How Dresses Were Made In The 15th Century | A Stitch In Time | Absolute History

i'm alice loxton and i present documentaries over on history hit tv if you're passionate about all things history sign up to history hit tv it's like netflix but just for history we've got hours of ad-free documentaries about all aspects of the past you can get a huge discount from history hit tv make sure you check out the details below and use the code absolute history all one word when you sign up now on with the show clothes are the ultimate form of visual communication by looking at the way people dressed we can learn not only about them as individuals but about the society they lived in i'm amber butchart fashion historian and in the words of louis xiv i believe that fashion is the mirror of history so taking historical works of art is our inspiration traditional taylor ninja michaela and her team will be recreating historical clothing using only authentic methods oh look at that it's changing color in the air and i'll be finding out what they tell us about the people who wore them i'm assuming the king wouldn't be dressing himself though right and the times they lived in and seeing what they'd like to wear [Music] the picture that launched a thousand theories jan van ike's famous double portrait painted in 1434 is considered one of the most complex paintings in western art i chose this portrait for a number of reasons it's something that has been written about extensively in art history there's a real appetite for new information that can shed light on this portrait and the cities now historically speaking it's also a very fascinating period we've seen the emergence of mercantile capitalism all around port cities in europe so we begin to see the effects of trade really heavily on the way that people are dressing now also the emergence of the merchant this is quite an interesting character they challenge the previous very rigid structures of society so there's an element of social mobility here you can become very rich through trade you don't necessarily have to have been born into wealth and i'm really interested to see if this element of social mobility is reflected in the way that people are dressing so there are a number of things going on with this portrait plus i really love the color green this dress is so alien to our modern aesthetic i'm really interested to find out from ninja just how complicated it will be to make i suppose the thing that strikes you first is just quite how much fabric there is in there and then as you zoom in you see these huge hanging sleeves which have the most incredible decoration going on at bottom of them what you're seeing there is literally layers of the fabric which have been cut with a special tool a pinking tool to give that very fragile frayed look and so the fabric itself this gorgeous green fabric what is this what material is it it was a kind of cloth that was woven very wide so it was called broadcloth this fabric today is usually called doe skin or superfine but what these very small samples don't really show is how beautiful that looks in the picture and that's because you need a larger piece of the fabric so this is a piece of dough skin so you can see that once it starts to drape and actually get the light on it it becomes a much more silky looking material yeah people don't usually associate wool as being a luxury fabric do they they don't and at this state it really was one of england's finest exports and it was bought and used all over europe but it's not just the wall that we're seeing here is it there's this fur trim as well now where does this fur in particular come from we're still thinking about what it might be and one possibility is it might be an arctic fox wow where does one get hold of arctic fox well for these people it would have been imported it would be baltic it's another expensive luxury item and that's quite helpful in an age before central heating isn't it would be really keep you warm yes wool and fur now we're not going to be using any arctic fox i'm assuming for this so what will we be using we'll be looking for a faux fur so really throughout here we're seeing quite a an opulent display of wealth this is literally wearing your wealth on your sleeves yeah and trailing it on the ground [Laughter] given that this dress seems to be such a conspicuous display of wealth i'm fascinated to find out more about the couple in the portrait and why they might have chosen these clothes to be painted in i'm hoping art historian jenny graham can shed some light on the subject so this portrait one of the most contested most debated in the history of western arts who do we think these people are they're a very wealthy couple we know that they come from the arnold feeny family who traded in luxurious fabrics and exotic items such as the four oranges that you can see this really represents their conspicuous consumption of wealth and splendid things now this picture has become ensconced within popular culture even charles dickens refers to it as that strange mirror picture why do you think it's got such an enduring appeal i can't think of another painting in sort of western art history whereby we know so very much about how it's been interpreted in different ways over the years it seems to be a painting which triggers all kinds of detective detective-like attempts to solve the enigma the riddle one of the overriding theories that's now been discredited is that she's pregnant but that's not the case is it no the pregnancy theory's first crop up in the 19th century but a modern reading of the painting is very much that she is holding up the green wool dress very very heavy and so the painting now is much more understood i think as a display of opulence and wealth and it's more than that as well it's very very interesting in terms of gender politics if she were to let go of the folds of the dress it would pool