SARONG KEBAYA & BAJU CINA – Traditional Peranakan Attire

Since their settlement of the Malay Peninsula, Singapore, and the Indonesian Islands in the 1400s, the Straits-Born Chinese, Peranakan, or “Baba-Nyonya” developed a culture and customs which were as unique and as different from those followed by their Mainland-Chinese ancestors as it was possible to be.

Over the passage of centuries, the Peranakan-Chinese developed a way of life, and a type of culture and series of customs which were similar to, but also markedly different from the practices that their ancestors would’ve been familiar with in China back in the 15th century.

These differences were numerous, and ranged from subtle, to significant.

For example, the Peranakan did not prepare the same dishes, speak the same languages, or wear the same clothes as their ancestors who had left China centuries before. They used ingredients which the Chinese were unfamiliar with, to prepare delicacies which the Chinese had no knowledge of, and wore articles of clothing which would’ve been completely alien to the Mainland Chinese. All these changes, alterations and variations, caused by having to adapt to their new homeland, resulted in the Peranakan developing their own unique culture in Southeast Asia. While there were several similarities between the Straits-Chinese, and the Mainland Chinese, the Peranakan also had practices and customs which made them noticeably different from the residents of mainland China.

On top of that, the Peranakan did not speak Mandarin-Chinese. Instead, many would’ve grown up speaking Chinese dialects – either Hokkien, or Cantonese, or a variant of the Malayan language known as “Baba Malay“, a creole-style language using elements of Malay, Hokkien, Cantonese, and also later, English, which had no relation to the languages spoken in China. In the 1800s, the Peranakan also started learning how to speak English properly. This was largely thanks to schools established in the second half of the 19th century, which allowed an increasing number of Peranakans to both speak, read, and write English with greater proficiency.

One of the main ways in which the Peranakan were different from the mainland Chinese was in what they wore.

Before the widespread influence of European fashions in the 1900s, Peranakan women (nyonyas) almost exclusively wore tubular wrap-around skirts called sarong. For the longest time, most Peranakan men (babas) also wore sarong. In the hot, humid, muggy climate of the South Pacific, it was the most practical thing to wear. Easy to put on, easy to take off, easy to wash, and easy to dry. By the 19th century, however, most babas had made the switch to more European styles of dressing (adapted for tropical climates), while nyonyas kept their traditional outfits.

A baba-nyonya wedding photograph, ca. 1910. The baba is dressed in a suit, while his bride wears traditional Peranakan wedding-attire, inspired by the wedding-traditions of their mainland Chinese ancestors from centuries ago.

Sarongs don’t have any fasteners – they’re simply wrapped around your body, then tucked and rolled like a towel. To hold it in place, an optional belt was added beneath the rolled upper hem, around the waist, although this was a practice mostly adopted by the women or ‘nyonyas’ rather than by the men. By the late 1800s, these belts were elaborately fashioned from sterling silver, or 22kt gold (if you could afford it), or silver-plate (if you could not!).

On their feet, nyonyas traditionally wore “kasut manek” – Beaded Slippers. These were outdoor slippers, worn for everyday use. Intricately handmade, one pair of such slippers took weeks, or even months to produce. Men also wore kasut manek, but almost always as house-slippers, and never outside.

Up-top, Peranakan men wore traditional Chinese shirts or jackets known as “shan” or “changshan” (also known as “baju cina” or “Chinese Clothes”).

Originally, women wore a similar garment known as a panjang or “baju panjang” (literally “long blouse” or “long tunic”) – a long-cut, loose-fitting, long-sleeved tunic.

By the early 1900s, the baju panjang was seen as a very Victorian-era holdover – overly formal, and old-fashioned. This was when the much shorter, lighter blouse or “Kebaya” started taking over. By the end of the Edwardian era, it had pretty much replaced the older Baju-Panjang (although some older “bibiks” kept wearing them) in popularity.

A Peranakan family from the early 1900s. Notice the mix of traditional Peranakan, and more modern European styles of clothing

Just like the sarong, the kebaya (and the panjang) did not have any fasteners. No buttons or zippers or clips. To hold them shut, a nyonya used a “kerongsang” (also spelled ‘kerosang’) – three brooches on a chain, fastened at the bust, the torso, and the waist. Again, like the belt which held up the sarong, the kerongsang was almost always made of either high-grade silver or high-karat gold, sometimes studded with diamonds.

Whether they were sarong (for the nyonyas) or shirts or tunics (for the babas), many Peranakan-style clothes were batik-printed. This hot-wax printing and dyeing process was invented centuries ago in Indonesia (specifically Java) and the style became very popular among the Indonesian Peranakans, and spread to those residing further afield in Sumatra, Singapore, and further up the Malay Peninsula.

Today, nyonyas still wear traditional sarong-kebaya outfits during special occasions, and men will wear sarong (usually at home, but not in public) or batik-print shirts to connect with their past and heritage.

 

TRADITIONAL TEXTILES: Where Does our Cloth Come From?

In today’s world of polyester, acrylic and spandex, traditional textiles and fibres can be increasingly difficult to find when it comes to buying quality clothing. What are the origins of the fibres used to create the textiles which our parents and grandparents grew up with, in the days before manmade fibres started to dominate the fabric-making world?

In this posting, we’ll find out together! We’ll find out what various fibres and textiles are, what they’re used for, and where they come from. While there are a multitude of fibres out there, I’ll just be covering the most common ones in this posting, or it could go on forever!

So rug up, and get comfortable…

COTTON

Used to make all kinds of fabrics, from toweling to velour to seersucker, and used to make all kinds of garments, from shirts, to blouses, to socks, and undergarments, cotton has been cultivated for centuries. That said, cotton, which grows in warm environments, is extremely difficult to harvest! Picking the bolls of cotton from the plants by hand was a slow, labour-intensive, and even painful exercise. Although the plant itself has no thorns or spines, the cotton boll – the bulb, or ‘fruit’ of the cotton plant – can be hard and spiky. When the boll opens, you gain access to the fluffy cotton fibres inside.

