The Cut of Women’s Clothes: 1600–1930
Abstract
Each period in the history of costume has produced its own characteristic line and silhouette, derived from a cut and construction which varies considerably from age to age. Here are patterns taken from actual dresses, many of them rare museum specimens, illustrated by sketches of the dresses. There are notes on the production of women's dress, with references to early technical books and journals, together with diagrams from some of them. Numerous illustrations show the dresses as worn complete with their hairstyles, jewelry, decorations and accessories.
Patterns serve as the blueprint for each and every article of clothing that people wear. Therefore, it is essential to have a fundamental understanding of the concepts that underlie pattern making. This chapter provides a comprehensive discussion of the process of pattern making. Guidance on how to construct essential blocks for basic garment components, how to choose the appropriate equipment and materials, and how to precisely measure one’s body are included in this chapter. A brief history of the pattern making is also provided in the chapter to familiarize the readers with historical developments. A section has been dedicated to understanding of body measurements and sizing systems in apparel industry. The chapter is concluded with pattern grading and sizing including methods of grading and pattern adjustment for different body types. A careful reading of this chapter will help you acquiring the basic knowledge and skills required to translate ideas into wearable works.
Aujourd’hui, nous connaissons principalement deux techniques de création et de réalisation vestimentaire, habituellement opposées : le sur-mesure et le prêt-à-porter. Alors que le prêt-à-porter impose à l’individu de correspondre à une taille et de s’y adapter, le sur-mesure s’adapte à la personne. Le projet de recherche de Jeanne Vicerial autour de sa Clinique vestimentaire fait converger ces deux approches vers de nouveaux systèmes de création et réalisations vestimentaires, formant alors un nouveau paradigme : le « prêt-à-mesure ». Un paradigme qui allie rapidité de confection du prêt-à-porter et caractère unique et spécifique du vêtement sur-mesure, où le vêtement-objet est en lien avec le corps de celui qui le porte. Un système de création et réalisations vestimentaires fondé sur une nouvelle technique d’agencement filaire, en partie bio-inspirée : le « tricotissage », entre le tricot – uni-filaire – et le tissage, qui permet l’obtention d’un textile, ou d’un tissu organique avec pour exemple le tissu musculaire humain. En collaboration avec le département de mécatronique des MINES ParisTech – PSL, dirigé par Yvon Gaignebet, le projet de recherche Clinique vestimentaire a notamment abouti à l’élaboration d’un prototype de table de « tricotissage ». Outil de création et machine de réalisation, la table de « tricotissage » est un système mécanique piloté par informatique pour « tricotisser » des vêtements sur-mesure à échelle semi-industrielle sans générer de chute. Une première rencontre avec la clientèle pour une prise de mesure manuelle amorce le dialogue, par communication verbale (envies et sensations consciemment explicitées), mais également non-verbale (postures et comportements). Des mesures qui prennent en compte non seulement des considérations anatomiques, mais aussi des éléments anthropologiques, physiologiques ou encore psycho-sociologiques. L’exécution du vêtement par la table de tricotissage est alors faite selon les mesures dimensionnelles du corps traduites et interprétées numériquement, et commande électroniquement les réglages de la machine. Lors de l’exécution, les interactions manuelles restent possibles pour ajustements, la machine est également un outil qui laisse la place aux gestes, renouant avec les interactions classiques de l’artisanat. Un artisanat numérique avec pour objectif final de concevoir sur-mesure un vêtement, sans chute, avec un savoir-faire centré sur la précision de la « coupe » et de l’assemblage, et obtenir un résultat vestimentaire personnalisé avec et pour la clientèle. Ce travail de recherche se poursuit avec Sculptures vestimentaires, pour redonner aux femmes leur parole sur leur vision de la mode, des normes et des mesures. Plus récemment, Quarantaine vestimentaire, était une réponse formelle et visuelle à la situation sanitaire lorsque fermeture et distanciation étaient les mots d’ordre. Chaque jour pendant quarante jours, une œuvre était créée à partir du seul corps disponible, le corps confiné de son autrice.
