Reflections on wearing 18th Century clothing
Suprisingly interesting – at least to me, and to the person speaking as well. This young woman wore 18th Century clothing for five years, and she talks about the experience. The talking part starts at 2:08.
The small tattoo on her left arm is, of course, not an example of historical accuracy. However, tattooed ladies were sideshow attractions in the circuses of the 1800 and 1900s:
These “Tattooed Ladies” were covered — with the exception of their faces, hands, necks, and other readily visible areas — with various images inked into their skin. In order to lure the crowd, the earliest ladies, like Betty Broadbent and Nora Hildebrandt told tales of captivity; they usually claimed to have been taken hostage by Native Americans that tattooed them as a form of torture. However, by the late 1920s the sideshow industry was slowing and by the late 1990s the last tattooed lady was out of business.
Just in time for the practice to go mainstream.
And this post wouldn’t be complete without…
I do recall that, when making the newer Tom Jones, Benjamin Whitrow (who also played Mr Bennett) said that the clothes were extremely comfortable.
But she’s wrong about women not having to worry about their appearance. We know this from Jane Austin. Catherine Moreland is agonizing over what to wear; in the narration we are told that, had she asked her brother, he’d have said that Mr Tilney won’t notice.
This is a couple who try to live as much as possible in a 19th century manner. You can follow them on Facebook. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9PleQ-ePpSE
In Korea, traditional pre-western clothing, hanbok, has become a popular fashion trend (tinyurl.com/yxgujve2).
And in China, traditionally styled clothing, called “hanfu,” is all the rage (tinyurl.com/yyljuurg).
Coincidence? Does all this have some broader social or political meaning? As someone whose ignorance of fashion is unmatched, I can safely claim ignorance.
Hanfu is largely affectation. Funnily the CCP has to keep a tight rein on Hanfu fans as they fear most any attack on them from the Greater Authenticity / More Chinese than Thou Flank. Perhaps buried in there is some inchoate longing for the Golden Age (generally held to be Tang/Song) or just history that’s from a distance less sordid.
Hanbok a bit affected too, although Korean women never stopped dressing traditionally at least some of the time.
Thailand recently went through a craze of dressing up as Ayutthaya Period nobility after a period soap opera became very popular. But walk far down to the quiet end of a Soi in Central Bangkok and you are likely to see some of the people walking around at dusk wearing those checkered sarongs. As old as time.
Perhaps there’s a tiny inchoate smidgin of Revolt Against the Modern World in the blinged out old time clothing trends, but suspect most of it is East Asian penchant for quickly picking up on trends amplified to the nth by social media.
Japanese, I think are the the most natural when it comes to wearing traditional clothes. It’s just a given in certain circumstances, never died (wee rough patch during Meiji/Taisho yes) and was going strong long before selfies and instagram, let alone the execrable TikTok.
Weekend at a Ryokan, Onsen, or just a night out at the fireworks during summer will bring this home. Or just engage a carpenter’s crew for some home renovations — you might be surprised what they show up wearing!
I also like to see very old Chinese going about in the daytime wearing what are effectively pajamas. Increasingly rare sight though.
And I forgot the Vietnamese. The Aoidai never died and from following r/Vietnam on reddit there seems to be a thing for dressing up as scholars and aristocrats and being photographed.
So I guess it’s going to be OK for me to dress up in khaki and pith helmet and engage some native bearers.
All those layers would be good in the winter, especially considering the heating available back then. Anyone who has relied on fireplaces during electrical outages in cold winters knows what I am talking about.
Ha! I sincerely was singing the “Lydia” song to myself while reading the post. I thought I ought to add it to a comment, but then I got to the end of the post and saw neo beat me too it.
“You can learn a lot from Lydia!”
Don’t forget Scotsmen. I don’t think the ancient kilt has ever gone out of style. I don’t recall Scottish women wearing traditional folk garb for everyday wear, however, but I may be mistaken.
I think a lot of earlier fashion was better designed to accentuate women and men’s bodies. Far too many Americans today walk around in ill fitting, styleless clothes. Shame.
Gringo, apparently layers have their place in warm weather too. I was visiting the Castillo de San Marco in Saint Augustine, Florida on a typically hot and humid day. I was wearing a polo shirt and shorts and commented to an employee dressed as a Spanish soldier, “Great outfit, but I’ll bet I’m cooler than you.” He corrected me and proceeded to give me a five minute lecture on how layers of loose, light fabric created a cooling effect.
