From an English Magazine: A French Hat with Italian Flowers, 1775

Isabella reporting,

Fashion history often focuses on what the elite classes were wearing in cities and at court, and overlooks what more ordinary people wore. The 1770s are usually represented by the extremes of high fashion as shown in fashion plates and caricatures, with exaggerated false rumps and hoops and towering hair crowned by elaborate hats and plumes (like this and this).

Yes, there were women - usually young, fashion-conscious, and willing to spend lavishly - who embraced the absolute latest styles. But just as few women today dress in clothes straight from the runways of New York and Paris, the majority of 18thc. women preferred clothes and hats that were not so much duplicating the latest fashion, as inspired by it.

The Lady's Magazine in May, 1775, listed a number of hat styles that were popular that spring. Unlike the detailed fashion reporting from the early 19thc. magazines that Loretta shares, readers of the Lady's Magazine had to use more imagination. There aren't any colored illustrations, or detailed descriptions, but the brief listings were enough for a woman to take to her milliner, and let their combined taste create an attractive hat.

One of the new hats for undress (day wear) for May is described as a "FRENCH HAT: chip, with nothing but Italian flowers." The reproduction hat worn here by Katelyn, a summer intern in the Margaret Hunter Shop in Colonial Williamsburg, fits that description nicely A chip hat was one made of plaited straw, stitched into shape; in the mid-1770s, hats were generally flat or with a very shallow crown, with a wide, flexible brim. Ribbons tied at the nape would not only hold the hat in place over a cap, but also bend the brim into a becoming arc worn low over the eyes. (The hat, along with Katelyn's clothing, was created in the shop using 18thc. methods.)

Italian flowers were not necessarily imported from Italy, but the generic term for artificial flowers of silk or paper. Flowers might have gone in and out of fashion, but I'm sure there were some women who always wanted them on their hats simply because they're pretty.

I like to imagine a young 18thc. woman like Katelyn visiting her favorite milliner's shop and making careful, pleasurable selections of the chip hat, silk ribbons, and flowers to create her own interpretation of 1775's French Hat.

Many thanks to Sarah Woodyard for background information for this post.

Photographs ©2015 Susan Holloway Scott.

A Victorian Mourning Wreath at the Oaks

Loretta reports:

As promised, I made a second trip to the Historic Paine Estate, the Oaks,
this time for a private tour with Jennifer Willson. This splendid old house is filled with treasures, some appearing in unexpected places. I hope to get to several of them in the coming weeks.

Today I start with mourning, which became a major industry during the Victorian era. Though Queen Victoria represents the extreme of grief, mourning did become more strictly codified and ostentatious in the U.S. as well as England, and fashion magazines like Godey's commented disapprovingly on current practices. Still, what looks to us like a morbid obsession may simply reflect the Victorian tendency to over-decorate and overdo. It may be a coping mechanism, too, for a time when even London's privileged lived over filth, and cholera, typhoid fever, and other epidemics raged through communities to decimate families.

In the days before photography, the bereaved used their loved ones’ hair to create mementos, and the practice continued long after photography became possible. Our predecessors did create some beautiful if rather macabre objects.

The wreath made of hair is one of the more spectacular expressions of mourning from this era, and the Paine Estate owns this fine example, as well as mourning jewelry, which I'll be showing in the very near future.

This blog post explains hair wreaths in some detail. And here is an example from the Everhart Museum.

And now for the plug, because this house deserves to be seen and experienced (and it needs our support):
If you’re in the area, I think you'll find a visit to the Oaks (140 Lincoln Street, Worcester, MA) as fascinating as I did. This year the remaining visiting days are 12 September and 3 October 1-4PM.  There will also be a Christmas Open House in early December, when the Oaks gets all dressed up in her holiday finest.

Doesn't fit your schedule? You can arrange a special group tour by contacting the DAR Colonel Timothy Bigelow Chapter: col.timothybigelowchapter@gmail.com.

 I also recommend Jennifer’s blog Revolutionary Oaks. She's a true Nerdy History Girl.

Please click on images to enlarge.

The Duke of Wellington's Waterloo Cloak, 1815

Isabella reporting,

To historians and collectors, "provenance" is a magic word. It's the history of an item or artwork - where and by whom it was made, who owned it over time, and if it managed to be in the right historical place at the right time to make it extraordinary.

This ordinary-looking men's cloak scores big-time in provenance. The tailor who made may be forgotten (though the buttons have been identified as the work of R. Bushby, St. Martin's Lane, London), but not the man who bespoke it: Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington.

Unlike many of his officers, Wellington wasn't a clothes horse, and preferred simple, functional dress for battle instead of the flashy uniform that by rights he could have worn. Over his military career, he probably owned a number of other cloaks that looked just like this one: a single curved piece of of heavy blue wool, fulled to keep out rain and wind, with a velvet collar and facings and plain gilt buttons.