Today, the two techniques for designing and making clothes are generally opposed to each other: made-to-measure and ready-to-wear. While the latter imposes a size category and requires the individual to adapt, the former is adapted to the person. The research involved in Jeanne Vicerial’s Clinique vestimentaire merges the two approaches, converging to form new systems for the design and making of clothes, creating a new paradigm: “ready-to-measure.” This model combines the speed of ready-to-wear with the unique, specific nature of made-to-measure, in which the clothing-object is connected to the body of the person who wears it. This system of designing and making clothes is based on a new approach to composing thread, partly “bio-inspired”: tricotissage, or “knitting-weaving,” between knitting—a single thread—and weaving, which enables the creation of a textile, assembled in a similar way to human muscular tissue. In collaboration with the mechatronics department at MINES ParisTech – PSL, led by Yvon Gaignebet, the Clinique vestimentaire research project has developed a prototype knitting-weaving machine. A tool for creation and production, the unit is a computer-driven mechanical system for knitting-weaving made-to measure clothing at a semi-industrial scale with no waste. Dialogue begins with the first encounter with the customer for taking measurements, through verbal communication (consciously expressed desires and sensations) but also non-verbal communication (postures and behavior). Measures that take into account not only anatomical considerations but also anthropological, physiological, and psycho-sociological elements. The production of the garment by the knitting-weaving table is then done according to the body’s dimensions translated and interpreted digitally and electronically. During the production process, manual interactions remain possible for adjustments; the machine is also a tool and leaves room for interventions, reviving the classic interactions of the craft. A digital craft with the ultimate goal of designing a custom garment, without remnants, with a know-how focused on the precision of the "cut" and assembly, and delivering personalized clothing with and for the customer. More recently, Sculptures vestimentaires continues this research, aiming to give women their place and voice with regards to fashion, norms, and sizing. More recently, Quarantaine is a formal and visual response to the health crisis, at a time when closing and distancing are the order of the day. A work is being created every day for 40 days using the only body available—the confined body of its author.
Hoy en día, las dos técnicas predominantes para diseñar y confeccionar ropa suelen ser opuestas: la confección a medida y el prêt-à-porter. Mientras que la segunda impone una categoría de tamaño y exige que el individuo se ajuste a ella, la primera se adapta a la persona. La investigación realizada en la Clinique vestimentaire de Jeanne Vicerial fusiona los dos enfoques para crear nuevos sistemas de diseño y confección de ropa, creando un nuevo paradigma: el prêt-à-mesurer (o «listo para medir»). Se trata de un modelo que combina la rapidez del prêt-à- porter con el carácter único y específico de la confección a medida, en la que la prenda encaja con el cuerpo de la persona que la lleva. Este sistema de diseño y confección de prendas se basa en un nuevo enfoque de la composición del hilo, en parte «bioinspirado»: el tricotissage, o «tricotar-tejer», a caballo entre el tricotar -un solo hilo- y el tejer, que permite crear un tejido, ensamblado de forma similar al tejido muscular humano. En colaboración con el departamento de mecatrónica de MINES ParisTech - PSL, dirigido por Yvon Gaignebet, el proyecto de investigación Clinique vestimentaire ha desarrollado un prototipo de máquina de tejer. Esta herramienta de creación y producción funciona como un sistema mecánico controlado por ordenador que permite tejer prendas a medida, a escala semiindustrial y sin material sobrante. El diálogo empieza con el primer encuentro con el cliente para tomar medidas, a través de la comunicación verbal (deseos y sensaciones expresados conscientemente), pero también de la comunicación no verbal (posturas y comportamiento). Las medidas tienen en cuenta no solo consideraciones anatómicas, sino también elementos antropológicos, fisiológicos y psicosociológicos. La confección de la prenda por parte de la máquina de tricotar-tejer se realiza entonces según las dimensiones del cuerpo traducidas e interpretadas digital y electrónicamente. Durante el proceso de confección se pueden realizar ajustes a través de interacciones manuales. La máquina también es una herramienta y deja espacio para las intervenciones, reviviendo las interacciones tradicionales del oficio. Un oficio digital con el objetivo final de diseñar una prenda a medida, sin retales, con un saber hacer centrado en la precisión del «corte» y el ensamblaje, y la entrega de prendas personalizadas con y para el cliente. Más recientemente, Sculptures vestimentaires ha continuado esta investigación, con el objetivo de dar a las mujeres voz y lugar en la moda, las normas y el tallaje. Además, Quarantaine vestimentaire ha ofrecido una respuesta formal y visual a la crisis sanitaria, en un momento en que el aislamiento y el distanciamiento están a la orden del día. Se ha creado una obra cada día durante cuarenta días utilizando el único cuerpo disponible: el cuerpo confinado de su autora.
