Which jacket?
Several months ago, in the planning stages of this project, we decided we wanted to replicate an actual surviving 17th century jacket, if at all possible, rather than create a new piece inspired by the originals. We outlined several criteria for the ‘perfect jacket.’
We wanted a jacket with a wide variety of motifs and different stitches, both of which would help to camouflage the fact that the embroidery was done by many different hands. We also wanted a pleasing color palette. Tastes change, and some of the color combinations used in the 17th century are attractive to modern viewers and some aren’t. As long as we had a choice, we thought we’d go with one that is; after all, the finished garment would be part of an exhibit and we wanted people to like looking at it.
Maybe most importantly, we’d need to find a piece whose owner (institution or individual) was amenable to such a project. Fortunately, the Colonial Wardrobe Department had a prior relationship with Susan North, Curator of 17th & 18th Century Fashion at the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) in London, England. Ms North had helped us on a few previous reproduction projects, providing details of pieces in the V & A’s collections, and generous with her expert advice. She had encouraged our efforts in recreating historic garments, asserting her belief (which we share) that you can gain insights through recreating a garment that won’t be obvious when studying an original.
We were inclined to look carefully at the Laton jacket, in the V&A, because it had been examined by the late costume historian Janet Arnold. She published not only notes on construction details but also a pattern, drawn on graphed paper, in her volume Patterns of Fashion: the cut and construction of clothes for men and women c.1560-1620. Having the pattern pieces would save us the time and trouble of drafting a pattern. Unfortunately, the Laton jacket (accession # T.228-1994) has a narrow stitch vocabulary – mostly detached buttonhole stitch – which is tedious to work, time consuming and requires a great deal of thread per square inch. Even worse, it is a treasure of the collection (that’s not the bad part) so it is permanently on display behind glass (that’s the bad part). We wouldn’t be able to get the detailed photos of the embroidery pattern that would be essential to the project.
We turned to another jacket in the V&A’s collection, 1359-1900. This one has a beautifully colored pattern, a huge variety of motifs, and is not permanently on display, so it could be photographed from all sides. We decided to combine the Laton pattern pieces with the embroidery pattern of 1359-1900.
I haven’t posted links to these jackets as I’d first like to get permission to do so. They’re easy to find, though. On the V&A website (www.vam.ac.uk), click ‘collections’, then ‘search collections’. For the Laton jacket, put in either the accession number or ‘Laton jacket’. For the other, put in the accession number.
On our way to settling on these two jackets, we considered several others, and traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City to look at two surviving examples. I’ll post more about these in the future.
This photo is just eye candy. It comes from an embroidered coif (a kind of head covering worn by women in the 17th century) designed and worked by several former members of the Colonial Wardrobe Department.
Here’s the information on how to join the team of embroiderers.
