From: Gretchen Miller Date: Tue, 7 Mar 1995 16:40:10 -0500 (EST) Subject: H-Costume Digest, Volume 249, 3/7/95 The Historic Costume List Digest, Volume 249, March 7, 1995 Send items for the list to h-costume@andrew.cmu.edu (or reply to this message). Send subscription/deletion requests and inquiries to h-costume-request@andrew.cmu.edu Enjoy! --------------------------------------------------------------- Topics: History of the bra Question and answers: Tea dying Opinion on Lifeforms (CAD) The nature of medieval/renaissance silk History of underwear and pantyhose Where victorians stored their clothes Dying with natural materials Favorite Folkwear patterns Reminders on unsubscribing and request the archives politely Excellent Irish dress source History of snaps Fulling/Felting wool ----------------------- Date: Thu, 2 Mar 1995 13:39:18 -0800 (PST) From: Diana Dills Subject: Re: H-Costume Digest, Volume 242, 3/1/95 I read somewhere that the bra was invented shortly before the turn of the century by a man named Otto Titzslinger (No kidding!) in Germany or Austria...anyone care to look this up, and find out if it's true or if some dressmaker was having a laugh at the expense of a gullible reporter? DIANA DILLS ----------------------- From: MLHardy@aol.com Date: Thu, 2 Mar 1995 17:23:34 -0500 Subject: Re: Re[2]: dyeing white to ivory Hi I'm new so forgive me if I do something wrong. But when you tea dye fabric, do you have to treat it first - the fabric I mean. I was wondering when you wash it does it come out. Thanks Michelle Hardy Harrington, DE ----------------------- From: alana_guy@broder.com Date: Thu, 02 Mar 95 14:03:58 Subject: Re[2]: computer costuming I've seend Lifeforms used, and unless you have a BA in computer graphics, don't beat your head against a wall. Maybe you could cheaply hire a competent artist to help you with your sketches - check out your local college, some figure drawing and illustration students are DYING to do stuff like this - sometimes for free as portfolio pieces, sometimes for minimal pay. I'm not a costume designer myself, but I love to draw, and I have a friend for whom I have occasionally drawn and colored plates. If you're financially embarassed, maybe you could barter services. A lot of artists like to dress up but don't have the patience to sew. Several years ago at Santa Rosa Junior College, I was taking a computer class and, in the lab, a fashion design student was using a computer program with an overall effect similar to paper dolls - as far as I could tell, only one body size (female, the usual fashion model legs-up-to-here type) with the student responsible for modifying and coloring basic clothing shapes. I didn't think the results were particularly attractive, but it might work for you. I think what the teacher did was make a hypercard stack. I shall try to follow up/look into this for you. _______________________________________________________ On Fri, 9 Dec 1994, Robin Findlay wrote: > > Does anyone know of a software package that will let me do the figure > drawings on the computer? I want one that will let me manipulate the body > to different positions and make the body tall and thin and short and stocky. > this would simplify doing hundreds of plates for say....shakespear or > those musicals that call for hundreds of dances and characters. > > Email me if you know of such an animal > > Robin > still looking has anyone used "lifeforms" by macromedia? ----------------------- Date: Thu, 2 Mar 1995 15:37:33 -0800 From: Alexandra.Ohlson@Eng.Sun.COM (Alexandra Rankin Ohlson) Subject: Re: the nature of silk Kat wrote >>Silks during the middle ages came in many weights. They were definitely >>*not* like our raw silk or duppione. They had veil weight silks finer than >>our silks can be made. Why can't our silks be made that fine anymore? I would assume we have a superior mechanical ability to weave. Has the silkworm itself changed, or is it that we no longer handweave most silks? Or were you not being literal? (I'm an engineer, ya know, no sense of hyperbole...) just curious, alexandra ----------------------- Date: Thu, 2 Mar 1995 15:45:16 -0800 From: Alison Kondo Subject: silk Caroline mentioned early Chinese silk being re-woven in the West, from lighter weights to heavier. I'd heard this the other way around, with heavier silks coming out of China & being unravelled & re-woven in lighter