Everything here was either found in my mother's costume jewelry stash or was purchased for less than $20 on eBay or Etsy.
Within the last dozen months or so, I’ve discovered a new obsession: Vintage costume jewelry. I’ve also discovered I’m a die-hard Trifari girl. I love me some vintage Trifari! Mostly because the designs are eerily suitable for SCA purposes (see the all the laurel themed stuff in that picture to the left?), and as far as costume jewelry goes, they’re made really well and are still affordably priced. In fact, I was wearing a necklace with my 16th c. stuff for years which I had liberated from my mother’s jewelry collection before making the discovery that it was a Trifari piece. Something similar happened recently with a fleur de lis pin that Francis wears in one of his 16th c. hats… Turns out it’s also Trifari.
Anyway, here’s a protip: If you’re looking for this sort of jewelry to use in your costuming, Trifari is a great name to remember. Also, other brands like Monet, Avon, Sarah Coventry, Florenza (more suitable in general for 18th and 19th c. styles), Coro, Napier, and Lisner all have affordable historically suitable designs and can be found easily on eBay and Etsy.
Here’s a few more photos of the overgown, since people seem curious about the construction. I’ve also sketched out a really rough and in no way to-scale pattern for the dress, which may prove useful to people who are interested in making this type of gown.
Wrap gown, 1490-1500. White wool, lined in linen and silk, edged in black wool.
I’ve been wanting to make a transitional* era wrap gown for YEARS and finally, with 12th Night behind me, I decided to just go and do it. Crazy as it sounds, I started patterning the gown Friday afternoon and finished the hem Saturday evening, meaning it took me just over 24 hours (including sleep and valuable web surfing time) to complete. It’s not that big of a deal, honestly… I modified one of my basic sloper patterns for the upper portion of the gown, and once the mock-up was worked out, the rest of it came together quickly. I finally have enough of a pattern library that I can go in and grab basic patterns for bodices and sleeves and modify them with minimal effort to get the right shape I need for pretty much any era between the 14th and 18th centuries, so that’s a huge part of why it doesn’t take me all that long to make something like this. The hard part (the pattern drafting/draping and fitting) has already been taken care of. Honestly, the hardest part of the whole endeavor was to track down the source of the image I based the gown on.
Ninya Mikhaila brought this book to my attention when I mentioned on Facebook that I was looking for more images of wrap gowns from 1490-1510. That started us off pooling our images for wrap gowns (she had a collection and I had a collection, so we joined forces and made a public gallery on the FB group Elizabethan Costume, which you can see here. NOTE: If you choose to download these images, please include all the relevant information like date, title, and source in your file, because I have HAD IT UP TO HERE with finding images online with no actual source information with them. I spent a couple of days tracking down a number of these images that people had posted online without attributing them correctly, and let me tell you, I was not feeling very warm and fuzzy after that ordeal. So, please, pretty pretty please, put correct attribution info the the title of your jpeg before up loading to the intarwebz. If you don’t, I will find where you live and send Trystan over to bite you.) Finally, after much searching, I managed to track down the image at the Bridgeman Art Library, where for a modest sum of $50 I could purchase a high resolution digital copy for personal use only. Uh, thanks but no thanks. (Though I hasten to add that the Bridgeman Library rep I emailed with was very helpful and should I ever need to purchase anything through them, I’d be happy to do so. When I’m rich.) At least with the cover of A History of Private Life II, I was able to get enough detail to see what I needed to see with the pair of wrap gowns on the ladies standing in the back.
Back of the gown, showing the seam treatment in the bodice and the pleated skirt. Note: The pleats still need to be padded to hang correctly.
Armed with twice as many images as I had before, and with a copy of The Queen’s Servants which I had gotten for my birthday, I set about figuring out how to make this gown happen. The Queen’s Servants doesn’t deal with this specific style of gown, but I did find it really helpful in contextualizing how this particular era of clothing was designed and constructed. I ended up making my gown along similar lines to the author’s suggestion on page 42, which theorized that there was a type of gown that had no seam at the waist in front, but one at the back where the back skirt was pleated into, to give added fullness. This worked beautifully!
