You probably clicked on this video thinking
that we were going to be trying on 500 years of maternity fashion. Well guess what, most women's
clothing was maternity clothing. So before we jump into things, I just want to make a little bit of a
disclaimer. Firstly, in this video we're going to be talking about very sensitive subjects related to
infant mortality and unfortunately about misc***age as well. So if it is something that is very triggering
for you or is very upsetting for you, I would not recommend watching this video and clicking off now.
Additionally, because we are talking about women throughout history this video is going to include
extremely gendered language due to the fact that we're talking about people in the past. Without
further ado, let's jump into things. So hi Kass. Hi, how are you doing? Good. Welcome back to the channel. You want to briefly tell everyone who you are. I'm Kass McGann. I'm the owner of Reconstructing History Patterns. I'm a clothing historian. I've been working as a clothing historian for 20 years. We're here today to talk about maternity clothing through the ages. Just a little spoiler, neither of us is pregnant. [Laughs] Yeah, two not pregnant women talking about maternity clothing! Maternity clothing is a fascinating subject that I think there are a lot of
misconceptions surrounding. Why not talk to a fashion historian about the actual reality of what
it might have been like for women. I don't have children so I've never been pregnant.
However, I get a lot of questions from my customers and visitors to my website throughout the years
about, "oh I'm pregnant and I want to continue reenacting but I don't know what to wear. What did
they wear when they were pregnant?" The shocking answer is, the same thing they wore every other day [laughs]. In the 21st century, it's hard for us to imagine that that would be the case because our experience is so incredibly different. As we're going to find out throughout this video there are reasons why
most clothing for women was maternity clothing. There's a statistic that i want to hit you with
right up front because it's very important to understand why this was the case. There's a book
called Women's Work by Elizabeth Wayland Barber. Wonderful book, it's one of the first books
I read in 1995 that got me interested in the study of clothing, and she reveals in this book the
average shirt, or tunic, whatever man's upper body garment, took about four years of a woman's spare
time to make and that's spinning, weaving, sewing. So four years that she wasn't cooking and cleaning
and taking care of children and in childbirth and all those things. And the average shirt lasts about
four years. We don't think about this modernly how very labour-intensive it is to make clothing before
the modern era. It's not that you simply weren't rich enough to afford a maternity wardrobe, it's
that no one was and also you were pregnant so often why would you have different clothing? It would have just been like any other day for them really. Women's clothing isn't only good for maternity. It's also good for you lose weight, you gain weight, you get older. Women's clothing has to be malleable and your clothing has to fit.
When we're talking about a pre-modern time period, you have one set of clothing and it has to fit you through all the changes. Let's start with the year 1420. What was going on in fashion in the 1400s? Why would you say it would qualify as maternity clothing? If you look at the silhouettes in art in the 1400s, there's no better example that I can give you than the Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck. And this is a portrait that many people,
many people who don't know the time period or who aren't familiar with art, think that the woman in
the painting is pregnant. She's not pregnant. It's a betrothal picture. She is not yet married
to this man. And there's a lot of symbolism showing his wealth, her family's wealth, their
devotion to each other, but one of the things that is not symbolic is the dress that she's wearing. It
is a beautiful rich dress. It shows that she comes from a very wealthy background and she can afford
this luxurious fabric. However, the way that she's holding it in front of herself, this volume of
fabric and the fact that it fits her breast area and then it's huge from there on down, if she were
pregnant, we wouldn't know [laughs]. It's not meant to hide pregnancy, it's meant to imitate pregnancy because
a pregnant woman, a pregnant wife, is a prosperous wife. All women's clothing from this time period is
very voluminous, even the clothing of common people fitted over the shoulders and into the bust area
but very voluminous below. You would look pregnant even when you weren't. We have pictures of people
picking crops in the field where they're wearing not quite as voluminous clothing, but they are
wearing clothing that is not tight around their waistlines. And we have a wonderful bunch of
extant garments called The Greenland Finds that were found in Herjolfsnes, Greenland in the 1920s.
These garments are an amazing record of what was worn in the 15th century by normal people. Every
single one of the garments that's been identified as a female garment has a gore that starts just
under the bust line and flares out. None of them have a waist seam, some of them have a more tapered
waist than others but there's not a single one of them that you couldn't go through at least eight
months of pregnancy and not have it be tight. The idea that you would have different clothing
when you were pregnant, well you didn't need it. What was the style of this specific gown called?
