Recreating The Iconic Suit Worn By King Charles II | 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] these days it's royal women who provide the fashion talking points but there's one male royal charles ii who despite being dead for over 300 years is credited with instigating a new form of menswear that's still with us today [Music] this portrait shows charles ii being presented with a pineapple by his gardener john rose most likely dating from 1677 the year charles shaved off his moustache it's thought that the portrait could have been painted as a tribute to rose who died that year charles is the restoration king this is absolutely crucial in terms of the way that he's dressing the way that he chooses to present himself his position is quite precarious and he uses dress and fashion throughout his reign as a means of consolidating his power and sending particular political messages i find this portrait really fascinating he's dressed in a very similar way to the gardener the king here is essentially saying i am like you but at the same time you must kneel before me so the way charles is dressed here is really emblematic of a shift in the male silhouette now what's especially interesting is that this really came about as the product of political rivalry between two cousins who were also kings so i'm really keen to investigate more about his dress and especially about the way that charles used his clothing to consolidate his political place given that this is such a rare portrait of charles in plain informal clothes i'm really interested to find out from our historical taylor ninja if there's more to this suit than meets the eye so charles ii restoration king the merry monarch himself his suit here looks quite simple is it actually a sort of simple outfit he is trying to do the man of the people simple suit look but no it won't surprise you to hear me say it isn't as simple as it looks for a start you can see all these black um clusters around the waist of his britches and around the bottom of his britches there also at his cuffs here and the shoulder they're loops of silk ribbon they were called knots and that would be yards and yards of silt ribbon and they're completely without function they're just added for the effect and you can see all these buttons and buttonholes i've counted them there are more than 100 buttons that we have to source or make that is fiddly work it is fiddly and it's time consuming even when you work quite quickly and i'd say i could do a nice buttonhole in maybe five minutes that's more than a day's work just doing buttonholes wow charles had a thing for encouraging the use of english cloth but it was really the finest cloth still very very costly and i think it's quite clear to see that the lining here what the artist is trying to show is that it's a silky fabric i think it's what we call shot fabric today so the the threads going one way or one color and the threads going the other way are a different color and at the time they called it changeable because the color changes um like this sample here you can see the yellow threads coming out there and the red there is in fact changeable it is in fact changeable yes yes even though this looks quite simple it is still a display of it as well there's an awful lot of money being spent on that suit even though it's not immediately obvious where it goes while our suit might be more ornate than first glance would suggest the suit charles's brother james ii wore for his wedding to mary of moderner is definitely fit for a king [Music] no longer on display to the public it's held in storage at the a but curator susan north has allowed me to come along and have a look [Music] it's absolutely incredible i mean the gold and silver embroidery here i can just imagine it kind of glinting in the candle light it would have been an absolute spectacle yes and you can see in areas like the inside of the cuff and under the arm where it's a bit more protected that gives a sense of just how spectacular the suit would have looked when it was worn i'm absolutely in love with this colour of the lining it's very similar to the colour of the lining in the portrait that we're looking at you can see almost a familial relationship i think between this and the clothes that charles is wearing in the portrait i love the amount of buttons that we've got going up here it's very similar to what we're recreating and with these buttonholes as well it's remarkable that they all survive um very often on older garments you know they recycle the buttons into something else and they cut them off it seems to me to embody some of the contradictions that we see in some of charles's wardrobe at around this time as well you've got the wool but you've also got the extravagance of the embroidery you've got this sort of much simpler more work a day silhouette in a way but then again you've also got this really showy extravagance as well the coat itself of course was never a fashionable garment it was strictly utilitarian what charles does with the suit is he decrees that this is court dress now you never show up in court wearing your ordinary riding coat i mean you just wouldn't do that so if you're going to take what is a utilitarian garment and make it court dress well you have to bling it up a bit [Music] charles's finances were tightly controlled by parliament so while his clothes may have been made from the most luxurious fabrics there was no room for waste so these britches don't fit on the width of this cloth i'm gonna do what's called piecing which is where the excess of the pattern is folded back and it means we're gonna have an additional seam but that's very period even the king is waste not one knot it was seven years apprenticeship and