Close details of amazing clothes from the Victoria & Albert Museum's amazing collection. Corners and closures and embellishment in color photos large enough to show the dimples of blindstitching; and the whole garments are shown only in smallish, lightweight, almost schematic line drawings. This is graphically nice and perhaps an efficient use of color photos; better yet, it is like my memory of some beautiful things: I can know, by reconstruction, that such-a-building was large, symmetrical, etc.; I do know by sensuous memory what the molding on the mantel looked like.
The material in the V&A is not a even sample: as the introduction says,
Historically, the arbitrary division of artefacts into either ethnography or art means, for example, that there are not many garments in the V&A from the continent of Africa and none at all from Oceania. (p. 8)
There are more gold-encrusted coats from Serbia/Bosnia/Greece than seem at all likely - the materials alone are ruinously expensive; I didn't realize that even the aristocracy there was really that rich. I probably underestimate both how much London centralized wealth as the nineteenth century drew on, and how much wealth can be forced out of poor peasants.
What's most impressive - and maybe invisible to most people in a T-shirt and jeans life - is the amount of work that went into, alternately, making tough rigid materials into garments people could move in; or into making garments even more rigid so they could fill space and control the wearer for impressive display. Smocking and narrow, narrow godets - both, incidentally, more stitch-intensive than anything we now do for work clothes - let people move. Technically impressive, without elastic or much knit fabric or mechanical sewing. Also, most clothes lasted long enough to be modified for size or fashion or repair, or needed to be wholly or partially unsewn and resewn for basic washing. Even a low-tech society clearly put a lot of thought into some of these problems; there are gussets in the gussets, in their armholes, and they aren't on the same grain of the cloth.
Heavily couched gold braid seems to have been the universal favorite for making clothes grander - no, I lie, aristocratic Japan was too perfectly refined; some examples of beige-on-beige gauze here are ungilded lilies (how does that drawcord move? The threads of the gauze don't seem to be broken; p. 76). Padding and quilting and dense embroidery stiffen up the commoners, for weddings or against freezing wind, or both. (Siberian marriage coat made of sixty tanned salmon skins; p. 128.)
Some items illustrate books I've blogged. A gauze-and-sequins bodice on p. 98 was called the "Queen of Oudh's costume", but probaby belonged to "a young dancer". Sold by models for the Warreners of In Times of Peril, I expect. P. 166 has an ornate, special-occasions labourer's smock from southern England, illustrating at least one 'traditional craft' from 's journals; maybe illustrating the traditional delights of the agricultural fairs he describes, which were rare enough for dress clothes but too indigenous for citified suits. (It's between a denim dress and a drover's coat, for anyone else who's been wondering.) The jacket of the Yellow-Hat abbot (p. 116) ought to remind me of history, but actually reminds me of .
Back to T-shirts: why don't ours fit? We don't plan to keep them through our seven ages; we can mail-order them; and yet, only a few of us get ones that pretty well match our neck, chest, and waist measurements; let alone having shoulder-seams the right length. I'm pretty sure we'd look better, and it seems doable. Maybe the point of the ubiquitous baggy garments is actually to disguise the body; everything not Lycra is swaddling.
ISBN: 0810965550
See also Historical Fashion in Detail: The 17th and 18th Centuries, by , , (Photographer); ISBN: 0810966085.
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... as they say abroad.
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