Once you’ve picked the cotton, it must then be processed to remove all the seeds caught up inside the fibres – an extremely slow, laborious process which took hours to complete! This is what slaves in the American South had to deal with day in, day out, for weeks on end during harvest-time on cotton-producing plantations back in the 1700s and 1800s. To make cotton-processing easier, Eli Whitney invented the cotton engine, or “Cotton Gin”. Raw, unprocessed cotton fluff was stuffed into one end of the machine, and a crank was turned, spinning a spiked drum. The drum-spikes basically ‘combed’ the cotton fibres through a mesh, teasing them out bit by bit. The mesh was just wide enough to let the cotton fibres through, but not large enough to admit the seeds caught up in the fibres. In this way, the raw cotton fibres could be separated from the seeds, and pure cotton could be gathered up, baled, and shipped out for spinning and weaving into fabric.

Once packed and shipped, raw, processed cotton was sent to cotton mills, either in the northern United States, or across the Atlantic to the UK. Here, it was spun and woven into fabric. The deafening noise of the rattling looms and spinning-wheels caused some cotton-mill workers to go deaf. It’s the origin of the term “Cloth Ears”, meaning an inability to hear properly.

LINEN

Light, airy and breathable, linen is the fabric produced from the fibres of the flax plant. Because of its light weight, softness and absorptive nature, linen fabric is often used for warm-weather clothing. Linen jackets, trousers and suits, linen shirts and handkerchiefs…linen was also used for toweling and bedsheets, which is why we still have the terms “bath linen” and “bed linen” today. Linen is generally the recommended material for summertime clothing because of its thin, strong, breathable, and lightweight construction.

SILK

We’ve all heard of the expression ‘smooth as silk’, but where does silk come from?

Silk is the thread which is extracted from the cocoons of the silkworm (the adorably-named ‘bombix mori’).

Silkworms eating mulberry leaves

Silkworms are now purposefully farmed and bred to produce silk, and the little critters are pretty pampered for the luxurious fibre that they generate. They’re fed almost exclusively on the leaves of the White Mulberry tree, although they can eat a (limited) number of other leaves. Sericulture, the practice of farming silkworms, has a history of at least 5,000 years, and originated in China. For literally thousands of years, China was the main producer, and exporter of silk, and guarded its silk-weaving and silk-farming processes jealously! Europeans loved silk for its softness and smoothness, its strength, and durability, but getting silk was almost impossible. Imperial decrees forbade anybody from detailing to a “foreign barbarian” where, how, when, or with what silk was manufactured, and Europeans remained in ignorance for centuries.

Eventually, knowledge of silk leaked out of China, and by the Middle Ages, silk-farming and production had begun in the Middle East and later, in Europe.

Silk has incredible properties. Spun, and then woven into fabric, it’s incredibly strong and dense, despite its light weight, and this made it ideal for all kinds of garment-making applications. In fact, some of the world’s first bulletproof vests were made of silk! Layers and layers and layers of silk were placed on top of each other, and then firmly stitched and quilted together, to form a thin, but very firm protective cloth padding which was impenetrable by arrows, and even by various types of gunfire. It’s how a lot of body-armour was produced before the invention of kevlar.

WOOL

Shorn from sheep (or lambs), wool has been used for centuries for everything from blankets and bedding, to tunics, hose, trousers, jackets, suits, coats, scarves and mittens. Depending on how it’s been carded, spun, and woven, wool can be anything from soft and plush to thick and fluffy, to smooth and luxurious!

These days, most “wool” garments are not pure wool. To give it strength and durability, it’s usually blended with synthetic fibres (polyester) to create a ‘wool-blend’. High-quality wool-blends are anywhere from 60-40 wool-poly, up to 80-20 or even 90-10 wool-poly. Wool has incredible water-shedding properties, as well as insulation, for warmth. It’s also robust against grime and light stains, and, depending on how it’s constructed – even fireproof!…although for that last quality, you’d want 100% wool construction.

Back in the old days, wool garments were 100% wool, and you can still find that today, if you know where and how to look, but they will cost more.

CASHMERE

Fluffy cashmere goats!

Mmmm…cashmere! Soft, fluffy, smooth, and warm. Cashmere is the name of the wool that is shorn from the Cashmere or “Kashmir” goat, which is native to India and Pakistan. Famed for centuries for its softness, cashmere is used for scarves, socks, coats, and other winter-weather clothing. As with pure-wool fabric, pure-cashmere is expensive. To stretch the budget a bit, cashmere may also be blended, almost always with wool, or sometimes, silk, for a more lightweight finish.

ALPACA

A type of camelid native to South America (in particular, Peru), alpaca wool is again, one more step above just ordinary sheep-wool. What makes Alpaca and Cashmere wool so popular is that the fibres of their wool are so extremely fine. This means that any fabric produced from their wool is both thin, and lightweight, but also incredibly dense, which makes them beautifully soft, and warm. Alpaca wool is used for blankets, scarves, and winter clothes due to its natural insulating properties and luxuriously soft texture.

VICUNA

Ever heard of vicuna? Probably not! That’s hardly surprising, considering that at one point, this little South American camelid was very-nearly extinct! Today, they’re no-longer extinct (yay!!)…but that fact has done little to hide the fact that vicuna wool is the MOST EXPENSIVE WOOL IN THE ENTIRE WORLD.

How expensive?

Well, for any reasonably sized vicuna-wool garment (say, a suit, an overcoat, a jacket, etc), you can expect to pay MULTIPLE TENS of THOUSANDS of dollars.

This is because of two main reasons: Vicuna wool is extremely fine and soft, and therefore, dense, and high quality (Oooh, luxury!), but also, because vicuna are small animals, and only produce a relatively tiny amount of wool each year. In an entire year, you’d be lucky to get more than a few tons of fleeces out of the global population of vicunas. Not a few hundred tons, not a few thousand…just…a few tons. And that’s it. And because vicuna only live in South America, you also have to factor in import and transportation costs for this valuable fibre, which drives the already high prices up even higher!…just to get your hands on what would be only a few hundred kilos of wool, if that.






 

Wearing History: Classic Men’s Jackets and Coats

As winter starts to bite down south, and the rain and wind and snow starts to increase dramatically, it’s time to start breaking out your winter wardrobe and trying to decide what to wear…or if you don’t have anything to wear…then trying to decide what to buy, so that you can wear it!

