18cNewEnglandLife
Clothing & Accoutrements
I'm Long On ... Time, Money, Skill
By Sue Felshin
So you're feeling inspired and you want to improve your kit for Battle Road,
but you're not sure what you should do? How about helping to balance the overall
look of Battle Road participants? A lot of your fellow reenactors have had to
choose their clothing based on what is cheapest or easiest to make or buy. Some
of them have based their choices partly on modern sensibilities. So while each
individual may be dressed in an authentic style, the overall statistics are
skewed from what they should be: too many smocks, too many gaiters, too many
fine ladies, too many shortgowns, and so forth.
- Use linen and wool, not cotton. Cotton is
authentic to our period, but we use way too much of it. Linen is expensive;
by wearing linen, you can balance out another reenactor who can only afford
cotton. We modern people are shy of wool because we think it's too hot; in
the right weight and weave, though, it isn't. It gets harder all the time to
find good wool as the modern world switches to those horrid synthetics. Seek
out good wool, and use it.
- Lower your economic status. Most everybody likes to dress
up, so there are too many fine ladies and gentlemen. There are a lot of
middling sorts as well, but not enough really low class people. See below
under "Men" or "Women" for particulars of what you can
make.
- Use unpopular colors. People in the 18th century had a
different color sense. They certainly did use some colors that we
still like today, and we reenactors tend to prefer those colors. They also
used some colors that we now think are awful. Make something from one of
those colors, if you can stand to. And men, consider using pink or lavender.
- Hand sew and use edge stitching. There were two main ways
of constructing a lined garment in our period. One was to assemble the
outside pieces, assemble the lining pieces, sew the outside to the lining
leaving a small length open, turn the garment inside out, and whip the
turning hole closed. With this method, there is no top stitching, or almost
no top stitching, so you can imitate it with a machine pretty successfully.
The second technique was to sew each outside piece to its lining piece, and
then whip stitch all the assembled pieces to each other. To assemble an
outside and lining piece, you put them together wrong sides together,
turn in the raw edges of outside and/or lining (as necessary depending on
whether the fabric will fray), and stitch the outside to the lining with a
running stitch. You can't possibly imitate this technique with a sewing
machine, because the running stitch edge stitch that holds each piece
together, and the whip stitch that holds each piece to the next, both show
on the outside of the fabric. This second technique is underrepresented
among reenactors, so if you have the time, use it.
- Piece your clothing. Just for the fun of it, see how
little yardage you can get away with by clever piecing. For lower class
clothing, don't worry about whether the piecing matches. Lie a striped piece
the wrong direction, or use a different fabric altogethe r, of a color that
only sort of matches.
- Get some wear on your clothes. Most of us only wear our
reenactor clothing a few days of each year, so it always looks new. You can
try distressing your clothes -- leave an item hanging on the laundry line
outside for a few weeks, or scrape a hem against a rough rock or brick until
it starts to fray -- but nothing looks as real as real wear and tear. Try
wearing your reenacting clothes around the house, or to do yard work or
gardening. Stop washing your clothes (except what lies directly against your
skin, like shirts, shifts, stockings, and kerchiefs). If they get dirty,
brush the dirt off or just leave it. If they get wet or sweaty, hang them
out to air.
- Practice deportment. This is good 18th century posture:
Stand up straight, shoulders back, shoulders down, butt in, feet turned
slightly out, legs slightly bent. Men, make a leg; you can stick your
stomach out a little to show your prosperous belly. Women, keep your stomach
in and curve your upper arms out and your lower arms back in making a
graceful curve with your hands in front of your waist; no hands on
hips; to display a fine gown, you may also curve your arms out instead of
in; walk smoothly and gracefully. For a lower class impression, though, don't
use good posture. Try to "ape your betters" if you like, but don't
be too successful unless you really want to portray someone trying to climb
the social ladder.
- Practice 18th century speech. Start by eliminating
"okay", "hello", and "hi" from your
vocabulary. You can try saying "yes" or "very well"
instead of "okay", and "good day" or "how do you
do" instead of "hello" and "hi", but we could
really use more research on this topic. Period plays are a great source for
daily speaking vocabulary.
- Learn about print fabrics, and make something using an authentic
print. Authentic prints are underrepresented among reenactors --
but we have plenty of inauthentic prints. It's hard to learn what prints are
authentic to our period, and hard to find them. It's better to use a plain
fabric or stripe than to risk a bad print. But if you have the time to
really learn about prints, that's great! Start by finding several books.
Read about what printing methods were available during our period. Find
books with many examples of prints from our era; Tidings and Textiles In
America are a good start but are not enough. Pay attention to the areas in
which the prints were produced and the fabrics on which they were printed.
