Musée du Costume – Chateau Chinon

For those travelling to the east of France this year, I recommend a visit to the Musée du Costume at Chateau Chinon, in the Nièvre departement of France. It is usually closed from Christmas to sometime in February, and it does have its own website where you can get further information.

The museum was based originally on the collections of Jules Dardy, though it has grown since then, and has been open to the public in the mansion house of the Buteau-Ravizy family, since 1992.

The collection consists of over 5,000 items ranging in date from the late 17^th century to the 1970s. The two photographs shown here are from the guide Voyage au Coeur des Collections, by Francoise Tetart-Vittu and others, published in 2011 (ISBN 978 2 914003 05 6; €15). The guide is recommended and well worth the money. It is well written and extremely well illustrated in colour,  but is not unfortunately available in English. 

The top photograph shows three men’s nightcaps or “bonnets d’interieur”, the top example is c.1690, the middle example is from the the first quarter of the 18^th century, and the bootom example has just been dated generally to the 18th century.

The lower photograph is of a robe a l’anglaise of about 1785, in linen embroidered with silk.

An article on the museum, again in French, is available here.

A Visit to South Devon

I recently visited south Devon and some museums and costume collections in the area. 

Totnes Fashions and Textiles Museum

Part of the Corsets and Crinolines Exhibition at Totnes

The museum is housed opposite the market square in Totnes. It has the Devonshire Collection of Period Costume. There are three rooms upstairs which have an exhibition that changes every year. The exhibition for 2015 is Corsets and Crinolines; it ends on the 2^nd October. The display shows on one mannequin an outfit, and on the next mannequin what would be worn underneath to produce that shape. The earliest garments in the exhibition are mid 18th century. Unfortunately the museum is not open at weekends; you can tell when the museum is open by the “dancing” puppets in the window, if they are moving the museum is open.

Totnes Elizabethan House & Museum

Although not a costume museum the Elizabethan House, built c.1575, just down the road does have some clothing in its exhibits, including this “window” display shown left of Thomas and Company who were local tailors. The theme garden outside has a bed of plants used as dyes.

Killerton House 

The F word at Killerton

Killerton is an 18^th century house with large gardens that has been owned by the National Trust since the middle of the 20^th century. The fashion collections held there include the Paulise de Bush costume collection. The upstairs has an exhibition of clothing which changes every year, this year’s exhibition 'The F-word: The changing language of fashion' explores how revolutionary innovations in fabric, cut and fastenings have changed the shape of fashion. The items on display run from the 18^th century through to the 1990s. There are some fascinating film clips showing on a loop including a 1940s film showing how zip fasteners were made and a 1920s clip showing how early plastic buttons were made. For more information about the exhibition have a look at the article on the website. The photograph above shows one of the cases.

Blandford Fashion Museum

Blandford Fashion Museum

Paid a visit to the Blandford Fashion Museum, housed in a mid 18th century house in the town of Blandford Forum, Dorset. The museum collection started life as the personal collection of the late Mrs Betty Penny. Mrs Penny used to go around the country with her collection holding catwalk fashion shows in which people wore the original garments she owned. Members of the museums community were horrified, but Mrs Penny over her lifetime raised over half a million pounds for charity by doing this. Late in her life Mrs Penny founded the museum, and in 2004 it received museum accreditation. The whole house, about 10 rooms, contains the collection, which has increased considerably since her death.

Blushing Brides

The garments are arranged sometimes by theme and sometimes by period. The collections start with the mid 18th century, in Room 2 done out as a Georgian parlour, and go up to the 1980s, Room 8 contains three Frank Usher outfits from the 1970s and 1980s. There are two rooms with exhibitions that change on a regular basis. At the moment there are two exhibitions, Blushing Brides (Room 3), and Passion for Pattern (Room 7). Blushing brides contains 19th century wedding dresses, some of which have original documentation including photographs of the dress being worn by its original owner. Passion for fashion covers the whole period of the collection, and all types of patterned garments. 

Passion for Pattern

The Dorset craft room contains specifically local items, and as well as the ubiquitous Dorset buttons, has examples of the local glove and lacemaking crafts. There are also examples of 19th century working women’s bonnets, and men’s smocks. 

 

The final room is a tea shop were one may purchase a reviving cream tea.

The website for further information is http://www.theblandfordfashionmuseum.com

Below the knee: pattens, shoes and hose - the MEDATS (Medieval Dress and Textile Society) summer meeting at the British Museum.

Figure 1 - Piece of sprang relaxed

What follows are my notes on what was said for four of the six papers given at the study day. I will write longer notes on the other two papers given; Jutta von Bloh – Refinements in sixteenth century princely legwear: examples from the court of the Duke of Saxony in the Dresden Armoury, and  Lesley O’Connell Edwards – “A Child of 20 yer that knytt gret hose by whom cometh their chiefe lyvinge”: archival and archaeological evidence for hand-knitted hose in Elizabethan England, as they fit better with the period covered by this blog. The notes are my personal interpretation, and depend on how fast I could write and how well I could keep up and understand. Any mistakes and misinterpretations are my own. 

Dagmar Drinkler, Bayerischen Nationalmuseum, Munich – The Reconstruction of tight-fitting textiles in Sprang Technique

Figure 2 Piece of sprang stretched



Dagmar’s thesis was she had been looking at tight garments and especially the highly patterned hose, for example as in the gondoliers in a 1494 painting by Vittorio Carpaccio, and wondering how they were made. She had been experimenting with sprang to see if it were possible to reproduce patterns that appear in medieval illustrations, in order to create a stretch fabric that would produce tight fitting hose. The same piece of sprang, woven in a pattern that copies some of those used in the medieval period is shown in figure 1 relaxed, and in figure 2 stretched to show how much elasticity there is in the fabric. Dagmar recommended Pater Collingwood's The techniques of sprang, 1999, and Carol James Sprang unsprung, 2011.

 

Timothy Dawson, Independent scholar – Trousers to Trousers in less than a Thousand Years

Tim took us through from the closed hose of the Thorsberg trousers in the 2^nd century AD to the closed hose of Ferdinand II of Aragon (d. 1516) via all the two separate leg styles of the Middle Ages. We looked at and discussed the hose of Clement II (d.1047), the hose of St Desiderius (12^th C), Hose of Henry III of Germany (c.1056), the hose of Rodrigo Ximenez de Rodo (d. 1247), by this point in time Tim said that point at the rear of the hose where starting to creep up towards the back. Many of the examples Tim used can be seem on this pinterest page on medieval hose. Question of bias or straight cut, and belts and attachments were addressed.

 

June Swann, formerly of the Northampton Museum – Fourteenth and Fifteenth century poulaines?

June said she added the question mark to the title having recently looked at some surviving complete poulaines. Poulaine is old French for Polish and the style of shoe is also referred to as a Krakow or pike, they are shoes with very long toes, this one was not shown by June but is in the Met Museum. June showed an image from the 1371 tomb of Kasimir the Great as an example of the early style.  The toes on poulaine curve outward, and Pope Urban V (pope 1362-1370) criticized priests for wearing them. The first reference to the word poulaine in England is 1388 and relates to armour, it is a hundred years later but armoured poulaine appear with the c.1485 parade armour of the future Maximilian I. June pointed out that early, 14^th century poulaine laced on the inside of the foot, and later 15^th century shoe laced on the outside. The cuff turns down all the way around. June had recently examined some surviving poulaine in collections in London, Nuremburg and Antwerp, all of which had entered the collections in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Having examined them she has some worries regarding them, and suggested people stick to known excavated examples. She did not use this example but here are some in situ photographs of poulaine being excavated in London. June also asked if anyone had actually seen a contemporary illustration of the toes of poulaine being tied up, as she had been unable to find any such illustration.

 

 Aimee Payton, Ashmolean Museum – Shoes in the community: engaging the public with medieval footwear

Aimee talked about connecting with the public and getting them the write the descriptions to some medieval shoes being put on display as part of an outreach project. The difficulties of getting the descriptions within a 120 word limit were examined.

The Calais Museum of Lace and Fashion



Late 16th century lace

I spent last weekend in France and made a visit to the excellent Calais museum on the history of lace, the Cite Internationale de la Dentelle et de la Mode de Calais. Calais is to French lace what Nottingham is to English lace, the place that saw the mechanisation of lace-making; in fact many of the machines in the Calais museum were made in Nottingham.



1630s lace

The museum is extremely well laid out and easy to follow, even if you don’t speak French very well, just remember dentelle a fuseaux is bobbin lace, and dentelle a l’aiguille is needle lace, most labels are in both languages. The museum starts with two short videos, side by side, of the two techniques. The creation of a small leaf motif in needle lace is shown from start to finish, as is the creation of a narrow piece of bobbin lace.

Mid 17th century

There is some beautiful reticella work, and examples of 16^th and 17^th century bobbin and needle made laces. One thing I particularly liked was the way in which they placed an image of someone wearing lace with original  lace of a similar design, as in the examples I show here.

The museum concentrates on the history of lace in France, so there is much Alencon, Argentan, Chantilly, etc., but there are also Flemish and Italian laces in the collection.

Late 17th century

 

18th century

Later on, when you get into the 18^th century, the museum has original garments to add to the display of lace, and by the time you reach the mechanisation of lace in the 19^th century they are putting together lace, clothing and illustrations from paintings, fashion magazines and photographs. The Calais lace industry supposedly started after the Napoleonic Wars, when in 1816 a Nottingham lace maker, Robert Webster, supposedly smuggled a lace machine into France.

The twentieth century gallery contains a collection of both underwear, and garments that include lace in their design. The couturiers represented include Paquin, Paco Rabane, Yves St. Laurent, and many others.



Display of bits of the lace making machines

The way in which the machinery that produced the machine made lace is also well displayed, as can be seen in the photo. Upstairs there is a whole floor of machines five of which are in working order, and they use them to demonstrate two or three times a day. The museum is in an old lace warehouse, though you would never know it to look at the outside, which is thoroughly modern.


Finally a very Joseph Wright of Derby style photo of left to right, Ann, Garth, myself and Graham, examining a case of 17th century lace.