Dr Kat and the Art of Pinning

it's really hot I'm really overheated hello and welcome back to the channel if you're new here hi you're very welcome this is really in the past and I'm dr. Kat and today while I am filming in the coolest room of the house it is still absolutely roasting hot the mercury is rising and London is boiling and that got me to thinking about clothes unsurprisingly how we dress and what we choose to wear and that then led me on to thinking about a particular set of objects that used to have an incredible cultural weight and prominence for our ancestors they still exist today and are still in use but they are not the everyday necessity that they used to be today I want to talk about pins and the art of pinning for dress [Music] [Music] when you were getting ready today putting on your clothes you would have been reliant perhaps without even thinking about it on a variety of technologies to make the task easier that enabled you to put clothes on your body fit them to your form so they didn't fall off or look shapeless and all of these things prevented you from having to effectively sell yourself into clothes and then at the end of the day cut yourself out of them but who invents these things when are they invented and what happens before they exist one of the earliest of these technologies is the button and buttonhole this is a medieval invention however when it first came about it was the preserve of the elite to create a buttonhole that can safely hold a button requires a lot of work and labor as you can see this is hand stitched around the buttonhole the democratization of buttons doesn't occur until mechanization of clothes production appears and that is a factor of the 19th century and the later Industrial Revolution perhaps you fastened your clothes with a zipper today well the earliest item that even comes close to resembling a zipper which was patented as a shoe fastener doesn't appear until 1893 maybe you used poppers or snap fasteners for that you'd have to wait till 1885 maybe you love velcro well that isn't around until 1941 so with no access to velcro zippers or poppers and we've quite limited access based upon class-2 buttons with holes how are the people of early modern and medieval England getting dressed well for the most part they're using points this is a lace that may have a metal tip on the end that goes through the holes that have been born into garments it might be used to close the front of a garment or it might be used to attach pieces of a garment to each other maybe the sleeve to the body of a garment and what this enables is for clothes to be form-fitting and also for them to be changed up if you want to put a different sleep on a gown to make it look new then you can because it's not all one piece it fits together and it's held together with these laces the other item that is used in ever increasing quantities as fashions evolve and become more complex of pins now this is not the safety pin that you might use in a pinch if an item of clothing is too loose or maybe even torn because the safety pin like this one you see here isn't invented until 18-49 so our medieval and early modern counterparts are using straight pins these I think you're probably most familiar with if you go to get your clothes altered it's the thing that a tailor puts in the bottom of your trousers or skirt to get your hemline right ladies who cover their head today they may also be using straight pins but broadly speaking most people are not using straight pins on a daily basis however if you were in medieval and certainly early modern England you could not have got dressed without them pins have been used for dressing and decoration of attire we believe for millennia the date for the earliest use of pins is given variously as four thousand and three thousand years BCE now pins might be made of bits of thorn from a bush they could be wood bone stone and latterly metal they can be very functional and also incredibly decorative now although there is this extraordinary span of history in which pins are being used for dress as you are aware I'm sure most of these earlier centuries and millennia are not my area of speciality so today I will be focusing on the use of pins for dress in early modern England because it is my area of expertise but also because for me it's the most interesting we start to see these hyperreal portraits the kind produced by Hans Holbein and we can through these portraits see an evolution of style as the fashions become more and more elaborate it becomes an absolute necessity to use more and more pins we can see in the span of few decades the absolute necessity of these pins in order to achieve the elite fashions that the portraits show so while there may have been an explosion in the number of pins being used to dress elite bodies in early modern England that doesn't mean that pins were not absolutely vital in the medieval period for vast proportions at this time you would have been importing your pins into England from France in the fifteenth and sixteenth century however you also had the option of buying home produced pins quite literally pin making happened in private homes and they would be producing items like this which I found while I was out mud locking and it's quite possible this is not massively visible so I will do a close-up if it's not but what you can see here is a small pin with a sharpened tip and a head and if you look closely at the head you can see that it's been knotted the way this is made is with a penis bone and I'm going to pull up an image of a penis bone and you can see that grooves have been made in the bone in this you place the wire that you're going to make your PIN out of the pin er then files the wire to a point the head is made by being tied and then soldered to seal it because these pin heads are so small it becomes necessary for somebody with quite dexterous fingers and keen eyes we believe that a lot of this work would have been done by women or children so within these cottage industries of pin making in 15th and 16th century England it seems that it is a family affair it isn't until 1622 that the first pin making factory is established in Gloucestershire by John Tim's bay now while this is a factory where lots of people are making pins all at once it is of course not mechanized its 1622 for the mechanization of pin making in Britain we're going to have to wait till 1838 where it begins to occur in a factory in Birmingham in the term pin money which was perhaps a little arcane for us even now we see the Hanover of this need for pins to dress in the 20th century pin money was a term that was used to describe things that you would buy for the household milk for the fridge or maybe even batteries for the remote but the