#historical costuming

[cy-lindric]

Now that I'm back from being hacked for skincare scam profits I can show you this 1790s waistcoat I've made !! First pic is the extant piece I've loosely based it off.

[kudriaken]

Another speedpainting study.

[threadtalk]

Did someone ask for Gigot sleeves? I thought I heard someone ask for them. How about ones with extra points? In velvet? Blood red velvet?

Emile Pingat was one of the late Victorian fashion powerhouses, and for good reason. Often rivaling Worth in artistry and decadence, this 1897 dress gives us so much to look at while remaining cohesive. The play on texture between the velvet and the silk compound weave (which is similar to lampas) is dizzying and yet I can't look away. Plus, the color of that periwinkle and white with the red. Then you get all the frills! Just marvelous.

From LACMA.

[stellaluna33]

We had a lovely night at the ball! And here's the (almost) finished dress! I also made Husband's waistcoat and tie. I was still sewing the day of the event and we arrived very late. 😆. But it was totally worth it. (The drink in the lower left corner is a cocktail made with absinthe and champagne, and was garnished with fresh violets)

[jewellery-box]

Robe a la Française. Pink silk satin and antique gold mesh with handmade organza flowers and sequins.

mme_jejette

[namarabia]

[die-rosastrasse]

Ball gown, 1840-41

Maker: Unknown

From the collection of Wien Museum

[marzipanandminutiae]

in view of Netflix and a few other networks apparently announcing that they are no longer requiring actors to wear corsets/stays, but framing it as the ultimate in feminist allyship against an Oppressive Historical Torture-Garment (and presumably typing their press releases one-handed, if you catch my drift), I have a few things to say:

1. I presume they will also be condemning Spanx, dieting, weight loss surgery, obsessive exercise, breast or pectoral or ab implants, Flat Tummy Tea, editing actors’ bodies in post, etc. since this is all about promoting healthy body image. ...right?

2. Okay, this one is not tongue-in-cheek: if a costume designer forces you to wear massively uncomfortable stays or corsets and tells you your discomfort is an inherent feature of that garment type, they are lying. All the articles on this cited reports from actresses saying they threw up because of Regency stays or couldn’t eat in Edwardian corsets. And while  I’m sure some of that is giving interview audiences the sensationalism they want to hear, I believe them in general. 

Someone needs to tell them that that’s not normal.

I have worn corsets and stays a lot in my life. I know people who wear them as everyday support garments. And neither I nor anyone I know has been seriously hindered in normal activities by them. There are even photos and videos of women from corset-intensive eras climbing glaciers, playing sports, having snowball fights, doing manual labor...living their lives

 Sure, there have always been and will always be people who find corsets or stays inherently uncomfortable- that’s why it’s good to have many support garment options available for people who need them. And there have always been and will always be ill-made, ill-fitting, or extreme examples of the type- I’m not  saying corsets are always The Most Comfortable Thing Ever For Everyone, because that’s not universally true of any garment.

But these production companies have been hurting actresses under the guise of “historical accuracy,” and this latest pronouncement is just another attempt to shift the blame. 

Don’t let them get away with it.

EDIT: Apparently the Official nature of the source for this announcement is in question, but the gist of the post still stands, so I’m leaving it up. Will edit further if new developments arise.

[herbirdglitter]

You know my favorite bits in period dramas are the ones where the heroine is “not like other girls” and chooses not to wear a corset because let’s be real, no inteligent woman in a period drama setting would do that.

And then you can tell it was written by someone without a chest because next thing you know, they’ll be running off across a field or something.

Like girl, you just took off the only breast support you had, and now you’re sprinting across a field?? How is this not an issue??

And then they’re like “I’m a woman of science” but clearly no, because any woman who knows anything about weight distribution wouldn’t choose to fling off their corset whilst still wearing a poofy skirt. Like it’s there for a reason. It distributes the weight and keeps your 50 lbs of skirts from digging into your bare skin. And I cannot stress this strongly enough, IT SUPPORTS THE BUST. WHAT ARE YOU DOING. I’ll make an exception if they’re dressing as a man or have anything gender going on, but otherwise, WHAT ARE YOU DOING??