The making of fashionable women's dress in Georgian England necessitated an inordinate amount of manual labour. From the mantuamakers and seamstresses who wrought lengths of silk and linen into garments, to the artists and engravers who disseminated and immortalised the resulting outfits in print and on paper, Georgian garments were the products of many busy hands. This Element centres the sartorial hand as a point of connection across the trades which generated fashionable dress in the eighteenth century. Crucially, it engages with recreation methodologies to explore how the agency and skill of the stitching hand can inform understandings of craft, industry, gender, and labour in the eighteenth century. The labour of stitching, along with printmaking, drawing, and painting, composed a comprehensive culture of making and manual labour which, together, constructed eighteenth-century cultures of fashionable dress.
The analysis of historic garments can reveal hidden information of past construction and reconstruction processes. Historically many garments, owing to the shifting value of clothing both economically and culturally, were unpicked, repaired, restyled or re-fashioned. This is no longer the case. With the main stay of contemporary fashion dominated by transglobal corporations owning multiple brands, the cost of clothing is cheaper than ever before. It is well documented that the current method of disposing of used clothing is unsustainable (Morley et al., Recycling of low grade clothing waste. Oakdene Hollins Ltd, Salvation Army Trading Company Ltd, Nonwovens Innovation & Research Ltd. 2006; Allwood et al., Well dressed: The present and future of the sustainability of clothing and textiles in the UK. Cambridge University Press, 2006). In the UK alone clothing of an estimated worth of £140 million goes to landfill every year (WRAP, Valueing our clothes: The cost of UK fashion, 2017). Stoked by human desire and demand driven by a fashion system built on economic growth and obsolescence, worldwide these statistics are set to increase. By 2030 clothing consumption is projected to rise by 63% (Fletcher & Tham, Earth logic. JJ Charitable Trust, 2019). This chapter summarises my practice-led research into historic methods of past reconstruction and re-fashioning techniques. Through primary research and practical application, I discuss if a solution can be found to the growing expanse of unwanted garments by investigating how our predecessors valued and reused their clothes.
This paper discusses a costume complex from the burial of the Princess Natalya Alexeevna Romanova, the sister of Emperor Peter II. The burial of the young Princess took place in a dynastic necropolis of the Ascension Monastery of the Moscow Kremlin in January 1729, among dozens of tombs of Great Duchesses, Queens And Princesses. Two hundred years later, with the destruction of the monastery, by the efforts of museum and scientific staff, all the sarcophagi of the necropolis moved to the Moscow Kremlin Museums. Here is where their research began as part of a large project “Historical Necropolis” (supervisor T. D. Panova). The costume complex from the burial of Princess Natalya Romanova was studied and restored in 2008–2010 under the highest category restorer in textile and leather N. P. Sinitsyna`s guidance. However, not all the items from the burial have survived to our days — only the princess's dress, her order things, stockings and part of a heavily ruined headdress have been preserved. The other part of the costume complex has been lost for various reasons and at different times (Grand Duke's Mantle, funeral crown, wig, shoes, etc.). This research came as an attempt to present the funeral costume complex in its integrity.
Fashion is a field fundamentally enmeshed with bodies and materiality. After the global and material turns for history, I contend that we are now experiencing the “embodied turn”: a development that recognizes the processes of doing, making and remaking, and reconstructing as a fruitful methodology with quantifiable, academically valid results. The pioneers of material clothing reconstruction changed dress history and fashion studies. From their lead, new generations of scholars are extending the original approaches, while historical re-enactors using their findings are now an established global community.
This article explores how remaking the clothed past can yield unique and useful research insights. How is the embodied methodology of making and wearing reconstructed clothing being done, and in innovative ways? Which directions might this take us; and how do new technologies advance the possibilities of enquiry using reconstruction? My discussion of these questions offers broad-ranging examples of the scholarly search for embodied or experiential dress knowledge to be discovered through re-making the past. I draw on personal experience of re-creating historical clothing, and current doctoral work examining what can be learnt from experimental archaeology to suggest “experimental history” is an equally valid concept. The article also outlines the need for dress and fashion scholars’ more extensive theoretical engagement with methodologies of re-creation.
https://doi.org/10.1080/00405000.2019.1621042
Digitisation of historical costumes is an actual multidisciplinary area of research that uses science-based methods of reconstruction in virtual reality. The main aim of this study was to create a method for generating numerical replicas of skirts of the late 1850 s and the1860s. We applied two-dimensional and three-dimensional software to parameterise all the elements of the skirts and recreate them layer by layer. Computer modelling allowed us to gain insight into the interrelation between the parameters of cage crinolines, skirt construction and the behaviour of textile materials on the crinoline’s surface. A replica of a historical costume was generated and the similarity between the historical prototype and its replica was proved. The application of computer graphics tools for the reconstruction of the visible and invisible elements of historical costumes can advance their scientific study. The reconstructions can be an effective instrument for teaching, enriching museum collections and producing online presentations.