Did it have a specific name? The noble people's garment was called a houppelande, but the common
people's garment, I mean this is just kirtle, dress, cotte, whatever language you're speaking, it
means dress. But yeah, the houppelande was the big voluminous garment and meant to show off your
wealth by the fact that you could afford this much fabric. The Greenland Finds, these are people who
couldn't afford the extra fabric and yet they're still making clothing that has that kind of a-line
shape to it. And that's their normal, daily clothing. That's every single woman's garment, not just one
or two. Now when we move into the 1500s, so say by 1520, what is going on in fashion at that point and why would you think of this as maternity clothing? [laughs] This is quite a different time period you have
progression from what we consider the Medieval period to what we consider the Renaissance
periods. The very end of the 15th century into the 16th century we have what's
generally termed Tudor fashion. Typically dresses have a structured bodice, a waist seam, and
a skirt. The bodice and skirt are sewn together but they're separated by a waist seam which is kind
of the revolution of Renaissance fashion, is that a waist seam happens, and once you have a waist
seam you can do two things; you can make the bodice tighter without restricting the legs and you can
make the skirts incredibly big because you don't have to take that volume of fabric and fit it into
the top of the body. We don't quite have anything we could call a corset yet, but there is the very
earliest iteration of corsetry, it's called "a pair of bodies.' So a pair of bodies is the two halves of
your bodice laced together. Anything you can lace, you can unlace. Anything you can lace tightly so
the two ends come together, you can leave open. Much like the stays I'm wearing today that don't
fit me anymore. [laughs] My stays right now are open down the back a good four or five inches, but they still
work to do everything stays need to do and that's one of the reasons that we see lacing in women's
garments throughout the ages and we don't really see lacing in men's. We see buttons in men's, we
see hooks, we see permanent joins. But in women's you always have to have this, "oh today I'm going
to lace very tightly, oh today I'm going to leave this open because I'm uncomfortable, or I've
gained weight, or I'm pregnant." In the Tudor period, we look at these gowns and we think, "oh that's
a very stiff gown. It has a very defined bodice. And that bodice must be that size and it can't
change," but one of the things that's not apparent when you're looking at a Tudor gown, there's
lacing down the centre front that's covered by a placket. If you left that lacing open, and there
are some pictures, early Tudor pictures where you can see the kirtle underneath is left open and you
can see the edges of the kirtle, the tops of the edges sticking out from under the placket that's
on top of them. In some portraits you have women who only have maybe an inch couple, centimetres
space, and other women their lacing is so wide open it's almost to their armpits. Even though they
are stiffened bodices, and they're not quite boned yet but stiffened bodices, stiffened linen, sometimes
some cording to make the bodice be that kind of ice cream cone shape that we see in later
centuries. It's stiff but it's still malleable because of lacing. Lacing is probably going to be
one of the themes throughout this entire video especially as we get into 18th and 19th century
it's all about lacing. Another portrait is a very late 16th century portrait of An Unknown Lady
by Marcus Gheeraerts II. She's obviously pregnant. I mean she's got, the belly bump is all the way up to
her breasts. She's got basically the bottom of her bodice completely unlaced so it's laced over her
breasts, it's laced open but it's still laced over her breast, and then it's just completely unlaced
below where a modern bra strap would be. And that's another benefit of lacing, you don't have
to lace the whole thing. You lace them as far down as you need and then you just leave them open. The 1600s, I feel like this is kind of the century that everyone forgets about. [Laughs] It's my favourite century! It's my favourite century. Say 1620 to 1720, what is going on at this point in history? There's a real progression from the 16th century into the 17th century. In the beginning of the 17th century women are wearing much what they were wearing at the end of the 16th, of course. You
know, no one throws out their clothes just because the century changed. Except the Victorians. Except the Victorians. [Both laugh] Because they're crazy! The 1620s, the typical dress of women of all classes, both upper class and working-class women, were wearing jacket and petticoat combinations. Much like what you see working women wearing in the 18th century, both working women and noble women were wearing this in the 17th century. The waist in the 1620s wasn't empire waist but it wasn't natural waist either. It was about halfway between. This is why no one talks about 1620s. It's a waistline that to modern eyes we think is ugly. It's a very strange place to have a waistline, and in order to have a waistline there, because your body doesn't go in there, you have
to create that and how they created it was with a boned bodice. So you had a bodice that was boned
into the v shape but then the bottom of the v stopped at your high waistline and then below that
it was just a pleated skirt or a gored skirt. You had these tabs that made the skirt and the skirts
