What’s in a Dress?  A Lot More Than You Think!

At this point in my education, I dream of doing work in a museum as a textile or fashion curator (or more likely an assistant). It was my dream to be around the beauty and history that are reflected and defined by our clothes. So, with this assignment, here was my chance to take a deeper dive into dress history.

Our instructor assigns our study group a given a time period, and I am super excited.

Will it be a time between the 1700s and 1800s with the beautifully corseted and full gowns? The striking art deco geometric shapes that defined the clothes of the 1920s? Or maybe even the floral and feminine Dior dresses that enveloped women’s bodies in the 1950s? I felt like I would be happy with any one of these periods … and then the list of assignments was released.

Our group was assigned the period 1000-1199. Seriously? Needless to say, I was not thrilled. 

Our Topic This course was supposed to adds depth to our knowledge of dress history and get us excited about Denmark’s place in it. The assignment would help us gain a richer knowledge of fashion from a specific period of time, learn how to research and find sources for our conclusions. The goal was to inspire us to think about how we can use this type of dress history research in theater, film, and museums.

Zero Waste Is SO Last Millennium

Assigned to work with a group of people I didn’t know well, I wanted to bring my strengths to the table. I was feeling pressured to get excited about clothing that felt irrelevant to me … and my typical enthusiasm and interest was at a low. I faked enthusiasm towards the end of my most recent career. But my excitement and energy were some of the very reasons why I got my first job. They were also a big part of why I was successful in Denmark. But I didn’t want to fake it. That was not the journey I had chosen to be on this time around. So, I dove in alongside my team and started looking for something that would grab me.

Almost immediately, I could see that a lot of today’s zero-waste patterns are lifted directly from this period. It was an intriguing revelation based on what I knew about fabric waste from tailored patterns in the fashion industry. I saw how our early ancestors were manipulating pieces of fabric to create shape but without wasting fabric. Clothes found from this period in Denmark had geometric-shaped pieces of fabric sewn together. As an example, slits made of trapezoidal or triangular pieces were sewn on each side of a skirt to give it fullness and drape.

Textiles were once deemed almost as valuable as gold and silver. As a result, they were well cared for, passed down from generation to generation. And often times they were reused until they, almost literally, disintegrated back into the earth. 

Fact or Fiction?

Most of the clothing we read about for this project were made from leather, linen, and wool. But there were also silks imported from Asia among the rich. But from a 21st-century perspective, the bottom line is that all these fibers were biodegradable! They did not pose the same threat to the environment that we face today with our synthetic fibers, such as polyester. The garments of the early 1000s served many purposes before being discarded, and they were used up to their full potential. A value that our society has lost in our race for consumerism.

Beyond the research about the period, in general, we had to choose a mural or garment to evaluate. But only few garments have been found from the time. This makes it hard to definitively show how the pieces were worn. A great resource are the frescoes remaining in churches throughout Denmark as a way to understand how clothing was worn. Not only that, but wills often included the clothing of the deceased that was passed down. This is another great resource to help illustrate how women dressed during this period and how valuable these pieces were.

Lesson Learned!

Through this project it became clear to me that much knowledge can be gained through careful research even when the sources at first seem scarce. Denmark was only a small part of what was going on in Europe and the rest of the world at the time. Often times, trends adopted from other parts of the world had already gone out of fashion in its country of origin. But what really caught my attention, and the lasting lesson I learned, was how interrelated we all are. We are constantly adapting to and adopting from each other. Not only that, we are also being inspired by each other, all in the name of communicating who we are as individuals and a society.

You can tell a lot by what a person wears. Haven’t we all heard that before? 

After this week, I saw how deep you can go and how much you truly can learn even about a topic that at first doesn’t seem very compelling. This is why no art exhibit should be without textile pieces. They are an important part of the story that we are all looking to have told — not only about the person, but about the entire community, country and even continent.

And in the end, sometimes the beginning is the best place to start. I had so many preconceived notions about clothes from this era. And as a result, I had shut out some important aspects of the clothes from 1000-1199 that now serve as an inspiration to me as I develop patterns for my own designs. Given the state of our textile industry today, I realized how much we can learn from the past, even going way back.