Op got any advice on finding sources for 18th c mens fashion? (most of the things i get are for women And That Aint Me Goal)
(edited lots of times because I keep adding more stuff, but there’s bound to be more that I’ve forgotten, and I fear this is not very well organized)
Oh boy I sure do!!! (I assume you mean sewing and wearing it?)
It is, unfortunately, pretty hard to find resources for 18th century mens fashion on the internet. (Note to self: make more tutorials.) But as I’ve been doing it for some years I do have a list of useful stuff!
My first piece of advice is to get yourself a copy of Costume Close Up. It’s my most used reference book, and my sewing is SO MUCH BETTER since getting it. The first half of the book is women’s garments and the second half is men’s garments (11 mens garments, all quite nice, with pattern diagrams and pictures), and it goes over the construction in fantastic detail. It explains so, so much. 18th century clothing construction is completely different from modern clothing construction, but once you learn it it’s quite straightforward, and lends itself far better to hand sewing in a lot of places.
(Really, I cannot stress enough how totally different it is. If you haven’t done any modern sewing before then that’s fine, you’re probably in a better starting place to learn 18th century ones than I was! I took a 2 year college fashion course where I learned modern construction techniques, and about 95% of what I learned there is irrelevant to 18th century sewing.)
One place Costume Close Up is a bit lacking is in the shirt chapter, because the shirt it features had the cuffs and collar replaced in the early 19th century and has no ruffles, so there’s no mention of sleeve buttons or how to put ruffles on.
Here I originally had links to a bunch of questions I’d answered, but I’ve answered a lot more since I first posted this, so I made an FAQ page.
For hair, I really recommend getting a copy of The American Duchess Guide to 18th Century Beauty. Yes, it’s only got tutorials for women’s styles in it (because it’s a companion to their dressmaking book) BUT all the techniques are easily transferable to mens hairstyles! And it has recipes for powder and pomatum and stuff! ‘Tis a good resource, with much good insight into 18th century hair.
I’ve got a blogspot sewing blog where I post about my sewing projects in a lot more detail, so I’ll leave links to some of the more informative of those ones:
In which I talk about shirt ruffles.
In which I talk about the pattern of my 1730′s coat, and a little bit about the construction.
In which I talk about the construction of my 1730′s coat in excessive detail with about 50 photos.
And the post on how I made my 1730′s waistcoat.
And the 1730′s breeches construction.
A similarly detailed post for my 1790 black & white coat.
And one for my yellow striped 1780′s-90′s waistcoat.
This waistcoat post has some decent construction photos too.
This is a very tiny post about a queue bag with not many pictures, but I’ll leave a link anyways because a queue bag is an important accessory.
(But be suspicious of any posts earlier than 2018, because a lot of my construction is much less good before that. The further back in the archive you go the less idea I have of what I’m doing.)
I have a youtube channel, which doesn’t have many videos because I am very slow, but I do have some tutorials and sewing videos, and try to cover things as clearly and thoroughly as I possibly can. I have posts on my blog with extra information & links for some of these videos. And written instructions for a couple of them, but I don’t usually do both.
As of the most recent edit of this post I have videos on death’s head buttons, cloth covered buttons, sleeve links, hand sewn buttonholes, machine sewn shirts, and hand sewn leather gloves.
If you want to do embroidery I recommend getting a copy of 18th Century Embroidery Techniques by Gail Marsh. Much like Costume Close Up, it explains everything! How an 18th century embroidery shop worked, how to transfer a design and stretch it in an embroidery frame, and all the necessary stitches and techniques. It has chapters on the many different kinds of embroidery and I really need to try them because I have only made 2 embroidered waistcoats and neither of them have proper 18th century embroidery. (I find the metal embroidery chapter especially intriguing, and have a bunch of metal embroidery supplies bookmarked on etsy. Did you know you can still get metal spangles and purl and all that stuff?! I’d really like to try crewel too. I love those big bold wool flowers.)
18th Century Fashion in Detail from the V&A is a fabulous book that I recently acquired. Not a pattern book, but a very good inspiration book. It has detailed photos of many many garments (about half of them are menswear) and line diagrams of what the entire garment looks like. The variety of embellishments shown there is mind boggling. There’s a lot of amazing embroidery, of course, but there’s also a painted waistcoat, one trimmed with strips of dyed green rabbit fur, and one with a pattern of decorative holes punched in it to let the lining show through! The introduction also details how the various businesses that made up the clothing industry worked.