started at your high waist. At this point, were they called stays or were they called pairs of bodies still? They were called stays at this point. You started hearing stays, but boned bodice was also something that was said. The word 'stays' starts coming in, I'd have to look this up, but I
believe that the first instance of the word stays comes in the very, very late 16th century. By the
1620s that people were calling them stays, would not be unusual. Now you have a high waistline and
you could get through many months of pregnancy with that laced completely closed because it
stops before the pregnant belly. Right there again, we have this kind of return to that
idea in the 15th century where a woman was beautiful because she looked pregnant. If
you look at pictures of Henrietta Maria, who is the Queen of Charles I of England, she's
always got this high-waisted bodice. That's the waistline of the time. In common women, the
waistline tends to be lower because it's more functional and they're not you know exaggerating
for fashion's sake, but lower-class women were still wearing their waists higher than at natural
waist. And again, if you've got a pregnant belly to sit your waistband on, it pushes everything up. And what was the name of the typical dress that people wore at that point? That's a really good question. [Laughs] Really, honestly the answer for the most part is dress. When you read period references to clothing of the time period it just uses the generic term 'dress' because they're not calling something specific. This is perplexing as someone especially that wears a lot of Victorian and Georgian fashion because it apparently gets so insanely complex by the 18th
century as we're about to find out. It does because by the 18th century you have an increase in
production, the industrial revolution happens, so you have more opportunities to wear different
styles of dress rather than wearing the same thing all the time. So you start having terminology.
And as a clothing historian, historians like terms so we want to say, "and that's a gúna, and that's
a kirtle, and this is why it's different. When we say kirtle we mean this kind of sleeve and this
kind of closure and...," but they didn't. And as a historian that's also something we have to be
careful about because historians put labels on things that the people who wore these things every
day would never have used. By the 1680s, the 1690s, I have seen quite a drastic shift in a silhouette
by that point. What would you say is happening? Yeah, by about the 1670s, I like to call it the
Revolution in Fashion, the Glorious Revolution of Fashion, because it happens about the same time
as the Glorious Revolution happens in the United Kingdom, which wasn't the United Kingdom yet,
in Great Britain. You have this silhouette that becomes something very familiar to us, that ice
cream cone top and the inverted ice cream cone bottom. Which we started to see in the Tudor period
but we never see it as exaggerated as it's going to be in the 18th century. We start seeing the
beginnings of that in the 17th century, about 1660s 1670s. And what you've got there is a very rigidly
boned set of stays and a petticoat. So women are wearing these stays and they're very long-bodied.
It's a myth that women couldn't sit down. Of course, women could sit down. [Laughs]
But in very, very fashionable circles there may have been a bit of a fashion arms race. "Oh my bodice is so long, I can't
possibly sit down." This kind of competition, but that would have been very, very elite and we
don't have knowledge that that necessarily happened. The silhouette was a very long waist so the
waistline drops and in order to make that look that way, you have to have a very long set of
stays. So now instead of having the bodice end at the waistline, you're having the bodice continue
into the hips so you're making a very smooth line. By the 1670s, you have everyone looking very tall
because they have these lengthy bodices on and then they also added to that by stacking their
hair in rolls on top of their head, it's called a tour, which is the French word for tower. Also
putting a veil called mandilla on top of their head, the typical spanish lace headdress came out of the
1670s but they were wearing it all over Europe at that time. Exaggerated silhouette like that, it's
not comfortable. Women wanted to be comfortable, and they wanted to be fashionable, but they also
wanted to be comfortable. What happened was women started wearing robes that they got from the
Middle and Far East. This is, you know, the golden age of trade. This is when the Dutch were trading
all over the world and the Portuguese, and so you have them bringing back silks and spices
from the Near and Far East. One of the things they brought back were robes from Asia, and these
robes are very simply constructed like a T. So you had no shoulder seam, the fabric went you
know from the back over the front just folded. The sleeves were not separate, they were part of the
fabric, and then they closed up the front. And women started wearing these over their stays. You know,
you could receive visitors at your home and you would have on your stays and petticoat and this
robe. And that robe became the mantua, mantua named after the city Mantua in Italy, which was a great
trading port. The mantua turned into the robe anglaise the robe française, all of those typical 18th century
gowns are the evolution of the mantua, but at the beginning the mantua was just this very plain
t-shaped robe from another country that you would pleat with your hands and stick a couple pins in