out all around her in a way that would make it almost impossible to walk and we know for example that there were lots of ways that women in this at this time signaled their social status the fact that they weren't going to be moving around or undertaking anything manual everything seems to signal restraint so the dress we're seeing here represents a number of different things it can speak to us about the position of women in society it can speak to us about the couple the status as merchants so it really there's an awful lot going on here isn't there yes i mean interestingly the green dress is made of wool which was very much associated with trade between bruges where jambonite paints the portrait and italy we know that the honor feeney family traded in cloth particularly so there's a sort of familial significance there but green itself was a color associated with high finance and banking when one made a trade in italy during this period one would place down a green cloth so i think there's a real significance given the trade in which they've made their money [Music] just as the painting's complexity provides continual debate for art historians so the dresses design is proving a challenge for ninja i'm trying to work out how the sleeves on this arnolfini gown actually work because they're incredibly complicated if you go to the bottom of the strips see look isn't that the bottom edge of a strip and that's the bottom edge of the strip so it's like there's layers tears isn't it it's got a sort of fold at the bottom hasn't it so that's the point maybe it's not a raw edge maybe it's folded i don't think that is a raw edge look it doesn't it's not pink the edge the edge is is definitely different that's not a pink edge that's a fold how about it's one piece that's really long and it's folded up behind itself and pinned so that that's behaving the long things would come down to there and then fold back up yeah and that would give it more body so it would stay it would give it that sort of flat front thing i think that's worth a shot need to do another 12. in something thicker yeah how about if i cut it in wool and then we can cut into it and see yes how it behaves yes it'll have more body won't it or ice is big perhaps a drawing board [Music] as we've seen everything about this portrait screams status just the sheer amount of fabric in the gown could have caused a fence at a time when strict sumptury laws dictated what different classes of society could wear as merchants the arnolfinis may have been rich but they weren't nobility and their ostentatious display of wealth was at odds with the rigid hierarchical society at the time in flanders where they lived one chronicler even blamed the outbreak of civil war just over 50 years earlier on the audacity of city dwellers who were better dressed than the nobles and this attitude wasn't confined to europe in england jeffrey chaucer wrote may not a man sears in our days the sinful costly array of clothing and namely in too much superfluity that make it fit so dear to the harm of the people but there is also the costly furring in their gowns so much pouncing of chisel to make holes so much dagging of shears with a superfluity in length of the aforesaid gowns trailing in the dung and in the mire wool was the primary fabric for clothing in the middle ages but quality varied depending on whether it was for a peasant or a prince english wools in particular were considered to be very high quality and some could even be more expensive than silk our gown would have been made from the highest quality broadcloth nowadays called doe skin to find out more about the processes involved in making this fabric i'm visiting a company that has been making dough skin for over 200 years so you've got a bale this size but when you unroll it wow after arriving in tightly compacted bales the wool is pulled apart and aerated in the blending process [Music] so this is what it looks like when it comes off out of the machine so you can see how different it looks how aerated and how pulled apart it is next the aerated wall is sent to carding this machine is going to take all of this yeah to make it look like this okay and how does it do that carding is where the wool fibres are broken up and aligned into strands that really does look like clouds or something you can really see it's starting to take that shape now this is what you get out at the end so this is what we call slubbing if you pull it apart you can see that there's no strength in there but you can take the same piece and put all those twists in and turn it and turn it and turn it and then try and pull it apart you can see that you've got more strength in there so that's the spinning process that we have to go through next to make it into the yarn the yarn is spun onto spools and then woven into cloth [Music] the next process is what makes our wool so special it's washed and beaten which shrinks the cloth meshing the fibers together giving it its felt-like texture and enabling it to be cut without fraying then tentering you know the same tender hooks yeah being kept on tender hooks that's where this stain comes from it would have been carried out into a field it would have been pinned actually onto wooden a-frames and left out into the sun to dry yeah obviously would have taken a very long time and therefore being kept on tenterhooks but this is the modern day equivalent so you see these holes yeah that's where your tender hooks are ah wow so this is your dough skin oh my god so this is it it's so beautiful i know it's the sheen it's the face of the fabric that gives it that beautiful beautiful sheen how exciting i can't wait to see it made up [Music] it's just incredible how many different stages this fabric has gone through to get it into this beautiful finished state and it's even more astounding to think that in the 15th century each of these different stages would have actually