In this posting, we’ll be looking at the history behind various coats, overcoats and jackets which have been worn by men throughout history, and which have entered popular fashion as wardrobe must-haves, even in the 21st century. We’ll be looking at where they came from, what features they have, and what to look for if you want to buy one, and what sets them apart from each other.

I won’t be covering this in any particular order, so you might need to scroll around a bit, if you want to find the jacket or coat that you’re really interested to know more about. That said…let’s start!

The Peacoat

The peacoat is one of the most common types of short overcoats that exist on the market today. They’re thick, fluffy, warm, stylish, and they’ve been around for centuries! So…what is a peacoat?

Peacoats were created in the Netherlands in the late 1600s or early 1700s. The original Dutch name was the “Pijjekker” – where ‘Pij’ (pronounced ‘pea’) referred to the thick, water-repellent wool cloth from which the ‘jekker’ (‘jacket’ or ‘coat’), was made. This original Dutch spelling and pronunciation eventually entered the English language as Pea-jacket or, as is more common today – peacoat.

Peacoats were created by the Dutch specifically for seafarers. The coat’s thick, soft woolen fabric kept rain and sea-spray off the body, kept the under-clothes dry, and kept the sailor warm. Because of these properties, the peacoat was adopted by the English for use in the Royal Navy in the 1800s, and later on by the American Navy in the late 1800s-to-early-1900s.

As a result…there’s MILLIONS of military-surplus peacoats out there!

So, what does a peacoat look like?

A classic, eight-button peacoat with slash pockets and epaulettes. The eighth button is hidden under the fold of the lapel, and would’ve been used to button up the ulster collar when required.

Traditionally, a peacoat is…of course!…navy blue. You can also find them in black (and some navies did make them in black, because the blue tended to fade over time), or even in grey, but navy blue is the most traditional colour.

A peacoat is a short to medium-length overcoat. The skirt or hem stops at upper-or-mid thigh level, and typically goes no lower. It features double-breasted button closure, usually, with eight buttons.

Today, it’s really common to find peacoats with six button closures…but traditional models always had at least eight, sometimes even ten, buttons. In my opinion – a peacoat that doesn’t have at least eight buttons is not a peacoat – for reasons that I’ll get to in a minute.

Along with the buttons, the peacoat also had a lot of pockets. Most peacoats will have four pockets – two inner liner-pockets, and two outer ‘slash’ or ‘storm’ pockets – diagonal or vertical hand-warmer pockets in the sides of the coat. Some REALLY old versions of the peacoat, dating back to Edwardian, or even Victorian times, had even MORE pockets. These aren’t as common today, but if you hunt around, you can find versions of the peacoat which have SIX pockets – the two inner liner ones, the two slash pockets, and then underneath them – two extra flap-pockets. They’re a nice touch, but they’re not very common today.

Peacoats also have sleeve-cinchers, to tighten the sleeve-holes to stop wind and rain getting inside, and (sometimes), epaulettes on the shoulders. Traditionally, epaulettes were used for affixing rank insignia, so some ‘civilian’ versions may not have them, but if you can get one with epaulettes…hey, they’re cool, OK?

Another distinctive feature of the peacoat is what’s called the ‘Ulster’ collar, which comes from the Ulster district of northern Ireland…where it’s cold…and wet…and windy. The ulster collar is a collar that can be popped up and wrapped around your neck and chest, and buttoned into place!

…you can’t do this if you only have six buttons on your peacoat. They simply don’t reach up high enough.

See what I mean?

It’s because of the ulster collar that peacoats always had at least eight buttons, because you needed them to reach high up enough that you could button the collar across your chest and neck in really inclement, wet, cold or windy weather.

This photograph shows, possibly, the most traditional peacoat style of all – with ten button closure, and the six pockets. Two inside, and four outside. Like I said, they’re hardly ever made today, so if you want one, you’ll either have to hunt really hard, buy it vintage, or get someone to make it for you.

Another variation of the peacoat which is hardly ever seen today (except vintage), is the so-called “bridge coat”. Peacoats were issued to the ordinary seamen. Bridge-coats were issued to the officers. The main difference is that a bridge-coat is knee-length.

Why? Because officers often spent hours standing on the bridge-deck of a ship – which in times past – could be an open deck with no shelter, fully exposed to the elements – so the coats were cut longer to cover more of their bodies. Seamen weren’t given the same cut of coat because they were were required to climb masts and rigging – impossible to do, if you can’t move your knees around because you’re wearing a thick, heavy long coat! So they were given the shorter peacoat instead.

Peacoats are great for when you need a medium-sized, but warm overcoat for bad weather. If they’re made of quality materials, then you don’t have to worry about getting them wet or anything – remember, they were designed to go to sea!

Buying a Peacoat

Finding an original, vintage-style peacoat can be a bit of a challenge today. Your best bet for real vintage styling is to buy an actual military-surplus vintage peacoat. Since they were built for harsh, seafaring environments, they’re very long-lasting. Most modern styled peacoats only have six buttons…which kind of defeats the whole purpose of the peacoat – the reason I like them is because you can button it right up to your chin if you want to – and if you want to be able to do that because it’s rainy or windy or snowing, then the more traditional eight or even ten-button variety, is best.

They should be made of wool fabric (traditionally a style of fabric called “Melton”). The best are 100% wool, but anything that’s majority-wool blend should be fine, too.

The Greatcoat

Another popular style of overcoat is the greatcoat. Originally created for the army, greatcoats are long, heavy, double-breasted, knee-length overcoats. They typically have four pockets (two inside, two outside), and six button closure down the front. Designed to be worn by officers in the field, greatcoats were cut longer so that they would keep their wearers warm during long days and nights out in the open, while on active military campaigns.

You can easily buy army-surplus greatcoats secondhand, and they cost next to nothing. My greatcoat is a dark green, Canadian army surplus from the 1980s and it’s fantastic in cold weather! The wool is thick and VERY heavy, but then, it was designed to deal with a Canadian winter – and it does that very well!

A classic, army greatcoat. As with the peacoat, you may find that yours has epaulettes on the shoulders, again for holding rank-insignia badges.

Buying a Greatcoat

Greatcoats are VERY easy to find. Any decent military-surplus or army-supplies or secondhand store, is likely to have loads of them! Just be prepared for how HEAVY they are! Since they were designed to be worn outdoors for long periods of time, greatcoats are made from very heavy wool fabric, and since they reach down to knee-length or even lower, they might be a bit cumbersome. But they work amazingly for keeping you warm!