But this particular cloak is special, because it's believed to be the one that Wellington was wearing when he won the decisive Battle of Waterloo. There are mud spatters along the hem that could have come from the rain-soaked battlefield, spatters that have carefully been preserved for their significance.

That's a powerful provenance - but there's more. After the battle, Lady Caroline Lamb was one of the British ladies to rush to Brussels. Ostensibly she was there to tend to her brother, Colonel Frederic Ponsonby, who had been gravely wounded in the battle (see Loretta's post here), but it was widely believed her real reason was to pursue the celebrated duke. Lady Caroline was already notorious for her famous affair with the poet Lord Byron, while Wellington was equally famous for never saying no to a flattering lady. Although both were married, that inconvenient fact mattered little to these two, and they did in fact have a (likely meaningless) hook-up in the days after the battle. Lady Caroline claimed that Wellington gave this cloak to her as a souvenir, and it's tempting to imagine the Iron Duke protectively draping the cloak over her slender shoulders.

Intriguing, but probably not likely. Lady Caroline wasn't particularly sentimental about the cloak, and at some point she gave it to surgeon Sir Anthony Carlisle.  In 1823, Carlisle in turn gave the cloak to Grosvenor Charles Bedford, a civil servant and collector, and the cloak remained in his family until this year, when it was put up for auction. Sotheby's had estimated it to sell for between £20,000-30,000. It sold for significantly more: £47,500. Fortunately, it was bought not by a private collector, but by the National Army Museum in London, where it will soon be on display.

For more about the cloak's history, see the Sotheby's listing here.

Above: Cloak, believed to have been worn by the Duke of Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo, 1815; photograph courtesy of Sotheby's.
Below: Field Marshal Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, by Sir Thomas Lawrence, c. 1820. The Huntingdon Library and Art Collections.

Fashions for August 1921

August 1921 dresses

Loretta reports:

For a little change of pace, I thought we’d look at fashion of the early 20th century. Color images have not been easy to find. This set comes from the Delineator, which basically sold Butterick patterns.

If you’re reading or writing books set in the Downton Abbey era, you will probably enjoy taking a more extensive look at the magazine online. It includes illustrations for undergarments, which can be extremely important in historical romance.



Meanwhile, I believe the descriptions of the dresses will make more sense to those who sew than they do to me. I do not understand the bit about the waist closing on the shoulder.

dress description

 

August 1821 dresses rear view

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the caption will take you to the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.

Breakfast Links: Week of July 27, 2015

Fresh for your browsing pleasure! Our weekly round-up of fav links to other web sites, blogs, images, and articles via Twitter.
• The story of Spitalfields silk.
• An early Victorian dress, inside and out.
• In elegant penmanship: a merchant's 1763 accounting book of the sales of African men, women, and children in Philadelphia.
• Photographer Eugene Atget captured the now-lost streets of old Paris about to be swept away.
• Flat roofs: 19thc. Italianate houses in upstate New York.
• Bodysnatching in 1816: a bad year to be alive, or dead.
• Image: One of Horace Walpole's "Gothic Lanthorns" from his house at Strawberry Hill.
• Seventeenth century women on horseback in art.
• The groaning Georgian dining table with the elaborate epergne at its center.
• Cracking open the history of fortune cookies.
• The Great New England Earthquake of 1663 came with a "roar like a great fire."
• Image: Mother of pearl fan, French, c.1895.
• Art and design meet in this "behind the seams" look at a 1918 dress by Lucile.
• The freaks and fascinations of 18thc. entertainment.
• Recreating 19thc. whitework embroidery.
• Who knew that Thomas Hughes, author of Tom Brown's School Days, also founded the idyllic town of Rugby, Tennessee, as a social experiment?
• The over-the-top coronation of George IV.
• Bigamy and bankruptcy: the unfortunate tale of 1750s Boston shopkeeper Henrietta Maria East Caine.
• Waiting for a summer promenade: eight of Britain's most historic surviving seaside piers.
• Image: Startling remedy for hiccups from an 18thc. herbal.
• "Have I been poisoned?" Real questions asked of an oracle by ancient Greeks.
• Women hunting, shooting, & fowling across the centuries in art.
• How to shop like a fashionable Regency gentleman.
• Image: A 19thc cartoon of "indoor cycling" complete with cinemetograph and fan.
• "A recipe for a Pomander": excerpts from a 17thc perfume book.
• All that flitters: spectacular sparkling wallpaper from 1910.
• Thought-provoking piece about how American slavery is presented on plantation tours.
• Image: Unabashedly unsubtle recruitment poster from WWI.
• Unfair sport: a brief history of Dickens-bashing.
• How Singer won the sewing machine war.
• Mass graves of Napoleon's soldiers recently found in Lithuania show that many died of disease and starvation, not battle.
• Manchester University launches largest-ever online collection of the work of Victorian author Elizabeth Gaskell.
• Image: Just for fun: In 1951, Harlequin Books wasn't just publishing romances.
Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.
Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection.