Garters at work

Loretta reports:

Susan & I have had several discussions about garters, and where it is best to tie them if you are living in the days before the latest thing, i.e., the garters illustrated in my previous blog.

Contemporary illustrations show us that garters could be tied just above the knee or just below it.  Top left, Boucher’s The Toilette (1742), shows a lady tying her garters above her knee.  You’ll note that this is just above the knee, not up on her thigh.

You can blow up this Fragonard painting  and focus on the lady’s garters.  Again, they're tied just above the knee.  Since garters didn’t contain elastic (although they might have springs), one tied them at a place on the leg where a natural bulge would help keep them from sliding down. 

Another good place to tie our heroine’s garters is just below the knee, above the swell of the calf, as Rowlandson illustrates in his Exhibition Stare-Case (ca 1811) and his many erotic engravings.

In the Rowlandson print you’ll notice how smoothly the stockings cling.  But I suspected this was not the case so much in real life.  (Anyone who wore nylon or silk stockings and garters pre-Lycra knows the annoyance of ankle sag.)

Art and illustrations usually show us smooth stockings, as in John Hoppner’s full length portrait of Captain George Porter (second at left).

But not always.  The Guitarist, by Jean Baptiste Greuze (1757), shows us how, I suspect, the stockings usually appeared in real life.

Men Behaving Festively: Plough Monday

Susan reporting:

While Twelfth Night is usually regarded as the end of the Christmas Season, in rural England there was one final celebration: Plough Monday.

The first part of the festivities, on the Sunday after Epiphany, was serious and solemn enough. A ribbon-decked plough was carried into the local church to be blessed in the hope of a prosperous, productive new year, and a symbolic return to work after the Christmas season.

The next day, however - Plough Monday - was marked by more pagan excess, with the newly-blessed plough dragged through the neighborhood by burly ploughmen with their faces painted black, loudly demanding pennies for a frolic afterwards. Anyone who didn't oblige risked having their yard ploughed up; think trick-or-treating with an attitude.

Afterwards followed much drinking, kissing-games, bonfires, drumming, and general partying in the street, led by Molly Dancers (ploughmen in hobnail boots and black-painted faces) dancing around the plough and with each other. Overseeing it all would be their "queen", Bessy, a big guy dressed as a woman. Traditions vary from region to region, but the basics (and the plough) seems to be much the same.

These two 19th c. prints capture the spirit of the day pretty well. I particularly like the resigned women and children watching from the front of their cottage, doubtless wondering what is up with their cross-dressing Dad.

Here are two 19th c. reports of Plough Monday, already a bit gilded with nostalgia: from Chamber's Book of Days (1879) and Hone's Everyday Book (1825). However, lest you think Plough Monday is now to be found only to Thomas-Hardy-Land, here's proof via YouTube (and in the pub afterwards, of course) that it's still going strong – at least with these Molly Dancers in Suffolk, UK. The band's traditional music is fun, too.

Illustration, top: "Plough Monday", from George Wilson's Costumes of Yorkshire, 1814.

Below: "Plough Monday", from Hone's Everyday Book, 1825

More about the Red Gown

Susan reports:

While searching through my stash of photos from Colonial Williamsburg, I found that I, too, had taken pictures of the early 19th. American gown (Regency-style in England, Republican-style in the U.S.) that Loretta wrote about earlier this week. We decided no one would complain about a few more details, so here they are.

The first shows the gown full length, held by its maker, CW mantua-maker Janea Whitacre. The next shows the lower hem, and also the slight train of the longer back hem. Next is a detail of the full, puffed sleeve, and finally, a detail of the reverse of the whitework embroidery.

One of the things that fascinates me about recreating an actual historical gown like this is that the manuta-makers copy every aspect of the original. If you look closely at the picture of the from hem, you can see that there's a deep tuck running parallel to the bottom strip of embroidery. While no one knows for sure, it's a good guess that the gown was shortened for the wearer in this way after the embroidery had been done, and necessity became a design feature.

Fascinating Women: the Countess of Warwick

Loretta reports:

Fascination with corsets took me to the Worcester Art Museum to look at Bound by Fashion.  As the brochure, interview, and article explain, the show uses works in the permanent collection to examine the history of the corset.