The Trenchcoat

Aah, the trenchcoat! Arguably one of the most famous articles of menswear ever created! Rugged, stylish, sophisticated, mysterious, sexy, practical…everything that a man…or an overcoat!…should be!

The exact origins of the trenchcoat are not clear. Two companies claim to be the originator of the trenchcoat – Aquascutum, and Burberry (yes, that Burberry). While it is true that both companies did create, and manufacture rainproof overcoats, exactly who started doing it first, is unclear. Partially because rainproof overcoats actually predate both of these companies!

What is clear, however, is that the classic trenchcoat that we know and love, was being manufactured by at least the 1890s, and first saw military action in the Boer War. However, as a small, colonial war, the Trench didn’t receive much press. That would all change, ten years later, when the Great War began. Although it was designed before the Great War, it was its heavy use in the trenches of that conflict, that gave the new garment its name: The trenchcoat.

By the 1910s, how wars were fought, and the clothes they were fought in, had changed dramatically. Gone were the fancy bright scarlet ‘redcoat’ uniforms of the 1800s, and in came army-brown uniforms and khaki in the 1890s and 1900s. As the British Army prepared to invade France and bolster up their allies in the fight against Germany and Austria, a new type of garment was required for the new fighting conditions.

So, companies like Burberry (the most famous manufacturer) started cranking out a new type of coat.

The trenchcoat is iconic. You know what one is the moment you see it. But what makes a coat a trenchcoat?

To find out – let’s take the most famous trenchcoat of them all, as an example:

Worn by Humprhey Bogart in the 1941 classic “Casablanca”, this is the actual garment used in the film, as sold by Bonham’s auction house.

Trenchcoats were cut long – knee-length at least. They were double-breasted, with, like the peacoat – eight-button closure. They had epaulettes and cuff-adjustors, like the peacoat, and diagonal or vertical storm-pockets, like the peacoat. They had interior liner-pockets, like the peacoat…but that’s where the similarities end.

The trenchcoat was designed as a raincoat which could be worn by army officers on the Western front. The water-table in northeastern France and Belgium, near the German border was notoriously shallow. After digging just four or five feet, you’d hit ground-water…which was terrible news for soldiers who were expected to dig trenches at least six or seven feet deep! Combine this with heavy rain, and the conditions that many soldiers and officers had to fight in were absolutely appalling.

Because of this, the trenchcoat was designed to repel water. To do this, it was made of a waterproof cotton fabric known as Gaberdine (which trenchcoats are still made of today). For warmth, the coats were given interior liners of wool, which were buttoned into place. Since officers had to move quickly through the trenches and across the fields, the coats were made lightweight, to facilitate movement. To deal with the heavy rain, the coats were given cuff-cinches, ulster collars, buttoned back-vents, full-shoulder yokes to keep water off the wearer’s back…and a curious flap of fabric across the right chest, known as a storm-flap.

The exact purpose of the storm-flap has been lost to history, and there are two competing theories. The first is that the flap is a ‘gun-flap’ – it’s where you rest the butt of your rifle while firing, and the flap provided padding against the recoil of the rifle. The other – more likely explanation – is that the flap – which buttons across the collar and top of the coat – prevents rain from running down in between the buttons, and getting your clothes wet!…which is why it’s called a storm-flap.

The storm-flap is always on the right chest – and you can see in the trenchcoat worn by Bogart, just behind the right lapel.

Another of the trenchcoat’s most famous features is the belted back and front. Like with almost everything else on the coat – this was added for purely practical reasons – the belted closure was designed to give officers (and trenchcoats were originally sold only to officers) somewhere to hang things, stuff like whistles, grenades, spare ammunition, and so on. For this reason, brass D-rings were often sewn into the belts to provide dedicated anchoring points, and to stop things from sliding around. Not all trenchies have this feature anymore, but they’re an interesting throwback to the coat’s military history.

Last but not least, the trenchcoat always had a buttoned vent. The ‘vent’ is the split or open flap at the back of the coat or jacket. A hidden buttonhole and button were sewn into the back of the trenchcoat so that you could, if you desired – keep the vent buttoned. Like with almost everything else on this coat – it was designed to keep off rain and snow.

That said – the trenchcoat is not really a cold-winter coat. It’s primarily a raincoat. If your winters aren’t excessively biting, you could quite easily get away with wearing a trenchcoat as a winter overcoat, but for anything involving snow, you’ll probably want something heavier, since the cotton construction (designed to shed rain), won’t be thick enough to deal with sub-zero temperatures, in most cases.

The Popularity of the Trenchcoat

More than almost any other garment on this list, the trenchcoat is iconic. It conjures up images of warfare, bravery, fighting tooth-and-claw. It also makes you think of the Golden Age of Hollywood, between the 1920s to the 1950s, of private detectives and shady characters, of guys who go around with watches hidden inside their coats, and sinister gangsters hiding shotguns inside the linings!

The coat proved so popular that, even before WWI was even over, Burberry started selling civilian versions of the trenchcoat directly to the public. American soldiers arriving in France in 1918 fell in love with the coat, and brought it back with them stateside, which led to its adoption in Hollywood…and anything big in Hollywood spreads around the world!

Buying a Trenchcoat

The trenchcoat is so iconic that almost every major fashion-house has produced a version of it at one point or another. If you want to be REAL traditional, you can buy one from Burberry, or Aquascutum…but be warned that they are EXTREMELY expensive, and that retail-prices of $1,800 – $2,500+, are not uncommon!

This being the case, it’s probably better to buy one either vintage or secondhand, from a decent vintage clothing store, or to buy a trenchie from another manufacturer – making sure, of course, that they have all the necessary details that make it stand out as a trenchcoat…otherwise, what’s the point?

Trenchcoats come – broadly speaking – in four colours: Black, navy blue, grey, and tan. Tan, camel, or khaki, is the most traditional colour for a trenchcoat, since it was designed to go with the original colour of the British field-dress uniform of the First World War. If something like that is a bit too stand-outy for you, however, then navy blue, or grey variations are also available. There are also black trenchcoats, but black is rather overrated as a trenchcoat colour sometimes.

