The Costume Historian & Art

by Sarah Goodman

Historic costume study isn’t so much about the clothing, but about the society as a whole. Looking back at a dead civilization and reconstructing its people usually starts with the most obvious: The artwork. From around 35,000 years ago, human beings have been leaving behind images of their world, and likewise, themselves. Coincidentally, this is also roughly the same time period when sewn clothing first made it’s appearance.¹ No matter how basic the art, the desire to leave a lasting impression behind is a uniquely human trait, as is the desire to create clothing, so it should be no wonder that art and clothing are ancestrally linked. Precious few artifacts of clothing exist, prior to 1600 C.E., which makes the field of costume study challenging, the farther back in time you go. In the same way that an archeo-anthropologist must reconstruct an entire human from less than a handful of fragments of fossilized bone, so must a costume historian clothe that human with only a few scraps of fibers.

Sixteenth century art has left behind more than just a collection of paintings; it has given us the ability to see with some accuracy how the people who made up the society dressed. Costume historians who specialize in the study of 16th century costume at some point or another turn to the German Mannerist painter, Hans Holbein, the Younger to glean precious information on historical clothing from his paintings and sketches. Perhaps best known for the double portrait called French Ambassadors to London, Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve, Bishop of Lavour, Holbein is often regarded as the costume historian’s painter.² So skilled in his representation of his sitters was he that a costume historian can often draft patterns directly from the artwork itself. However, not even Holbein can be a totally reliable source, as nearly all of his portraits show the subject from the front or three-quarters view, and rarely full length. When studying 16th century clothing, a person can not simply focus on one painter, no matter how skilled they were. Other artists contemporary with Holbein can be used to create an overview of European fashion, and when art can no longer provide visual help, written descriptions of clothing in the form of wardrobe accounts, wills and personal letters are relied upon to fill in the gaps. Artists that I have found particularly useful in costume study are works by Jean Clouet, Holbein’s French equivalent, and the miniaturist Lucas Horenbout, whose illuminations of the English court are particularly important for understanding headgear. Additional sources of art research come in the form of tapestries, embroideries, woodcuts, funeral effigies and even coinage.³

Sometimes, the less sophisticated artist, the more use the artwork is to a costume historian. Janet Arnold notes in her excellent book on using art for costume research A Handbook of Costume, that:

[In] many cases it is true to say that the less sophisticated the painter, the more information there will be for the student of costume. As soon as a painter starts to observe the play of light on fabrics or becomes involved with new techniques of painting, the details of dress are no longer so important to him. (Arnold, 17)

Relying totally on an accurate depiction of the individual’s clothing in a piece of artwork is not entirely realistic. Even Holbein was known to have “sweetened” the image of his sitter on occasion⁴ and it must be remembered that recreating the clothing of the sitter accurately was only one of several goals of the artist. In many instances the costume historian becomes an art historian for this reason. Someone who can perceive the difference between a higher and lower waistline or a wider or narrower skirt will be able to tell the time period in which the painting was created. Copies of a particular artist’s work by another artist several years after the original one was painted often show either a conscious or unconscious “updating” of fashion, and often a costume historian can provide a cheaper alternative to expensive dating procedures just be examining the way in which clothing is depicted.⁵

Another issue to be considered is the personal biases of the artist and what their eye is unconsciously drawn to. Arnold cites the French Ambassadors to London, Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve, Bishop of Lavour as particularly interesting in the depiction of the possibility of Holbein unwittingly painting styles of clothing familiar to him as a foreigner, rather than contemporary English fashion.⁶ Trusting the artist implicitly to give us all the information accurately isn’t realistic, just as the ability to recreate the clothing of this time period in complete accuracy is impossible. Again, Arnold puts the job of the costume historian into perspective:

Although it would be possible to reconstruct a dress, silks and velvets are no longer hand woven from hand spun threads. The resulting irregularity gave a different texture and appearance to the surface of materials made before the industrial revolution. Modern techniques cannot produce an exact reproduction of fabric for purposes of research, to understand exactly what the painters saw. (A Handbook Of Costume, 23)

In a perfect world, a costume historian could simply walk over to a drawer and pull out a garment from several hundred years ago and study it. Even though textiles as old as 5,000 years have survived the elements, hardly any but a handful of clothing has survived the graves of Europe in the last 400 years⁷ . Those articles of clothing that have survived are typically in such a fragile state that they cannot be publicly displayed. Often the textile restoration that such a garment has been subjected to in order to keep it from disintegrating has altered it enough that the original pattern of the garment is unrecognizable. And if the restoration attempt was far enough in the past, inaccurate information might be taken from the garment by an unsuspecting researcher.⁸ Using art from the same period, a costume historian is better equipped to understand the construction and fit of the clothing.