weights or mixed with other fibres for the Roman markets, both to suit the warm climate & to stretch the amount of the expensive fibre. A lot of clothing history texts comment that the West started its own silk industry when some monks smuggled silkworms & the mulberry they ate out of China to Byzantium about the 6th century. Alison ----------------------- From: DGC3%Rates%FAR@bangate.pge.com Date: Thu, 2 Mar 95 17:08:52 PST Subject: More on underwear I am enjoying the underwear thread, because what we wear underneath affects how we move in our clothes, besides revealing much about social attitudes and how they change. Regarding the introduction of pantyhose, I agree with the 1967 date, because I remember first wearing them when I lived in New York (1966-68). No one has mentioned that awkward era around 1966 when skirts had risen to mid-thigh, but pantyhose had not yet been invented. The dresses we wore were innocent little shifts and trapeze dresses, very easy to move in, but modesty still limited our movement. If you watch Barbra Streisand in "On A Clear Day You Can See Forever," there is one moment when her stocking tops peek out below her mini-dress. I thought pantyhose were a godsend, especially after the latex pantygirdles that held stockings up under fitted dresses. Additional resources for underwear: On a used-bookstore foray, I recently found three charming little British books on underwear by Rosemary Hawthorne (Souvenir Press, London, 1992 and 1993): _Bras: A Private View_, _Knickers: An Intimate Appraisal_, and _Stockings: A Quick Flash_. Hawthorne is a veteran garment collector who cites the right sources (Cunnington, Arnold, etc.) and adds illustrations from her own collection. Her writing style is a bit breezy but amusing. I also enjoy her very English perspective. Hawthorne says the bra as we know it was invented in 1913, by socialite Mary Phelps Jacobs, with two handkerchiefs, pink baby ribbon, and the help of her French maid. There were earlier "brassieres" in the late 1800s, but they are more like boned camisoles, including the "bust improver" with the ruffles facing inwards that my grandmother described wearing. The Howard Hughes and Jane Russell incident was in 1943 (remember, Hughes was originally an engineer and the Library of Congress files Janet Arnold et. al. under Stsructural Engineering). Danine Cozzens ------------------------------------------------------ Danine Cozzens Internet: dgc3@pge.com Pacific Gas and Electric Company San Francisco, CA ------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------- From: Evewallace@aol.com Date: Thu, 2 Mar 1995 20:46:01 -0500 Subject: silk, dyeing, etc. --about super fine veiling silk.... It can be made that fine. if you look in fancy expensive fabric stored you can find silk organza, often Italian, and pretty fabulous too.. expensive of course. It is semi transparent and has a lot of sizing in it so its sort of stiff and crispy. You can also sometimes find silk chiffon, o la la equally disastrously expensive...wide spread distriubtion? i think it's based on the market. You can get organza types, stiff semi transparent fabrics made with 100 % poly or equally plastic, at a fraction of the cost. mmany people ( i wont say most) will not buy the most expensive. ..as a child we used to dye things with yellow onion skins ..we boiled cloth with the skins ....would need some fine tuning ..i don't remember a smell but maybe there is one... a question...recently a really nice adventurous fabric store folded here in my town. several others in a nearby city have gone down in the last year. we are left with one very expensive one and the cheapo chains, ie no middle ground. is this happening elsewhere too? ----------------------- Date: Thu, 2 Mar 1995 18:29:47 -0800 (PST) From: Pat Kight Subject: Re: Victorian Closets (H-Costume Digest, Volume 243, 3/2/95) > Date: Sat, 25 Feb 1995 09:04:00 +0800 (PST) > From: nancy fernandez > Subject: Victorian Closets > > Gentle Readers: > > Last night I went to a talk about Victorian homes and the people who > lived there. The speaker argued that Victorians of every social class > had closets too small to accommodate their clothing. > > I don't know where I got this from, but I thought that undies and casual > clothing were hung from pegs in the closet but better clothes were > folded and put away (somewhere). Does anyone have any