Fitting & Proper - A book with patterns & construction details similar to Costume Close Up.
A Glimpse into 18th Century Tailoring - Another book with pattern diagrams & construction details, also fairly evenly divided between men’s and women’s garments. The text is printed in two columns, with Swedish on one side and English on the other.
(While I provided internet links for the books I mention, I strongly encourage you to order books through your local bookstore if you can.)
The Cut of Mens Clothes 1600-1900 - a book of patterns that’s available online as a free pdf and also another better quality pdf (and somehow, magically, still hasn’t been taken down for copyright infringement. Which is good because it’s out of print and expensive! Go download it right now!!) This is VERY HELPFUL for pattern drafting and I’ve used it a lot! It hasn’t got much on construction though.
LACMA Pattern Project - More patterns on grids that you can scale up! I look forward to trying their c. 1790 cutaway coat one.
I should write a post sometime about how I scale up patterns to fit me. I basically trace out a little diagram of the pattern pieces, measure myself, guess at how big the various pieces ought to be based on that, and draw them up full scale on a big roll of stiff brown paper. An unprofessional method, I think, but it works surprisingly well for me. (Though that might only be because I’ve had years of practice… my earlier patterns were not good.) I usually mock them up in old sheets or very shitty thrift store fabric to make sure that they fit.
Burnley & Trowbridge - they have some good historical sewing tutorials on their youtube channel. Lots of little videos about certain techniques and things, and also a men’s shirt sew along, and a work cap one.
Neal Hurst’s youtube channel - He’s a tailor & collections curator at Colonial Williamsburg, and has some videos on sewing techniques, and some very long livestreams where he chats with various experts about particular topics.
Tips and tricks to make hand sewing easier.
False buttonhole tutorial
How to set in buckram interfacing (video)
Functional buttonhole tutorial (video)
Quick little post about how I made some metallic buttonholes, which is something I need to cover more thoroughly someday.
How to make bird’s eye thread buttons for shirts. That’s just one kind though, a lot of earlier 18th century ones seem to have Dorset knob buttons, and Dorset wheels are also on a lot of shirts (though mostly later ones I think.)
Gina B Silkworks has a lot of videos and books, workshops, etc. about various kinds of passementerie buttons, some of which are 18th century.
Video of some stretches to do to prevent damage to your hands
The Historical Sew Monthly Challenge - This isn’t specifically an 18th century thing, but it’s something I’ve been participating in (to various degrees) since 2013, and it’s actually what prompted me to make my sewing blog. I find it to be good motivation to finish things, and the people who run it are really lovely.
18th century notebook - pages of links to extant clothing, organized by kind of garment.
18th Century Material Culture - Lots of… slide shows I guess? They’ve got a bunch of pictures of specific garments all collected together, anyways. But I’m a tad suspicious of them because their coats page has a few sleeved waistcoats on it, and sleeved waistcoats are very obviously not the same thing as coats.
Here’s a link to my pinterest. I know a lot of people hate pinterest but I find it to be an excellent way to organize my historical reference pictures. (Oh my god I just noticed I have over a thousand pins on the extant 18th century waistcoat board?) Beware of pinterest captions in general though, there’s a LOT of mislabeled stuff floating around there. Thank goodness we have reverse google image search.
The more you look at reference pictures the more you’ll develop an eye for what looks “right”.
There are probably more things that I’m forgetting at the moment, but if I think of them I’ll edit this post & add them.
Some places to buy stuff (Not at all a complete list, and your best options will vary depending on where you live. I live in Canada so most of these are North American.)
Puresilks - They have an incredibly huge variety of silk, especially taffeta. (Which reminds me, stay away from slubby dupioni if you’re looking to be historically accurate!) I’ve ordered from them a few times and have always been pleased with the taffeta, but once I got a brocade labelled as rayon and it turned out to be polyester. Since writing this post their prices have nearly doubled, so I haven’t ordered from them in a few years.
Silk Baron - never bought anything from them but I’ve heard they’re good?
Pure Linen Envy - Reasonably priced linens, and they’re right here in Canada for once! Their summer breeze weight is my favourite thing to make shirts out of, though the featherlight works for even finer shirts, and they have some heavier ones that are great for summer outerwear, buckram, waistcoat backs, etc.
Cotton Lace - As the name suggests, they sell nothing but cotton lace, and some of the designs work very well for 18th century shirts.
Renaissance Fabrics - Wool, linen, silk, and some other stuff. I have two pieces of wool from them and it’s nice. And they will send you up to 4 swatches for free!