Even though the overgown is done, and all of the necessary undies are as well, I still need to make the headgear. I’ll be working on that this week, and I’ll post a full recap of the outfit and all the layers next weekend, when the outfit will make its debut at the Crosston Dance Ball.
*Transitional era in this context refers to the period from roughly 1475 to 1500, when women’s dress styles in England and France began to transition from the medieval silhouette to “Tudor” silhouette. Smart asses will be quick to mention that “Tudor” actually applies to this period since Henry Tudor ascended to the throne of England in 1485, therefore anything from 1485 to 1603 counts as “Tudor”. :P
Guess how I spent my birthday yesterday? If you guessed “Sick in bed and complaining on Facebook every hour about how sick you were and how it wasn’t fair you were sick on your birthday” then you’re probably friended me on Facebook. I want to have a nice, earnest discussion regarding SOPA/PIPA and how both should die in a fire, but I can’t summon the energy nor the brain cells to write anything remotely coherent at the moment…
Which is why I am so grateful to my good pal Trystan who wrote sent me a link to her latest blog post, An Introduction to Copyright for Bloggers, Especially Costume Bloggers and asked that I link to it on this here website, to ensure as many people as possible will get to see it. Trystan, whose day job requires her to know things like how to avoid copyright infringement on the internet, has put together a concise list of the basic things bloggers, particularly those of us of the costumer variety, should know about how to use, display, reproduce, and credit copyrighted material. She does a good job breaking down exactly what is and isn’t covered by copyright, and how you can avoid doing douchey things like infringe on someone’s protected material, be that someone another blogger, some random person on the internet, a publisher, or a museum.
I know that every time I post something here that involves images that I did not take with my own camera, I’m kind of blindly hoping that what I’m doing is not infringing on anyone’s protected material. I typically get written permission, even from friends and family, to post photos that they took of my garments, and I’ve been known to message Flickr users for permission to use their photos on this website (did that just yesterday, in fact). If you look at my banner image above, you’ll notice that it states “photography by Gar Travis,” because he’s the awesome photographer who took that photo, AND he gave me written permission to use it in the banner. Today, I had to navigate the difficult waters of securing reproduction rights to a particular image from a 15th century manuscript that is fairly essential to my research on a particular style of gown, but the image rights are tied up by the Bridgeman Art Library and would require me to spend $50 for a “personal use only” image. Which means putting it up here on this website would be in violation of that, since websites such as mine are essentially self-publications. For educational use, yes, seeing as how I don’t charge for subscriptions to access my content, but it is still considered publishing. And fifty bucks is a bit much to swallow for a digital image, no matter how critical it is to my research (my other option would be to hop on over to the Bibliothèque Municipale in Dijon, France and take my own photos of the manuscript… Assuming they allow photos in the first place, which is hit or miss with manuscripts; and even then, many institutions request that you sign waivers stating you will not publish your personal photos of their items before they allow you to photograph anything). I can re-draw it for free, and link to a rights controlled image on the Bridgeman Art Library website if need be, and I won’t be in violation.
Anyway, the point is, that while I’m 95% confident what I put online conforms to Fair Use, Educational Use, and Creative Commons guidelines, I still may slip up, because honestly, copyright is confusing! But T. has at least made it a little less so… So, go read it and pass it along (with appropriate credit!) and enjoy the internet responsibly!
While I’m working up the nerve to call the SF Pleating Co. for price quotes, I found this YouTube video of a short lecture on the history of Fortuny. A REALLY short lecture, briefest of brief lecture, but a mere taste of the history of Fortuny and his Delphos gown… But interesting, nonetheless.
Shot of side seam, Delphos gown, c. 1930. From the Whitaker Auction Smugmug site.