The Chesterfield Coat

Available in both single and double-breasted varieties, the Chesterfield is a formal, knee-length overcoat, with slash, or flapped pockets, and is characterised by the contrasting, dark velvet collar across the back and sides, and the breast-pocket below the left lapel.

Not all modern Chesterfield coats have the contrasting velvet collars, but if you’re going for the traditional look, then try and find one with such a collar. Despite its current status as a rather formal overcoat style, the Chesterfield was originally considered to be a more casual option! When it was created in the 1800s, it was largely worn as an alternative to a coat that has almost completely fallen out of fashion – The Frock Coat!

I won’t cover frock-coats here as a separate entry, but it was the main type of overcoat worn between the Regency era of the 1810s, up until the Edwardian era, of the 1910s, a span of roughly 100 years.

Edwardian-era, double-breasted frock coats

The frock coat was heavy, and long, reaching knee-length, or even below! It was seen as cumbersome, old-fashioned, and impractical. This was largely due to its flaring, full skirted hem. The excessive fabric used to make it just wasn’t fashionable anymore!

Overall, the Chesterfield was just more practical. It had more pockets, and it had a straighter, less flamboyant cut, which didn’t use so much fabric. It basically did everything that the frock coat did, but with less fabric, and more options!

Buying a Chesterfield

Chesterfield coats are basically the quintessential look, when most people think of an ‘overcoat’ – as such, any decent outfitter or retail store is likely to stock them. Keep in mind that chesterfields are designed to be long-draping, however. A hem that doesn’t reach at least the knee, can’t really be called a chesterfield. On some older chesterfields (like, if you buy vintage), can drop right down to the ankle, although this is rare on most modern coats.

Flight Jackets

A relative newcomer to the menswear scene is the fighter jacket and bomber jacket, which first appeared in the 1910s. These are typically gathered under the overall title of ‘flight jackets’.

The First World War was the first major conflict to see heavy use of aircraft. Early fighter, bomber and reconnaissance aircraft, used by the German Imperial Airforce, and the Royal Flying Corps (RFC, later the RAF), often featured open cockpits. Flying at heights of several thousand meters, windchill, exposure and cold temperatures were a big problem for early aviators.

To stop pilots from dying of exposure, or from getting frostbite, tailors started creating new types of jackets and coats for them, which were specially designed to take into account the peculiarities of this new occupation.

Bomber jackets were typically made of leather. Windproof and extremely durable, leather was unlikely to rip, it would repel water, and since leather doesn’t have any weave – it was the most effective way to block wind.

The flight-jacket of a WWI-era RFC pilot. The diagonal, cross-chest pocket was added in specifically so that pilots had somewhere secure to stow documents such as maps, mission-orders, pencils and identity-cards, without having to reach into lower pockets, while sitting in the confined spaces of the cockpit.

The only problem is that raw leather is rather uncomfortable against the skin. To combat this, bomber jackets were given soft sheepskin, fur, or wool linings inside. This prevented the pilots and bombers of WWI and WWII from freezing to death while on long-range missions.

Since pilots spent most of their time seated, with their jackets zippered or buttoned shut, bomber jackets were designed with pockets on the outside – usually two breast-pockets, with buttoned flaps to stop things falling out – and two lower flapped pockets, or even just simple slash pockets.

When the first flight-jackets were created, open cockpits were the norm. Because of this, flight-jackets were designed with cinched-in waists, cuffs, and even collars! Elasticated, gathered-in hems and cuffs were common. Wind-flaps or storm-flaps (such as on the relatively-recently-invented trenchcoat!) were also used.

By buttoning over the gaps in a jacket or coat that existed near the collar or around the chest, the storm-flap prevented wind and rain from getting inside a pilot’s uniform. To further improve things, in WWII, flight-jackets were made with zipper, to ensure an even more windproof closure.

Another common accessory used to reduce the wind and cold was the humble white, silk scarf. It’s an iconic part of the uniform of a WWI-era aviator! The scarves were used to keep the neck and chest warm, and to stop wind from blowing down inside your clothes.

The soft, silk fabric also prevented the fur or sheepskin lining of your jacket from scratching, rubbing and chafing your neck – which could happen a lot to WWI pilots, because without RADAR on their aircraft, they were constantly turning their heads left, right, up and down, to scan the skies for enemy aircraft.

When you probably had gloves on to keep your fingers from freezing off, the last thing you wanted to do was to have to remove them every few minutes to scratch an annoying itch on your neck!…the scarf prevented this from happening.

Flight-jackets became immensely popular after WWII, and greasers and bikers in the 1950s and 60s adopted the flight-jackets that their fathers wore during the War as part of their ‘look’, for purely practical purposes – the close-fitting cuts, convenient pockets, leather construction and windproof designs made them the ideal garments for motorcycle-attire!

Buying a Flight-Jacket

Due to their rugged, modern appearance, flight-jackets are still widely available, either at vintage stores, or at modern retailers who produce their own variations on them. That said, flight-jackets have kind of morphed into motorcycle-clothing, so the two may be used interchangeably. Flight-jackets are typically wool or sheepskin-lined, for warmth, and with elasticated or belted waists and cuffs, to hold back the wind.

 

A Beginner’s Guide to Buying & Fixing Vintage Clothing

If you’ve been a reader of my blog for any decent length of time, then you’ll know that I love fixing stuff. Usually, that ‘stuff’ is some variety of antique or vintage item. I find it very satisfying to breathe life and rejuvenation into old objects, and items and make them useful, or at least functional, again. If I can repair something instead of throwing it out, I’d rather have it repaired.

For about seven years, I worked as a volunteer in a local charity thrift shop. It was only one shift a week, but it got me out of the house, and I met some really fun and interesting people, who I still hang out with from time to time (if they’re reading this, they know who they are! Hey guys!).

One thing that working in a charity shop made me realise is just how much stuff people really throw out, and how many things people buy that they really don’t need. But sometimes, that’s good, because then we can actually find all kinds of things, which are really nice, for really cheap prices. And sometimes, you can find it even cheaper, if you know what to do with it.

And this brings me to the purpose of today’s posting – buying and repairing old clothing.

Now, first thing’s first – this isn’t going to be a full-on style posting. There’s a million excellent menswear styling sites out there (if you want to find a few, I suggest looking up the Gentlemen’s Gazette, Real Men Real Style, etc) – but this blog, right here – ain’t one of them. I’ll give a couple of pointers and tips, but that’s it.