@Rufus:
No True Scotsman… 🙂
Rufus T. Firefly, I once was hitchhiking in Needles, California in August. I believe the temperature was 115. I recalled desert Arabs in woolen robes, and put on a sweater. I was fairly comfortable in the half hour or so it took to get a ride.
But layers in 90ish weather in San Agustine FL- like TX in summer. Maybe I need to try that.
It’s not your personal cup of tea, I’m sure Neo, but I would be remiss if I were to let this thread go by without mentioning Rory Gallagher’s classic ‘Tattoo’d Lady’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkleKuAshLA
As a Gentleman Who Sews, some time ago I learned about this charming young man in Bristol, UK, who wears Regency clothing full time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b01S7EBQztk
I also follow Bernadette Banner, a dress historian and former costumer on Broadway, who makes and wears mostly late-19th Century clothing. She has at least one video all about “no, corsets were *not* horrible and uncomfortable, that’s modern propaganda”.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSHtaUm-FjUps090S7crO4Q
I liked the part about women not wearing underwear.
You get tired of being cold. Eventually, you get really tired of it. And you’ll do practically anything to get a couple of more degrees. People used to have lap robes which were either left in convenient places or carried. You could, among other things, put your hands under them. One of the more recent pieces on Lincoln shows him walking away from the camera with what looks like a throw rug, , maybe a foot and a half wide and four feet long hanging down his back. For when he next sat someplace.
The pointy hats worn by medieval women with the veils hanging therefrom were to protect their faces from the heat of an energetic fire next to which they would stand…to get warm. Close enough that unprotected skin would be damaged.
Watching Downton Abbey made me wonder. The guys were always in three layers and the women in what mostly looked like, if not summer, then surely light clothes and the rooms always had a fire in the fireplaces. Disconnect there. York is on the same latitude as the southern shore of Hudson Bay. Paris as the northern shore of Lake Superior. Marseilles the same as Boston. The French go south in the summer.
Renaissance paintings show people dressed in what looks like layers of blankets. And big, floppy hats for indoors.
Brit fiction, up until recently, always had a scene where the characters were in front of a fireplace with bad weather outside. Readers demanded it without knowing they did.
The lady is correct about beginning her lecture with the response to cold.
I wear period clothing when I do author events – late Victorian bustle, Natural Form to Edwardian – with the full corset and underthings, and it is really quite comfortable. The corset really helps uphold generous boobage. And it is really nice now elegant the whole hat-and-gloves-and period accessories make it all. The men that I meet while dressed in vintage come over all gallant and courteous – it’s amazing.
Anyone who has lived in the south for any length of time knows that it’s much easier to stand the sun when you’re fully covered with fairly loose clothing, light long sleeves, everything in cotton if possible.
I admire this lady’s passion for re-creating historical reality.
It’s not very often that one sees a push-up bra that starts at the waistline!
The Gulf Stream makes Great Britain reasonably habitable. Cold kills far more people than heat. But global warming!
om I talked to a guy who went to school in London…an American. Asked him about the winter. “It gets into your bones and wraps all around you,”, he said, referring to the temperatures.
Still further east, the moderating influence of the Gulf Stream is lost and they developed ceramic stoves, far more efficient and economical than fireplaces. Had to.
And in Northern China, they had the Kang: basically a bed / day bed you lit a fire (accessed from outside the house) underneath. Gets so cold up North that the common expression for bathing has connotations of ‘splash / dab’ whereas down in the South it connotes rather more the idea of sloshing it on.
Now I’m dimly remembering the Jack London tale about the old Eskimo talking to a trader/trapper about his son who was hanged for murder but is comforted by the words of a missionary who once told him that his son was going somewhere hot.
Talking of heating, it’s kind of mind-boggling that the hypocaust was lost during the Dark Ages. How messed up must things have been that something so convenient and rather low tech wasn’t kept up.
No mention of what it must have taken to keep garments neat and clean. Mrs. Listo keeps a constant eye on me, calling out the smallest stain; then into the wash it goes. (Pride of ownership, she says.) I wonder then about period films, and even this video, the clothing having hardly a stain or crumb.
Zaphod, regarding Eskimos and some place warm:
I’ve always imagined the folks who found North America via the land bridge almost certainly sent exploratory groups south, to see if there was habitable land there. How else did Incas and Mayans and Sioux and Cherokee… get to where they were? I imagine the deal was, send an Eskimo scouting party south, if they find more favorable living conditions come back and tell the rest and all the Eskimos will follow. Must be that none of the expeditions ever bothered returning to tell their brethren.