references or > family knowledge, ect. about Victorian clothes and closets? Albany, Ore., where I live, is widely touted as having one of the largest arrays of standing Victorian-era houses (in terms of differnt architectural styles, not numbers of structures) on the West Coast. Thanks to a historically depressed local economy, many of these houses had undergone only minimal remodeling until the fairly recent past. I've talked to lots of folks who've tackled remodeling or restoring the old "painted ladies," and many report that the houses had *no closets at all*, except occasional small pantry areas off their kitchens. Rather, their inhabitants used wardrobes, trunks and chests to store their belongings, including clothes. My own house (an 1885 Queen Anne cottage which originally served as both a lodging and office for the doctor who built it) had to have closets added when it was remodeled in the 1990s. Even an addition built on in the 1920s was closet-less! (Funny the things that will make a person de-lurk!) Pat Kight kightp@peak.org ----------------------- From: John Dow Subject: Dyeing with tea... Date: Thu, 2 Mar 1995 22:47:41 -0500 (EST) Well, I don't have as much practical experiance with this as some of the others who have replied (i.e. I've never dyed anything intended to be "good" except for a costume in 7th grade, which was a white shirt and skirt that needed to be pink. (We were doing a spoof of the Wizard of Oz. Student-written, directed and acted. And not actually that bad, as it turned out. But back to the subject. :) but I did do a project for a science class one year on dying with natural products (note: using the actual flesh of an onion (the type with the orange skins) results in an interesting faint-faint-faint greenish white.) and I learned two things. 1) Results will vary depending on fabric type, as some take dyes better than others (and there are books on this in the library that are quite helpful) and 2) With the fabric I was using (a natural fiber knit of somesort, I think. It was a while ago) quite a bit of the dye rinsed out. So you should really check with swatches to see how long you'll have to leave the fabric in the dye and/or how many times you'll have to dye it. (You can get some REALLY nice colors with natural products. Someday when you feel like stinking out your kitchen whip out that bit of white fabric you were never going to do anything with anyway and go wild. :) (Blueberrys give a really nice purple-ish blue. :) -Kristine (Who finds this list very interesting. :) (In case any of you are wondering, I'm a junior in high school now. :) ----------------------- Date: Thu, 2 Mar 1995 21:13:22 -0800 From: Alison Kondo Subject: Folkwear One comment on the possible pattern choices... I like the idea of doing a more fitted, rather than rectangular pattern, but this penalizes, timewise, those of us who have to alter the patterns to fit our measurements. Its a whole lot easier to adjust straight seams than curvy fitted ones...I wish Folkwear would expand its size range in their fitted clothing, rather than default to "if you're large, we have baggy patterns for you". (I'm a standard dress size 14, but most of the bulk is muscle, so "downsizing" is not a question of just dieting). Does Folkwear have any patterns which would fall in the middle ground of not just being "squares & rectangles", but not limited in size range? What about doing one "old favourite" & one from their new batch? Alison ----------------------- From: close@lunch.engr.sgi.com (Diane Barlow Close) Subject: Unsubscribing, how to do it properly. Date: Thu, 2 Mar 1995 22:08:47 -0800 (PST) > please unsubscribe me. I realize this is going in one eye and out the other for a good number of people, judging by the number who keep rudely insisting on sending their unsubscribe requests directly to the list -- and bugging their 500 or so fellow list members with their request, when those members can't do a darn thing to get them unsubscribed... And I realize that I posted this same message just last week, on February 24th, but here it is again in the hopes that it may do some of you some good. Much thanks to those of you who do follow the instructions and send your requests to the proper place! ALL UNSUBSCRIBES need to go directly to Gretchen at: h-costume-REQUEST@andrew.cmu.edu And, while we're at it, ALL requests for changing to the digest