Finding Stuff at Thrift Shops

These days, bargain-hunting at thrift-shops is very popular. Usually, the amount of stuff being dumped on these places is so high that they HAVE to price it dirt cheap, just to get a high enough turnover rate, so that the stores aren’t snowed under all the time. But this gives you an excellent opportunity to find great stuff at bargain prices. Usually, it’s clothing, but you can find other stuff like antiques, books, homewares and kitchenwares that you didn’t even know existed, and all kinds of other stuff. For the purpose of this posting, however, we’ll be concentrating mostly on clothing, since that’s what most people buy at charity shops.

Always Inspect Everything!

Before you carry your latest prized garment to the front counter to buy it, always check the ENTIRE garment. This goes without saying. Try it on. Make sure it fits. A jacket or coat should always fit in two key areas: The shoulders, and the sleeves.

A jacket or coat shoulder should stop where your shoulder stops. You might get away with it being a finger’s width too wide, or half a finger too narrow, but anymore than that, and it won’t fit properly. Make sure you’re comfortable putting it on and taking it off. Try this a few times to be sure.

With coats and jackets, make sure the sleeves are the right length. What’s the right length?

Stick your arms out to the front and then to the side. A jacket sleeve never goes beyond your wrist-bones. A coat sleeve never goes past the knuckle of your thumb closest to your palm.

What’s the difference? A coat goes over a jacket, but a jacket never goes over a coat. They’re called “overcoats” for a reason, you know.

How long a coat hangs is up to you. A jacket should never drop below your butt. A coat can go all the way down to the ground, if you can find one long enough. Generally, an overcoat will drop to anywhere from mid-thigh to knee-length. Sometimes you can find some which drop even further, but they can be tricky to obtain.

Once you’ve found something you like and have decided that it fits you, make sure that you check everything about the garment! And I mean everything – check for holes, check for moth, check for rips, missing buttons, tears, wear-patches, staining…absolutely everything. Examine every square inch of fabric, and take as long as you have to, to be absolutely sure.

Once you’ve summed up the item’s imperfections, decide whether or not you can live with them. Can you repair them? Can you ignore them? Is anyone going to care about that wine stain on the jacket lining, when nobody’s ever going to see it? Does it matter that you patch the back of your coat, since it’s on the inside and only you’ll know it’s there? Does it matter that that ONE button is SLIGHTLY off, because you had to replace it?

Similarly, do the same thing with shirts, and trousers. Is the rise too high? Too low? Are the jeans pinching your balls? (hey, it had to be asked, OK?), and probably most importantly – that crotch stitching is still holding up, right?

On top of that, the main thing to check with trousers of any kind, apart from the waist, of course, is the inside leg. The inside-leg measurement is taken from the groin down to the ankle. I’m about 5’7″, and my inside-leg is 29 inches, while my waistline measurement is 32 inches. You should always remember stats like this if you intend to go thrift-shopping, and of course, bring a measuring tape with you. That way, you’ll save time by measuring the clothes before you even try them on.

Buying clothes at thrift-shops is always a gamble and always a compromise. You have to decide:

What can you accept? What can you excuse? What can you let slide or get away with, or not worry about?

Certain things should never be compromised on. Never buy anything that doesn’t fit, never buy anything that can’t be repaired, never buy anything that you’re not comfortable wearing (either physically or mentally), and never buy anything that cannot be cleaned properly. There’s no point buying something if you can’t get the stains out or can’t repair it. Moth holes, for example – forget it.

On the other hand, some things you can get away with. Oh it’s missing buttons? Whatever. Buy some new ones and replace them. Oh, it’s got a hole in the lining? If it doesn’t bother you, then don’t be bothered by it. Nobody’s going to see it anyway. Likewise, holes in pockets can be sewn up, and so on.

What Can You Repair?

That really depends on what your skills are. My grandmother was a dressmaker for forty years. When I was a child, she taught me all kinds of basic sewing skills. How to thread a needle, how to sew on a button, how to measure, how to chalk cloth, how to cut, how to leave seam-allowances, how to stitch, cut and sew buttonholes, and all kinds of other things. These are all things which are useful skills, if you want to buy vintage clothing or secondhand stuff at thrift-shops. So, if you do intend to buy clothes from thrift-shops, what basic sewing skills should you know, to try and repair and revive clothes to bring them back to life?

Below is a short list of a few skills that you might need to know, but first…

What Stuff Do you Need?

My 1930s Singer vibrating shuttle machine. It only does one thing, but it does it very well!

If you intend to repair clothes that you bought at a thrift-shop, you should have the following: Needles, thread, pin-cushion with pins, tailors’ chalk, a measuring tape or ruler, an iron, a thimble, a seam-cutter, a needle-threader, scissors, and ideally – a functioning sewing machine that you know how to use.

Sewing on a Button – Difficulty – EASY

Let’s start dead simple – everyone should know how to sew on a button. To determine where the button should be sewn, either use the existing buttons on the garment as a measuring guide, or else use the opposing buttonhole as a guide. Mark this with chalk, and then thread and knot your needle. Feed the needle through the cloth from the INSIDE of the shirt, going out. And then feed the button through the needle and down onto the shirt.

How many times you sew the button up against the shirt is up to you, but be sure that you do it evenly and use all the available threading-holes. Your button threading can either look like an “X”, an “O”, or an “H”, but keep the threading consistent – either do it twice, four times, six times or eight times. Don’t do it an odd number of times, because then it looks sloppy. Above all, make sure that the stitches are tight and even. When you’re done, stitch the needle through one of the stitches behind the button, tie a knot and cut the thread. Done!

Not all buttons are created equal, however. Due to the thicker fabrics, coat and jacket-buttons should not be stitched TOO tightly against the garment. If they are, then you’ll find them harder to button due to the thicker fabrics and the chunkier, larger buttons used to hold your garment closed. So long as the button is firmly anchored to the jacket or coat, you can leave a TINY amount of slackness in the stitching, maybe an eighth of an inch, or even less, but certainly not more.