With all this in mind, I undertook the construction of the gown from Holbein’s Portrait of a Lady of Henry VIII’s Court (Image 1)⁹ . In many ways, I consider the clothing in this portrait ot be transitional and inconsistent with current Tudor fashion at the time. Based upon what I know of English fashion during the 1540’s, I noticed right away that the sitter’s sleeves do not fit with the traditional Tudor styling, which is characterized by a tight upper sleeve and a large belled lower sleeve. This style was kept in fashion for over 50 years and changed very little, even though construction methods seemed to improve the fit of the garment at the shoulder.¹⁰ The sitter in Portrait of a Lady of Henry VIII’s Court, however, wears a different set of sleeves that are overly large throughout and pleated to the shoulder of the bodice. They are then slashed down the center from the top of the shoulder to the wrist and fastened at six different points with a pair of gold aglets. A red silk lining, or strip of fabric, is pulled through the spaces between the aglets. Similar sleeves appear in two other notable portraits roughly contemporary with this one: Portrait of A Lady, Possibly of The Cromwell Family (Image 2) by Holbein in 1542 and Portrait of Katherine Parr attributed to William Scrots, 1543 (Image 3). The Cromwell lady is also interesting because certain accessories in her costume match the 1543 portrait. Most notable are the jewels at the crest of their respective French Hoods¹¹ , which are virtually identical (Images 4, 5). The billiments belonging to the sitter in the 1543 portrait are all slightly convex beads approximately 1 1/2 inches long and about 3/4 inch wide, with grooves running the length of the bead. The Cromwell Lady’s billiment has these same beads, alternating with a flat rectangular bead. Holbein did design jewelry for the King and his court, so it is very possible that the identical beads in both portraits were an original design. It is also possible that Holbein merely sketched the faces of each woman and then used a studio costume for the clothing and accessories, which may explain the overall similarity of the two gowns and jewelry.

The portrait of Katherine Parr by Scrots also answers a few more questions as to the origin of the sleeve style in the aforementioned Holbein portraits. It is widely accepted that the surviving Queen of Henry VIII is depicted wearing a loosely fitted gown, a style the English associated with Flanders and commonly called a “loose gown”.¹² Even though both of the ladies in the Holbein portraits appear to be wearing the tight fitting English style gowns, they have borrowed the wide sleeves from the loose gown. This could be an indication of an increasing acceptance of “foreign” fashion in the court, brought about no doubt by the rising influence of the middle class, a large portion of which was made up of Flemish and Dutch merchants living in England, the most prominent of which Holbein was frequently commissioned by.¹³
The topic of researching 16th clothing is never complete until the subject of underwear is tackled, and for once, we can’t rely totally on Holbein for help. However, you can’t begin to construct a reasonably authentic 16th century costume without building the right foundation, so where do you turn? In most cases, a costume historian is limited to a very narrow time frame and a specific region. The English viewed the fashion of the foreigners as weird, but eventually began adopting foreign elements of dress into their clothing¹⁴ . Certain articles of clothing, such as corsets and farthingales¹⁵ garnered much attention from detractors such as clergy and later, satirist Philip Stubbs. However, Stubbs’ writings and surviving wardrobe accounts, while proving the existence of controversial items such as corsets, do not provide a very clear picture as to what they looked like. Artwork from later years, or different countries are often useless as fashion was rather distinct from region to region. In short, the study of historical costume can be wide open to many conflicting ideas on what exactly was taking place under their clothes.

The practical approach to making historical undergarments is to take any information that can be gleaned from written accounts of fashion and apply it to the visual aspect of a painting. For example, the 1543 portrait in question depicts a young woman in a simple black dress with no hint as to what sort of foundation garments she may be wearing. We can infer, based upon information from Holbein’s sketches of the More daughters (Images 6, 7, 8) that the garment in the 1543 portrait might be worn in a related fashion. The best thing about the More family sketches is that they show pregnant women “laced down” to accommodate their bellies. The non-pregnant women in the copy of the original family portrait by R. Lockley (Image 8) all have stomachers, similar to the one depicted in Holbein’s Jane Seymore portrait (Image 9) which covers the open front of the gown. The pregnant women have left the stomacher off and one can see not only the way the open front of the gown is laced across the stomach and chest, but that an underkirtle is visible beneath. This same underkirtle can be seen in other contemporary portraits, such as Holbein’s portrait of Lady Guildford (Image 10), peeking above the edge of the gown neckline. In some cases, there is more than one kirtle visible, usually no more than two, though. It can be supposed that this kirtle was also a support garment, or covered one.

