Sew with me! 1650s English bodice and gown reconstruction tutorial and notes.
Category: Tailoring
Shaping Femininity Book Cover and Pre-order!
Very excited to announce that my book Shaping Femininity has a cover image and pre-order links! See below for details! About Shaping Femininity In sixteenth and seventeenth-century England, the female silhouette underwent a dramatic change. This very structured form, created using garments called bodies and farthingales, existed in various extremes in Western Europe and beyond,… Continue reading Shaping Femininity Book Cover and Pre-order!
Randle Holme’s The Academy of Armory (1688) and late Seventeenth-century Women’s Dress Terminology
The 1680s was a decade of change in women's fashion. The new loose-fitting mantua gown vied for popularity with traditional gowns that contained structured bodices (a battle that the new style would win in later decades) and bodies slowly began to be called stays during this decade. One of the best written sources we have… Continue reading Randle Holme’s The Academy of Armory (1688) and late Seventeenth-century Women’s Dress Terminology
Talk: Body-makers and Farthingale-makers in Seventeenth-Century London
By 1700 tailors no longer dominated England’s garment marketplace, as stay-makers, mantua-makers and seamstresses began to produce key items of female dress previously made by tailors. The demise of the tailoring monopoly was a complex process that involved many factors. This article examines one overlooked aspect of this transition by exploring two groups of specialized artisans that have been previously neglected in histories of seventeenth-century garment production: farthingale-makers and body-makers.
The tailoring Trade in Seventeenth-Century Oxford – Tales from the Bodleian Archive.
Tales for the MS Morrell series at the Bodleian Libraries Oxford