A total of 600 hours of work went into making Cele Peterson’s copper dress, on which a bet hinged. It was capable of ripping the wearer’s skin.
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Legendary Tucson dress-shop owner Cele Peterson created a copper dress on a dare, said Laraine Daly Jones, museum collections manager at the Arizona Historical Society in Tucson.
Peterson was a board member of the Tucson Trade Bureau, which put on a weeklong celebration called Tucson Copper Days in the 1960s and 1970s.
One of her co-organizers bet her she couldn’t make a copper dress, Daly Jones said.
Peterson won. The dress took 33 yards of copper, 11 yards of bronze and 600 hours of work, said a 1975 article in the Kingman Daily Miner.
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You had to wear it carefully, Daly-Jones said. “It had the potential to rip skin.”
That didn’t deter Fiesta Bowl Queen Paula DeDario from wearing it in the pre-game parade in 1975.
“Her complexion and auburn-colored hair set the dress off well,” the Daily Miner wrote.
The dress is now part of the Cele Peterson collection of the Arizona Historical Society.
Peterson, who opened her first Tucson dress shop in 1931, was usually more practical in her designs, though always elegant.
She died in 2010 at age 101. Her business lives on and is still family-owned.
