[HN Gopher] What can historical clothing reveal that other sourc...
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What can historical clothing reveal that other sources cannot?
Author : benbreen
Score : 35 points
Date : 2023-08-28 20:07 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.historytoday.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.historytoday.com)
| pimlottc wrote:
| Wikipedia has an article about the specific jacket and portrait
| mentioned at the start, with a good photo:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Layton%27s_embroidere...
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| The V&A museum's historical clothing exhibit was my favourite
| part of an already outstanding museum collection.
| hinkley wrote:
| I recently encountered a couple articles about the Bronze Age
| collapse. Turns out most civilizations did not contain
| substantial quantities of both copper and tin, since they appear
| in very different geological formations. When supply lines were
| interrupted, everything went off the rails.
|
| The provenance of the materials in an item can say a lot about
| the geopolitical landscape at the time they were made. Status and
| fashion tends to contain items where supply lines are a mere
| trickle.
| eesmith wrote:
| FWIW, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse
| says "Archaeometallurgical studies performed by various teams
| have also shown that trade in tin, a non-local metal necessary
| to make bronze, did not stop or decrease after 1200".
|
| It lists many other possible causes.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse#Possi...
| keiferski wrote:
| History is more about political and social history, but the
| article made me think of the concept of _qualia_ , or subjective
| experience. I feel like clothing would be a huge resource of
| individual experiences wearing corsets, suits of armor, togas,
| and so on, and how they affected daily life and deeper values,
| too.
|
| There is probably a book out there that compares the Roman toga
| to the modern business suit and then explains how that is
| relevant to how political power "feels" today vs. in the ancient
| world.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| My wife points out that wearing corsets may be related to the
| expectation that a gentleman will pick up a dropped
| handkerchief (or other item). The lady _can 't_ bend because of
| the corset.
| hammock wrote:
| Lady ought not bend anyway because she's wearing a skirt and
| may expose her ankles (or worse). At best she can squat down
| but the ground is dirty...
| neuronerdgirl wrote:
| Codswallop. Corsets were not the restrictive garments our
| modern mythology would have you believe. Except for a few
| specific types of fashions, corsets throughout history were
| designed to be well-fitting and maneuverable. Women wore
| these garments while working - including lower class women
| working fields, factories, and other hard jobs. Corsets were
| effectively bras for these women, and you could absolutely
| bend down to get your own handkerchief. These myths have been
| well documented and debunked by the historical costuming
| community [0-3].
|
| 0 - https://youtu.be/zNwTqanp0Aw?si=3duaZETPo2IZwFqU
|
| 1 - https://youtu.be/rExJskBZcW0?si=sx1oClP0avxEMUUB
|
| 2 - https://youtu.be/Xpie2GL0M4I?si=HzP2g76ycNLiPCxB
|
| 3 - https://youtu.be/4XBLBfWNH7I?si=Kkr7t0y9bINlWsqw
| keiferski wrote:
| For sure, there are a lot of examples like that, including
| women's buttons being backwards (for an assistant to button
| them, the theory goes) and a knight needing a page to help
| put armor on. Most clothing today can be put on without any
| help, which might be a reflection of an individualist
| culture.
|
| https://nowiknow.com/why-womens-shirts-button-backward/
| hotnfresh wrote:
| Those slim little mid-century genre paperback novels (sci
| if, mostly) fit _suspiciously_ perfectly in blazer /suit
| outer pockets, without even wrecking the drape. I'd say
| they were sized--including ideal length of the work--with
| that in mind.
|
| Older Modern Library kinda works, too. Certain variants
| (the smaller leather softcover run) are much better than
| others, and of course many of the books are simply too
| thick for that.
| keiferski wrote:
| A funny related story:
|
| _Sony co-founder Akio Morita desperately needed to sell
| the company's first transistor radio - the first in Japan
| and the second in the world. So Morita pitched it as
| being shirt-pocket size._
|
| _The only problem was that it was slightly larger than a
| shirt pocket, so Morita ordered several shirts with
| abnormally large pockets for his sales force._
|
| https://www.spokesman.com/stories/1995/mar/13/sony-puts-
| big-...
| mywittyname wrote:
| I have clothing with buttons and zippers that are
| "backwards" (online tailors will do either way). There's
| not a huge difference one way or the other, so I don't
| really buy into the notion that it was done because
| servants buttoned your clothing. Proponents of this theory
| leave out the fact that wealthy men had valets up until
| _very_ recently. Yet valets had no apparent issues
| buttoning their masters. If this were a class symbol, men
| would engage in it as well.
|
| If it had a reason, it was probably to distinguish "men's"
| clothing from "women's".
| throwaway7374 wrote:
| My theory is that upper class women had much more
| complicated clothing, with multiple layers. Some dresses
| had buttons on the back for example,
|
| A man's shirt and jacket was simpler. A man was expected
| to be more physically active and probably needed to take
| on/off his jacket several times a day without help.
| motohagiography wrote:
| In a former life, I wrote light articles about fashion and
| style, but from an unspoken view that clothing was an
| expression of how people percieved and aligned to power. We
| have smarter models for that now in the current century than
| the last, but fashion is still upstream of politics by a couple
| of years, and it's a good leading indicator of who the next
| influential-coalition will be made up of. For example, I
| suspect the mythology of Beau Brummel's relative minimalism was
| mainly about the rise of domestic industrial textile fortunes
| over the colonial fur and silk trade fortunes that sustained
| the crown and nobility.
|
| Also, ask any follower of fashion, and whether they understand
| why or not, they will tell you that a resurgence of cargo pants
| is very concerning indeed.
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(page generated 2023-08-29 23:01 UTC)