thedressishistory-blog

[thedressishistory-blog]

the fourth.

Wow. It only took me about ten months to find my way back to this blog but here I am now, with my afternoon coffee and a very Swedish cardamom bun, trying to get over my writer’s block that seems to have lasted at least as long as my PhD career. It’s my first week back after four weeks of vacation and I am trying to settle into the work again. The first week has been mostly consumed by administrative work and various applications and procedures connected to a J-1 visa that I hope to obtain soon.  Yesterday, for example, I spent around two hours trying to crop my photo so that the final result would be 600x600 pixels and my face would fit in a green oval kindly provided by the online application’s photo cropping tool. If anyone ever wonders what a PhD student fills her days with, well, that’s what I basically do. But more of that later.

Since I don’t have any clear objective with this post I wanted to give you an overview of a really cool project that I did many months ago, in March to be more exact. As PhD students we are encouraged by the department to go through a teacher training course and even though it’s not mandatory, I think that everything that can makes your CV longer and your set of skills broader should be embraced with open arms, something which has often resulted in me mindlessly running after every opportunity within my reach in order to make the future me more employable. As I actually do hope to teach on a university level one day, I welcomed this opportunity, even though the idea of lumping together people from different backgrounds and with different amount of teaching experience into one course seemed suspect at the time.

In retrospect I can say that the course itself was a rather ginormous waste of time. I’m not saying I didn’t learn anything at all, because I did, but I definitely did not feel afterwards that the course had in any way equipped me for teaching undergraduate students. All of us were required to complete some kind of teaching (a lecture, seminar, workshop, you name it) and to ask a mentor sit in, who would discuss ideas with us before the actual class and afterwards give us feedback on our performance. My mentor was a lovely professor from the Department of Art and I can honestly say that I learned more from her within the 90 minutes that we talked before and after my seminar than the rest of the course put together.

On top of the teaching we also had to think about a problem related to our teaching, research it and write a paper about it. The only requirement was that we should work on it full-time for a week. It only took me about five seconds to think about what I wanted to do and since we were allowed to complete the projects in groups I recruited my colleague/work-bff Beverly to help me out (conveniently enough, she was in the same group with me so we could bemoan our fates while the course was still going).

Put shortly, we held a one-day workshop where we reconstructed a sixteenth-century garment with master students. Ever since I made a teeny tiny Gestaltrock from the pattern in The Tailors’ Book of Enns in 2015, reconstruction is something very close to my heart (and, to some extent, my PhD project) and something I often think about when the glaring lack of anything material in my own research becomes too evident.

However, as unfortunate as it is, on a teaching course it’s hard to get away with simply saying that “we did it because reconstruction is cool and look at the awesome old things we made” so our main motivation reads like that, “Holding a reconstruction workshop of our own seemed a fruitful way for us to combine our interest in history with an exploration of a fairly unexamined teaching method.”

If not for Early Modern Cultural History Node (an inter-departmental research environment for students as well as researchers that receives support from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities), the organisational details would have been hard to pin down. However, the infrastructure provided by the node and its research leaders meant that it was easy and breezy with booking rooms, arranging and acquiring necessary tools and also finding our project a very natural home. Since neither of us is a pro at reconstruction or sewing in general, we also recruited Cecilia, a lecturer at the Department of Textile Studies and someone who basically knows everything about Renaissance costume, to be our Yoda for the day. In the beginning she gave an introductory lecture and the four groups of eight people set off making one of the “Rock für knecht oder büben” from the Tailor Book Nidermayr.

We didn’t require any of the students to have previous knowledge of historical garments or garment-making and as the node is run by the Departments of History, Textile Studies, Musicology and Art we ended up with a mixed bunch of people. We also decided to make them work in groups rather than alone, since not only did it save us a lot of space, it was also a good way to facilitate interesting discussions and the students made better progress with the pattern.