This article showcases experimental dress reconstruction as a valuable research tool for the historian. It presents a case study detailing how two underskirts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, French Farthingale Rolls and French Wheel Farthingales, were reconstructed using historical techniques and experimental methodologies. The first section outlines my methodological approach to reconstructing these ephemeral garments, exploiting archival and printed records, visual sources, and knowledge of seventeenth-century sewing techniques. The second section focuses on the experience of reconstruction and shows how this process allows the historian to form tacit knowledge. This section also raises questions and provides answers about artisanal design practices such as reflective rationality, embodied experiences, and tacit skills that cannot be accessed in other ways. Finally, this article shows how reconstruction can inform understandings of the embodied experiences of dressing and wearing. Dressing the female body in the reconstructed underskirts discussed in this article made it possible to observe the garments’ practical realities and challenge polemical historical sources concerning fashionable sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European dress.
The young colonial city of Toronto was a landing place for many newcomers to Canada, and was a city of opportunity. The steady growth in population between 1834 and 1861 afforded women employment outside of the home, notably in the needle-trades (i.e. the roles involved in the manufacture of clothing). This article argues that the needle-trades were a significant source of employment for women in pre-industrial period Toronto and explores the social and professional distinctions between ‘dressmakers’ and ‘seamstresses’, by enumerating and aggregating women from the City Directories and 1861 census. Several biographical case studies are included to demonstrate the variety of women employed in the needle-trades, based on information from the primary source data.
This paper documents the journey of several research initiatives, which focused upon creative pattern cutting. Instigated by a peer-reviewed, journal paper entitled, Insufficient Allure: The Luxurious Art and Cost of Creative Pattern Cutting (Almond, 2010), the endeavors attempted to elevate concepts of tacit knowledge and the making process as a form of legitimate, academic enquiry. The projects culminated in the first peer-reviewed conference dedicated to the discipline: The First International Symposium for Creative Pattern Cutting, held at University of Huddersfield in the UK, in February 2013. To trace the impact of the research initiatives, I consider how the skills of the pattern cutter, clothe the body with a myriad of shapes and silhouettes. I discuss this in relation to the different pattern cutting techniques that can be utilized to realize three-dimensional form and ways in which the research enterprises have arguably elevated the professional position of the cutter in terms of esteem and remuneration. In order to assess the impact of these initiatives, both within the fashion industry and in the emerging arena of fashion research, I identify some of the different research approaches utilized in practice-based enquiry and how results can be arrived at from hands-on experience, inspiring us to develop new ways to pattern cut.
It is considered that jacket was widespread in the 19th century due to its simple and convenient production technique. This study aims to explore the western women's jacket in the late 19th century, which is the basis of modern women's outwear, and we focused on the patterns and construction, the technical aspect of the jacket. We researched pattern books and preserved costume materials, and the study methods are as follows: First, we analyzed the pattern of the jackets from the pattern books and preserved costumes. Second, we analyzed the construction of the jackets from the preserved costumes and compared it to previous researches. The study results are as follows: 19th century jacket consisted of a bodice, a back bodice, a side panel, two-piece sleeve and a collar. The front bodice had cuttings and a dart to make the jacket fit the shape of the body and the two-pieced leg of mutton sleeve, puffed at the shoulder. Various styles of collar and neckline existed. The pattern suggested diverse ways of designing a jacket, such as cutting with partition, dart and pattern expansion that focused on three-dimensional effect at that time.
The slim, simple chemise of the 1800s came into fashion at the outbreak of the French Revolution. Believed to be a sartorial tribute to democracy modeled on an ancient Greek women’s gown, the dress became a staple of neoclassical style. In fact, however, its genealogy is much more complex. It was first worn by the French queen, whose reference was Caribbean, not Greek. Thereafter, Napoléon used the dress in an imperial context, shifting its meaning from Greece to Rome in line with his political agenda. Women’s magazines depicted the dress differently still: they presented exotic accessories to go along with the dress, such as liana-vines, Oriental-style tunics, and chain-link necklaces. Looking at these accessories, and at magazine descriptions, backgrounds, and stories, this essay shows how polyvalent the dress was. It brought to discussion a number of changing ideas about social politics, including colonialism, Jewish emancipation, and the abolition of slavery.