Burnley & Trowbridge - Fabric, trim, buckles, linen thread, books, etc. I love everything I’ve gotten from them except their wooden button blanks, which are overpriced and bad quality.
Wm. Booth Draper - They carry much the same stuff as Burnley & Trowbridge.
American Duchess - They mostly do women’s shoes, but sometimes they do mens. Their stock doesn’t stay the same all the time though.
Sock Dreams - They have quite a few passably 18th century stockings! My beloved O Woolies seem to have vanished from the store though :(
Delp Stockings - I’ve never bought anything from them before, but they have a lot of historical stockings.
LBCC Historical - cosmetics. I have their white foundation, liquid rouge, and lip stain and they’re good! They last forever too, you only need the teeniest little speck. (A word about the white face paint though - it looks lovely in dim lighting but terrible in bright sunlight or camera flashes.) Darkened eyebrows were part of 18th century makeup too, and for that you can just burn the round end of a clove and use it like a pencil.
I realize that a lot of the things on this list are fairly expensive, so you ought to have a good hard think about how much 18th century sewing you want to do before investing in them. Since this is my One Big Thing that I spend the majority of my free time on, and since I wear much of what I make for everyday, I feel okay about buying some expensive supplies now and then. And I do try to be very economical with my good fabric, and use all my scraps, just like they did in the 18th century! This isn’t to say you can’t make nice things with cheaper supplies though. I have several wool things made from picked apart thrift store skirts, and some plain cotton things that are somewhat inaccurate but still good. The selection at my local fabric store isn’t very good, but nice things do turn up occasionally.
Trust the overall shapes of historical patterns, even if they look weird to your eyes. They aren’t supposed to fit the same way modern clothes do. A lot of movie costumes look “off” because they add modern amounts of ease to the clothes.
Just as you cannot always trust movie costumes or pinterest captions, you should be aware that the styled outfits on museum mannequins sometimes get things very wrong also.
Proportions are also super important in patterns! Look at portraits and observe how big things are in relation to other things, and where they sit on the body.
If you make your patterns out of stiff paper, like I do, you can punch holes in the pieces and hang them on shower hooks. This makes them easy to store because you can put several patterns on a coat hanger and hang them up in the closet. I also was taught to not add seam allowance to my patterns, which means when you trace around them that line is your stitching line.
Label your pattern pieces. Do it. Write the date you made the pattern and what the pattern is for on every single piece. (I admit this is something I’m still bad about) You may think “Oh, I’ll remember what this is for” but then 6 months later you’ll find 4 different unlabelled breeches patterns and have no idea which is the one that actually fits you properly.
Wipe down the work table before you set your sewing on it, especially if your fabric is a light colour, and even more especially if it’s a table that multiple people use. Wash your hands before doing hand sewing, and wash your ironing board cover once in a while too. Clean your iron when it gets gunky.
On that note, you should also keep your sewing machine clean and well oiled. The manual will tell you what to do.
Machine sewing and hand sewing are both good! I do both in most of my projects, in varying amounts. A lot of 18th century techniques are much much better done by hand, but I don’t see any problem with doing some machine sewing (instead of the backstitch or running stitch) on certain construction seams that aren’t visible, especially for shirts. (I should note that while I do strive for accuracy in most of my projects, I am not a reenactor.)
Facebook groups can be a great resource sometimes, but you’ll also find people telling you completely untrue things thinking they’re being helpful, so don’t trust anything without sources. And there are also a few assholes who hate fun, so just remember that miserable grumpy old reenactor men aren’t the boss of you and you should sew things that make you happy.
It’s best to use cheap fabric for your first few attempts, because you won’t be brilliant right away, but don’t be afraid of expensive material forever! It’s so much nicer to work with nice materials, and you should use them instead of hoarding them.
Here’s a post of some of the garbage I made when I was first trying to sew clothes. Don’t be discouraged by your early attempts! Keep sewing, we all have to start somewhere! With years of practice I’ve gotten so much better, and so will you!!
It’s hard to find good lace these days, and if you can only find shitty lace then plain organdy ruffles are always a better choice. I’ve tried putting bad lace on shirts and sadly there’s no way to hide its badness.
A few accessories can make a world of difference in how “complete” your ensemble looks. Gloves, hats, watch chains, muffs, fans, a walking stick if you can get one. All good things to add!
Good luck with your sewing! Have fun and remember to wax your thread and use a thimble!