And then they say it’s because they’re painful or that they’re “instruments of the patriarchy”, except no they fucking weren’t, men wore corsets too, they were literally just bust support and historical corsets didn’t hurt, because they were made to fit your body, and they actually molded to fit it more the more you wore them. I know, I have multiple.

And if you think one couldn’t breathe, yes you could, people wore corset like garments for like 500 years, you think they would wear them if they couldn’t breathe? And no they didn’t lace them tightly except for special occasions and that was only a few people. In fact for most of history, it was physically impossible to lace boned garments any tighter then they were supposed to go because metal eyelets weren’t invented yet. You achieved the small waist look by padding out your hips and maybe your chest and sleeves creating an optical illusion

[cy-lindric]

Costume update !! I finally got to wear my 17th century outfit at Provins last weekend. I made the doublet with handmade threaded buttons, the linen shirt, the falling band & tassels, and a very rushed cassock that I'll probably fix or re-make when I have more than a couple of days ahead of me, lol. The lace is from tudor tailor and the boots & pants were thrifted.

I one day I'll find a way to make nice pictures of my costume, too, that'd be nice.

[kudriaken]

Tudor fashion study. Small gesture sketches of historical costuming.

[threadtalk]

I can practically smell the candy cane on this British dress from 1849! Surprise, though--it isn't a holiday gown... it's a wedding gown!

As many folks know, the concept of the white wedding dress is fairly modern, dating to the middle of the 19th century. And even then, it wasn't ubiquitous. Wedding gowns weren't the "wear it once" they are today, and many women sought to find dresses they could later incorporate into their wardrobes. Even my grandmother, who married in the 1940s, wore a brown dress for her wedding. Part of that was a financial decision, of course, but I love the idea of colorful, practical wedding wear, too.

This dress is silk damask, which is always exciting for me. That means the pattern is reversible! Not something you would notice by just looking at it.

In classic 1840-1850 transitional wear, it's got a lot going for it: the very tailored waist looks very 1880s, while the silhouette is firmly in the 1840s. Those candy cane arms, though!

From the Bowes Museum.

[hobbit--punk]

In case anyone’s wondering how our move to Madrid is working out, today involved my landlord toting a duffel bag full of chainmaille, plate armor, and a broadsword up to our apartment so he, my husband, and I could all nerd out about historical clothing together. The three of us wound up comparing notes through broken English, terrible Spanish, and Google Translate for an hour. 

Landlord: has mad metalworking and leatherworking skills, but no sewing skills and minimal woodworking skills. Needs a gambeson for his chainmaille and wants a wooden horse crest for his plate helmet. Can’t speak English well enough to find tutorials on YouTube.

My husband: has some metalworking skills including several years of making chain maille whne we were in uni, and mad woodworking skills including beginning carving. Has been wanting to learn to make swords for longer than we’ve been married.

Me: Has intermediate sewing skills, mostly in historical clothing and making quilts, is a native English speaker who knows how to find just about any skill set tutorial on YouTube. Has been wanting to experiment with medieval clothing.

Today has been a good day, y’all. 

[jewellery-box]

Robe á la Française with bows made of silver lame and antique silver laces, hand embroidered buttons and bows centers, silver tassels made of metal. Silk taffeta and duchess satin.

mme_jejette via Instagram

[dresshistorynerd]

I think we can all agree that this is dumb, right? Though the title is highly misleading and the quote marks around "ban" do a lot of work here. These companies just no longer requires actresses to wear structural garments. Still a dumb and bad solution to the problem of badly made costumes.

Couple of my issues with the article:

The purpose of the corset or any other similar structural garment wasn't to reduce waist, but to provide support and shape the silhouette. In the article someone from Netflix commented that they shouldn't promote that women should make their waists smaller, apparently it's "bad optics". And from Neflix the main series where corsets are no longer required is Bridgerton, because one of the main actors had bad time with her stays. But if you take just one quick look at the Regency silhouette you will see the waist is far from reduced. Literally there is no waist. Completely covered. They have been doing something terribly wrong if they have made Regency stays that pinch down the waist. Some actors also seem to think the waist is supposed to be reduced all the time. I remember that one actor in HBO's The Gilded Age complained about the corset, but then in the same breath admitted that she had asked the costumers to make it purposefully a little too small so she could be tight-laced all the time (a practice some fashionable rich Victorian women did for high society events, and definitely not all the time). But beyond the inaccuracies in the article, there is an issue here. Structural garments supported the bust yes, but also in many periods they supported the weight of the dress. In 17th and 18th centuries and Victorian Era the skirts of rich women especially had a lot of heavy fabric which would be hard to deal with and move around with, if all the weight is only on the waist. But with a structural garment it distributes the weight to the whole torso, especially on the hips.