One thing I started noticing right away that for some reason wasn’t apparent from still photos: The pleating is actually irregular. It’s not perfect little knife pleats, but it’s also not “broom stick” pleating which is more like intentional wrinkling. While Fortuny patented a pleating machine that was ostensibly used to set the pleats for his gowns, the end result is actually pretty visually similar to arashi shibori (or pole wrapped shibori). This slick little video gives you a glimpse of how it’s done (not that I’m suggesting buying this woman’s kit, just it is pretty much the only video on YouTube that actually showed the process well enough to understand how it’s done):
Arashi shibori is the technique I mentioned I wanted to experiment with, since as you can see, it yields highly regular pleats, and can be done with a bare minimum of equipment (PVC pipe, fishing line, and water). Most modern arashi is apparently done on the diagonal, but it can be done on the straight grain, too.
So, pleating aside, how was the fabric assembled to make the dress? And how much fabric did one dress take? The one thing to keep in mind is (obviously) that any pleating process reduces the width of the fabric considerably, and the more dense the pleating, the more fabric is actually taken up. One of the frustrating things about researching the Fortuny gowns is that for all the info out there on the internet (which, ain’t gonna lie, is usually my first stop when I’m starting out on a project), for all the beautiful photographs of Delphos gowns, and all the lavish praise that’s heaped on Fortuny as a genius artist and inventor, there’s almost nothing out there dealing with how these gowns were assembled. Pro tip: if all the info on a particular designer deals with his vision and not with the practical aspects of his craft, he’s probably considered an artist not a designer and therefore academics will devote page after page of wank about how his art revolutionized modern society, and not a whole lot about what the guy actually did or how he accomplished it. Which is irritating for people like me, who need to know the “how” not just the “why”.
Interior view of Delphos gown, c. 1930, showing Fortuny signature in red ink along selvedge. From the Whitaker Auction Smugmug site.
Anyway, what I’ve been able to scare up is that a Delphos gown typically took 4 to 5 panels of 37″ wide fabric (un-pleated). (Thank you FIDM Museum Blog for that tiny little crucial tidbit that doesn’t appear anywhere else) The panels were hemmed along all raw edges (probably by hand, though of course no source I’ve found yet mentions this) and then pleated. After the pleating had been set (using magic, one assumes), the panels were then hand-stitched together at the shoulders and sides. You can see in the picture at left that the pleats wrap around the neckline seam in a continuous fashion, indicating it was seamed first, then pleated, then stitched together, and finally a cord was inserted to draw the neckline close. In some designs, the shoulder seam was apparently reinforced on the interior with an unpleated piece of silk. Murano glass beads were strung on rattail and the rattail was stitched to the sides of the gown (and occasionally the hem and the neckline) to weigh the garment down.
I have been able to track down a line drawing of one of Fortuny’s patents for the Delphos gown, which you can see here. It’s basically an Ionic chiton (which, popular history suggests, was exactly what inspired the Delphos dress: The Charioteer of Delphi). Still no official word yet on the type of silk fabric he used, but I’m starting to think it’s probably something similar to habotai, which can be found in a variety of weights and takes both dye, and heat set pleats well.
And on that note… I think I need a nap. I was up all night obsessing about the Delphos gown and couldn’t shut my brain up! Though I do remember having one weird dream about a heartbroken Conan the Barbarian… Don’t ask me, I have no clue either!
So, the early 20th c. is nice and all, but it’s not really my bag of tea when it comes to costuming. That said, I can’t stand the thought of missing out on a good party with friends, even if the costume era is kind of “eh,” so I just ponied up for tickets to the GBACG Titanic dinner. The pros far outweigh the cons… Excellent location (the Bellevue Club in Oakland, the same site we used for the Trianon event), decent looking catered menu, most of my friends are going…
Fortuny "Delphos" gown, c. 1912. Musèe de France.
The problem is clothing. Isn’t it always? And since I’m not going to get a ton of opportunities to wear a 1912-era gown other than this event and Costume College, I’m kind of not inclined to put a lot of effort into making a giant production out of something to wear for 5 hours. Especially since I lack the appropriate underwear for the era, so it would mean starting entirely from the skin out and would only add to the amount of time I have to spend sewing. However, trying to find anything off the rack that was suitable and met my exacting standards and didn’t cost a small fortune, proved a challenge.
