gallery. Fashioning our World was a project for young people run in partnership with The Salisbury Museum, exploring sustainable fashion by looking at items in the museum’s collection to explore how people repaired and repurposed clothing in the past. The project was funded by the Esmee Fairbairn Collections Fund and Wessex Museums.
For one of the workshops, students were shown this patchwork dressing gown as an example of crazy patchwork. The students were particularly inspired by the range of colours and fabrics in the dressing gown and developed their own patchwork tote bags. Some students used patchwork to repurpose clothing and a book cover. The dressing gown is a wonderful example of recycling and reusing fabric in an inventive and creative way and is the perfect choice to represent the project.
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