If you’re trying to find buttons for a garment because some are missing, and you think it’d be easier just to replace ALL the buttons at once, one way to do this is to find a coat or jacket of a similar colour and style, but which is unwearable (because it’s filled with holes, or has massive stains on it, etc), and cut off all the buttons (if it has a full set) and simply use those to re-button your better-condition garment. Keep the original buttons from your first garment in a button-box or tin for use in other emergencies.

Tip: If you’re sewing through particularly thick fabric (heavy wool, for example, or several layers of fabric at once), then make sure you have a thimble! It’ll save you from being pricked and poked as you try and yank and push that needle through. It may only be a few milimeters thick, but there’s a lot of friction between the fabric and the needle when you’re sewing something. I have a few antique silver thimbles that I keep in my sewing box, but whatever you can find is probably suitable enough – just make sure it’s nothing smooth, like those kitschy little porcelain ones – it needs to have dimples on it, to catch the point of the needle and to stop it sliding around everywhere!

Pinning Clothes – Difficulty – EASY

One of the most important things that you’ll need to know when repairing clothes is how to pin fabric. Is a sleeve coming off? Is the lining coming undone? Did you tear your waistcoat shoulder and need to sew it back together? (That happened to me once, and it was a frustrating repair!). For all these applications and more, you need to know how to pin stuff.

For this, you’ll need a bunch of tailor’s pins. They’re easily purchased in-bulk from any fabric and craft store, sometimes even at supermarkets. Best to buy two or three packets – they don’t always last very long.

The point of these pins (no pun intended!…OK not much of one, anyway…) is to hold two or more pieces of fabric together, and to stop it from sliding or coming apart when you’re trying to sew them back together.

After positioning the two pieces of fabric how you want them to be sewn together – take your pins – which should be housed in a pin-cushion – and feed them through the fabric, one at a time – parallel to the seam that you’ll be sewing. This is to allow the two pieces of fabric to lie flat and straight – if you pin perpendicular to the seam, the fabric may bunch up or pull out of alignment while sewing – and you certainly don’t want that!

While pinning, make sure that the pins go straight through both layers of fabric, and then back out through both layers of fabric. Make sure that the pin goes all the way through, and all the way out, but also, that the pin goes in and out through the fabric over the shortest distance possible – this gives you enough leeway for the pin to move (which it may do, while you’re sewing) without sliding out of the fabric entirely (which is a possibility) and ruining the end effect!

Hemming Trousers – Difficulty – MEDIUM

This is something that I reckon every well-dressed guy, and any girl who wears trousers or jeans – should know – HOW TO HEM YOUR TROUSERS! I’m constantly amazed at how many of my friends have no idea how to do this.

Finding a pair of jeans or trousers that fit you great in the waist, but which are too long, is a problem for a lot of people. Chances are that nothing will fit you perfectly off the rack, no matter how much weight you lose or sit-ups you try to do. That’s just the reality of life. Some shops (such as Uni Qlo, for example) do offer an in-store alteration-service for a nominal fee, and if you want to, you can do that, if you buy something from a store, brand-new. But if you’re buying from a thrift-shop, you don’t have that option. So you either have to pay someone to do it (which I would never bother doing), or you do it yourself.

First, you gotta figure out your inside-leg. To figure that out, get a pair of trousers that already fit you really well, and measure the inside-leg. That’s taken from the middle of the crotch-seam, down the INSIDE of the trouser-leg to the bottom of the hem – by inside, I mean the inner-side of the trouser leg, as opposed to the outer-side, not the literal inside of the trousers where the seams are hidden. Am I making sense here??

That measurement is your inside-leg. For most people, it’ll be between 26 – 40 inches, depending on how tall you are. If you’re really tall, then it could be as much as 50 inches. Either way, remember that length and then measure it out on the pair of trousers you want to hem. Mark that point on the trouser-leg with chalk and then rule a line along the bottom of the trouser-leg at that mark. Make sure the trouser-leg is flat and your ruler is straight!

Depending on how much fabric is below this line, you can either hem straight away, or you might want to cut off some of the excess fabric. If you have more than an inch and a half of fabric, I’d suggest trimming it off.

Once you’ve made your measurement and it’s ready to hem – fold the excess fabric UP inside the trouser leg. Here, you might want to iron it, to set a crease so it doesn’t flop around. Next step is to pin the hem. Using tailor’s pins, pin the hem so that the fabric stays in place while you sew it in your new hemline using a sewing machine. Make sure that you sew the hem so that the new line of stitches is as close to the edge of the folded-up fabric as possible, and not the new hemline – otherwise all the loose, unsupported fabric inside your trouser-leg will flop back down and you’ll have a bitch of a time trying to put your trousers on later. This is also why I suggest removing excess fabric – it just gets in the way.

Cutting buttonholes – Difficulty – MEDIUM

I don’t know anybody who cuts their own buttonholes, but I have done, on occasion. It’s not strictly always necessary, but in some instances, it may be.

About a week ago, I was at my local flea market, looking for a new winter overcoat. I lucked out and found a lovely 60-40 wool-poly blended navy blue peacoat. It fit decently in the shoulders and arms, and it was a longer cut, going down to almost my knees, which I liked, because I believe overcoats should be as long as possible without looking awkward.

The thing about peacoats is that they’re double-breasted – they are ALWAYS double-breasted. There is no such thing as a single-breasted peacoat. I don’t own anything that’s double-breasted (apart from one grey jacket) and I thought it’d be fun to buy a double-breasted overcoat. It’s different, it was in a colour I liked, a style that suited me, a size that fit me, and had features which I liked – namely that it buttoned right up to the throat, which is great in freezing winter weather!!

But – it only buttons up on one side – left over right.

I’m a firm believer that if you’re going to do something, you should do it as right as you can – what’s the point of having a double-breasted overcoat which only buttons up on one side? So, I took it home and made extra buttons on the other side, so that I could overlap the coat either direction.

To make new buttonholes, you will need:

A sewing machine, thread, a needle and thread, tailor’s chalk, and a pair of very sharp, pointed-tip scissors.

First thing’s first – mark where the buttonhole is going to be, and how long it’s going to be, compared to the diameter of the button that’s going to go through it. If you have the button handy – use that as a guide. Use tailor’s chalk to mark the boundaries of the buttonhole that you wish to make.

Next step is to sew a rectangle using your sewing machine – bordering around the chalk-marks you made.

