| Period Clothing Construction Page 2 |
| Aside from the Big Three, wool, linen & silk, many other fabrics were made using all sorts of animal hair, camel and goat especially, and felt was also made and used in various times and places; the fur felts that were so popular for hats led to the extinction of the European Beaver by 1550. These subjects are too esoteric (meaning I don’t know much about them) for me to cover them here. My guess is that felt fans will already know a great deal about felt, so I will pass it by. The same goes for leather, a non-woven “fabric” that ranges from thick, stiff and heavy to a weight and fineness almost like silk. It was used for all sorts of garments and objects, but it is an entire mystery to me, so I leave it alone. (Won’t someone please write an article on this for the Kingdom of Atenveldt’s MOAS newsletter? I need to learn!) Dying is a subtle art, and the range of dyestuffs used in various times and places is a study all to itself. If you want to dye your own cloth, seek the expertise of a good dyer. If you just want to know the names of colors and dyestuffs and how the art was practiced, the two books recommended ant the end of this section will give you a great deal of information. The Internet is also a wonderful source of information on dyes and dying. One final note on wool cloth. Most cloth woven after 1400 was heavily fulled, a process by which the cloth is shrunk and thickened and a nap is raised. This is a process, requiring large amounts of water, feet or pounding hammers to pound, and teazles to comb the nap up. I doubt many of us will ever attempt to replicate it, so I’m guessing that un-fulled cloth will be more often seen than the more historically correct fulled cloth. For a MUCH fuller discussion of cloth and its manufacture, I recommend: Textiles and Clothing : Medieval Finds from Excavations in London, c.1150-c.1450, by Elisabeth Crowfoot, Frances Pritchard, Kay Staniland and Renaissance Dress in Italy 1400-1500 by Jacqueline Herald. There are also many excellent books on the history and practice of spinning and weaving. |
| Cutting Your Coat to Suit Your Cloth |
| The cloth-thrifty cut of clothing lasted from the dawn of sewn clothes until about the middle of the 14th Century, when a new style of body fitting clothing began to replace the old loose styles. Most, maybe all, historians of clothing agree that the impetus for the new style grew out of the need for the gambeson (padded coat worn under armor) to become more closely fitted to the body to fit under the ever more closely fitted and articulated plate armor. |
| What Dorothy Burnham’s little black book did was to show us, in beautifully clear diagrams and not-one-word-wasted prose, was how the width (and length) of cloth determined how cloth could be cut so that there was almost no fabric wasted in making a garment. So persuasive was “the little black book” that the directions for making the Tunica of St. Louis (the French king, not the Missouri city) are on dozens of historic clothing websites, and pre-made garments reproducing it are available from dozens of SCA and RenFaire merchants |
| Of course, after Dorothy Burnham’s little book Cut My Cote was published by the Royal Ontario Museum, it was perfectly obvious that people who invested enormous amounts of time and energy necessary to produce cloth would not want to waste their investment, and would therefore be extremely thrifty in how they cut their garments. Obvious, of course, but most people interested in the history of clothing never bothered to think about it very much, beyond the old platitude that draped clothes were the mark of weaving societies while fitted clothes were the product of leather/felt wearing societies. I remember some costume history book I read about forty years ago putting it this way: Weavers have too much respect for the selvedge wantonly to cut it up |
| The new armoring coat went by many names, aketon, pourpoint, gyppon, jupon (England), pourpoint, jupon (France), farsetto, zupone, guibone (Italy) and jubón (Spanish) but its basic form changed the way people moved, the way they thought about the body and, of course, the way they cut their clothes. Young noblemen with fine physiques began wearing their jupons even when they weren’t wearing armor and having them made from expensive silks because they were never meant to be worn under armor at all. |
| Women’s cotes became cotes-hardi as their gowns, in imitation of the men’s jupons, grew tighter and tighter and required stronger (hardier) fabrics to take the strain of encasing the body, and shaping it as well. The moralists preached against the impropriety of the new styles, and against the extravagance of wasting so much fabric: the bits and pieces of unused cloth called “cabbage.” The 15th century saw two opposite trends in clothes. The tight, short jupons, and the ever more body fitting hose coexisted with the huge, voluminous houpelandes that extravagantly wasted fabric on huge sleeves and wide bodies, while the tight clothes wasted fabric by their cut. The age of conspicuous consumption had begun. The 16th century brings ever more refinement to the cut and fit of clothes, and by the end of the century, tailoring had triumphed completely over the old thrifty fabric conserving cut of the past that now went “underground” and was to be seen only in shirts and smocks. The old “outer garments” become “underwear” Old habits of thrifty cutting did not entirely die out in the 16th century. It is apparent from the diagrams in the Milanese Tailor’s Handbook and in Juan de Alcega’s Tailor’s Pattern Book that people were willing to have garments pieced together in ways that nowadays we would consider pretty peculiar, but Señor Alcega understood that a tailor had to keep his prices down and not waste fabric. |
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| This page last updated 06/22/02 |