In Pursuit of the Middle Class

The initial project sketch.

New year, new dress, yadda yadda - If you've read any of the other diaries, you know how I am about that already. Suffice it to say that this year's project is a real, live, middle class dress. Does that mean I plan to have it crawling with lice? Er, no. That means that, in the interest of doing something that we don't see too much of at faire, I plan to make it as reasonably accurate to the myriad constraints of middle class life (the desire to be fashionable, the need to move during regular light chores, sumptuary laws, etc) as possible. That means it's research time at the OK corral, basically. One of my rather quirky little pet peeves is the extent to which sumptuary laws are ignored at faires. (The ' sumptuary laws' were a set of rules governing who could wear what, based on their rank. They also specify how much it will cost you in fines to wear something above your station, in some instances. It's been argued that the fact that these fines exist implies that the system was generally ignored, so to hell with it anyway. I'd personally argue that, unless you're going on the assumption that you are an *extremely* wealthy merchant, you had prolly best pay attention to the darned things. Add together the cost of, say, gold trim, with the fine for wearing it if your rank isn't quite up to par, and you're looking at a pretty pricey outfit. (There is, of course, an exception: anyone was allowed to wear anything that was given to them as livery of their lord.) So my thought is that it's prolly best to stay pretty close to what you were allowed to wear. The fines are significantly lower that way.) So, anyway, it basically annoys the snot out of me when I see metallic-and-pearl encrusted middle class entrants in the costume contest. (It's not at bad as the, 'peasants in purple velvet' peeve, though.)

The general gist of it is that the middle class should really avoid: purple, cloth of gold/silver, tinsel, sables, imported wool, scarlet or crimson velvet, fur of the feline persuasion (and really, you shouldn't skin cats anyway), and entire outer garments of velvet. Several persons who directly served her maj could get away with gold and pearl trims on their caps, hats, hatbands, capbands, garters and boothose or silk netherstocks. If your husband was valued at 100£ a year, you could wear satin, damask, or tufted taffeta in gowns and kirtles, or velvet in kirtles, the fur of anything that lived and died in the queen's kingdom (I've never figured this out: does it become a queendom?). If your husband made 40£ a year, you could wear silk grosgrain, doubled sarcenet (I have no idea what that is), camlet or taffeta in your gown, and satin or damask in your kirtle. And if you weren't otherwise mentioned in the law, you weren't supposed to wear any guards of silk on your petticoats, cloaks, or safeguards. There are also stipulations against enameled chains, buttons, aiglettes, and borders. (They don't really make those nowadays anyway, so it's not such a bother to work around that restriction.) I settled on a rather nice grey brocade with a very small pattern for the gown, and, in a fit of luck, found a matching grey brocade with a larger pattern for the underskirt. I had about 24 yards of blue grosgrain lying around (did I just use "24 yards" and "lying around" in the same sentence? Jeesh.... I am getting a little far over the edge about the fabric thing) that I thought would be good for lining the gown. I also wanted to work some grey fur into this somehow. I figure there were probably abundant populations of furry gret things in england at the time.

That gets us about to the designing part, the results of which you can see above. I decided to combine a couple features from several personal favorite sketches and portraits into the gown - the high, manhoitered sleeves are a personal longstanding favorite, as are the simple, arched elizabethan bodices. The skirt holder-upper thingy appears in tudor and italien sketches, and I think it's pretty neato. The little slonchy tick marks represent small bits of fur trim. The guarding will be made from more of the blue grosgrain that is also the lining fabric. My original plan had been to make the lower sleeves from the grey brocade of the skirt. Here's the catch: the grey brocade for the underskirt (and supposedly for the sleeves and possibly a cold weather partlet) was in the form of a 90" circular table cloth. One of the things I wanted to do was to have an underskirt that was brocade all around, so I wouldn't have to worry about the skirt flapping and showing the edge of a forepart and the undecorated underskirt next to it. (I hate that.) The more interesting part of this dress is in the proposed construction. As stated at the outset, I want this one to be reasonably accurate, and able to accommodate light chores, or, at the very least, movement. I volunteer to help with the day to day (well, weekend to weekend) work for the Friends of the Faire group at Bristol. I hench. Henching generally involves sitting at the bench and filling out membership forms, but occasionally involves filling water coolers, picking up plates of food that have been officially orphaned, moving a bench, quickly navigating from point A to point B, passing through an obstacle course of tables, benches, and broadswords along the way (rapiers, technically, but broadswords sounded better), and on feast days.... Well, ok, on feast days, I wear peasant garb, because I'm not actually a suicidal lunatic. ;) My thought is that those are activities roughly on par with what an elizabethan woman might have encountered keeping shop, or inspecting merchandise, or going to the market. My other thought, from years of experience, is that this is all a bloody inconvenient mess in a hoop skirt. Hoops skirts have two natural states: inconveniently collapsed, and inconveniently unwilling to collapse. The later happens when you are a) driving, or b) trying to move through a fairly tight area (crowd, priv, etc). The former seems to only happen when you're on stage for some reason. Like a costume contest or something. So I have a sneaking suspicion that the standard, Alcega farthingale pattern is not really accurate for a well-off, but still working, prosperous merchant type in 1574 (the year for bristol). (The Alcega pattern, btw, was published in 1589 in spain.) I also need a corset that provides the right line, but doesn't constrain movement too much. Teehee. Such small demands I make in life, right? I need a skirt support that collapses easily on demand, and a corset that will comfortably provide support without any discernable drawback. *giggle* Completely wacky.