been done by hand it really goes to show just how expensive this fabric would have been it was a real status symbol and a real show of wealth [Music] come and see how gorgeous it looks wow it could just make you cry it's so beautiful it is gorgeous look at it it's like liquid isn't it just what we wanted it's it's so perfect and i did have to think quite carefully about how to cut such a wide pattern piece from the wool and it had to have pieces extra pieces sewn into it so we've got those pieces at the sides here oh wow and you can see how where they're upside down the light folds completely differently yeah on it and nowadays that's something we wouldn't find acceptable at all but of course you know in the gown you just you just don't see it with the way it falls yeah it just gets lost in the in the pleats and the folds the the real complex features of this gown are not there yet so we've got the pinking in the sleeves and also there's all this very tight pleating in the front and back i suspect of the gown i've done quite a lot of samples of the pinking because it's quite scary to go you know you can only cut once yeah so i've done one strip here oh it's quite effective isn't it it's really effective so exciting it is exciting it's all you know it's all such experimental archaeology it's brilliant yeah you don't you don't make these things all the time and you can't possibly know all of the answers without just doing it which is what we're doing you'd like to have a go okay yes yes i would [Music] sound like it might not harder i don't think i feel like it wasn't hard enough oh there we go i think what this also really illustrates is it's the nature of the cloth that allows you to do this kind of technique and it and it not frayed and it not breaks apart [Music] how delicate and yet how complex it looks yeah and then harriet is working on a very exciting piece this and this really is so it's so exciting it doesn't look so exciting but drab linen you know one of the features of these gowns is the way they've got all these pleats in the middle we know from having tried to make these reconstructions in the past that you you can almost achieve that look and then as soon as the person moves all the pleats move and we've experimented with things like stay tapes and sewing the insides and nothing's ever been quite as effective as we want it to be yeah linen especially a sort of a rough canvassy linen like this has got a lot more control about it yeah what we're doing is just lightly stitching the linen down onto the wall we don't credit tailors this only with um such ingenuity and um it's slightly embarrassing when you discover these technologies and you think they knew a lot more than we did they knew their fabrics really well you really need the fabric it's incredible the number of different techniques that go into it haven't even got to the fur yet there's quite a lot of it wow and it's heavy oh my gosh in fact this is something i hadn't really considered is just how heavy this whole thing is going to be yeah because there's fur on its own if you lift that and see how heavy it is and then we've got the wool on the top oh gosh yeah so is this the full amount of this is going to go into the dress yeah because we've decided that the whole of those big sleeves must be lined in fur and then most of this gown which is probably why she's standing there like this she's just going to get it dying was perhaps the most important of the finishing processes to give woolen cloth its final appearance blue dye had been common since the 14th century and even peasants were likely to own a coloured gown deep shades like those in our portrait though were still hard to achieve [Music] the colours in the arnold feeney picture are really important you've got this real richness to their colours and i think that it's all kind of bound up with the wealth and the status that's really on display in this picture so i'm really keen to see if we can replicate those colors using the techniques that would have been around in the 15th century i think it's going to be a really interesting experiment to find out debbie bamford specializes in traditional dyeing techniques so how common was green as a colour in the 15th century not as common green is a much more expensive color because it's two dyes it's the yellow and the blue the yellow dye is made from a plant called weld or dye as rocket which is dried and broken up if you'd like to take a string and tie that tightly around for me like this so this goes in here it just goes in there you just you just drop it in anything happening oh yeah yeah oh yeah look yeah look at that now the crucial bit weld responds very very well to the addition of a little blog of this hold your nose could you explain i have a feeling yeah that i might know what this is could you explain to me what this is this is spell urine this is minimum three week old urine and i'm using it to modify the collar okay so you can see there's pale yellow there yeah if i pour some of this in this isn't giving the colour it is now drawing the colour out of the line let's see how i've shaped it makes so much difference so if i put that in there with that now you can see the yellow much more clearly on the pot yeah now that's got to be heated up for a while for about 40 an hour 20 minutes and that should then start developing the color for blue another plant called woad is used which is dried and made into balls for storage we have to dissolve it in an alkaline right so that's where the stellar urine came in and so the dye vat is actually made up with sterile urine and the word mist it's kind of a dyer's best friend really stale urine yes so we take the yellow piece out now oh okay look at that that's a really really lovely color that's really quite a busy vivid yellow that's lovely that's one of my favorite colors if you want to put it just slide it in very carefully oh