Category Archives: Clothing

Tripping in Richmond

20 Monday Aug 2018

Posted by in Clothing, Events, History, Museums

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Visiting the Stately Home: an early touristic diversion

Friday night, Drunk Tailor and I waited until the worst of rush hour in NOVA was over and headed south to Richmond, surprised not to be engulfed in a terrific thunderstorm of the kind we are becoming accustomed to driving in. We had planned a weekend trip to see the Napoleon: Power and Splendor exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. It’s a traveling exhibit, but this is the first time I’ve been close enough to see it, and we had the added benefit of being able to attend in costume with the Regency Society of Virginia. (Reader: I required a new outfit.)

The idea of visiting a museum in costume is incredibly appealing, and all the more so when you can visit galleries of objects from the time period your costume replicates. Add to that the layer of traveling on the weekend in the clothes from the time when tourism first became a “thing” (at least among the monied classes), and you have a recipe for an excellent adventure.

(Somehow, while often at events together, Drunk Tailor and I are rarely seen “together,” so images like this are nice to have.)

If you are going to play the tourist, especially if you are visiting the “spoils” of the former emperor, you have to dress appropriately. American tourists today may travel in camo crocs and backwards baseball caps, but people in the past dressed for touring and it seemed appropriate to dress for this trip.

Admiring the panorama. (Cropped only to enhance periodicity)

This trip, with the fun of visiting in period clothes, reminds me of the books still in storage, and the books I have yet to read — one on early country house tourism— that document the changes in how people spent their time and consumed goods, and the reasonably concurrent rise of both the museum and the department store.

Raptures about the mounting, I think, but we might as well we shopping.

Peale and Zola have more in common than you might think, or at least Mr. Peale and Mr. Selfridge. These compendia of material goods are similarly structured — both organized around themes or types, whether ladies’ lingerie or Oceanic art– and have similar aims of edification and [cultural] consumption.

When your hat sees its cousin in a case….

All in all, an excellent trip, with much to see and talk about. After finishing our tour of the Napoleon exhibit, we lunched (another experience similar to the department store) and toured more of the museum, and had a day well spent.

Hair a la Titus and the Resting Bingley Face

15 Wednesday Aug 2018

Posted by in Clothing, Making Things, Research

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Reader, it is hot where I live. June, July, and August are tiresome months here, humid and warmer than what I became accustomed to in New England. After a year, I realized I’d had enough of trimming my hair myself. I texted a friend with good hair, and found someone to liberate my neck. Excellent, right? Well…it’s all good until you want to dress up.

Lady Russell’s headdress, Persuasion, 1995.

19th century history hair being somewhat mullet-like, my short in the back bob was not going to get the job done for last weekend’s Jane Austen Ball at Gadsby’s Tavern. What to do? Cap it, of course– there’s no way I could figure out how to tie a turban elegantly and reliably without giving up the hope of finishing some other projects I really want to finish this month. So, a cap/hat/sewn headdress. Aside from the examples seen in film adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels, what evidence is there for these concoctions?

ladies heads with various wraps and feathers

London Head Dresses, June 1804

woman in a gray tam o-shanter cap

Detail, Plate 11, April 1799 Journal des Luxus und der Moden.

Enough, it would seem, to be getting on with. In addition to the 1804 Ladies’ Head Dresses plate, there are plates in the Journal des Luxus und der Moden showing headdresses and wraps, as well as an image of a pelisse and matching tam-o-shanter-like hat. These are simple enough to make, and I managed one in less than 24 hours.

two couples in historical dress

I had no idea Drunk Tailor and I would color coordinate so well. Also, Dat Hat.

The fabric is left over from a gown I made to wear to a dance in Salem one spring, , but which happily coordinated well enough with the sari gown made for a photoshoot, and also worn to Salem for a dance. Briefly, the cap is made from scraps, ornamented with a two-layered rosette centered with a paste button, with the bulk of the caul gathered up and stitched down to hold the shape and embellished with three coordinating tassels looped onto a gold silk-wrapped cord. In the end, not too resting Bingley face, and a satisfactory cover for what I’ll call my hair a la Titus when I’m not in the current century. Drunk Tailor’s hat covered, somewhat, here.