As happened when I discovered Horace Walpole via an exhibit (posts here, here, and here), some weeks ago, I made some discoveries in a museum I’ve visited numerous times.  How many times had I gazed at John Singer Sargent’s 1905 painting, Lady Warwick and Her Son (at left)?  How much didn’t I know about the lady wearing the haughty expression?

According to the exhibition placard, the Countess of Warwick
is probably wearing an “S-curve corset.  From a frontal view, this complex corset, which was usually made of ten-fifteen sections of stays and material, formed an hour-glass shape.” 

The placard also informed me that in real life, her ladyship was an author, a socialist, a founder of agricultural colleges, and a vigorous supporter of labor movements.”  I had always assumed Sargent flattered his subjects.  He did elongate his subjects here, “to give the pair a timeless formal dignity appropriate to their high social position and the great traditions of the English aristocracy.”  He didn’t flatter her, however.  A photograph accompanying the exhibit showed that she was even more beautiful than he painted her. 

What neither photograph nor painting tells us is how complicated and fascinating a woman she was.  Here’s a wonderful glimpse of the woman herself.

One More Little Corset

Susan reports:

Here's one more example of 18th c. child-sized stays as reproduced by the mantua-makers of Colonial Williamsburg. (These are the same stays mentioned by our reader Abby, a former intern in the shop, who remembered showing them to fascinated visitors.) These really are tiny, sized for an infant, and stiffened not with baleen, but with pasteboard – we'd call it cardboard. The lacings are on the back of the stays.

Teeny Tiny Corsets

Susan reports:

Whenever we discuss corsets or stays (as they are called in the 18th c.), we're usually referring to the ones that adult women wore to give them fashionable shapes, and "improve" on Nature. But ladies weren't the only ones who began the day with a tight lacing. Most well-bred European children, girls and boys alike, also wore stays from the age of three months onward. 

The goal was not narrowing the waist, but to encourage proper posture and make standing straight a lifetime habit.  You know, being "upright" and "upstanding."

Costume collections have many of these tiny corsets, some measuring only sixteen inches around the chest. (The example, left, is a recreation by the Colonial Williamsburg mantua-makers; here's an antique example from the CW collection, and another from a private 

collection.) They're substantial, no-nonsense garments, quilted layers of stiffened linen and buckram, reinforced with baleen boning. The two young children in the painting below are clearly wearing stays beneath their fashionable clothing.

By the time boys were ready for breeching at about age five, they put aside stays along with the rest of their uni-sex baby clothes,

and began to dress like miniature men. Girls never gave them up; ladies wore stays their entire lives, even while pregnant. The girls of the later 18th c. did have the advantage of reaching womanhood in the brief era of the high-waisted Regency styles, and would have been spared whalebone for twenty years or so of their lives. But one wonders if the famously willowy figures of the time resulted from the stays worn as children.

To modern parents, the idea of toddlers in corsets seems horrifying. But every generation has its own ideas for raising healthy children. Those of us of a certain age (cough, cough) will recall the peculiar emphasis put on "correcting and supporting" children's feet in the 1950s and 60s. Kids were weighed down by clunky, reinforced oxford-style shoes with rigid arch inserts and tight lacing over the top of the foot. The more things change....

Department of Quotation: Twelfth Night (6 January)

Loretta reports:

From The Every-day Book, by William Hone, published 1827

To explain, to those who may be ignorant of the practice. On Twelfth-night in London, boys assemble round the inviting shops of the pastrycooks, and dexterously nail the coat-tails of spectators, who venture near enough, to the bottoms of the window frames; or pin them together strongly by their clothes. Sometimes eight or ten persons find themselves thus connected. The dexterity and force of the nail driving is so quick and sure, that a single blow seldom fails of doing the business effectually. Withdrawal of the nail without a proper instrument is out of the question; and, consequently, the person nailed must either leave part of his coat, as a cognizance of his attachment, or quit the spot with a hole in it. At every nailing and pinning shouts of laughter arise from the perpetrators and the spectators. Yet it often happens to one who turns and smiles at the duress of another, that he also finds himself nailed. Efforts at extrication increase mirth, nor is the presence of a constable, who is usually employed to attend and preserve free "ingress, egress, and regress," sufficiently awful to deter the offenders.

If you read the e-text, you'll see, further down, mention of Twelfth-cakes.  Colonial Williamsburg offers a recipe. And here's a BBC story, complete with wrong date (????)