Firstly, we looked at the pattern as a group and worked to decode what kind of information it contained, what were the component parts of the garment, how they were placed on the fabric, and additional miscellaneous information. Because we were much more interested in illuminating the processes of garment-making than in producing a historically accurate item of clothing (even had such a thing been possible), we decided to allow for the using of “anachronistic” materials such as straight pins, pattern paper, standard measuring tools, and a sewing machine, while at the same making sure that students were well aware that the equipment used during the early modern period were much different. We also distributed a list of questions that we asked the students to reflect upon throughout their work, and explained that we would use these reflections to assess the workshop together with them at the end of the day.

What kinds of conclusions might one draw from the day?

1. Historical pattern books are useless if one doesn’t have imagination or creativity to adapt the costumes because they are basically never true to scale and if you simply draw it on the fabric and cut it out you will end up with something funny. Now from my long experience of having reconstructed exactly one garment I already knew it, but it was cool to see the students come to the realisation and begin wondering about other purposes of these tailor books.

2. The students definitely found this hands-on teaching method valuable. A couple of students felt that they would have benefitted more from the workshop if they’d had previous experience in sewing and/or tailoring, all of them felt that they came away with insights that they could not get from lectures, seminars, and literature readings alone. One student did note that she felt such a workshop would be more valuable as part of a larger course that included more thorough lectures and course readings.

3. Transferring things from a 2D pattern into 3D ready garment is often more difficult than it looks like. Students said that simply looking at the portraits and paintings provides us with no information about the size of the garments or how the garments were constructed. For researchers working with costume from any period, working with the actual garments is crucial to understanding the wider social implications.

4. As our mentor Cecilia also observed, what struck her during the workshop was how much time students (and people in general) have to reconsider measurements, and the ways that bodies are measured. She also reported that she felt that this exercise was especially suited to advanced-level students, whom she experienced as much more “independent and active” than undergraduate students. She observed that advanced students showed a marked tendency to discuss much more with each other the implications of what they were doing and to see the process more analytically.

5. Finally, students are lazy at giving feedback and if your report builds on feedback, unless you have very specific questions and you hammer them relentlessly  about getting specific feedback they will still most likely answer “it was interesting” to pretty much anything. This is also something to consider for any future endeavours in reconstruction, namely, how exactly to measure the amount of learning that students are learning and how to ensure that they, in fact, are learning everything that they’re supposed to. Just as the students suggested, the answer perhaps lies somewhere in integrating the more theoretical classroom study with the more practical and hands-on exercises.

To end with a quote from Elizabeth Mary Cavicchi:

As a teacher interweaving historical experiences into labs with students today, sometimes I wondered, where is the history? When no one had time to do readings, or a historical observation did not match what we saw, or a student viewed something in the light of what is known now but not then, the history could seem remote. Eventually I learned that for the students, history did not rest on specifics, dates, or even ideas. The students formed their own sense of history through connections and differences they observed between historical materials and activities, and things of their everyday world.[1]

[1] Cavicchi, Elizabeth Mary, “Historical Experiments in Students’ Hands: Unfragmenting Science through Action and History”, Science & Education 17 (2008), p 720.

Here are also some pictures to visualise how we spent our day:

The Tailor Book of Hans Nidermayr, the younger of Innsbruck, 1544/68, pp. 54-55 © Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum, Innsbruck , F.B.4240

Frustrations on paper.

The pinned hood being tried on by its makers.

Let me tell you, none of us really understood that this is how the coat/gown was supposed to look like before it was put on a dummy and someone remembered this portrait of Don Carlos from the morning’s Powerpoint presentation.

So yeah, I think this is it for now. The weekend is upon us and I hope that this post will lead me back to the path of productivity and my dissertation will start writing itself like

Until next time!

Astrid

[thedressishistory-blog]

the third.

So what do I actually do? I write about clothing in seventeenth-century Tallinn in Estonia and various social practices concerning clothing. Without going too much into detail about what we actually understand as “social practices”, I use it as an umbrella term to describe various kinds of activities in people’s everyday lives that involved clothing. These were by no means limited to the act of wearing the clothes they owned but included repairing clothes, cleaning and maintaining clothes, selling clothes, exchanging clothes, bequeathing clothes and so forth and so forth. The questions I am working with here are, for example, what kinds of clothes people owned, how these clothes looked like and how they were described and what it meant to own clothes.

