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Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part IVa: Dyed in the Wool
- sillyquiet 6y agoThe depiction of medieval folks wearing drab and dirty and torn clothes in black, browns, and and grays is THE biggest peeve I have with costume design in ‘historical’ movies and tv shows. The absolute worst offenders in recent memory being Vikings and The Last Kingdom, but there are a plethora of others. Not to mention the biker-gear-leather-fetish as armor look they all seem to go for.
- elseweather 6y agoIF you enjoy this kind of thing, (and you aren't already an acoup fan), he wrote an entire article about the biker-gear-leather-fetish trope in Game of Thrones: https://acoup.blog/2020/12/04/collections-that-dothraki-horde-part-i-barbarian-couture/ https://acoup.blog/2020/12/04/collections-that-dothraki-hord...
- sillyquiet 6y agoAh great read! A tad condescending in tone but I imagine they do have to deal with outraged fans a lot.
- C4stor 6y agoThe blog is called "a collection of unlimited pedantry", so at least some pedantry is to be expected !
- jabl 6y ago> The blog is called "a collection of unlimited pedantry", so at least some pedantry is to be expected ! While we're on the topic of pedantry, the blog is called "A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry", not "unlimited". Pfft!
- thaumasiotes 6y agohttps://www.tor.com/2014/03/25/how-history-can-be-used-in-fiction-the-borgias-vs-borgia-faith-and-fear/comment-page-1/ https://www.tor.com/2014/03/25/how-history-can-be-used-in-fi... > Even costuming accuracy can be a communications problem, since modern viewers have certain associations that are hard to unlearn. Want to costume a princess to feel sweet and feminine? The modern eye demands pink or light blue, though the historian knows pale colors coded poverty. Want to costume a woman to communicate the fact that she’s a sexy seductress? The audience needs the bodice and sleeves to expose the bits of her [that] modern audiences associate with sexy, regardless of which bits would plausibly have been exposed at the time. > I recently had to costume some Vikings, and was lent a pair of extremely nice period Viking pants which had bold white and orange stripes about two inches wide. I know enough to realize how perfect they were, and that both the expense of the dye and the purity of the white would mark them as the pants of an important man, but that if someone walked on stage in them the whole audience would think: "Why is that Viking wearing clown pants?"
- sillyquiet 6y agoYes, this makes sense, but you can convey what you want to an audience without compromising historicity so thoroughly I believe. Taking the Vikings tv show example - Ragnar Lothbroke would have been in richly and boldly colorful, probably embroidered, clothing of wool and linen and maybe even silk or cotton from trade. He would have been covered in gold and silver jewelry, and his armor and weapons would have been gilt or inlaid with silver, gold, and copper-alloy and intricately engraved. Instead we get an extra from Sons of Anarchy complete with tats and edgy haircut. Edit, also 3/4s of those impressions the modern audience does have is from decades of movies and tv shows. I think a project that respects its audience could do its part to start projecting more accurate impressions of past aesthetics and fashion sensibilities.
- taneliv 6y agoBy the by, any series (or movies) that you'd recommend for their historical accuracy, especially with respect to the everyday things like clothing and other customs?
- BlueTemplar 6y agoSpeaking of Vikings, he covered the latest Assassin's Creed too : https://acoup.blog/2020/11/20/miscellanea-my-thoughts-on-assassins-creed-valhalla/ https://acoup.blog/2020/11/20/miscellanea-my-thoughts-on-ass...
- JetAlone 6y agoYeah, it's like they saw one depiction of "sackcloth and ashes" and decided to extrapolate it to be the constant fashion of the lower classes throughout medieval history.