That’s when I had a sudden stroke of genius. Fortuny! I’ve wanted to make a Fortuny Delphos replica for years and just haven’t had the appropriate kick in the rear to make it happen. And the added bonus here is that it is comfortable and uncorseted, so I can drape myself all over the place without worrying about a sudden attack of diaphragmatic spasming (ie. hiccoughs, which hurt like a bitch in a corset, let me tell you).
Research is commencing as I type, and several books are currently winging their way to me from various libraries. First order of business: Figure out what kind of silk Fortuny used and whether there’s a modern equivalent that will work. Second order of business: Figure out how to pleat the sucker.
(I have several options to check out for the pleating… I know Fortuny’s method was never disclosed, but there’s a shibori technique that yields similar results that I want to experiment with, and if that fails, I can always send the fabric off to SF Pleating Co. to be pleated by machine. But first thing’s first: Figure out the type of fabric!)
If anyone has attempted a Fortuny gown, I’d love to hear your thoughts and advice. Cathy Hay, I’m looking at you!
So, last weekend I was elevated to the Order of the Laurel, which is a Major Award, and a Big Deal in the SCA. It’s a little bit like getting a lifetime achievement award but with the expectation that you’re not going to die or quit any time soon and will continue to foster the medieval arts and sciences by being the same badass you were in the first place, but now with a title and job requirements. It’s sort of the SCA equivalent of a job promotion, now that I think about it. Especially now that I’m required to attend meetings. Wait, why did I agree to this? Oh well, too late now…
Anyway, the ever-s0-brief description of what it means to join the Order of the Laurel is to be found here, on Wikipedia of all places. Scroll up if you want to be apprised of what Peerages mean within the context of the SCA; otherwise, feel free to roll your eyes and think to yourself, “What a bunch of nerds.” Often, and this isn’t always the case, people are recognized for specific arts. If you guessed I was recognized for “Being fabulous,” I’ll give you points for being perceptive, but specifically, it was for costuming. (Shut the door! No way!)
Since this is a costuming website, I’ll now share with y’all the whole costuming shebang involving my elevation, beginning with my so-called “laureling outfit.”
Inspiration:
Attributed to Alessandro Allori, "Bianca Capello", 1560-1580.
Please kick me if I ever try to buy a dress for a special occasion anywhere else but Moon Zooom, here in San Jose. That place never fails me. Some friends were throwing a formal NYE party last night and, because I’ve been in my hermit hole working on 12th Night stuff for the last week, I didn’t have a chance to go shopping for a formal gown (I have tons of cocktail dresses, but nothing that fits the “formal” category). So, I got up on Saturday and thought I’d try Ross or Marshall’s or the Salvation Army, figuring at least one of those places would have something I could wear for the evening’s festivities.
To make a long story short, I was wrong. Every one of those stores had just about nothing worth spending money on, let alone something that qualified as “evening wear”. I almost got something at the Salvation Army, but the dress was about three miles too long and I didn’t have any time to make alterations. Leaving the store, I figured my last hope would be Moon Zooom, this quirky little retro/vintage clothing and accessories store here in San Jose. I’ve been very lucky with finds there before, but I had it in my head that I could find something in a more mundane store so I put Moon Zooom off until the end of my shopping trip. I really just should have gone there first. Upon walking into the store, I went to the one rack where I’ve had consistently good luck finding vintage evening gowns, stuck my hand into the hangers and pulled out this:
SCORE! And at $45 it was actually cheaper than most of the dresses I had already looked at. I couldn’t resist getting a matching earring and necklace set to go with the dress, too, as well as those bitchin’ full-length silver lame gloves. My space ship drivin’ gloves, as I lovingly refer to them. :)
The good news is the gown fit, but there’s always issues with modern body shapes and vintage clothing, and for me it’s usually in the rib cage area, so it was a tight squeeze to get the dress zipped up. But the zipper withstood the abuse and I got to swan around feeling like a goddess all night. Best of all, apparently women were shorter in the 60s, so I didn’t have to hack any material off the hem to make it the right length for me. You have no idea how happy this makes me, since 99.9% of everything in stores these days is on average 10″ too long for me.