it, pin it to your stays so it would stay in place and put a belt around it so your waistline would
show off. In pregnancy, what do you do? You pin the mantua a little differently because you're a bit
bigger. When you're pinning the mantua to your stays you have the space in between the opening of your
mantua. You don't want people to see your stays, I mean maybe you do, but maybe you want them to see
something more pretty than the front of your stays. So you get a beautiful piece of embroidered silk
and you pin it to your stays before you pin your mantua to your stays. And that's how the stomacher
was born. People are putting this piece of fabric on the front of their bodices way back in the
Tudor period, we spoke about that how they were covering up their lacing with this. The same
thing happens with a stomacher. So stomacher was sometimes set behind the lacing and you would
have decorative lacing over the front of it, but sometimes the stomacher just pinned right onto
your stays and then your gown didn't have to meet in the front. You could pin the gown along the
sides of the stomacher. If you were pregnant, you just pinned it further out here, and if you were
were not pregnant, you lost some weight, you were thinner, you just pin it closer in. You could change
out these stomachers because, while they were very beautiful silk and wonderfully embroidered and
very decorative, they're very small so you could have a bunch of different ones and it would make
your entire outfit look different just because you had a different decorative stomacher on the front. Now going into say the 1710s and 20s? There was a garment called the mantua still in the 1720s and it was basically the old mantua from the 1670s but it was more sewn into shape. Whereas in the 1670s you were putting on this robe and pleating it however you wanted it to be and then you would unpleat it when you took it off. By the 1720s, they are permanently pleating the mantua so that when you take it off it still has that shape but still it has this open bit at the front. And that open
bit either closes by pinning it to your stays, pinning it to your stomacher, or it laces zigzag
across the front across your stays or stomacher. The mantua looks different but it's still the same
animal if you see what I mean. It's just evolving over time. Just like an animal. Yeah like an animal [laughs].
And now you've got stays in this time period where, and I don't think there's a time period where you don't have them, that could have lacing in front as well as back. You hear this myth banding about that women who had servants had back lacing stays and women who were common women,
who didn't have servants had to have front lacing stays because they had to dress themselves, and
this just isn't true. We have stays that are only front lacing in the collections of noble people,
and we have stays that are back lacing that are clearly common people stays. The reality is
that no woman is an island, you know? Nobody lives completely alone and can't find somebody to lace
them into their stays. It's not this idea that, "I'm portraying a working-class person I can't have
back lacing stays." You absolutely can, matter of fact, stays that are only back lacing are far more
common in the surviving record than stays that are front lacing. You tend to have front lacing
stays that stay laced the same amount in front and you adjust them in the back where no one sees it. Yeah, much like I have a pair of stays that are based off of an extant from about the 1780s and
they've got maybe like a halfway down slit that laces up in the front and then fully laces in the back. And you know what that slit is for? For nursing, yeah because we're talking about maternity clothing but we haven't touched on the fact that a woman who is pregnant eventually is going to
have that baby and then she has to be able to nurse it. Coming into the 1740s and 50s, Rococo is
starting and these other more artistic movements, then we're going into the middle-late part of the Georgian period. What is going on and why is it maternity clothing? This is just a magical question we're gonna keep asking. When we look at clothing from the 1670s and the 1720s and the 1740s, 50s, 60s, 70s, we see something very radically different, but the fact of the matter is, the details
are different but the basic structure is the same. You still have a set of stays. You still have
petticoats from the waist down, and you have a dress that is open in the front. And whether it's
open in the front straight down the centre, or it's open on the front and you pin it to your stays
or you lace it across the front of your stays, they still close the same way. One of the ways
that women often close things in this time period is by the use of pins. You know, sometimes you
have lacing across the front, but more often you have women pinning their clothing closed
and sometimes you pin it closed, you just bring the two edges together and you put pins down the
front. And if you need it to be smaller, you just overlap the edges and pin down the front. So this
same thing keeps happening. We don't think about using pins this way in our modern lives, but in
the 18th century you had pins like crazy. I mean you were using pins for everything and pins were
an essential part of a woman's wardrobe. I strongly debate the use of pins in sewing. Most pins that