Would you, a New Englander, have had access to that fabric? Count how many
colors were used. Look at the shapes and the sizes. Really familiarize
yourself with prints before you go out and buy one. Before you buy anything,
you should be at the point where you can glance at a print and immediately
realize "oh, that looks like copper roll; that's post-Revolution"
or "that's a small diapered block print like the one in such-and-such
book; I could use it for a middling common gown" or "that's a
period-style print, but it was only fashionable for upholstery".
- Work up an impression, or several impressions. See Persona
Development.
- Either make a frock coat, or make a jacket
-- or sleeved waistcoat -- and trousers. Frock coats were
the most common main garment of the day. A fair number of reenactors have
them, but we could use even more. A jacket or sleeved waistcoat, trousers,
and a floppy hat or workman's cap make a good impression of a poor farmer or
laborer. It wasn't as common as a frock coat and breeches, but this
impression is seriously underrepresented now among reenactors, so it could
be a good choice, too.
- Replace your military cock hat with a civilian hat, your
haversack with a wallet or snap sack, your metal canteen
with a wood or gourd canteen; get reproduction
shoes and replace your full gaiters with farmer's
gaiters or no gaiters. Haversacks and metal
canteens are largely military items and would have been rare to non-existent
in eastern Massachusetts in 1775, and only a moderate proportion of
participants should be wearing gaiters. We are allowing these items so that
more reenactors will be able to participate, but the fewer, the better.
- If you really have time, money, and energy to burn, try to make leather
breeches. Not the Dan'l Boone mountain man kind; just
ordinary breeches, only made out of leather. They were fairly common during
the period, but we reenactors don't have much experience with them. A few
reenactors have tried, and some have even succeeded. Apparently it's fairly
hard to get the right sort of leather and to fit them so that they're
properly tight in the leg and don't chafe.
- If you feel like investing in something that's very authentic, particularly for Battle
Road, get a fowling piece. This was a common man's hunting
weapon, often of local manufacture using surplus hardware of British,
French, Dutch and even Spanish origin. There are also many examples of very
elaborate fowlers which were produced in Europe and the Colonies. You can
find many fine examples in Newman's
books, and elsewhere. They're woefully underrepresented at Battle Road,
since most people buy English Brown Besses or French Charlevilles that are
mass produced by Italian and Japanese companies. A fowler would need to be
custom manufactured, but given the increased prices of the production pieces
in recent years, it may be worth a little extra investment to have a truly
representative weapon for most any early war Civilian, Militia or even
Colonial military impression.
- If you don't have stays, make stays. That should keep you
busy for a while!
- If you have stays, make an everyday gown of linen or
wool, preferably plain, or at most a stripe. Most reenactor women right now
wear either "short gowns" or bedgowns, or fancy ball gowns. We really
need more plain gowns to get the right balance. You can make either a full
length gown (that is, around high ankle length) or a short (pause) gown,
which ends a little above the knee. Make an ordinary English gown (seamed
all around at the waist) or a gown "en fourreau" (seamed all
around at the waist except at the center back where it is one piece from top
to bottom), whichever you prefer. For a middle class impression, use a
moderately fine wool or linen. For a lower class impression, use a coarser
wool or linen and make the gown just a little bit ill-fitting; use a plain
length of wool instead of a cloak or cape; wear men's reproduction shoes,
preferably rough-out ones. Poor people in Massachusetts Bay weren't as poor
as poor people in England -- there wasn't a whole class of utterly destitute
people in rags -- but we still could use more reenactors in lower class
clothing.
- Get reproduction
shoes. Men can hide modern shoes under half gaiters, but women
can't.
- Boys were usually breeched between the ages of 3 and 7. Reenactors tend to
breech their boys on the early side due to modern sensibilities. Breech
your boys late to counterbalance others.
- Reenactors tend to let their girls wear grownup clothes too young. Keep
your girls in young children's
clothing until they hit puberty.
- Make a pudding
cap for your toddler.
- If you're going to be an interpreter, read more about the
history of the day and the era. In addition, many excellent books are listed in
the Bibliography
section.
- Do some research. Go to a nearby historical society or
library. See if you can find some local diaries, town meeting minutes,
census data, newspapers, or what have you. Read them for your own sake, and
if you can, write up a little article about what you learn, or at least
write up a bibliography of the items you find. You might learn about the
local occupations, or daily life in that town, or how one particular person
participated in the Battle Road. You might learn the relative proportions of
farmers, merchants, and laborers in one town. You might learn what people
grew there, or ate there, or what was for sale, or what servants had run
away. All of this can be used to improve our reenacting. We would love for
you to send your findings to the Battle Road Committee to be posted on our
Web site, and there are also publications of reenactment umbrella
organizations that are always looking for new research to publish.
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