it's funny although a little exasperating how artists designing "princess" or medieval-esque gowns really do not understand how those types of clothes are constructed. We're all so used to modern day garments that are like... all sewn together in one layer of cloth, nobody seems to realize all of the bits and pieces were actually attached in layers.
So like look at this mid-1400's fit:
to get the effect of that orange gown, you've got
chemise next to the skin like a slip (not visible here) (sometimes you let a bit of this show at the neckline) (the point is not to sweat into your nice clothes and ruin them)
kirtle, or undergown. (your basic dress, acceptable to be seen by other people) this is the puffing bits visible at the elbow, cleavage, and slashed sleeve. It's a whole ass dress in there. Square neckline usually. In the left picture it's probably the mustard yellow layer on the standing figure.
coat, or gown. This is the orange diamond pattern part. It's also the bit of darker color visible in the V of the neckline.
surcoat, or sleeveless overgown. THIS is the yellow tapestry print. In the left picture it's the long printed blue dress on the standing figure
if you want to get really fancy you can add basically a kerchief or netting over the bare neck/shoulders. It can be tucked into the neckline or it can sit on top. That's called a partlet.
the best I can tell you is that they were technically in a mini-ice-age during this era. Still looks hot as balls though.
Coats and surcoats are really more for rich people though, normal folks will be wearing this look:
tbh I have a trapeze dress from target that looks exactly like that pale blue one. ye olden t-shirt dress.
so now look here:
(this is a princess btw) both pieces are made of the same blue material so it looks as if it's all one dress, but it's not. The sleeves you're seeing are part of the gown/coat, and the ermine fur lined section on top is a sideless overgown/surcoat. You can tell she's rich as fuck because she's got MORE of that fur on the inside of the surcoat hem.
okay so now look at these guys.
Left image (that's Mary Magdelene by the way) you can see the white bottom layer peeking out at the neckline. That's a white chemise (you know, underwear). The black cloth you see behind her chest lacing is a triangular panel pinned there to Look Cool tm. We can call that bit the stomacher. Over the white underwear is the kirtle (undergown) in red patterned velvet, and over the kirtle is a gown in black. Right image is the same basic idea--you can see the base kirtle layer with a red gown laced over it. She may or may not have a stomacher behind her lacing, but I'm guessing not.
I've kind of lost the plot now and I'm just showing you images, sorry. IN CONCLUSION:
you can tell she's a queen because she's got bits I don't even know the NAMES of in this thing. Is that white bit a vest? Is she wearing a vest OVER her sideless surcoat? Girl you do not need this many layers!
so you know that ballgown look that people default to when making "princess" designs
this is kind of the fashion equivalent of when an AI has been trained to approximate what art looks like without understanding what it's drawing or how physics work. A costume designer has general recollections of about how the dresses looked from art, and a lot of the art they're learning from is also romanticized revival recreations of earlier art, so things are getting pretty confused structurally.
(I have to blame Disney for a lot of the specific trends but to be clear this was already happening before Disney was born.)
You can probably recognize how the gestalt of the bodice evokes what would actually be two layers--a gown laced over an under-gown, maybe with a stomacher in the same color as the gown.
The skirt is the very distant legacy of a trend that starts around here, in the early 1500's:
deliberately slitting the skirt of your gown so that it shows a triangle of the under-gown peaking through.
You know what a farthingale is? it's this thing.
Reeds sewn into the skirt to give it that round bell shape without needing 100000 layers underneath. Unsurprisingly invented in Spain, where it's hot as fuck. This is also the era where the farthingale starts its evolution into the eventual hoop skirt. You see that wide "ballroom" shape in a lot of princess designs. Princess Peach is a classic example.
Farthingale becomes hoop skirt, and using basically the same technology (reeds sewn into the fabric for support) the under-gown/kirtle becomes stiffened and shaped.
Eventually you get to this very pronounced version of the "slashed skirt" shown in the left figure, below. You can see that the red skirt is probably part of a whole dress, because the red sleeves in the same fabric are visible under the outer gown. (you can also see the chemise at the edge of the neckline). They did have detachable sleeves back then, as a standard part of a gown, so the red sleeves could be pinned to the chemise instead of attached to the body of the gown.
>Right figure, you can see this shit is getting elaborate now. I think that's a white under-gown with a yellow gown and a burgundy overgown. The collar around her neck is actually a partlet, not connected to anything else, just tucked in and maybe pinned underneath the neckline. But they're starting to have separate skirts now, so it's also possible she's only wearing a yellow skirt with the overgown on top it.
At this point whalebone is coming into the picture in a BIG way, and that's when you start to get Tudor style boned gown/kirtles tight around the bust really taking off. Also boned sleeves, if you can believe that. The smooth flat conical bodice is the product of a boned kirtle, which will eventually become stays, which will eventually become a corset.
anyway by now we're fully out of the medieval period and into the early modern/renaissance.
look at this bad ass bitch, hat ON titties OUT, who is doing it like her
I went to the ren fair recently, which got me interested in the specific historical inspirations of common “Renaissance Festival” clothes and consequently bugged my sister about her research so hard that it made us miss our turn
One common outfit you see (thanks to Amazon) is this modern take on the kirtle
On the left: Amazon. On the right: a recreation of what people actually wore. You can see how we have the same basic concept with a very different execution. This is what you would call a kirtle.