we find are dress pins, are pins for holding your clothing together. I guess basting would have been the norm then, just basting things together, not even pinning them. Pinning to sew is a very, very modern idea. So just to play devil's advocate, I wear a lot of equestrian clothing especially 18th century riding habits and redingotes and these are all closing with buttons. Would you say that this is an exception to the rule that most women's clothing is maternity clothing? Well it is an exception but it's an exception to a bigger rule. All women's riding costume is an imitation of
men's dress, and more importantly men's military dress, which always has you know buttons, almost as decoration. Sometimes the buttons on men's military dress aren't even functional. In 1588 there was a
document called Stubbes Anatomie of Abuses which is basically a rant by a puritan preacher in England
who was railing against women, "wearing doublets like unto the men." The only time women are wearing
doublets is when they're riding, because a doublet is a man's upper body garment. So women are wearing
them when they're riding and one of his complaints was that women look like little men, and that
wasn't to be had. Women have to look like women and men have to look like men, and never the twain
shall meet. And this kind of complaint about women dressing as men, these complaints by conservative
ministers or other people who were professional... complainers, I suppose, about women wearing men's
clothing you know, happens over and over again. So one complaint is that, "oh they look like
men." Which clearly they didn't, but that was the complaint, but the other thing is that they're not
being feminine and that's all about the buttons. That's all about the military-style clothing.
And you can't be pregnant and wear that clothing, so therefore you're not a proper wife. Riding side saddle was incredibly dangerous, I mean riding side saddle was dangerous in the Victorian
period as well, because your skirt could get caught and you could get dragged. Before then, you didn't
have any place to hang your leg that crossed over the horse, so you were literally sitting
sideways on a chair on the back of the horse with nothing really to hang on to. So a woman out riding
is already risking herself and therefore risking her family because she is carer of her children,
she's the person who runs the household. Women riding was something that was not really applauded,
and women riding during pregnancy, I mean that would have been the ultimate thumb of the nose to
the establishment. Because you're putting yourself at risk, and more important than you is
your baby. You're out riding pregnant? I don't think you'd get out the front door. So you have this
situation where, yes, absolutely, women are wearing riding costume, and riding costume has buttons and
therefore isn't malleable. You can't wear riding costume in pregnancy unless you made a completely
new riding costume for every stage of pregnancy, which we don't know that anyone did that. You
wouldn't be allowed to ride in pregnancy because it was so very dangerous for both you and your
baby, that you know if anyone could stop you, they would. So the idea that riding costume would
have to accommodate pregnancy, it just wouldn't. Women must have been potentially confined to being
at home at a certain stage because of the fear of the risk? Because the Georgians weren't stupid but
they only had as much knowledge as they did, and if they couldn't understand the science, they couldn't
see the baby, or see them on an ultrasound, they wouldn't have had the knowledge to be able to
discern what was and wasn't safe. In the Georgian period they didn't know these things so if a
woman had a misc****age they would try to blame it on something and if if she was exercising, you know
if she was taking a walk and she had a misc****age, well the next time she conceived you don't let
her go for a walk anymore. Correlation does not equal causation. So you're saying oh well she went
for a walk and then she lost the baby, so therefore the walk killed the baby, so now you can't go for
a walk anymore. Women were confined to their house, and sometimes confined to their beds, for months
of their pregnancy. In Georgian England in the 18th century and in the United States, the bedroom
was less of a private space than it is now. If you had friends visiting you, you would often
receive them in your bedroom, you would receive all of your friends in your bedroom, and you
would have parties in your bedroom. Women who were confined would be confined to their bed and would
be sitting up in bed jackets, which are incredibly shapeless 18th century garments, but they're not
allowed to get out of bed or they're at least not allowed to leave the room, and certainly not
allowed to leave the house for probably at least the last three months of pregnancy, if not the
last five months of pregnancy. So is this where the casaque and the battante and these types of gowns come into play? Oh yeah, absolutely, I mean all of the jackets all the things that the the 18th
century jackets the cassette the robotons you're wearing them over stays but they're wrappers
they're early wrappers when you're wearing something like that it doesn't matter what your
shape is underneath it the the point is look at this beautiful silk don't look at the shape that's
underneath it while women did wear cassacks and um and robotons when they weren't pregnant certainly
it was a great way to disguise a pregnancy or to cover up a pregnant belly it's very new that it's
okay to have your belly out there so you know the cassette the the the robotons all of the the
bed gown all of these rather a-line garments look the same on someone who's pregnant