then you'd have to work as a journeyman and then you would essentially have to do an exam and a lot of tailors specialised in particular garments so they only made coats or they only made britches so i do often think when we're doing these sorts of reconstructions that a period tailor would just find it absolutely laughable that we attempt to do so many different things i probably wouldn't qualify in period taylor's eyes and i'm a woman i mean how ridiculous is that no tailors were almost definitely men i'm leaving quite small gaps between the patterns because the seam allowance can actually be very small the smaller amount of seam allowance you have the less wasteful this process is going to be and the happier the king will be [Music] so these just get backstitched on with linen thread and the matching silk thread is saved for the things that matter like buttonholes and sewing on trims things that really show it breaks quite easily as your as you sew it through the fabric the friction of the action wears away at it quite quickly so what you have to do is run it through a block of wax and that smooths down all the hairy fibers and enables the thread to slide through the fabric easier you can see it'll have this strange extra seam on the side which is odd to the modern eye often but uh when it's nicely pressed flat it will disappear into the coat and be barely noticeable and i think these all these funny extra seams make it more interesting a garment personally because they are there on the original ones [Music] charles ii had lived through civil war exile and the abolition of the monarchy more than any other english king he understood the powerful political message a monarch's clothes conveyed so most of the time chose to be painted in classical dress or armor i'm keen to find out from historian rebecca radiel how charles navigated the tight rope between reestablishing the monarchy and separating himself from the excesses that had contributed to its fall so here we can see charles ii in a way that is much more typical of how he liked to be represented how important was it that he sort of transmitted this very regal style well he had a really difficult balancing act because on the one hand he had been invited back as a monarch so he wanted to project this image of monarchy and kingship but then on the other hand he was very aware that his father charles the first had been executed for being too extravagant in his style and tastes and also being a little bit remote from the people and aloof in some respects so how did charles ii try to distance himself and his image from his father by not actually being that extravagant on a day-to-day basis the clothes that he wore were pretty sensible the colours weren't loud it was only when it came to the ceremonial occasions that he really upped the ante as did the rest of the court and this is where we get these fantastic accounts from samuel peeps about people being clad in silver gold him not being able to look at the court because it was hurting his eyes too much the other thing to bear in mind as well was charles ii grew up spent his teenage years in disguise going from various city to city across the continent he mixed with all and sundry he was more of a relatable man than his father anyway so it's a real tight rope that he's walking isn't it yes it is very much so [Music] had spent time at the french court while this man louis xiv was establishing it as the center of fashion an idea that still persists today charles envied louie's wealth his style and his absolute power and louis fully understood the relationship between political power and the spectacle of fashion there's no doubt that charles was influenced by his cousin's sartorial splendor despite his careful manipulation of his public image charles ii caught with its french tastes was still considered profligate the public's antipathy was intensified by three disastrous events war plague and in 1666 the great fire an event which many blamed on the french so on the 7th of october 1666 charles issued a declaration that his court would reject french fashions and create an english style and this was the long vest worn with a knee-length coat this gave the male silhouette a much leaner appearance a complete change from the more triangular doublet and hose now because of this and his championing of the vest charles ii is credited with creating the three-piece suit what's unusual in fashion history is that we can place this innovation to its exact date and it's all thanks to samuel peeps 8th of october 1666 the king hath yesterday in council declared his resolution for setting a fashion for clothes it will be a vest i know not well how but it is to teach the nobility thrift sadly for charles according to peeps louis thought so little of his cousin's vests that he dressed his servants in them 22nd of november 1666 monsieur betelier tells me the king of france hath in defiance to the king of england caused all his footmen to be put into vests which if true is the greatest indignity ever done by one prince to another [Music] so there been any particular challenges so far no it's fairly straightforward we're really doing the preparation now to actually begin the epic buttonholing and so how many people would have worked on the original outfit we've got taylor yes he would have had um probably a journeyman tailor working with him as well so the king's tailor is a master tailor he's the one that would have cut out all of the pattern pieces and decided where the piece seems were going and all of that he would have then handed it to his journeyman tailor so let's say that's harriet's the journeyman tailor for today yeah she's doing the actual putting the pieces together once they've been cut and