Clothes could also be included in various conflict situations as they are described in seventeenth-century court material and here I am of the opinion that the fact that an item of clothing was explicitly mentioned in a court case meant it signified something. For example, there are cases that describe conflicts between two people, usually men; in one case the two went to a pub, got drunk and started arguing, one pulled out a knife and slashed the other’s waistcoat. In another case a conflict also emerged and one man pulled off the other’s hat (it might have been a cloak, I can’t remember exactly). These cases of conflict are useful to study because what had previously been tacit became explicit - in the latter case, for example, one immediately thinks of the theme of dishonour that came from pulling off someone’s hat. So essentially the object of clothing materialises the virtual schemas of the social system, to put it in William Sewell’s  terms, but it is only in the case of the conflict that has been recorded for posterity (ie us) that we learn of it. History is full of conflicts, rows and arguments like these but unfortunately only a tiny fraction has survived for us to read and write about them.

As you can guess from the previous then clothes are everywhere and nowhere. To get closer to what people were wearing and how they thought and felt about what they were wearing you have to sift through thousands of pages in the archive. I have chosen to focus on inventories, wills and court materials because they are readily available and also because there’s no point in trying to write about everything. It’s simply not possible in the three years that I get to research and write my dissertation. But of course there’s a lot of other stuff. Visual sources might be scarce but there’s plenty of other types of written sources. Material from tailors’ guilds is readily available to examine the production of clothes as well as the social relations within guilds, ship books are sometimes extremely detailed when it comes to the kinds of fabrics that were imported and exported, discussions of clothes have also been recorded in Tallinn town council’s minute books. It’s a varied bunch of sources, which on the one hand is awesome since there’s a lot of work to be done on the history of material culture and costume in seventeenth-century Estonia. On the other hand, I feel I should have 48 hours in each day to be able to go through all the material before I die.

What about our relationship to our possessions today? A few weeks ago there was an article in a Swedish newspaper about an experiment that was done as an exam project. Two people emptied their flat of everything and made everything that they considered necessary for living from scratch, such as spoons for eating and a mattress for sleeping on the floor. However, the whole thing was almost completely unproblematised beyond the usual “it’s more complex than just consumption” and “we came to the conclusion that it was sad at home without our stuff”. Additionally, what I perceived to be even more problematic was that their emptying their lives of stuff appears to have been very selective, as they kept their laptops and the subscription to a delivery of ecological vegetables as well as ate a lot of take-away in the beginning. Not only did I get the impression that they hadn’t really considered previous research in sociology and anthropology (not to name history) where the relationship between people and their material goods have been studied from a number of different theoretical angles, trying to recreate a setting where you live without anything in the 21st century and choosing to do it in your upper middle class Stockholm flat with your laptop and take-away food simply misses the point. Looking at the header picture I cannot but speculate that they most likely did not produce their designer glasses or sweaters themselves. Even though I would absolutely hate to be without my glasses, if I have the sense of sight, do I really need glasses?

I recommend reading this article about a personal relationship to things I stumbled across earlier this week, which takes a much more realistic attitude to the possessions that surround us in our daily lives. The author reflects that since she has had to go through difficult periods in her life, such as losing her job and divorcing her husband, the only things (interesting choice of word, I know) documenting her life are her material possessions. Our experiences and memories become more real and tangible when we project them onto items. It is also a way of reassuring that we don’t forget that cherished memory if we have something commemorating it that we can hold on to.

The author also writes about an intense fear of losing her sense of self, should her possessions disappear.

I fear that disposing of my possessions would dissolve me. I’m precariously balanced on an emotional seesaw. On one side, writ large, are phrases such as ‘check your privilege’ and ‘first-world problems’, which remind me that many endure far worse. On the other side is the gut-wrenching sensation that I’m being erased.

I have never had the need to part with all of my stuff and I admit that it would not be easy for me to do. I would most likely feel similar to the author. Even though I sometimes try to tell myself that things are just things and since I am not lacking anything there is no need to consume more, my things, my material world comforts me. I like my books and mugs and my bowls and my collection of shoes. My daily routine is a constant interaction between me and my things, and most of this interaction is internalised and subconscious. Isn’t it interesting that (at least in my personal experience) when kids get a new toy or some new gadget as a present the parents always tell them to take good care of it because they won’t get another one? Is this how we establish an intimate relationship with the material world?