need to go directly to Gretchen at: h-costume-REQUEST@andrew.cmu.edu And ALL requests to subscribe need to go directly to Gretchen at: h-costume-REQUEST@andrew.cmu.edu But most importantly (one more time please :-), ALL UNSUBSCRIBES NEED TO GO DIRECTLY TO: h-costume-REQUEST@andrew.cmu.edu and NOT to the list. Thanks. -- Diane Close close@lunch.engr.sgi.com I'm at lunch today. :-) ----------------------- From: close@lunch.engr.sgi.com (Diane Barlow Close) Subject: Accessing the Archives, please keep for your reference. Date: Thu, 2 Mar 1995 22:29:53 -0800 (PST) Since I'm about to go on sabbatical, and will only be checking my e-mail occasionally from March 15th to June 15th, I figured it would be a good idea to provide everyone with a reminder of how to get back issues of h-costume discussions from the archive which is kept on my machine. Please keep this message for your reference, as I will be unavailable to help you during that time. Archives are available by using e-mail, from the archive server, majordomo@lunch.engr.sgi.com. To get an index of available files, send a message with the words: index h-costume as the body of the message, to majordomo@lunch.engr.sgi.com. Then use the command: get h-costume filename where "filename" is the actual name of the file, to retrieve the named file. Multiple requests per message are allowed. I suggest starting with the files CONTENTS and TOPICS. Note that they are spelled in all capital letters -- the server is case sensitive. When you get an index of files back, you'll notice that some file names are spelled in all capital letters and some are a mix of lower case letters and numbers. Request them exactly as you see them listed. I.e. if you request "contents" you'll get back an error message, but if you ask for CONTENTS you'll get back that file. The CONTENTS file is a list of all the topics discussed, split up by volume numbers. The TOPICS file is an alphabetical list of all the topics discussed, and a notation that tells you in which volume they can be found. So, if you wanted the file called CONTENTS you'd send: get h-costume CONTENTS as the body of a message to majordomo@lunch.engr.sgi.com and the server would send you back that file. -- Diane Close close@lunch.engr.sgi.com I'm at lunch today. :-) ----------------------- Date: 03 Mar 95 02:32:40 EST From: Gary Anderson <72437.674@compuserve.com> Subject: Dress in Ireland >From Janet Wilson Anderson Re Irish Dress There is a good book on the subject called, logically enough, "Dress in Ireland" by Mairead Dunlevy, 1989, B.T. Batsford Ltd., London ISBN 0-7134 5251 X. (However, like so many of Batsford's wonderful books, it has already gone out of print.) Here's some excerpts: The medieval section covers 1300-1500 AD and has quite a bit of detail on men's dress (including an actual 15th century gown found in a bog), and some information on women's clothes. The most illuminating fact was the continuing effort by the English to legislate against "Irish" dress during this period and on into the Renaissance. "The Parliament of Ireland in 1297 declared 'that all Englishmen in this land [must] wear, at least in that part of the head which presents itself to view, the mode and tonsure of Englishmen.' ... In the Statutes of Kilkenny of 1366, Englishmen were ordered to adhere to their own 'custome, fashion, mode of riding and apparel'... This ruling against...Irish dress styles in general was repeated on occasions and not repealed until 1635. Those conforming to official English regulations were expected to reflect the fashions and major changes which were taking place at that time in the dress of the wealthy of London." And elsewhere: "By the end of the fourteenth century there was a clear distinction between the dress of those deeply loyal to England and of others in Ireland." During the "Anglo-Norman" period, various parts of Ireland were more or less under English influence and English styles are shown on a variety of statues and from illustrated texts. So depending on what part of Ireland you are interested in, English styles might be quite appropriate. This includes the Dublin area for certain, since several of the illustrations are shown and dated from this area. Kirtles, or later houpplelandes, here dated as appearing around 1375, were worn by both men and women. Also cited as popular is the full-length cotehardie with tippets, introduced