Tags
18th century clothes, authenticity, details, dress, fashion, lacings, Mary Adams, paintings, Research, resources, spectacles, stomachers, Yale Center for British Art
Meet Mary Adams, painted in 1754. She looks to be a certain age, does she not? But she’s still rocking some style. I like black, and wore black clothes almost exclusively for years from high school on, despite the relentless taunts of feral sixth-grade boys. (My nickname was Boots. Costuming and living history is but another episode of dressing funny…)
But I digress.
Mary was a happy find this morning, because I knew I’d seen this little detail somewhere…and here it is:
Did you catch that? It looks remarkably like Mary has laced her gown over her kerchief, and not over a stomacher. I’m doing a little dance, thankyouverymuch, because that is how I roll. Or lace, as the case may be. Look, too, at the top of the lacing: her gown is pulling. Yes. Imperfections, how I adore thee.
Snark aside, it’s a kind of relief. Looking at Copley and Feke and all their sleek silken women is like flipping through Vogue in the doctor’s office waiting room: after a while, I start to feel woefully inadequate in all ways. From the Richard III gown’s wiggly seams to my inability to pin my dresses straight, and heck, the generally asymmetrical rumpled-ness of my presentations… you can get to feeling very low, as Thompson and Thomson observe in Prisoners of the Sun.
So among the things I note in the painting is the depth of the pull at the top of the gown. Hmm. I feel better about how my flesh and gown relate in the armpit area now.
But if the pull line starts over beyond the robings, that helps a costumer figure out where to put the lace holes and how to arrange the gown. I also like the asymmetry of blue lace zig-zagging down the kerchief. When I work that out on Richard III, and alter my red calico gown, I’ll use Mary’s portrait as a reference.
Finally, and perhaps best, of all, Mary can read. And she need spectacles. That wonderful pair in her hand look like they are cousins of this pair. All in all, a happy find this morning.