What other effects might our stuff have on our mental worlds? A friend of mine remarked some time ago that she finds it incredibly difficult to focus on work when the physical space around her is too cluttered and untidy. I too find that more than a certain amout of stuff around me makes it difficult for me to be mentally at peace. Instead, I start thinking about reorganising and reordering the space. On the other hand, I have seen people whose offices are an absolute mess and they are not the least bit bothered by the towering heaps of papers and other gadgets, empty coffee cups and perhaps some clothes lying around. So while some people have the need to carefully order their possessions with some sort of system that makes sense to them, others simply find comfort in things simply surrounding them.

I want to be more than my things. But is it really possible to separate ourselves from our possessions?

To return to my own research, with this discussion I am by no means implying that the relationship that we have to our possessions today, is necessarily the same kind of relationship that people had to their material goods during the seventeenth century. When it comes to clothing, I will hopefully succeed in arguing the contrary - that in a society where clothing was seen as economic capital and where most people only had the clothes they were wearing and a few extra shirts if they were lucky, this relationship must have been profoundly different.

Astrid

[thedressishistory-blog]

I think all of us have felt like this one time or another. With this I conclude my week and go home.

[thedressishistory-blog]

the first

I started keeping a diary on a regular basis when I was about 8 years old. Back then it was mostly about boys and hearts with arrows in them and how we got a dog. And how my mother did not understand me (she still doesn’t, by the way). When I turned 14, I moved to the interwebs and started a blog. It was actually quite popular for a while and I also managed to cause trouble for myself because somehow some of my classmates got wind of it (it wasn’t really a secret to begin with) and let me tell you, people who are douchebags do not like to read online that they are douchebags. Oh well. In 2008 I moved to Edinburgh in Scotland to study History and English Literature and I started yet another blog to let people back home know what I was up to and how my procrastination was going. I kept it going up until the beginning of 2013, by which time I had relocated to Uppsala in Sweden to do a masters in Early Modern History in Northern Europe. However, I had less and less time to update the blog since life was happening and somehow I felt that since I was doing so much in real life there was no need to write about it any more. And that was that.

However, since starting my PhD last February quite a few people have told me that it helps them to keep a notebook at hand to write down whatever comes to mind and reflect on things they’ve read or seen. I have tried to start with that like maybe 10 times. The result is that now I have about 10 different notebooks with a few pages filled with scribble and then a big nothing. I even bought a gorgeous Moomin notebook (I love Moomins, I honestly do), wrote some inspirational hipster quotes on the first page to keep me going but well, that didn’t help. And I actually enjoy writing a lot. So what is wrong with me?

So now, a year and a half into my PhD journey I decided it was time to create my own Tumblr, this time with the explicit aim of writing about things connected to my work. One of my friends who is doing his Phd in Göteborg keeps a similar blog and I was quite inspired by him, since not only does he write well, he is also hilarious. However, I will not be held responsible if some more private matters, such as how I painted my kitchen table with chalk paint as a true DIY champion, pop up every now and then. I can’t tell how long this will last. Maybe I’ll get tired in two weeks.

I am aiming for Twitter as well, about six years too late, I know, but this is yet another of my many anxieties connected to my journey of becoming a world-famous historian (ha-ha). I feel that don’t have nearly enough time to do everything I want to do. I should be developing my database. I should be writing. I should be reading about objects and how we relate to objects. I should be reading for my upcoming theory course, which I have a feeling will be intense. And yet, somehow I decided that now is the best time to start a blog. Or whatever this Tumblr page of mine will eventually be.

Technically, I made this account like two weeks ago. But then I got annoyed by the fact that being the backwards Luddite that I am I did not even understand how most of this Tumblr stuff works. So I quit for a few weeks. Lucky I found the “new post” button, eh?

If you have any clever suggestions for a Twitter username, I am all ears.

Astrid