- fab1an 6y agoGreat to see stuff like this on HN. Curious: there is an unbelievably huge wealth of this type of "content" that lives almost exclusively in history books, or at least seems profoundly difficult to find on the internet. Then there's the insane illusion that virtually all knowledge is accessible within the first Google search result page, so I'm always pleased whenever articles like this one find their way to the surface... Incidentally, if anyone is interested in the general topic of making cloths / tailoring, I just recorded a podcast episode on this - the show is about deep, obsessive hobbies and the first episode is about a neuroscientist who transforms into a tailor at night: https://www.whentheworkisdone.com/ https://www.whentheworkisdone.com/
- philipkglass 6y agoThere are a lot of books covering historical subjects on the web. Their contents usually won't show up in a general web search though. I have learned a lot about the past from old books. Google Books, the HathiTrust, and archive.org are useful here. Newer books are often available on Library Genesis. As an example: have you ever wondered about the state of toxicology in the late Victorian era? What poisons were known, what poisons were detectable (and how), and other nuts-and-bolts details of a certain kind of murder mystery? This information is hard to find in modern web pages -- particularly if you don't know enough to tell who is a trustworthy guide to the past. But a HathiTrust search does the job easily. Use the "advanced full text search" form. Search for the word poisons. Restrict results to English language documents in the years 1880-1900. You'll get a wealth of books back, like this illustrated 1885 text: "Micro-chemistry of poisons : including their physiological, pathological, and legal relations; with an appendix on the detection and microscopic determination of blood: adapted to the use of the medical jurist, physician, and general chemist" https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nnc2.ark:/13960/t9d51ct7s&view=1up&seq=7 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nnc2.ark:/13960/t9d51... Or from 1883: "Indian snake poisons, their nature and effects." https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924003195769&view=1up&seq=5 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924003195769&vi... 1899: "Practical materia medica for nurses, with an appendix containing poisons and their antidotes" https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=loc.ark:/13960/t0pr8z47c&view=1up&seq=5 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=loc.ark:/13960/t0pr8z...
- 6y ago
- jonplackett 6y agoIt’s easy to forget, or just not realise, how insanely far we have come as a species, and all the shoulders we’re standing on. It makes me very, very grateful for where we are now, but also feel really, really spoilt.
- aemerson_ 6y agoReading this actually makes me think the opposite: That we basically do the exact same processes but with the production obfuscated away and at a larger scale. When you peel back the layers of garment manufacture today it's basically the same processes and materials as this series lays out.
- ordu 6y agoI believe, that you both think the very same idea just using different words.
- jonplackett 6y agoWhat I basically mean is, I’m really glad I don’t have to spend my time and effort making clothes from scratch or smelting iron, or farming wheat. Or any of the many tasks that led up to making that even possible. I’m really glad someone else has figured out how to do the many, many extremely time consuming steps (like domesticating sheep and wheat and flax) so that we can now enjoy those benefits. But I also then feel like, shit, I really ought to be doing something for the world. They literally worked ALL this out for me. I barely have anything I need to do to survive and live an easy life, compared to back then at least.
- JetAlone 6y ago"Alternately, if the dye for a given hue or color came from something rare or foreign or difficult to process (for instance, in all three cases, Tyrian or royal purple, which came from the murex sea snails – if you have ever wondered why no country has purple as a national color this is why, before synthetic dyes, coloring your flags and uniforms purple would have been bonkers expensive), then it was going to be expensive and rare and there just wasn’t much you could do about that." The wearing of Tyrian purple clothes (made from the murex snails) was just banned for commoners in Rome, and its production was seriously disrupted if not stopped after the fall of Constantinople, to the extent that soon after that Roman Catholic Cardinals were commanded to wear red instead of purple garments, which they had formerly been treated to. This extraordinarily profitable business in dye is why Byzantium is so often coloured purple in video games like Civilization.
- dredmorbius 6y agoSee generally, Sumptuary Laws: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumptuary_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumptuary_law
- 29athrowaway 6y agoIf you are into these kind of things, check this out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichcahuipilli https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichcahuipilli (Ichcahuipilli, the mesoamerican military armor)
- AdmiralAsshat 6y agoI was gratified to learn upon visiting historical Williamsburg that turmeric, the spice my mother always warned me to be careful with when adding to food because "It will stain the pot, stain the wooden spoon, stain your clothes, and stain anything else it touches" was, in fact, a historical ingredient for yellow dye.