History of Costume and Costume Anatomy Introduction

Clothes today are designed so much for comfort and con venience that we find it difficult to understand people from other centuries, who seem to have dressed deliberately for show, or to attain a fashionable outline, rather than for ease and simplicity of movement. To some extent this impression is a misconception, for our knowledge of what people wore in the past has been gained from statues, frescoes, paintings and very formal photographs. Those who deserved to have their appearance recorded for posterity, or who could afford to do so to gratify their own vanity, were very nearly always dressed up in their best and most lavish attire, so that people in future years could appreciate just how worthy they were.

At the other end of the scale from the expensively dressed aristocracy of the grand portraits were the poorest people, whose clothes were often ragged and filthy versions of what the prosperous had worn fifty or sixty years before. Not surprisingly, there is little pictorial evidence of this. Between the two extremes, in every country, came the ordinary people. They could afford to follow fashions, if not set them, and their taste started trends for their sons and daughters.

It is the "anatomy" of ordinary clothes — their fabric, design and decoration — which gives us a vivid picture of the costume of any age, and there are many sources of information for such details. We can find out what materials were used in Victorian and Edwardian times from Mrs Beeton’s wonderful book on household management, in which she writes of "summer dresses of barege, muslin, mohair and other light materials". We know what Lord Byron spent on clothes, and what he sent to the laundry, from the meticulous accounts kept by his steward, Antonio Lega Zambelli, who noted such purchases as "sixty pairs of nankeen or white jean trowsers”. We are used to thinking of jean as a modern fabric, whereas its name comes from a type of cloth made in Genoa, or Genes.

There is a tendency to think of the fashions of the past as "costumes" — something worn by actors to create an impres sion, unaccountably spotless or artificially dirtied; or some thing discovered in grandmother's attic trunk, to dress up in on a rainy day, or to wear to a fancy dress party. But records from the earliest times show us that what looks like fancy dress today was everyday clothing once.

Fashions were changed to suit the architecture in which they were worn, and sometimes the architecture was changed to suit the fashions. The high, pointed headdress which women wore in the fifteenth century grew to such fantastic proportions in France that the doors of the Castle of Blois had to be heightened for the ladies to get through comfort ably. When Joan of Arc arrived at the Court she was ridiculed because of her clothes and her little hat.

Exaggerations in fashion, some of which started as the whims of the very rich and then became everyday wear, were often the result of individual shortcomings. For example, Charles VIII of France, who had six toes on one foot, wore specially designed shoes to cover the deformity. This gave rise to the stylish, square-toed shoes of Tudor England.

An important aspect of the anatomy of dress is the use of fabric, and the origins of the different materials. In the Middle and Far East, and in the southern hemisphere, people have always dressed sensibly, taking into account the temperature and the way. of life. So we find that the Ancient Egyptians wore transparent, gauzy linens, and the Ancient Greeks wore very little. Silk was kr. own in the Far East long before it came to the West. When such exotic materials were brought home by the soldiers of the Roman Empire they were enthusiastic ally adopted by those who could afford them. In the Middle East the desert people have always worn voluminous abas and burnouses, often in dark colours or black. However, the adaptation of styles of clothing to suit the climate is a com paratively recent development in the West. Europeans and inhabitants of other northern countries appear to have worn clothes designed for mild weather, and then added or sub tracted a layer at a time, depending on the temperature. The introduction and popularity of lightweight, synthetic materials in the West created opportunities for new, different and sometimes shocking styles, especially for warmer weather.

Over the centuries international travel has brought innova tions in fashion, introduced new fabrics and styles, and subtly altered costume from one country to another. The costume of today, in any country, has received a myriad of influences and will, in turn, be altered to shape tomorrow's clothing.