Tag: newspapers

Runaway Styles

On By kittycalashIn Clothing, History1 Comment

Many thanks to Becky Fifield (The Still Room Blog) for revisiting the article she published last year on her amazing Runaway Clothing Database (RCD). It is available now as a downloadable PDF from the publisher’s website. I devoured it for its systematic look at classifying–cataloguing, really–not just the runaways themselves, but their articles of clothing.

What Becky did with nearly 900 ads was to create catalog records for each woman who ran away, as well as her clothing. It’s a phenomenal project, and one that works well now, in an age of computer databases and improved cataloguing nomenclature. It is also a testament to dedication and love: the amount of time to construct the database and enter all the records is significant. That’s hours, tens of hours, of work before the fun part of analyzing the data can begin.

Kudos to Becky, for hard work and inspiration!

Vogue for the Lower Sorts

On By kittycalashIn Clothing, Reenacting

How does a reenactor know what to wear? There’s a wide range of choices for any decade, so how do you know what’s right?

Well, you don’t, not without documentation. This is where it can be nice to be a soldier. There’s griping in my house about “plain old white linen grumble frocks grumble waistcoat grumble” but really, the man and boy know who they are and what to put on. (Doesn’t stop them wanting regimentals, and I know they’re casting sidelong covetous glances at British coats.)

What about the women? The range is vast, from Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Izard

to the  Oyster Seller.

Both are ca. 1775, though the original Oyster Seller was probably earlier, but here’s the thing: how differently would she have dressed in 1775 than she would have in 1765?

It’s a point taken up, to a degree, in The Dress of the People, which I devoured in the orthopedist’s waiting room yesterday.

So if you know you’re not Alice Delancey Izard, but you’re not really an oyster seller, either, what do you do?

You check the ads.

I search runaway ads for Rhode Island to check my choices. That’s how I came to make a blue wool cloak, because I found Lucy, who ran away in December 1776 in a “blue Baize cloak.” There was Polly Young, who ran away in June, 1777, in a “black skirt petticoat and a short calico gown with long sleeves.” What did that short gown look like? I wish I knew. But it does place short gowns in Rhode Island (Lucy wore a short striped Dark Flannel gown when she ran away). Now, if only we knew what “short gown” meant in New England.