then we'd have an apprentice that can be hannah over there so hannah's got to a stage in her apprenticeship where she's allowed to put some of the pieces together but we've given her the linings rather than the expensive top fabric right so would you like to try a working buttonhole i would i would like to try very much great what you need to do is use this buttonhole cutter wow yeah okay so you hold that on on there kind of upright like this i'll just show you that so following the line like that and then you're just gonna tap it smartly with the hammer wow this is more tool heavy than i was expecting okay there we go perfect lovely so then you take your needle and thread so we're going to put the needle through the slit so take it all the way through so they're not going to go through to the back yeah and then we're going to go back in and we're going to come up just beside where that thread was coming out right yeah that's it and before you take the needle all the way through you're going to loop your thread around the end of your needle and this is what makes the buttonhole stitch and pull it back towards yourself so you don't get too much rectangle and what what should happen oh pull it back towards the edge of the hole that's it and that's made your first little buttonhole knot great and you keep going until you get all the way to the end of the slit [Laughter] okay i feel like it's going to take me a lot longer than five minutes it will yes this is um this is why taylor's had apprenticeships of seven years because there's so many things like that that you really got to perfect the art of before you'd be allowed to get anywhere near the king's coat what's incredible is that we're looking at these tiny details of which there are hundreds on this garment and i mean the amount of work and time that goes into just these tiny details is immense isn't it all that's involved is mere hours of labor so you're telling me that this i'm that you know i'm killing myself over here is actually unskilled labor um essentially it is really it's not worth an awful lot [Laughter] so i think i'm really coming up to the end of this uh buttonhole i've just been finishing the oh the little blast edge yeah if you lay it down on the surface and then you can snip it off so let's have a look okay uh i think i might have accidentally yeah i'm not sure your button's gonna go through there shall i see yeah i have a go okay let's see oh is it gonna go just about it's fine it's fine it's not complicated but it is very fiddly it's very you have to be very dexterous don't you it's you do there's and there's still an awful lot of hours work even in an apparently very simple suit yeah hours and hours i mean who'd have thought that a suit fit for a king would take so much work i guess it's kind of obvious when you think about it [Music] charles ii wardrobe accounts are held at the national archives and provide a fascinating insight into his carefully constructed image [Music] looking at the actual accounts of charles ii's wardrobe is quite a strange feeling really it's really exciting seeing all of this stuff how you know the detail that it's been documented this was clearly something quite important that money was being spent on and actually seeing it here in this glorious handwriting is really amazing feels quite special so some of the first orders that we can see in the account book unsurprisingly are for his coronation robes of purple velvet lined with powdered urmin and laced with embroidered gold lace and is really about creating a spectacle of power this is what a king looks like these accounts show that charles loved clothes ordering on average between 30 and 40 new suits a year however while his cousin louis xiv might have been able to parade around in diamond covered coats charles knew he had neither the money nor the political clout for power dressing we see a lot of plane cuts a lot of muted colours as well especially grey and also this one i particularly like which is references to sad colour [Music] so the vest first makes its appearance in the accounts in 1666 and we see it numerous times here for making his majesty a purple cloth coat hose and vest we see vest really starting to feature throughout however while charles was really proclaiming this as an english style what he didn't mention so much at court was that this was actually an order to his french tailor claude sorso so claude sausseau is quite an important character here he was charles ears tailor when charles was in exile charles brought him back to england when the monarchy was reinstated and he remained his tailor for the next 10 years so this really shows that although charles was very keen on promoting english fashions he couldn't fully escape the influence of french style for me the most telling and poignant entry of the wardrobe accounts is the very first what's interesting about this is that despite these accounts starting in 1660 the year of charles's restoration to the throne they're stated as being in the 13th and 14th year of his reign so what we're seeing here is the reign of charles ii being dated right back to the time that his father was executed so all of those intervening years have just been written out of this history [Music] despite only being at the start of their sartorial journey it's easy to recognize the vest and coat introduced by charles ii as the forerunners of today's waistcoat and jackets the britches however are another matter these are his britches they have a waistband it's going to have a button at the front and at the back there's a little gap so on the waistband there'll be some eyelets so he can he can sort of put weight on and let the back out a bit for a bit of ease but he can't get smaller at the