and someone who's not now if we go into 1790s the waistline is starting to go back up with
the whole french revolution fashion and everything like that and now going into as well regency
because in a way regency really does start i would say around 1790. it does absolutely does because
that's when the fashion changes so drastically we start to see ground gowns and all these different
styles i suppose it's the higher waistline once once again accommodating for pregnancy you can
wear regency era stays quite late into pregnancy because they don't touch your belly they're higher
yeah the high waistline of the late 18th century and the early 19th century really accommodate
pregnancy quite well we still have the the same thing we have clothing that closes by laces we
have clothing that pins to stays so the shorter waistline makes it easier for regular clothing
to be pregnancy clothing there's no maternity clothing because normal clothing does the job
now we're entering a period where i would say it's the most difficult to wrap our heads around
how that could possibly be maternity clothing and that's the victorian period core sets were a
lot longer they definitely covered the uterus in a lot of cases can you talk about why you would
think that victorian clothing is also suited for maternity let's think about the victorian period
exactly what it means victoria took the throne in 1838 and died in 1901 so that's a whole lot
of decades clothing changed very radically from when she first took the throne until when
she died in the 1840s you still have a fairly high waist you return to that kind of weird waste
that they had in the early 17th century it wasn't high and wasn't natural and then in the 1850s
1860s the waist it's at a natural level but it's still artificially high because you're putting
a crinoline underneath it which kind of pushes everything up so corsets in that mid victorian
period are shorter than corsets become in the 1880s they're very short i wear mid victorian
all the time and they're so short you can go quite late into pregnancy before you'd have
to do anything about changing your corset and again leaving your corset open those things still
work and then we start seeing corsets made from maternity now that have extra slashes in them
in the bottom part of the corset that lace open so as your belly gets bigger you lace those
pieces open so you're still wearing a corset but the pieces over your growing belly are allowed
to be become wider and wider would you say that's around the 1870s when the switch is beginning to
happen yeah i think 1870s 1880s um because you're starting to get cheaper fabrics and cheaper
labor and the sewing machines invented in in the 1840s but by the 1880s women are having
them in their houses not that wealthy women are making their own clothing but still if a woman
has a sewing machine in her house she can sell her labor to women and be a dressmaker because the
corset lengthens in this 1870s 1880s now you have a corset that covers your hip bones so it's it's
rather long so you have to do something different because you can't wear that corset over a pregnant
belly it's just it's not going to accommodate it you can unlace yourself a bit in the back for
the first couple months but you can't wear it very long so you have to wear a different corset
and then the victorian's well-earned reputation of being a bunch of prudes the whole idea of a
woman's confinement expanded even more it was absolutely scandalous to be seen in public with
a pregnant belly you know a working-class woman would show her belly because she had no choice she
has to work but a woman who was not working class a woman of of the middle and upper class would
never go out and allow people to see that she was pregnant in the victorian period the the upper
class victorians looked on common working people almost as if they were a different species as if
they weren't human she is a big pregnant belly but that's just the same as my horse having a big
pregnant belly that's so horrible it is really horrible but it is the way people thought of of
each other in that time period the victorians kind of had this crazy idea about not being animals not
being mammals being something else somehow and i think that people before the victorians were just
more cognizant of their relationship to nature in the victorian period you have the first
great movement from people the exodus from the countryside into the cities the majority of people
live in cities for the first time in history that changes your relationship to the natural
world think about victorian cities they're not lovely cities we have today that have parks
and greenways and this kind of stuff they were industrial choked with smog and there was this
this difference between the upper class and the working class that difference was not as stark
in the previous time periods by the victorian period it got to be like almost two different
species and there was also a big thing in the victorian period about how things appeared
people lived these very quiet private lives and they were crazy behind closed doors but to
the world they appeared normal and that was so important to them and i think that is why people
spend so much money on on clothing because clothes are the ultimate way to show someone an appearance
it's literally what we put on our bodies in upper class women you have regular day dresses
that have buttons all the way down the front it looks beautiful but you can't have buttons
on a body that's going to change but if you do have buttons on a dress like so much of victorian
