'You really must get some flounces'

By Susan Vincent

Okay, here’s the thing. According to the United Nations, a truck full of textiles and garments gets dumped or burnt every second. Measuring this way, how many trucks full of waste clothing got thrown away in the time it took you to read to this point? Maybe around ten?

We all know that fast fashion is an ethical and environmental disaster. We know we have to consume less and reuse more. So let’s take a look back in time and see if we can learn anything from the practices of the past.

Any curator of costume will tell you that many – perhaps most ­– of the garments in their collections bear the signs of repair and alteration. For those skilled enough to read them, these seams and stitches are eloquent testimony to a garment’s changing life and also to the changing age, shape and desires of its wearer. Clothes are astonishingly malleable, although most of us have forgotten this. They can be made bigger or smaller; they can be augmented to assume a different shape; they can be cut apart into new incarnations. Surface decoration comes and goes, function changes, and one colour transforms to another.

Here are just four examples, one for each century.
 

 

This Armenian cope – an ecclesiastical vestment – dates from the seventeenth century. It is made from Persian velvet with an embroidered panel, or orphrey, edging the front. But the main body of the cope is constructed of joined-together pieces. Their shape and size – as you can see in the close-up – show clearly that they were once part of other garments. One or more of these was cut up, its scraps and panels husbanded, and carefully pieced together to form this new item.



The second example is a baby’s jacket that may have originated in India. It is made of a linen chintz, with four ties added as closures – both practical and jaunty – and dates from the second part of the eighteenth century. Like the cope, it has been sewn from reused fabric, either unpicked from an adult’s garment or cut out from a bed cover.

Here is a dress from the nineteenth century. Unlike most of the garments in museum collections, it has a documented provenance: we know exactly who wore it and when, and how it was altered and why. It belonged to a young woman called Amelia Beard (1844–1918; married to John Welles Hollenback in 1874), who lived in Brooklyn, New York. She first wore it in 1862, to be bridesmaid at the wedding of friends. Around ten years later, in response to a last-minute party invitation and finding herself with ‘nothing to wear’, Amelia adapted the gown to its present Polanaise style, the fine cotton muslin re-sewn as an overskirt cut away at the front and gathered high behind. 

And from the 1920s–30s, here is a delicious pair of silk lounging pyjamas. (The item is not in the public domain so I can’t include the image, but you can see it on the Met’s website here.) When originally made the legs were wide; sometime later they were narrowed for a new look.


While the signs of reuse lie within existing garments like these, they live also in documentary evidence. Letters are a great source for this. Look at Jane Austen’s to her sister Cassandra, for instance. 
The trend at the time was for dresses to be cut fuller towards the hem and increasingly trimmed at the bottom 
with frills and borders. When Jane reports to Cassandra on the modishness of this, she adds:

‘You really must get some flounces. Are not some of your large stock of white morning gowns just in a happy state for a flounce, too short?’(Letter dated 14 Oct. 1813)

Cassandra must have agreed and got busy with her needle, for twelve days later Jane enquired: ‘How do you like your flounce?’

The Austens also adapted the colour of garments, to change the purpose or extend their life. But dyeing – undertaken by a more or less skilled professional – could be expensive and the process hazardous for fabrics:

‘My Mother is preparing mourning for Mrs. E. K. – she has picked her old silk pelisse to peices [sic], & means to have it dyed black for a gown [...] how is your blue gown? – Mine is all to peices. [sic] – I think there must have been something wrong in the dye, for in places it divided with a Touch. – There was four shillings thrown away; – to be added to my subjects of never failing regret.’ (Letter 7 Oct. 1808)

Should we be trying to copy the reuse employed by Jane and Cassandra and almost every other wearer in the past? Is it possible to move forward to the future by going back to older ways?

We mustn’t kid ourselves that the Austens or any of our other forebears were any better than us. I’m sure that if they’d had the opportunity, they would have done precisely as we have. Theirs was a practice of necessity; ours – until environmental disaster forces our hand – is a moral choice. And in our time-poor and materially rich lives, it will take both commitment and resolve to change our habits, and the investment of buying better-made garments in the first place.

But one thing is certain. In producing cheaply, buying easily, and discarding without thought, we have not only misused our resources and polluted on a global scale. We have also killed the wonderful, ongoing life of our clothing.


