Category: Clothing

Filthy Friday: Rolling with a Purpose

On By kittycalashIn Clothing, Laundry, Living History, Reenacting

“It looks like you rolled in dirt,” I said to the Young Giant when he dumped a gritty mess on my lap.
“I did,” he said, “but it was rolling with a purpose. We dug a fire pit, and then I had to keep the fire going. So I was on my belly in the dirt.”

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This was followed by, “Mom, you need to mend my shirt.” But first, I needed to wash that shirt.

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I’d like to wash that shirt right out of my hair, but there it is: it’s got to be attended to.

I did what mending I could before I washed it, since some areas seemed more likely to disintegrate further in the wash.

That’s clean linen verus dirty linen, the 18th century wrestling match. Patch secured, I very nearly packed this into a priority mailing container for delivery to the esteeméd Red Shoes Laundry, but I took a deep breath, and put the lobster pot back in the cupboard. (Yes, I considered boiling this on my stove top on a 95° day. Wouldn’t you?)

Instead, I trekked down to the cool of the basement and ran the water as hot as it gets and added Oxiclean (used by some of the finest weavers I know when they encounter dyes less fast than anticipated.)

The first tub achieved a kind of colloidal slurry of mud and sweat and soap. Delicious. Five rinses and an overnight soak later, dirty shirt became just a shirt again.

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I took advantage of the clear weather to dry this outside on the grass, hoping the later sunlight would aid in whitening.

Wondering about that patch? Wonder no more, compare:

It’s another one of those “is it done? it’s perfect” situations. I’d love to wash my clothes with historically correct methods, but for now, the shirt’s clean enough for final mends and wearing in October. The winter should give me time to figure out stove top washing.

Fashion, Fantasy, and Intention

On By kittycalashIn Art Rant, Clothing, Living History, material culture2 Comments
Fort-based: as military as I get.
Fort-based: as military as I get.

I am not a costumer, not really. But I’m not really a re-enactor in the classical sense: I no longer roll with a military unit and my military experiences are typically fort-based domestic activities. My favorite events have me representing women’s work in the past, the quotidian experiences of ordinary people. Documentation is my thing: what happened on a particular day, in a particular place. Who was there? What were typical clothes? The foods in season? The gossip of the day?

A Lady's Summer Promenade Dress, 1800.
A Lady’s Summer Promenade Dress, 1800.

And yet. Everything I do is really a fantasy, even when it’s work. We are not [yet, always] using the actual words people spoke or wrote. We typically inhabit characters who are grounded in fact but for whom we do not have full documentation. We are representations. We are playing, more than we are being.

I could easily be persuaded to take a walk along a sea wall  or coast to collect seaweed samples for pressing. This would inch me into Austen territory, especially if my friends will join me. I’ve even gone to the lengths of acquiring an appropriate hat, and to make another gown is but nothing in the pursuit of happiness.

Mary Gunning, Countess of Coventry. Jean-Étienne Liotard,.
Woman in a Turkish interior Pastel on vellum, Jean-Étienne Liotard, 1749. Museum of Art and History, Geneva.

If I could truly be a fabulist, I might be tempted to adopt a style a la Turque, for a portrait by Copley or for my paramour. This portrait by Liotard– who was known for his Ottoman works—  is a great temptation, with her patterned overdress and belt with golden clasps, though she is thirty-three years earlier than The Abduction from the Seraglio, Mozart’s comedic and trendy 1782 opera.

If I made myself a Turque (and Reader, it is tempting though useless), I will confess it would be for the multiple pleasures of wearing it, knowing why it had been worn in the past, and for the pleasure of having it taken off me. Because we forget what the European fascination with exoticism and Orientalism meant: they meant sex. The Abduction itself is, in essence, a tale of sex trafficking.

And that is something we do forget about the past, that the clothing we adopt as we portray the past had meaning– sometimes a meaning we miss, when we layer costume upon clothing. Wives and mistresses alike were portrayed a la Turque, and some theorize that this style of portraiture was chosen to portray the sitter in timeless, classic dress. For Copley’s sitters, it was a way to be at the height of London fashion; for Lady Mary Montagu, Turkish dress allowed her to travel freely in the Ottoman Empire. But portraits of women in Turkish dress situated in Turkish interiors were also allusions to polygamy and to sexuality, and there is no way of escaping the fact that paintings of women were largely made for men.

So what, then, of fantasy dressing in the past? What sense can we make of historical representations of “Oriental” fashion? How do we understand what our clothing and our appearance means? Every choice we make is layered with meaning, in the present and in the past.  For women, routinely objectified by society, the meaning of our clothing is particularly important, even when, or perhaps especially, when it is not what we want to focus on.