Zaphod,
Regarding the hypocaust, it’s been in Europe and Canada for awhile and becoming more common in the U.S., a honeycomb of pipes carrying warm water under a floor (almost always wood or tile). Driveways with such systems under concrete are even used for melting snow on some homes.
Estoy Listo:
One of the things mentioned in the video is that it was the linen undergarments that tended to absorb sweat, etc., and I beieve they were washed much more easily and often.
See this for information about personal hygiene, as well as the linen undergarments. You can find more more about it here.
Just an aside regarding female tattoos.
There is a series about building the transcontinental railroad, Hell on Wheels, which I found to be particularly dedicated to visual accuracy. I thought it pretty impressive except for the first time I saw the character “Eva” (played by Robin MacLeavy). They showed her with a particularly obvious chin tattoo. My reaction was, well, so much for historical accuracy. Sometime later I stumbled across the 19th century photograph of Olive Oatman, and to my surprise there it was, the historical reference of that same tattoo.
I’m not implying that Neo’s comment about the arm tattoo is incorrect, hardly so. I’m just noting that we make so many stereotypical assumptions about the past that we oftentimes forget that in these earlier eras people didn’t stop being people. We often react to the discovery of details from past societies like an adolescent first reacting to the discovery of sex: “You mean, Mom and Dad???? . . . . Gramma and Grampa????!!!!”
(note: Sorry I can’t provide photos, but the images of these women will pop right up if you do an internet search by name)
T:
Actually, I wrote in the post that the tattoo returned during the 1800s. But the video is about the 18th Century, which is the 1700s. And there were no tattoos here at that time.
Rufus and Zaphod:
The under floor house heating system using a burner fueled by wood or coal(?) hearth is also used in South Korea but has been known to kill entire families by carbon monoxide (CO). (Does North Korea have heat?)
Hydronic systems (circulation of hot water) through tubing embedded under the floor in grout or affixed beneath a wood floor is a high end heating option that has replaced electric heated floor systems IIRC. It can be efficient (not the same as inexpensive) if a heat pump is used to warm the water.
What were normal clothes were when I was just starting out in adult life are now considered literally archaic. I may be the last lawyer on the Westside of LA who wore a suit and tie to work every day, b.c. (before Covid). People would frequently ask me, “Why do you wear a suit? Who does that, anymore?” Basically, because that’s what lawyers wore in Philadelphia when I started out, and I’m too damned ornery to change. (I bought a couple of seersucker suits, which were normal summer wear, and they are much more comfortable than a lot of clothes people wear. On those very, very rare days when I have to go to court, I can wear a seersucker in the summer and be perfectly dressed and very comfortable, while the other lawyers were looking very out-of-sorts.) Also, because when I walk into a meeting, I don’t have to fight for a place in the meeting hierarchy — everybody knows I’m the lawyer. Alas, I have now fallen into evil ways, and when I go to the office a few times a week, I wear Hawaiian shirts and khakis, and there is a high probability I may continue that whenever Gavin Newsome lets us out of confinement.
I won’t spoil the punchline, but talking about dressing for cold weather & migrating Eskimos* triggered one of my favorite Robert Service poems.
https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-cremation-of-sam-mcgee/
*(would YOU have gone back, once you found a warm location, just to get the cousins who always complained that you weren’t sharing your blubber fairly?)
Neo,
As I mentioned I wasn’t disagreeing. I understood the timeline. I was just pointing out how humans, including myself, have a tendency to be somewhat culturally chauvinistic. We can’t conceive of past societies doing what we do without the technology we have. A good example is the late medieval brassiere (13th century IIRC) that was discovered several years ago. The article’s author marveled at how much it looked like its modern counterpart. Well, women’s bodies haven’t changed THAT much in 800 years, so if one is fabricating something for a woman’s body then why would it NOT look similar to its modern equivalent? Why the astonishment? It speaks more to our modern cultural narcissism than anything else.
Well, T – that was an interesting find!
I love learning about historic clothing (used to do theater in college) and you are right: there are only so many things that one can do to cover certain parts of the anatomy.
https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/medieval-underwear-bras-pants-and-lingerie-in-the-middle-ages/
“This article was first published in the August 2012 issue of BBC History Magazine ”
https://rosaliegilbert.com/bras.html
“The Medieval Woman”
This site has lots and lots and lots of pages for different parts of clothing.
The question arises: if 18th C. clothing was that much better . . . then why did she stop wearing it everyday?