The Case of the “French Vardinggale”: A Methodological Approach to Reconstructing and Understanding Ephemeral Garments

0129a17cc8cd74dfb03b1cbb9412bfeedd89ad0e3b — Reconstruction of French Wheel Farthingale, c. 1610s

I’m delighted to announce that my new article was published on Friday! It’s about the experimental reconstructions I did as part of my PhD – some of which are documented here on this very blog. It talks about why historians should engage in experimental reconstruction, and what we can and can’t learn about artisanal knowledge and practices, as well as embodied experiences.

It is part of a bigger special issue in the journal Fashion Theory on the “Making Turn” edited by Professor Peter McNeil (UTS) and Dr Melissa Bellanta (ACU), with editor-in-chief Dr Valerie Steele (FIT NY).

So far, only my article is available on early view. However, if you are interested in historical reconstruction as a research practice, please make sure to check back to the journal over the next few weeks as my colleagues’ papers will also appear. I will link them in this blogpost as they are released:

“The Embodied Turn: Making and Remaking Dress as an Academic Practice” – Hilary Davidson (The University of Sydney/ La Trobe Melbourne)
“Looking for Maternity: Dress Collections and Embodied Knowledge” – Catriona Fisk (University of Technology Sydney)
“Attaining Poise: A Movement-based Lens Exploring Embodiment in Fashion” – Todd Robinson (University of Technology Sydney)

Now that the article is out I’ll be doing a more layman’s blogpost series about how I made the French wheel farthingale. But if you’d like to read the article please click on the link below to get institutional access. If you don’t have access but would still be interested to read it please get in touch and I will see what I can do!

Abstract:

This article showcases experimental dress reconstruction as a valuable research tool for the historian. It presents a case study detailing how two underskirts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, French Farthingale Rolls and French Wheel Farthingales, were reconstructed using historical techniques and experimental methodologies. The first section outlines my methodological approach to reconstructing these ephemeral garments, exploiting archival and printed records, visual sources, and knowledge of seventeenth-century sewing techniques. The second section focuses on the experience of reconstruction and shows how this process allows the historian to form tacit knowledge. This section also raises questions and provides answers about artisanal design practices such as reflective rationality, embodied experiences, and tacit skills that cannot be accessed in other ways. Finally, this article shows how reconstruction can inform understandings of the embodied experiences of dressing and wearing. Dressing the female body in the reconstructed underskirts discussed in this article made it possible to observe the garments’ practical realities and challenge polemical historical sources concerning fashionable sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European dress.

Keywords: reconstruction, dress, farthingales, experimental dress methodology, embodied knowledge