in the second quarter of the 14th century, and continuing into the fifteenth. None of these styles feature anything in any of the illustrations or statues even vaguely resembling laced, boned or stiffened bodices, but rather are all flowing garments. The key "Irish" garment cited is the "mantle' - a form of cape -, so much so that in 1462 Dublin charged a tax on all mantles brought into the city and "from the 29 September 1466, any man found wearing a mantle for his daily garment was fined sixpence... On the same date it was enacted that a woman would be fined sixpence if she wore a saffron smock or kerchief in Dublin." Since they were trying to stamp out "Irish dress", this gives some indication of just how "Irish" the mantle was considered. It was worn by men, women and children, all social stations, came short or long, lined or unlined, but in general was fitted over the shoulders and open in the front. It was also a noted item of export, due to its practicality. For men the "Irish" (non-English) dress is described as "ionar, mantle and trews." and "hood and liripipe". However, this source does not give much more information on "Irish" women's dress for this period other than a reference to the ionar and leine from the 800-900 AD period as continuing in non Anglo-Norman areas for several centuries after. Both ionar and leine are also flowing garments, with not much fit, as shown in the illustrations and statues of the time. This attempt by the English to subdue the native Irish dress led Henry VIII to legislate against saffron dye (considered a particularly Irish color), the display of wealth in "overly long and full garments and the wearing of the Irish mantle, except as a travelling garment." "Old fashioned styles, such as hoods and cotes were also forbidden." It might be noted, that as is so often the case with sumptuary laws, these were flouted as well. In the sixteenth century, there are numerous examples of distinctive Irish dress, clearly different from both the English and Continental fashions.... but that's another topic. JanetWA ----------------------- Date: 03 Mar 95 02:32:32 EST From: Gary Anderson <72437.674@compuserve.com> Subject: Snaps >From Janet Wilson Anderson Re "Snaps" Now you've got me going on a hunt to find out when they actually appeared. Research to date shows: They were called "press studs" in some early 20th cent. English sources. Probably originated under a patent since they appear as "patent fasteners" in "Costume in Detail" on the 1905-07 gown on page 305 and are so called in a couple of other American sources I've found. They do *not* appear in the 1895 Montgomery Ward complete catalog, which has an extensive sewing supplies section, which makes me think it's likely they appeared sometime in this 10 year period. I'm really curious, so I'm going to keep delving and will report findings. (And isn't there a great book idea there for someone to write - "When was it invented and when did it get widely used?" So many costume items, fabrics, and fasteners are very hard to place in context that it would be wonderful to have a guide available. I just had to research all this a few months ago for the zipper, and really had to dig! If someone writes it, I'll publish and sell it for you!!!!) JanetWA ----------------------- Date: Fri, 3 Mar 1995 00:42:48 -0800 From: knowles@netcom.com (Sheryl Knowles) Subject: Re: Re[2]: computer costuming Per Robin's request for a computer figure-drawing program: I am a professional computer graphics artist and my daughter is presently studying costume design in college. When she was younger, I used to draw template figures for her on Deluxe Paint on my old Amiga, then she would draw costumes over those figures. It worked as long as she remembered to save the costumed figures to a different file than the figure template file. And she could have as many different figures as she could talk me into drawing. A similar approach would be to scan into whatever drawing program for whatever platform you choose (or can afford :-) to use ... figures from art books on figure drawing... or, perhaps, negligee figures from advertising catelogs. I have seen Lifeforms - about 3 years ago - and tended, at the time, to agree with Alana's assessment. ---Sheryl Knowles ----------------------- From: RCarnegie@aol.com Date: Fri, 3 Mar 1995 03:48:57 -0500 Subject: Re: H-Costume Digest, Volume ...