This article examines the hybrid imagery of the Orient exhibited in two mandarin-style robes made by the Japanese company Takashimaya for export in the early twentieth century. I argue that these robes embodied two parallel and interactive impulses in a specific historical period: Japan's political quest for national identity dovetailed with the Western cultural undercurrent searching for renewed exoticism.
Purpose
– Empire style fashion, Greek-Roman style robe with bare shoulder and chest and short sleeved with long gloves which created a slim silhouette, was worn even in winter season in Europe, where average temperature is 0-5°C. Most women suffered with catching cold and thousands caught flu and tuberculosis of the lungs, called muslin disease. The purpose of this paper is to find out clothing insulation of the robe by measuring the thermal resistance and to guess how cold they felt in this robe in winter time.
Design/methodology/approach
– The authors performed the investigation on original robe shape with based on historical evidence and data, such as drawings, sketches, pattern books and sewing books, and reproduced a representative robe costume and tested its thermal insulation. The fabrics of robe were thin wool, silk and cotton following the literature evidence and preserved costume. Thermal insulation of the robes was measured using thermal manikin with the test method ISO 15831. The authors analyzed the thermal insulation of reconstructed robes with an inner cotton breech as for daily use and tested them wrapped with cashmere shawl on manikin shoulder as for severe cold weather.
Findings
– The dress robes had the range of 0.61-0.67 clo regardless of the type of fabric materials, and 0.80-0.81 clo with the cashmere shawl. These values were not enough for women to keep body temperature or comfort in winter time.
Originality/value
– This study combined fashion historic theory for costume reproduction with clothing science and technology for thermal insulation. Combination of costume history, construction technology and measurement engineering is the ingenious idea, and the combination of historical and scientific research evidences interdisciplinary originality.
This paper examines the place of the Aphrodite Kallipygos statue in European aesthetics in the early modern period (ca. 1300-1800) and traces the impact it may have had on dress in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. The study contextualizes the sculpture within the discipline of art history and the field of dress studies. It focuses on the unfitted tunic dress cinched below the bust, and on how some chemise dresses came to be worn in a new way in the 1790s. At this time new embodiment practices emerged in French fashion. A new columnar silhouette was on the rise that paid homage to the "natural body" seen in statuary, and cinching below the bust enhanced the delineation of individual breasts. Subsequently we witness the progressive lessening or elimination of voluminous underpinnings, allowing the controversial delineation of the lower body through clothes to take place, and the rise of a new erogenous zone, the buttocks, which were hallmarks of the Aphrodite Kallipygos. Through this article, the authors aim to demonstrate with visual and written sources that this statue was sufficiently known, admired, and copied to have had an effect on late-eighteenth-century dress behaviors.
The clothing trade in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provides examples across the spectrum of industrial organization, and it thus offers an opportunity to compare activities and to account for the adoption of different systems. This article, based on extensive archival research in the records of corset-making companies, shows clearly the relationship between the corset industry's ability to standardize production and the adoption of operations on a larger scale than was possible in other sectors of the women's garment industry.
The objective of this study was to increase the understanding of the relationship of garment cut to the fabric's shaping around the body, as developed by Madeleine Vionnet. Six Vionnet gowns were selected from 40 artifacts attributed to Vionnet to illustrate aspects of Vionnet's cut. Gowns are discussed individually with references to similarities and differences in cut. The grain in relationship to the fabric's orientation on the body, the use of slashing to create body contour shaping, and the use of insets exemplify the Vionnet cut.
The goal of this research was to determine whether sewing techniques changed with changing styles of women's outerwear; with different fabrics in a single style; with changing technology; and with varying recommendations in how-to-sew literature. Researchers examined 100 garments from 23 museums in 5 states; 8 distinct styles, spanning 1800 to 1869. A few sewing techniques were unique to individual styles of outerwear (dresses and wraps); many techniques were shared by two or three adjacent styles of outerwear. Recommendations of sewing techniques were followed frequently, ignored occasionally. Sewing technology, especially the sewing machine, was slow to be adopted in making women's outerwear; even dresses of the 1860s were often partly hand sewn. Fabrics made very little difference in sewing techniques chosen within a single style of women's dress or wrap.
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