ALTON - Joan Sheppard is a multi-faceted woman known for her community service work, nature preservation and also her dress and clothing collection.
Get The Latest News!
Don't miss our top stories and need-to-know news everyday in your inbox.
Recently, a pair of Sheppard’s previous dresses appeared in the beautifully designed and published book: “Little Black Dress,” written by author Shannon Meyer.
Sheppard stressed she didn’t want to give these beautiful dresses unless they would be preserved and she thought it was a perfect fit to donate to the Missouri History Museum.
“I contacted the museum and asked if they wanted some of these items and they said yes and took a lot of my shoes, my dollars and toys and stuff,” she said.
Sheppard’s dresses are found on page 59 and page 87 of the book.
The dress on Page 59 is a sleeveless crepe dress, dating back to 1925 from California. The dress was worn by Irene Dost Locker, who would have been 20 years old in 1925. The dress contains an uneven hemline that was popular in both evening wear and day dresses in that time.
Hemlines and sleeves crept up in this era and women started shaving legs and underarms, plucking eyebrows, cutting their hear, wearing makeup in this era, the book says.
On Page 87 of the book is a sleeveless crepe dress with floating panels in the 1960s made by Pettites By Suzy in New York.
This fun dress was worn by Sheppard and she called it her “car wash dress,” the book says. The style of the dress was made popular by Pierre Cardin in the 1960s.
Sheppard has donated the two dresses to the Missouri History Museum.
Sheppard said she donated three dresses from her collection about 10 years ago to Missouri History Museum.
One of the dresses Sheppard donated was a maternity dress.
“There weren’t that many black maternity dresses back then,” Sheppard said about the 1960s. What I donated was a black dress for a cocktails dinner and not a long dress. Who would have ever thought that would end up in an exhibit.”