A structural garment needs to be fitted well and worn with with a shift underneath. It absolutely can be uncomfortable, create bruising and restrict breathing, if it's not well fitted. If you have ever used too small jeans that contain no spandex at all, you know how nasty the effects can be on the skin. Especially TV sets often have very little time for creating costumes and they might have just one fitting or at tops two or in worst case scenario none at all, which very easily leads to ill fitting costumes. That is a huge issue with structural garments. I've been making transitional short stays for myself and I have never made a garment like that so I'm still struggling fit it well (it's unfinished), and I can say it's not comfortable when it doesn't fit well. I haven't watched Bridgerton but I have seen couple of screencaps of different scenes with characters wearing stays and no shift to be seen anywhere. I really do hope they actually are wearing shifts when they have the full outfits on and just didn't wear them in these scenes for aesthetics or something. Because, yes, that will absolutely give you bruising, if you wear any type of fitted and structured garment against your skin without any fabric between it and the skin, against which the structural garment can slide against. It would be irresponsible to put your actors in such garments without shifts. I don't blame the actors for complaining about the "corsets", since I can believe they are uncomfortable if they are not well fitted or god forbid if they aren't wearing shifts.

I don't know how many times this needs to be said: corsets are not torture devices. While I don't blame the actors for complaining, reading comments like this kills one brain cell every time: "Women existed in that for such a long time, which does give you a lot of sympathy for that time period and what they were going through. For the first month, I couldn’t breathe." I'm sorry, but women literally did physical labour in corsets. They climbed mountains in corsets. (I have a whole post related to this.) Do these people really think so little of women in the past that, if corsets really were torture devices, they would have just endured them quietly for centuries? Of course the most fashionable clothing in a lot of the periods were uncomfortable and hard to move in, even restrictive, but those were the court gowns and ball gowns the young fashionable elite wore for the special evening occasions to show off to the high society. But does that really differ from today? If you look at the MET galas and stuff, do these actors really claim the outfits are comfortable? The everyday clothing and the clothing of the working class was fairly comfortable, and yes, they all wore corsets.

Yes, you can make properly fitted, comfortable supportive garments for costumes in any production. The proof is in opera. Opera singers wear corsets in a lot of productions. I have read many accounts by opera singers who talk about how their corsets are well fitted and actually makes singing easier, because you can "lean" on the corset (I don't know anything about singing, but that's what I have seen them say). Also they tend to wear those large and heavy period dresses and as alluded earlier moving on them on stage without corset would be very hard. Singing also would be harder as the singers could easily become breathless from moving the heavy dress without using the muscles on the whole body. Operas have much smaller budget than these big tv and movie productions, so there's really zero excuses for making badly fitting corsets.

So yes, it's dumb, it's inaccurate and kinda infuriating. But it's also actually pretty sinister. The issue isn't actors wearing corsets for many hours, that's what people have done for ages and still do in re-enactments, opera etc. The issue is that there's too little time for fitting and sewing the corsets in modern tv and movie production. And this is part of a much broader issue. Costume designers and makes are unionized in Hollywood and for a while now Hollywood studios have tried to cut the amount of unionized behind the scenes labour they employ.

Making profit from a movie or a tv show is not good enough anymore. Now productions that don't "perform as expected" are seen as flops. The production companies make predictions of profit and green light projects they have calculated to make most profit, and if they don't make that high profit, it's a flop and it won't get the planned sequel or the next season. To achieve those high profits they also do everything they can to lower the production costs, and one way is by employing as little unionized labour, to whom you have to pay fair wages, as possible. So costume departments are then very often understaffed and they have way too little time to produce the costumes in proper quality. This can be seen very blatantly in the clear drop in quality of movie costuming during the past couple of decades. So the reducing of structural garments in costumes seems like yet another attempt to reduce unionized labour disguised as feminism.

Obviously the good and smart solution to the problem of uncomfortable structural garments is to hire enough costumers for long enough time so they can have multiple fittings and make them better.