In my recreation of the gown in the 1543 portrait, I took a slightly different approach. Granted that the More sketches and the Jane Seymore portraits argue for an open fronted gown covered with a stomacher pinned in place, I had to wonder whether or not the fact that these depiction's of a stomacher fronted gown would be applicable to a gown worn some years later (20 years after the More sketches and around 10 years after the Jane Seymore portrait). Also, I had to consider the fact that this would not just be a museum showpiece, but an actual working garment that will be worn by a real human being. This brings up another good issue: How to know the difference between what is likely the authentic way of doing something, versus what is the practical way for a modern human to go about wearing the clothing. As I don’t normally have an army of servants to help me dress, I opted not to have a front opening gown with a stomacher, and instead made my bodice lace closed at the side-back, similar to the extant gown worn by Elenora de Toledo in the grave.¹⁶

The corsetry issue is even more difficult to clear up with pictorial evidence, as there really isn’t any portraits painted of women in their underwear at this point in the 16th century¹⁷ . Later decades, particularly the years right around the turn of the 17th century did produce some paintings of women in their corsets¹⁸ , and at least two surviving corsets from that period (one from Germany and the other from England) bear testament to their existence¹⁹ . However, no corsets exist from the early to middle years of the 16th century in England. Obviously there was some shaping garment being worn at that point, if we are to trust Holbein and his contemporaries in their depiction of the fashionable shape. There are written descriptions of “pairs of bodies”, which is widely agreed upon to mean the forerunner of the boned corset. These pairs of bodies, so-called because they had a front and a back that wrapped tightly around the body , were described as being lined with buckram, cardboard and pasteboard, or stiffened with willow bents or some other rigid material, such as metal strips²⁰

My solution was to create a linen corset, in the same shape as the bodice, and stiffen it with hemp cord. The use of hemp as a stiffener has not been documented in corsets at this date (although it becomes popular by the middle of the 17th century)²¹ , however it is a known stiffener for petticoats²² . This appears to be a “poor woman’s farthingale” or a softer alternative to the stiff willow bents in traditional farthingales when a less rigid look was desired. I chose to work with it in my corset because it gave a less flattened look to the shape of the body, whereas metal or cane would make the corset too rigid and more along the lines of later fashion in the 16th century.

The overall effect of this costume is one of comfort and modesty, where the body is allowed some natural shape to remain, as opposed to tight corseting and rigid skirts. I feel this is a dress more in keeping with the upper-middle class of the Tudor era with it’s simple lines, lack of ostentatious ornamentation and quiet dignity. Perhaps this unknown lady was the daughter or wife of a wealthy foreign merchant who could afford to commission Holbein. We may never know the identity of the sitter, but her clothing still speaks volumes of information about her station in life.

The creation of this costume was the first time I have attempted to recreate an entire gown from an historical source. The study of historical costume is something that I have always involved myself in, one way or another, and this costume proved at times frustrating due to the restraint of my personal creativity. Having been so inspired by Holbein’s Unknown Lady for so many years, I am proud of my finished costume.

Without access to the artwork from this time period, I would have no understanding of true nature of historical costuming, and without Holbein, I would be unable to construct a costume with this much confidence. There are many questions still unanswered in historic costume research, but as long the art from the 16th century survives, I am confident that I will be able to increase my knowledge of the clothing of this time period, so long as I care to look for clues.

