What’s a Waistcoat?
We’ve been calling the garment we’re making a “jacket.” But if you visit the 1627 English Village (and I hope you will) you’ll see women wearing garments of the same shape and calling them “waistcoats.”
Most of the time, we can’t be positive what name a person from the past would assign to which piece of clothing. Names could even be confusing to contemporaries. For example, see Anne Buck’s brief article (“The Baby under the Bush”, Costume, 1977) analyzing the records of a 17th century inquiry into the parentage of a foundling baby. The woman who unwrapped the baby described the child’s clothes; the mother, who had dressed and abandoned the baby, described the same set of clothes. In more than one instance, the same garment was given different names by the two women. Even in our own time names of garments can be ambiguous. Consider the word “jacket” in 2007. Jacket can mean a tuxedo jacket, a suit jacket, a windbreaker, a baseball jacket – and the different items aren’t interchangeable.
The earliest of the Plymouth Colony wills and inventories date from the early 1630s. Most of those are records of men’s possessions. In the couple of instances when women’s possessions are listed, the word “jacket” does not appear. There are, though, more than a couple of references to “waistcoat”, and at least once to “waistcoat and petticoat.” We know from other sources (including pictorial sources) that garments shaped like the jacket we’re reproducing were worn with a petticoat almost universally by working class women. Sweeping up all the bits of information, we’ve decided to call these garments “waistcoats.”
Since modern people usually think of a vest (sleeveless upper-body garment) when they hear “waistcoat,” we’ve decided to call our reproduction garment a “jacket.” This name conjures an image closer to the item we’re making, and has the added advantage of following the example of costume historian Janet Arnold, hardly a bad thing.
Tags: Anne Buck, jacket, Janet Arnold, petticoat, waistcoat
