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 17^th 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.

Tricia’s writing tonight:

When we were initially working on the jacket planning, we had to have a physical pattern for a jacket to apply the design and embroidery to. Since many of the jackets in collections are now mounted for their own conservation, taking the pattern (how is a mystery to me!) from the chosen jacket would be impossible. So we looked to the extraordinary research by Janet Arnold to guide us. She was fortunate enough to view
and work with two well known examples previous to their most recent conservation and mounting. In her book, Patterns of Fashion – The cut and construction of clothes for men and women c 1560-1620, she diagrams a jacket in the collection of the Museum of Costume at Bath, England and the Laton jacket at the V&A. Which to choose?Plimoth uses the Bath jacket as the base pattern for the costumes used by the interpreters. They have extensive experience modifying the pattern for individuals. The Bath jacket as it is now does not include lace. We decided to use the Laton pattern and to include on the final jacket the ‘extras’ that help to define it as an example of over-the-top fashion for this culture. That includes the lace and the ribbon ties.

With that choice made, Denise (formerly a tailor with the Colonial Wardrobe Department) drafted the pattern from Janet’s book onto dressmaker’s paper using the 1″ grid as a guide. She then made up a jacket in muslin. She found that she needed to make modifications to the arm areas to get the armholes correct. She unpicked, corrected, and then sewed again until the pattern was perfect. Then she unpicked the muslin one last time and used the fabric pieces to transfer a new pattern to dressmaker’s paper. That’s the pattern we’ve been using.

Tricia

Here I am again. Thanks, Tricia, for writing up this entry.

A few notes: Years ago, we drafted the Bath pattern to life-size and then drafted four sizes from it: women’s small, medium, and large, and one child size. These patterns were transferred to brown paper and then laminated. We use these patterns, making alterations on the fabric as we cut, to make jackets for the female colonial interpreters.

This photo shows the pieces of the child size pattern laid out for cutting. This fabric will be the lining of a jacket for one of the child volunteers in the 1627 English Village.