Luxury and Fashion

26 Thursday Jul 2018

Posted by in Clothing, Events, Making Things, Research

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Sometimes this is a hard hobby to love. My hands hurt, my creativity feels dead, and there’s no place to go all dressed up. After a long, unpleasant spring, I finally feel like sewing and playing. Drunk Tailor and I definitely missed some things we very much wanted to do, but now we’re reinspired, we could take baby steps back to our normal semi-hectic pace– except of course, we are plunging back in with three events in August after a whirlwind trip to Ticonderoga.

Wedding dress in cotton muslin ca. 1797. Nationalmuseet Danmark.

With the summer heat in mind, I ordered batiste and voile, thinking I would make the Tidens Toj gown, but when the fabric arrived, it seemed that the purveyor had confused the two fabric types, so a new plan was required. Alas, the trials of costume research and falling down the fashion magazine rabbit hole for hours at a time…

1798 Gown, watercolor by Ann Frankland Lewis, 1798. LACMA, Costume Council Fund (AC1999.154.1-.32)

Next up: an open robe or wrap-front gown over a matching petticoat, trimmed in blue-and-white Greek key trim, with a pair of pointy-toed ribbon-tied slippers and a sleeveless blue silk waistcoat, in three weeks or so.

The waistcoat construction is finished, scaled up from the original garment patterned in the DAR’s “An Agreeable Tyrant” catalog. I chose to line mine, possibly from pure habit of making men’s clothing, possibly because I’m not that great a teeny-tiny hemming and require a lining to hide my sins. With gold silk cord trim and covered buttons, I think it will have a pleasantly military vibe.

For the gown and petticoat, cotton in Virginia’s August heat seems like a solid choice, though by the time the layers are on and the sun is up, it’s possible that nothing will be really cool. (The majority of the day will be spent in air conditioning, so really, anything would be okay.) The trim arrived last night, and has a body that will need batiste (and not voile) for support. The combination causes me to entertain fears that this aesthetic is a little too boat-shoes-and-belts-with-embroidered-whales for 1797-1799, but when topped with something not unlike Drunk Tailor’s militia cap, the aesthetic will tilt from yachting to the Good Ship Lollipop.

Mending: Check

18 Wednesday Apr 2018

Posted by in Clothing, History, Living History, Reenacting

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My poor old apron. It’s almost– but not quite– the firstarticle of historical clothing I made. (The first was a shift. Infrastructure and fundamentals, people.) It acquired some new wear (actual holes!) in New Jersey, and required mending.

First, it needed to be washed. I hadn’t taken a objective look at my apron in a while, but after we got home from Salem, I knew I had to mend it, which meant washing.

Reader, it smelled.

You get used to smells, and even enjoy them: wet wool, gunpowder, wood smoke. And then there’s tallow. I’ve never gotten used to the smell of tallow, and I don’t remember when this apron encountered hard fat, but the odor is unmistakable.

So is the water.

This past weekend, I had a chance to mend this favorite apron while I peddled luxury goods at Fort Dobbs’ War for Empire event.

Although I have a sturdy plain linen apron, I’m fond of checks, and of the hand this apron has achieved after much wearing and some washing.

It will never be really clean again, but for now, the apron is mended and back in rotation.

Black and White World

06 Friday Apr 2018

Posted by in Clothing, Research

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Isn’t she grand? She’s on offer elsewhere; I came across her while narrwing down a date for a very different portrait.

She reminds me of a Tamara de Lempicka, if Tamara and Ammi Phillips had set up easels next to each other. From her forthright, slightly sulky gaze to the exuberant folds of her gown bodice to the hints of style in the details, we can learn a lot from this painting. There’s a kind of provincial Hepplewhite sideboard behind her, set with a colorful garniture; the copper hot water or tea urn places us in a parlor. The painting frame has a shell in the center of the bottom rail, the chair a turned knob on the back upright– we are on the edge of fancy, the moment when neoclassicism really gives way to exuberance (think canary yellow rose-painted china, big puffy sleeves on printed gowns, and fancy-painted chairs).

Below, an earlier entry in the black and white world. This lady was sold at auction recently. She’s earlier than our near-Tamara above, plainer in dress, sulkier. She is certainly more academic, and somewhat better painted, in addition to being set in a vaguely classic scene, in a very neoclassical chair, draped with a fine shawl.The artists is definitely showing off some skill in the “painting transparency” department.

The lady in black is firmly set in the neoclassical period. Restraint and moderation are watchwords– despite what you may think of that hair, which is recalling Greco-Roman precedents–much the way certain factions in the Revolutionary period were driven by piety and discipline. Politics and national ethos or mood are embedded visual culture then as now, and even in these portraits, simple as they seem.