you like the smell of that one and that really just smells unpleasant doesn't it yes the more times it's gone back in the dye bath the more expensive the color gets right you want a dark green you're going to go in two or three times if you want a green like you're wearing all like we're talking in this particular painting then yes that is i've got some status and i've got some wealth that's so interesting i didn't realize that there's strength of the color sort of determined the price i mean it makes perfect sense you want to take the yellow out of the blue yeah so this we're hoping that this is going to be going to be green yeah okay oh my god it's just so horrible it looks gorgeous oh look at that it's changing color in the air pretty much getting to the same color as my top i did not realize that it had that kind of reaction to the air that's really exciting isn't it yeah that is an amazing color that's gorgeous it's beautiful green isn't it and you can see how that is getting you the colour for the arnold phoeni absolutely again yeah it's so interesting i think if it wasn't for this smell i would have been very happy being a medieval desire [Music] well 15th century dying techniques still produce incredible results ninja's finding not all traditional methods fit quite so well with modern life what we've now got to do is wait for the hot plate to heat up and then the hot plate to heat the iron up in the the taylor shop in arnolfini's time his apprentice would have settled this up the coals and the brazier early on in the day and one of his tasks would then be to maintain that heat and make sure that the the heat of the iron was never interrupted so the tailor wasn't inconvenienced so that you know we're doing everything by hand as it would have been done in arnold feeny's time and this is really the only real inconvenience of early tools because all the other tailoring tools that we use really haven't changed very much since the 15th century [Music] there we are i can hand it over to hannah who's preparing at the moment the edging for the sleeve slits like so yeah it's good [Music] that is the last slit oh that's really nice it's gorgeous isn't it yeah it's ready to put the fairy linings in yeah they're not ready yet sorry [Laughter] [Music] if we didn't steam it because the nature of the wool is that it's very bouncy which is what's really beautiful about the nature of the fabric means that it wouldn't stay in the place fanning out like that that we wanted to as soon as the wearer moved around the pleats would shift whereas because they're stitched to this canvas and then they're steamed into place so the fibers have molded around those pleats that lovely fan shape that harriet's actually arranged should stay just sending the steam down into the pleats aren't we nice lovely look at that it's like a peacock's tail isn't it yeah it is really beautiful it's exactly right good [Music] [Music] it's so soft in here [Music] when they move they're even better they are it's great seeing them moving it looks so much like the painting i can't get over this it's just incredible and it's so heavy it feels insanely luxurious does it really luxurious so can you actually walk do you think if you grab a handful of the stuff so that you can actually not tread that's it [Music] oh it's very elegant that's really exciting and it gives you that stance that yeah she has in the painting as well doesn't it which is really interesting maybe part of that stance is to do with the weight of the fabric balancing it yeah that's being held it's you know you have to kind of lean back to be able to get purchase on the yeah and the weight of the fabric well it's a constant reminder of your wealth yeah isn't it this is so heavy i've got so much money that's good that's a good thing yeah the sleeves are just absolutely phenomenal it didn't occur to me that they would make you want to do that yeah basically that they would be so kind of fluid it's that sort of fluidity that the whole thing has but that's what you just can't get from a poor in a portrait as a maker you always want to say could you just lift your arm could you just do that and and then you would see what was going on and we can't do that with yeah it really gives it life doesn't it to have a real human person in it and not too hot i mean it's it's quite hot definitely the thing is at this period in the 15th century it's basically what the period that's known as the mini ice ages this is a time when the river thames regularly froze thick enough that you could have whole frost fares it makes a lot more sense when you take away central heating and reduce the temperature outside by a few degrees yeah a lot of people you are a lady of leisure if you're a labouring woman you would keep a lot warmer but you're spending a lot of your time just sitting or standing and so you would definitely need these kinds of layers yeah and swishing and swishing i would just spend all my time if you needed to warm up any more you're just a bit swishing and then sit down again it's just fantastic this experiment has been really fascinating what surprised me about seeing the gown i think is really how bulky it is how much fabric and how much fur there is it must have cost an absolute fortune this idea of wealth and status is really rammed home she really becomes a symbol of these new types of wealth these new types of people who are buying and selling who are trading at this time it also is incredibly fascinating in terms of the female body ideal as well that was prevalent in the 15th century so having an idea and understanding of what this feels like to create this is is just invaluable [Music]

Channel: Absolute History

Views: 296,447

Keywords: history documentaries, absolute history, world history, ridiculous history, quirky history

Id: cdIbyx5M8gc

Length: 28min 51sec (1731 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 08 2021