 

Documented Fantasies

On By kittycalashIn Clothing, Events, History, Living History, Museums, personal, Reenacting, Research5 Comments

It was three years ago on a warm August afternoon in the museum room we’d turned into a photo studio when I quipped, “All my fantasies are documented.” It’s been hard to live down ever since.

With Mrs B watching Miss B self-perambulate upon the sidewalk.
With Mrs B watching Miss B self-perambulate upon the sidewalk.

Documentation, research: we all do it, everyone who reads this blog does it. What matters is how you use it– or, maybe even more importantly, how well you understand how you are using your research. This past weekend was the Salem Maritime Festival, and round number three for me in the West India Goods Store (WIGS, which sounds far more political than it is). The year was 1804, and as you may recall, that required a new dress.

Reader, I wore it. And it survived!

Yes, it is made from an IKEA curtain. The pattern is my own, derived from examples in Janet Arnold, at Genesee, and the KCI. Once again, I discovered the power of upper body strength and leverage. It’s not that my stays are too big necessarily. The busk is too long, that I will grant you. But I think the shoulder straps are as well, and the shift– that slattern! She was rolling a la Renaissance Faire, which is completely unacceptable, of course, as she slid down my right shoulder by the end of the day when the shop had been unpacked into the conveyance.

So let us focus on the non-slattern part of the day, when a mercantile enterprise briefly overtook the WIGS.

Behind the Counter

There was some custom, though numerous debts were recorded in the ledger.  (Somehow, there are no images of Mr K sweating over the figures in the book, though I recall them clearly.)

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The shop was hot, but we attempted to stay fed and hydrated, as we discussed the various kinds of goods imported to places like Salem and Providence in 1804. Politics were rather difficult to discuss, as Mr K has a marked antipathy for Mr Jefferson that caused a mild agitation; expanding the country does seem a bold and perhaps unconstitutional move, given the deal Mr Jefferson has struck with Bonaparte, but perhaps this is for the best. The Indians will surely benefit from Christianity and education.*

It’s engaging in the moment, and we’ve done our research. But it’s a fantasy nonetheless, a kind of happening grounded in primary sources and material culture. I’m OK with that– I understand what I am doing– but I wonder sometimes if the people I’m watching on social media understand what they are doing with the fantasies they portray.

 

 

* To be SUPER clear, I’m staying in character here. I worked in Missouri and I have enough understanding of “manifest destiny” to disagree with this point of view.

Friday’s Fright: A Dress in White

On By kittycalashIn Clothing, Events, History, Living History, Uncategorized1 Comment
The Frightened Girl, oil on canvas by Cephas Thompson ca. 1810. MFA Boston, 1986.397
The Frightened Girl, oil on canvas by Cephas Thompson ca. 1810. MFA Boston, 1986.397

Two paths crossed for me this week, both in the early Federal era. Cephas Thompson, a self-taught New England painter, recently became very interesting to me. Although he grew up in Massachusetts, Thompson painted extensively in Virginia, but also in Providence, so of course the story resonated with me. But even more than the story, I loved the images. What a show the portraits would make– and he seems to have painted miniatures as well– so when I met with a local preservationist who turned out to be a fellow art school fugitive, wheels began to turn.

“What clothes!” my new friend said.
“I can get you a room full of people in those clothes,” I replied. And what fun would that be, a gallery opening where the people in the portraits appear to have come to life? Beats the pants off mere mannequins, but keep your Cossacks on: this one’s gonna take a while. In the meantime, what about those clothes?

Salem Register, July 14, 1803.
Salem Register, July 14, 1803.

Saturday marks the third time I’ve been part of the Salem Maritime Festival, and once again the West India Goods Store will be the base of operations for a mercantile enterprise. Millinery has its charms, but this year, the park historian shared fascinating notes on “She Merchants” of Salem, and the Hathorne sisters really intrigued me. Drunk Tailor dug into online newspapers (harder than ever to access remotely) and found an 1803 issue of the Salem Register

That’s an incredibly helpful list of goods to sell (and to pack from the Strategic Fabric Reserve), but a new year means a new dress, of course, and for reasons still not entirely clear to me, this seemed like exactly the right time to wear white. That’s sort of where Cephas Thompson comes back into play: white dresses.

Mrs. Cephas Thompson (Olivia Leonard). Oil on canvas by Cephas Thompson, 1810-1820. MMA, 1985.22
Mrs. Cephas Thompson (Olivia Leonard). Oil on canvas by Cephas Thompson, 1810-1820. MMA, 1985.22

There’s a pile of white cotton and white linen on my table, ready to be packed up this evening: with the dress on for a fitting, I felt like a bowl of whipped cream, the red silk Spencer and scarf the cherry on top. Happily, white and red are documentable to New England, though I would be mortified to be as frighted of a garter snake as the girl in Thompson’s painting. Strawberries and coffee are entirely different, and I shall probably require a bib for Saturday, lest my whipped cream be spoilt.