Images
 
1. Waistcoat (close-up on armhole alteration), 1610–20, silk and linen, V&A Museum, London, no. 179-1900

2. Cope, first half of 17th century, velvet. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund, 1914, no. 14.67

3. Detail of cope

4. Baby’s jacket, c. 1760–c.1800, linen chintz. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Gift of Jonkvrouw C.I. Six, 's-Graveland, no. BK-1978-784

5. Evening dress, c.1877, cotton. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection, Gift of Amelia Beard Hollenback, 1966, no. 2009.300.3290

6. Evening dress, back

7. Journal des Dames et des Modes, 5 October 1813, Costume Parisien: ‘Coeffe à la Chartreuse. Par-dessus de Perkale’. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, no. RP-P-2009-2432

Dance and privilege - interpreting the past, by Gillian Polack

I’m writing this post weeks before it gets put online because I’m off to Ireland for the World Science Fiction Convention and for a bit of research and to see a lot of friends. Another person attending the conference asked about Regency dances the other day, and named specific English dances. There are several possible reasons for there being no dances announced at that precise moment in time, but the first thing that came to my mind was the element of Pride and Prejudice that is all about the military. The Bennet sisters who were so excited when beautiful young men in uniform came their way. 

Some types of story (and the way the military is depicted in Pride and Prejudice means that it’s one of them) let us think that historical hurt can defended with a parasol or with gentle intervention. 

In fact, this is true for some people in some places at some times, including in the early nineteenth century. In New South Wales in 1808, Governor Bligh’s daughter, Mary, defended her father against the military that was deposing him. She used her parasol. She later married into the military, however. Jane Austen depicted a truth about the relationship of women of the right background and their relationship with the British military at that time, and Mary was, for me, the young woman who exemplified it in real life.

It was not the only type of relationship.

Those same military personally, if they were in Ireland, presented differently to different parts of the population. They may still have been an excitement and beautiful young men to those of the right ancestry (mainly English and Church of England) but they were certainly not kind to much of the Irish population. Social events that included these soldiers were not something many wanted to attend. Re-enacting those events is re-enacting historical problems. Having modern parties that features those problems, including English dances that celebrate the military, is celebrating hurt.

This can be extreme. We all have our own examples of historical incidents that are almost too painful to talk about. Mine is food-related from the 1940s, and has nothing at all to do with Jane Austen or dancing. I’ve mentioned it before and no doubt I’ll discuss it again. It’s something I still haven’t resolved or come to terms with and I am forever repeating myself on matters historical until I sort things out. 

I have a cookbook I still have not used, because every time I bring it out I say “I will use it and remember these women” and I look through the recipe (which are delightful) and I make plans… and I can’t bring myself to cook. Every single one of the authors of this book was dying while they were remembering food they used to make for friends and family. Their particular cuisine was almost wiped out by the murder of the Jews of Middle Europe. How can I have a dinner party with this in mind? How can I not?

What I can do is what Edna Ferber did, and find a way of translating the complex and awful history into fiction. That way we see more than one view. That way we look at Ireland and can see why some dances had different values to those same dances in England, and we can see why.

We know that historical experiences are not shared, but when an exciting narrative comes along we can forget. Fiction helps cement us in the forgetfulness, but it can also help us see views other than our own. I was going to talk about how wonderful Tara was before the Civil War in Gone with the Wind, but then I remember how a couple from different backgrounds had their lives destroyed when someone found out in Showboat. This is how Edna Ferber handled part of the painful past, in the novel Showboat. There was a hero-moment when Steve drank a tiny amount of Julie’s (his wife’s) blood so that he could claim he had the right blood in him and so that they could stay together. The reality in Showboat was that the hero moment didn’t take the pressures off. It didn’t allow Steve and Julie to continue making a living as a couple. It didn’t allow them any happiness. 

The reality in Gone with the Wind was that Scarlett O’Hara’s life was privileged. She suffered during the war, but she wasn’t a slave before and she wasn’t treated like a lower part of society afterwards. The reality in Jane Austen’s stories is that most of her characters are similarly privileged.

Dances are one of my clues to how people were treated and what they did with their lives. In Showboat, Julie dances in a particular way that demonstrated her background. In Pride and Prejudice, the Bennet girls dance in the way that demonstrates theirs.

I need to discover what someone not linked to British troops and English rule danced in 1808. I already know about the dances Mary did around the time she defended William Bligh using her parasol. William Bligh may have had the worst bad luck – first the mutiny on the Bounty and then the Rum Rebellion in New South Wales – but he was not lacking in privilege in most ways and his daughter danced the dances of the gentry, just like the Bennet daughters.