Empress Elisabeth of Austria is having a moment, thanks to the Netflix series The Empress. Elisabeth, nicknamed Sisi, married her first cousin Emperor Franz Joseph I in 1854 at age 16. Sisi was a beautiful woman, and was painted and photographed in many fabulous dresses, with one exception- no one knew what her wedding dress looked like. There were no illustrators, photographers, or journalists allowed into the wedding ceremony, and the dress itself disappeared (the dress in the picture above is from her coronation as Queen of Hungary). Therefore, the empress's wedding dress has been a mystery for almost 200 years, without even an eyewitness description. The only clue is a sumptuous train that is believed to have been attached to Sisi's wedding dress.
(Image credit: Prof. Mortel)
That train is in the Imperial Carriage Museum in Vienna. Dr. Monica Kurzel-Runtscheiner, the museum's director, has been on a quest for years to uncover any clues as to the imperial wedding dress, with little luck until 2021. That's when an obscure portrait of Sisi was discovered in a Czech museum, wearing a dress with the exact train displayed in Vienna! The portrait was painted three years after the wedding, by an artist who wasn't officially associated with the royal family. How did that happen, when Sisi had gone to such lengths to keep the dress a secret? It's possible that three years later, she had second thoughts about archiving the look before destroying the dress, or maybe she was proud of still being able to fit into it after giving birth to two children, and possibly already pregnant with her third.
Dr. Kurzel-Runtscheiner spent months studying the painting, and then went to great lengths to actually recreate the dress, which is now displayed alongside the portrait in an exhibit at the Carriage Museum until November 5th. See the portrait and the replica dress alongside the story at Atlas Obscura.