origins of that term is in the necessity of pins for dressing husband's brothers and fathers would provide the women in their life with money to go and buy the pins that they needed so they could dress in the most fashionable style as befitted their time and also their social rank I'd like to share with you a couple of examples of how pins would have been used now these are portraits from the 1500s and so they show incredibly elite sitters but one is from the first half the 1500s and one is from the latter half of the 1500s in the first image of Jane Seymour painted by hands Holbein in 1536 if you look on the sides of her gown just by her arms you can see rows of telltale circles these are the pin heads that are holding in place the stomacher of her gown now what this is probably masking is the laces that are holding the body of her gown together a stomacher goes over the top so that you're not seeing those laces it makes it look like one single piece of fabric what it actually wasn't in this case the stomacher matches the gal but there are also alternatives where a gown might be a less elaborate fabric and you might put a bolder stomacher in there so it looks more expensive equally the stomach errs could be interchangeable so you may have a rather plain or a plainer outer gown and a vibrant pattern stomacher maybe three or four or five lawmakers so you can take an individual gown and wear it different ways it looks like you have more variety in your wardrobe in this way and therefore like you perhaps have more money in your family as I mentioned fashions constantly evolved and changed and became more elaborate and evidence of this is found in this portrait it is the ermine portrait of Elizabeth the first by nicholas hilliard that is dated to 1585 now while we can't see those same telltale pinheads that we saw in the image of Jane Seymour we can certainly see that pins are being used here working from the top elizabeth is whipped here and in her head she has decorations of pearls these would presumably have been on straight pins maybe they would not have been quite so sharp and as they're going near to the scalp and girls decorate the tops no knotted little pins here these are elaborate decorative pins moving down we see her lace rough when it had been freshly laundered this lace rough would have been a single long piece of fabric that would then have been stopped once starched it would have been set using ions that look quite like a curling Tom actually that would be how you get these circles the figure 8 shape that is so common with Russ now the starch holds it in some way and the heat also sets it but to maintain its shape it would have been held together with a crisscross of straight pins so essentially all around Elizabeth's neck would have been sharp straight pins holding her rough in place the veil she wears would have been pinned to her garments and the cuts that sit at her wrists would also have been pinned in place what pins can do is they enable people to attach pieces that needed to be laundered Elizabeth and her ladies are not going to be washing her main gal the jewels for example have had to be all taken off and also this may well be velvet that is simply not washable at this time but the white lace cuffs and the white lace rough could have been laundered so the pins enable you to take off the things that can be washed it also means as with Jane Seymour stomacher that parts of your garment can be interchangeable so you can have different looks in various forms the pins themselves as we see in this image of Elisabeth range in their function the ones are her health are extraordinarily delicate and decorative meanwhile the things that are holding her rough in place and her wrist cuffs and equally her veil are less visible these are functional pins but she would undoubtedly have needed hundreds of pins to dress with this level of magnificence the early modern period is in many ways the central point the eye of the storm of the heyday of pinning for dress and for decoration today it's largely been relegated if you do have straight pins at home there probably in your sewing kit something that you use if you quick need to hem a trouser or skirt it's not something that most people wear on them every day as they leave the house and perhaps the last great hurrah of the straight pin is in the early 20th century in the Edwardian period when women were wearing hats like this and they required enormous ly long straight pins to fix their hat their elaborate hairstyle in addition to securing hats safely to hair these straight pins they would seem also provided ladies with a defensive weapon there are tales like this one of a woman being accosted on public transport and using the hat pin to defend her honor there was also alarm that suffragettes may remove their happens and use them as offensive weapons for centuries them women have been in charge of storing up pins in order for them to dress themselves and their families to maintain their social standing and also their modesty both by ensuring that they are covered with fabric but as we see me at Audion period when the pins become longer they use them as weapons to defend their modesty in that regard - it is fascinating to me that these pins were so integral to everyday life throughout so much of our history and yet now because of the development of fabric technologies and fastening they are almost entirely forgotten for their original purpose and I wonder if you can think of any other objects that are being treated similarly are there things that were so integral to our past that we may be forgetting in our future or even ideas and practices if you would like me to talk about any of those if there's any you can think of then please do pop it in the comment section down below or come and find me over on social media or leave the links in the description box you can follow me there and we can continue the conversation I'd love to know what you think about this video so do let me know and I hope you've enjoyed it and found it useful if you did then please tell me by clicking the thumbs up button please also subscribe to my channel and hit the belly icon so that YouTube tells you when I've next uploaded I hope you're going to have a great day whatever you're doing and that you are staying out of the heat as best you can and I look for speaking to you in my next video well hopefully be a lot less sticky take care of yourselves bye bye for now [Music] [Music]

Channel: Reading the Past

Views: 7,785

Rating: 4.9804401 out of 5

Keywords: Education, Literature, Culture, History, Early Modern, Renaissance, Medieval, Fashion History, Pin Making, Dress Pins

Id: jpSJAC5au_g

Length: 14min 48sec (888 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 26 2019