moment i'm putting in some uh gathering cords so that we can draw them up into the waistband and if i pull this one this form of gathering is is now called cartridge pleating it forms the sort of the sort of folds that you can imagine on a cartridge belt it's it's just like where you you put the cartridges in but these aren't going to fit high on the waist they're going to be quite low slung if you look at the painting there's a whole abundance of shirt hanging out over the top he really does give the impression of someone who has you know he's got his coat open he's got the the shirt out and the britches are sort of hanging low it's really very a very like his undressing yeah a very sort of sensual look compared to the the sort of slightly more buttoned up clothes of other other eras they might look a little bit short compared to trousers these days and obviously quite vulnerably loose but he he would have had a pair of drawers underneath linen drawers so and they were drawn in around the leg a bit more snuggly so there wouldn't have been anything uh inadvertent being displayed i think that side of things was kept for private matters although obviously he had quite a lot of those he was a bit free with his private matters i've either miscounted or done one extra so ah well then that's okay so is it worth pinning on say 16 on just on one front yeah oh they look really nice already oh look at that that is gorgeous you can imagine him frolicking round yeah they are merry britches aren't they yeah you see that's the joy but isn't it that even though there's there are original garments that we can look at when you make something and it's got its freshness about it it's it's really exciting and it is slightly different put the bounce back in the king [Music] i initially chose this suit because i was fascinated by its simplicity but as i've learned was often the case with charles ii there's much more to it than meets the eye worn on the body clothes change from lifeless fabric into a potent means of communication i cannot wait to find out what i can learn from taking a walk in the king's new clothes [Music] oh look at that that is amazing that is so good you've got this real sort of elegance in the arms and then these gorgeous cuffs here and then these just sit so low down it seems really unnatural so you've got obviously i knew you had all of this volume here but it's just kind of the the contrast between the two is quite an odd feeling we don't sort of associate this with a men's silhouette especially with a king's silhouette but it just feels and we expect men to be more built up around the shoulders exactly yeah and today the whole point of tailoring you know savile race style tailoring is to create that broad yeah sort of triangular torso that's that we associate with very manly men and sort of epitome of the sort of classical masculine ideal emphasize your hip area no narrow you seem quite comfortable there yeah i think i think i would have been very comfortable there i think i'd be comfortable wearing this today i love it you could quite happily kind of lounge lounge about in it and i guess that's kind of the point that's brilliant it's the posing it's you you can stand still in that and look amazing as long as you just open up and have a bit of lining on show and but that's the effect that it has on you like feeling these different proportions feeling the fabrics feeling the clothes on you actually makes you stand like we're used to seeing people stand in that time it's very exciting feeling clothes want to be worn a certain way don't they yeah exactly and if the effect that they have on the stance and the way that we move yeah it's kind of yeah living history i'm particularly enjoying seeing the flash of the the little rows of buttons when when you turn around because they're just so sweet yes and hannah those all those ribbons just look great don't i know it's so bizarre to have seen them in a massive black pile and then to all of a sudden see them flowing you can imagine just all the movement in there it's amazing i think it's less silly because those britches on their own are it's a they're a very silly garment yes but with the outfit they make sense yes they do it's really nice makes me feel very elegant you look really very graceful seeing the outfit of charles ii made up kind of blew my mind when we went to see the portrait it's in a very dark room and it can't be lit too harshly because everything's very old it's also been above the fireplace for a long time so it looks very dark and it's difficult to see the detail so i was initially just bowled over by really how bright it is it just looks exquisite and also how you can really see the different details you can really see the silk bows you can really see the lining it just looks incredibly elegant we're moving towards a point today in men's fashion where gender binaries are really being broken down so we actually see some contemporary designers designing outfits not a million miles away from this or certainly taking on these ideas around decoration around frippery i guess so it's almost like we've come full circle right back to charles ii in restoration england

Channel: Absolute History

Views: 68,823

Keywords: Absolute History, bespoke tailoring, clothing craftsmanship, clothing design history, clothing reconstruction, clothing recreation, fashion analysis, fashion documentaries, historical attire recreation, historical biographies, historical documentaries, historical garments, historical sewing techniques, pattern making, regal fashion, royal attire, royal fashion history, tailoring history, vintage fashion design

Id: WuiNiWVvrK4

Length: 28min 55sec (1735 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 01 2021