fashion it is a statement of wealth it's saying this dress is my size now and if i change sizes i
will buy a new one because i can afford it buttons become this statement of wealth a victorian woman
who's pregnant is not letting herself be seen so she's still wearing the same kind of the wrappers
that you wear around your house what you wear to the morning breakfast table she's wearing that all
the time and she's not leaving the house and it's extraordinary to us but that's what was happening
it's upsetting for you know for a modern day woman definitely because it's like well this
sucks you know that that was like the reality for for for women back then urban life was not
safe the first time in history that you had that huge concentration of people in this small
area all living in a small area well crime rose exponentially and it was also dangerous to be
outside in the streets the air was horribly polluted we have um statistics that talk about the
height of londoners versus the height of people who lived in the country in england at the same
time period and the londoners are always shorter and the victorians are shorter than the tudors
and the georgians the victorians are the shortest people if you were a person of wealth you wouldn't
leave the safety of your house to go out in the streets and also it was incredibly dirty i mean
we don't we don't think of this but the streets mostly weren't paved and also people are throwing
out their chamber pots into the street so there is literally excrement that you're walking through
on the street and horses and horses which just makes more excrement yeah bigger excrement yeah
um so incredibly dirty incredibly dangerous so if you were a pregnant person who didn't
have to leave her house why would you your house is safe and if you're wealthy
everything you need is going to come to you it's funny to me because i think the corset is probably
the least dangerous part of the victorian period you're absolutely right you're absolutely right
there's so much more there's just everything else moving into dress reform because i'm sure things
are beginning to change now and by the 1890s we get very sports specific clothing as well how did
all of this accommodate for pregnancy i think you have a carry-on from the victorian period because
it didn't change in the edwardian period or the 19 teens it was cheaper to buy clothing it was
cheaper to have clothing made for you we're still living in a world where there's no off-the-rack
clothing there's no sized clothing you can't just go and buy something if you're wearing
clothing that you didn't make yourself or didn't commission to have made for you you're wearing
somebody's hand-me-downs and you can you can buy second-hand clothing i mean there's a trade in
second-hand clothing is is centuries centuries old so people who lived in in the edwardian period and
the teens had access to cheaper clothing but they also had that same ethos you know the victorian
ethos didn't go away they still had the same idea that a pregnant woman shouldn't be seen in public
their everyday clothing wasn't as accommodating to pregnancy as the clothing of the georgians and and
the tutors and the stewards working-class women are still wearing that stuff that pins down the
front that laces that ties on the side that will accommodate different sizes that you can hand it
down to your daughter who's much smaller than you or you can give it to your sister who's much
bigger than you and it'll work for you know not just people in um different stages of pregnancy
but people who are different sizes to end on the final decade final decade of our little
thing the 1920s yay 1920s so that waistline oh no made for pregnancy yeah there's no waistline
you know i mean i've had so many women say to me oh i can't wear 20s fashions because i'm not that
skinny like why do you think everyone in the 1920s was skinny because i can show you pictures of
women who definitely aren't skinny in the 1920s i have a couple of extent patterns that we
reproduced our company and the bust measurement of these patterns is 52 inches the big difference
in silhouette in the 1920s is there is no waste the clothing doesn't go in at your natural waist
it doesn't go in at empire waist it doesn't go in at a high waist it just drops from your
bust line to your hip line patterns from the 1920s don't even have a waist measurement so you
could be a pregnant woman and wear a 1920s dress you know undoubtedly women in the 1920s much
more liberated than than the previous decades but they still had that idea of you shouldn't
show off a pregnant belly so once their dresses got tight enough that it showed they would wear
bigger dresses from there you get real maternity specific clothing in in every day but in the
1920s you just didn't need it because your dress would cover it anyway and i guess that the real
maternity clothing correlates with rack clothing as in clothing that is pre-sized pre-sized
clothing is something that comes in in the 1920s 1930s well this has been thoroughly fascinating
thank you so much cass for sitting down and just to let everyone know we're going to continue these
500 years of series progressively throughout the upcoming months and years and such that way
we can talk about some more topics and see how they've evolved over 500 years i'm very
excited about the next one we're going to do it was such a wonderful idea you had and i'm so
happy that you asked me to participate with you because i'm having a great deal of fun thank you
for having me yeah thank you so much to cass sure