I have another vintage ball gown that I purchased from the same seller at Moon Zooom for Costume College 2010, which some of you may recall:
I have no idea where it went off to, though… Otherwise, I might have trotted it out last night. Anyway, this is all just a shameless plug from a satisfied customer who wants to share her love of an awesome store. :)
If you’re in the South Bay area, Moon Zooom has two locations, one in San Jose and the other in Santa Cruz. Definitely check them out!
Sorry about the multiple postings yesterday… Seems my WordPress app on my iPhone was lying to me about the update failing multiple times. Sigh!
Anyway, I thought that I was overdue for an update on my laureling duds. I haven’t had a chance to work on the outfit in over a week, what with the holidays and the typical end-of-semester craziness, but it is starting to come together.
There’s still a fair bit to go, but I’m confident it will be finished by January 5th at the latest. The shoulder embellishment needs to be attached, the sleeves finished, the petticoat made, and I might not be wearing that particular partlet (Kendra might have been drunk when she offered to make me one a few weeks ago, and I don’t know if she remembers agreeing to it… But no worries, this one will work fine. ;). I’ve also made a few changes to the original plan that I think work better, such as opting not to wear my white silk satin gown under it, but instead making sleeves and a petticoat. I think it’ll end up wearing better over the long run. Also, I opted to wear a pair of bodies under it… Mostly because I wanted an excuse to make a handsewn pair of bodies before I got laureled (one of my personal before-I’m-laureled goals that I’m trying to knock off the bucket list).
And check this baby out! The coolest thing about getting laureled is that people like to do nice stuff for you, and if you’re lucky to be BFFs with a kickass artist, you get things like this. It’s by none other than Jen Thompson, who is just about as kickass an artist as you can get. I love this SO much! I sent her this pic and she just nailed Francis’ profile perfectly! I’m trying not to paw at it too much since the oil glaze still needs to cure before it’s totally dry, but I couldn’t resist setting it in the frame and pinning it to the gown to see what it will look like. It’s now safely stored in a box until the big day.
So that’s about it! I should be getting back to the cleaning up I’m allegedly supposed to be doing while F is out in the garage working on more laurel-related stuff. It’s getting close! Aaaah! I’m not ready!
If you’re like me, you probably hate figuring out how to make the front of your sixteenth century skirt attach gracefully to the front of your pointed sixteenth century bodice without bulging, or skewing. I’ve personally always just ham-fisted my way through making the skirt and bodice points line up on my 16th century gowns, with mixed results over the years. But it never occurred to me that there could be a logical, elegant solution to figuring out how to put skirt front and bodice point together without a ton of annoying math, until I saw Noelle’s tutorial.
I have been meaning to plug her tutorial for months now, but I keep getting sidetracked and forgetting to do it. Well, tonight, while I’m ostensibly working on my laureling outfit, I was reminded that I should really put this up here for everyone to see it, because I’ve been using this method for the last couple of gowns I’ve made since Noelle posted it, and I think she deserves some credit for the ingeniousness of the method.
My mom, my sister, my friends at school, my friends outside of school, and a random girl who stopped me in the parking lot at school on Wednesday, have all been asking the same question:
“How did you do that with your hair?”
So, again, here’s this video tutorial I found on YouTube that describes this process I use. The hairstyle on its own is awesome, but I actually use it to get my notoriously will-not-hold-a-curl-for-love-nor-money hair to have beautiful curls that STAY PUT between washings (usually I go 3 days between hair washings. After day 2, I use a dry shampoo on my roots because while I’ve been able to cut back on the amount of washing my hair needs, it still gets greasy by day 3, and the dry shampoo really helps get that under control). In fact, it’s this particular hairstyle that is what generates all the curiosity, not the after affect of the curls. I particularly like using this style because I do have to leave my hair in curlers/rags/pincurls for close to 24 hours to get a curl that lasts longer than a few hours, and this style at least lets me go out doors without looking like a weirdo and it’s easy to sleep in.