Another common ren fair look is the outer-wear stays. Always with the un-collared billowy undershirt.
I want to draw attention to the lacing. Stands to reason that costumers now would use contemporary lacing rather than that of previous eras. But check out even the romantic depictions of clothing from the 1870’s below this. No grommets. That’s just pure fabric baby.
Very few renaissance era women ever wore anything exactly like the ren fair corsets. For one thing, cross lacing wasn’t common, and metal grommets were not accessible to normal clothing makers. For another, structured stays (or “bodies”) were underwear, not outerwear. (Apparently something more popular with English peasants than French peasants, who didn’t use them.)
Left: stays (underwear). Right: jumps (outerwear)
Stays are boned. Jumps are not. Stays/bodies were pretty expensive due to the craftsmanship, and a poor person would have budget for a single pair. You can imagine this investment was not as popular with women who did hard physical labor. Jumps got really popular in the mid-1700’s and largely replaced stays in working class fashion.
A brief history lesson: clothes are ephemeral; we lose them as they are worn out, cut down, repurposed, and thrown away. Before modern anthropology and modern record keeping, it was difficult for anyone to know what anyone else looked like in the past or even a country away. Words used to refer to one kind of garment kept being used even as that garment changed in structure and purpose over time. Even after paper became common enough for printing art, it wore out fast and art was lost. References were hard to get.
What we think of as “peasant garb” is actually the product of a game of telephone that travels back from Romantic Revival art, and many of those (urban) artists got their idea of what rural peasants wore from opera costumes. The costumers working at the opera were not going out to the country side to take notes on what farmers actually wore, nor did they want to. Opera is show biz, you want it to be evocative, but not ordinary. Their costumes would have been based on what urban folks were wearing, with extra little touches like a shepherds crook to make it look “rural”.
Below: some mid-to-late 1800’s artistic depictions of peasants wearing improbably nice fabrics/clothes (probably a reflection of opera costumes). The painting of the peasant girl on the right is wearing more-or-less jumps.
You can see how the romantic art depictions of unstructured vests eventually inspired the “medieval revival” styles of the 1960’s/1970’s which lives on in the ren fair. Not only the neckline of the vest, but the style of undershirt with an open neck and billowy sleeves.
Compare (unstructured, laced, outerwear):
Nobody wore that in the 1400’s or 1500’s, but they wore things that looked similar at a glance. When 1960’s artists went back looking for early modern/medieval styles to replicate, they mostly had a hodge podge of this art to reference and extrapolate from.
The fact that a historical laced kirtle with an over skirt looks a lot like stays worn on the outside, probably made this confusing for artists. Undershirts of the 1500’s were collared and high necked, however, with tighter sleeves.(Below, 1500’s kirtle)
One last example of 1800’s romanticism, this time depicting a contemporary girl. Looks familiar, right? We’re back at the ren fair, if you take the bonnet off.
It does look similar to what was being worn in the 1800’s. Here’s a cartoon showing a working class woman in the 1870’s.
TLDR; what we think of as “Renaissance” or even “medieval” peasant garb is actually a remix of the working class clothes from the 1800’s, with some confused memories of the kirtle from older art thrown in.
Structured stays? 1500’s. The blousy no-collar undershirt? 1700’s. The cross lacing? 1800’s.
Anyway. This image of peasants has always been costume & fantasy. That’s why I think it’s kind of fun that it reaches a terminus in the anachronism and fantasy of a Renaissance Festival.
Analysis of clothing by Kenna Libes in this painting depicting colonial women in the late 1700’s. Not really related to what I’m talking about, but an interesting spot between two eras.
cannot believe we are having a whole discussion about "princess dresses" without talking about THEE iconic feature of the Princess Look, the conical hennin (Wikipedia)
I realize this is about the medieval era and not the early modern period but also, since we're talking about things that historically have layers that have been flattened into one piece for costuming purposes: THE FRENCH HOOD
most modern depictions in movies and film (even otherwise very accurate ones) make it a sort of headband/kokoshnik-looking thing with a veil at the back, like this:
while we're not 100% sure still how exactly a French hood worked, we can infer from documents and some paintings/sculptures from the time that it was probably more like a couple of hoods (as in cloth bags that go over the head, not just a veil) stacked on top of each other to create a layered effect:
an innermost one (the coif) made of linen to protect the more fancy layers from hair oils and dirt and to contain the hair, with perhaps a decorative ruffle,
a second one (the cap) that might be a different color, like red,
a third, longer hood with a contrasting lining that could be folded back (to both help keep it on the head and also to create a different look) and possibly a decorative trim,
and possibly something like a jeweled ribbon or decorative chain that could go on separately for extra glam
Side note on jumps v. corsets: jumps are VERY common with ACTORS at Ren Faires, especially those doing stage combat and physical comedy, bc they are comfortable and don't restrict movement. You'll see merchants and patrons more often in 'exterior corsets' but a lot of the cast, especially lower-class characters, will have jumps. Sometimes laced, sometimes just hook-and-eye up the front.
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