Bibliography

1. Arnold, Janet. A Handbook of Costume. London: MacMillan. 1973

2. Arnold, Janet. Patterns of Fashion: The Cut and Construction of Clothes For Men & Women, c1560-1620. London: MacMillan, 1985

3. Arnold, Janet. Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Unlock’d. Leeds: Maney. 1988

4. Gentili, Augusto, et al. Paintings in the National Portrait Gallery, London. Boston: Bullfinch Press. 2000

5. Jurmain, Robert et al. Essentials of Physical Anthropology. United States: Wadsworth Thompson Learning, 2001.

6. Virtue, Cynthia. “Extant Clothing of The Middle Ages”, (online) http://www.virtue.to/articles/extant.html

7. Weir, Alison. Henry VIII: The King And His Court. New York: Ballantine Books, 2001

8. Weir, Alison. The Six Wives Of Henry VIII. New York: Ballantine Books, 1991

9. Zwingenberger, Jeanette. Hans Holbein The Younger. London: Parkstone Press, 1999

¹ Robert Jurmain, et al Essentials of Physical Anthropology (United States: Wadsworth Thompson Learning, 2001), 285.

² Augusto Gentili, et al. Paintings in the National Portrait Gallery, London (Boston: Bullfinch Press, 2000), 136.

³ Janet Arnold, A Handbook of Costume, (London: Macmillan, 1973). 90.

⁴ The story of Anne of Cleves and Holbein’s portrait not matching up in real life had disastrous results for poor Anne, but likely saved her from an even more disastrous marriage to Henry. Alison Weir speculates that the only reason Holbein survived that episode was because of Henry’s great respect for him as an artist, a testimony to the importance that artists such as Holbein had in 16th century politics. (Alison Weir, Henry VIII)

⁵ Janet Arnold, A Handbook of Costume, (London: Macmillan, 1973). 23.

⁶ Ibid, 19.

⁷ An excellent source for the study of extant 16th century garments is the book Patterns of Fashion: 1560-1620 by Janet Arnold. Some of the clothing she studied for the book is on view at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Janet Arnold is widely regarded as the authority on historical English clothing from the 16th century to early 20th century.

⁸ The pourpoint of Charles of Blois, which dates from around the middle of the 14th century is a good example of how a restoration job can affect the appearance of a garment. For years it has appeared to costume historians as though the pourpoint (or early form of the doublet) was quilted. It is now understood that a textile restorer stitched the garment to a mesh backing to prevent it from deteriorating, creating a quilted appearance. (Cynthia Virtue, Extant Clothing of the Middle Ages, online article)

⁹ Metropolitan Museum of Art

¹⁰ Images 9 and 10 show a ten year gap between the paintings, and yet the clothing has changed very little.

¹¹ The jeweled portion is referred to as a billiment and is thought to be a separate piece which secured the veil or hood portion to the “paste” or crescent shaped upper part. However, there are no extant French Hoods in existence, so their construction is entirely conjecture

¹² Arnold, “Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Unlock’d”, pg. 139

¹³ Jeanette Zwingenberger Hans Holbein the Younger (London: Parkstone Press, 1999), 59.

¹⁴ Catherine of Aragon, upon her entrance into London in 1501 caused a sensation in her Spanish Farthingale, which made her appear “as broad as she was high” to English eyes (Alison Weir, The Six Wives of Henry VIII, 31)

¹⁵ From the Spanish word for a skirt stiffened with bents of willow, “verdugado”, Anglicized to “farthingale”. It’s essentially the precursor to the 19th century bell shaped hoop skirt, but it is more conical and not as wide, at least in the beginning of the 16th century. The farthingale was first brought to England by Catherine of Aragon in 1501, but it wasn’t until some 30 years later that it was fully incorporated into English fashion. (Janet Arnold, Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Unlock’d, 190)

¹⁶ Janet Arnold, Patterns of Fashion: The Cut and Construction of Men’s & Women’s clothing, 1560-1620 (London: MacMillan, 1985), 41.

¹⁷ The trend at this point in time seems to be either a woman is wearing clothing for a portrait, or she isn’t wearing any at all. It’s my belief that Dianne d’Poiters, mistress of the French Kind, was painted more times during this period of the 16th century without her clothes than she was with her clothes. If you’ve got it, flaunt it, right?

¹⁸ “Portrait of Elizabeth Vernon”, c. 1600 and “A Woman At Her Toilet”, c. 1600 (Image 11, 12)

¹⁹ Ibid., 46.

²⁰ Janet Arnold, Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Unlock’d (Leeds: Maney, 1988), 145.

²¹ Ibid 195.

Me, looking haggard after an intense 3 days of non-stop sewing and writing in order to finish the blasted costume and paper by it's due date. I intend to get better pics of the finished product once I can convince myself that I'm no longer traumatized by the whole project.

Oh, and my professor kindly gave me 95/100 on the paper. I think she might have liked it... ;)