The end result is this:
Day 2 Hair: The curl is a bit more relaxed, but still has a definite wave to it.
I’ve tried just about every curling method and on my hair, it’s all fail. But this one works like a gem! So there you go!
I sincerely hope there is a special hell for people who put research images online and don’t cite their sources. I’ve been spending the better part of two days chasing down references for a school-related project and I can’t even begin to describe the level of frustration I’m at with “researchers” who wouldn’t know how to cite a source if it walked up to them naked and covered in chocolate and started humping their leg.
Let Auntie Sarah break it down for you: If you’re going to put an image online in connection with research, don’t give incomplete information, or omit information on where you found it. Author, Title, Date, Location. IT IS NOT THAT HARD.
No, wait, here’s a visual:
John Hoppner, Mrs. Mary Robinson, c. 1783. British Museum.
See? And hey, you can also do something like this:
And for those of you who are probably wondering, “What if I don’t know where the image came from originally, because I found it on some internet site somewhere a million years ago and THEY didn’t list the information?”, post what you know about it. If you know where you pulled the image from, link back to it. There’s also Tin Eye, which can perform image searches for other sites that have used your image, or something similar, though it’s kind of spotty as to what it turns up. The bottom line – try to do a little leg work of your own in figuring out where the source came from. Don’t perpetuate the cycle of crappy citing!
I know, I’m pissed off, exhausted and prone overreacting right now, but for the love of God and all that is holy, just because it’s your little blog it doesn’t mean no one else will ever look at it and go “Wow, that image is exactly what I’m looking for!” and want to be able to track it down for their own research.
Unless you’re one of those assholes who purposefully doesn’t post source info because you like to think you have proprietary ownership of all the research which isn’t even original to you. If that’s the case, kindly die in a fire.*
Also, the British Library’s online search functions SUCK. And while I’m at it, people who hotlink images from a Tumblr account and then subsequently overload some poor person’s Earthlink webpage so badly that not even Archive.org can crawl it, please to also die in a fire, you lazy selfish asshat.
Anyone else want to unload some costume-related angst? I’m all ears!
* I understand not wanting to publish until you’ve completed your research so you won’t be scooped, but if that’s the case, don’t put that shit online until you’re done! I have a giant stack of research I’m sitting on right now that I’m not putting online because it’s not bloody finished yet, but once it is, you bet I’ll put it up for everyone to enjoy WITH THE SOURCES for each and every image. Because I? Am not an asshole.
I’m just going to put this here for your amusement/horror/edification. This is a portrait of Camilla Martelli, the lover/second wife of Cosimo I de Medici, painted by Jacopo Ligozzi. Ligozzi did a number of other portraits of Camilla in far more typical dress than this one… Though the portrait is at the Uffizi, I’m having a hard time coming up with explanations for Camilla’s costume. Perhaps it is a masque outfit (that would certainly explain the crazy), or one of those grand-lady-painted-as-insert-exotic-mythological-queen-here types of portraits. Either way, it is doubtful that this was anywhere near what Camilla would have worn on a day to day basis, but I love it all the same. I mean, look at it! It’s like a veritable cautionary tale of fashion victimhood! She’s breaking all the sixteenth century rules (fringe/bangs! ruching! red ruffs! feathers on your coronet!) and pulling out all the stops. Nothing exceeds like excess!
Of course, Camilla apparently liked excess in her every day clothing as well… Possibly to make up for the fact that she was never given the title of Grand Duchess, despite marrying Cosimo I.
Alessandro Allori, Camilla Martelli, 1580s.
Check out those sleeves. I love them. Nothing says “suck it, I’m still married to the Grand Duke” like those sleeves.
Interesting side note about the two portraits: They are pretty clearly based on the same source. I’ve seen the Ligozzi identified as Camilla’s daughter Virginia, but based on the fact that the clothing in both portraits are nearly identical (barring the embellishment on the Ligozzi), as is the major identifier, the jewelry, I think we’re looking at the same woman in both portraits.