After that, you need to make the actual hole itself. Always sew the boundaries of the buttonhole before doing this – the point of the stitching is to ARREST and PREVENT any unwanted tearing or fraying in the fabric. If you don’t do the reinforcing rectangle first, then all you’ll get is a huge bloody hole in your coat that’s of no use to anybody.

To cut the hole, use sharp, pointed-tip scissors. If you can get them, there are specific buttonhole scissors that exist – but if you can’t get them, then any scissors like what I described, will do. Pierce the fabric and feed the blade of the scissors through, and then cut along the chalk-mark inside the stitched border. Make sure that the button slips through comfortably, but not too loosely.

The final step is to reinforce the buttonhole. If you do not do this, then the fraying edges of the buttonhole will cause the entire thing to fall apart. Get your needle and thread, and sew around the edge of the buttonhole using a whipstitch, or overcast stitch – these are designed to furl over the edge of the fabric, and therefore prevent it from wearing out and unwraveling. Make the stitches as tight and as close together as possible to produce a neat, even appearance. Once it’s done, tie off the thread, snip the excess, and you’re done!

Of course, if you want to use a sewing machine, you can do that too – and use a buttonhole attachment, but if you’re not confident with using one, or don’t have one, then this is the most traditional way of doing it. It’s an easy way of adding buttonholes to garments that you find secondhand and want to alter to your own tastes or uses.

Blind Stitching – Difficulty – EASY

Blind stitching the name given to the method by which two pieces of fabric are sewn together, without there being a visible seam or stitches. The stitching is done in such a way that it is ‘blind’, or invisible.

Blind stitching is useful if you’re trying to sew seams back together that have come apart, but you don’t want it to be obvious that you’ve done a homemade repair – you want it to look like it was never damaged in the first place!

Blind stitching is easily accomplished with a simple needle and thread. It involves sewing the two pieces of fabric together in such a way that the thread holding the two pieces together cannot be seen from one side (usually, the outside!). So, how is this done?

To successfully carry out a blind stitching operation, you sew the two pieces of fabric together by passing the needle through the fabric, without poking all the way through. Basically, you catch threads or fibres of the fabric, pull your needle through, catch the fibres or threads of the other fabric, and pull the needle through that. On the other side of the two pieces of fabric – there shouldn’t be any hole or any thread visible.

Blind stitching is relatively easy – but it has to be done slowly, and carefully if you want a neat and presentable finish. Best to do it when you’re bored, and lonely, sitting down watching TV or YouTube videos, because you won’t want anybody trying to actively steal your attention while you’re doing this. The only slight disadvantage with blind stitching is that since the stitches don’t pass all the way through the two pieces of fabric, it may not be as strong as conventional stitching. You can remedy this by making the stitches more numerous or tighter, to give the seam some extra strength!

Darn it! – Difficulty – MEDIUM

You might’ve heard of darning from reading old books, or watching period movies, old TV shows, or possibly, from speaking to your grandparents. It’s that thing that grandma did late at night when there was nothing else going on. But what is it?

Darning is a process whereby clothes are repaired. To be specific, it’s a method for repairing, filling in or patching holes, usually in thick, knitted or woven fabrics and garments such as scarves, jumpers, cardigans, beanies, mittens etc. It doesn’t really work that well with thinner fabrics or fabrics with a tight weave, like cotton.

Darning is a process whereby you fill in the hole created by the loose, or missing threads, by weaving in fresh thread to replace it. First, you identify the hole that needs darning. Then, you get your needle and thread. Ideally, you want a thread that matches the colour of the fabric as closely as possible.

Prepare your needle and thread as you usually do, and then tuck the point of the needle through the weave in the fabric, near the edge of the hole that you’re trying to darn. For a neater finished appearance – darn from the INSIDE of the garment, so that none of the fiddly bits – like that knot you tied in the end of your thread – are visible when the darning is completed.

Pull the thread across the hole and through a weave in the fabric at the other edge. Then repeat the process going back the other way. And back the other away again. And again. And again. Until the entire hole is covered.

Now you’ve done half the process. The next step is to go from top to bottom, weaving your needle in and out of the threads you just created, while also doing the anchoring stitches that you did earlier. Keep your stitches as dense as possible to create an even, solid mass of thread which will eventually build up, and cover the hole. Yay! You’re darning!

A wooden darning egg. Darning eggs can be made out of almost anything – metal, glass, wood, even stone. It just has to be something sufficiently hard that the needle doesn’t break it. The curved shape helps to stretch out the fabric, and stops it from bunching up and kinking.

One way to make darning easier is to place something inside the garment, so that you have a solid surface to rest against while you darn. This stops the fabric from flopping around anywhere. Traditionally, this ‘something’ was a hard, round object made of wood, known as a “darning egg”, or a “darning mushroom”, depending on the shape.

Darning is usually done on thick, woven wool clothes and fabrics. Stuff like sweaters, dressing gowns, socks, sweater-vests, etc. The thick, fluffy weave of the fabric hides (or makes less noticeable) the repair-job of darning. Darning will never make a garment look like new, but it will stop it from getting worse and falling apart. For this reason, darning is a repair technique usually reserved for things which won’t be seen publicly – dressing gowns, socks, or sweaters which might be covered by a jacket or overcoat. Of course – the neater and more densely packed your darning stitches are, the less noticeable the repair will be overall, especially if you use a colour-matched thread.

Conclusion

Well, that brings this posting to an end. For anyone who loves bargain-hunting and seeking out secondhand or vintage clothes, hopefully this posting has given you a bit more confidence to be a bit more adventurous in your hunter-gathering, and given you a bit more confidence in repairing your own secondhand scores!

 

Decadent and Delightful: A History of Dressing Gowns

Despite the fact that winter in the Land Down Under has barely started, we of the Antipodes were recently given a stern reminder of the fact that, despite being one of the hottest and driest countries on earth, Australia can also get bloody cold in winter time! This is due to the oft-overlooked fact that there’s no landmasses between us and Antarctica, defending us from the frigid gales, storms and icy cold fronts that routinely come blasting up from the Roaring Forties.

Waking up to below or near freezing temperatures every morning is no-one’s idea of pleasant unless you’re a penguin. And this was what prompted me to start looking into buying myself a new dressing gown. I had one when I was younger, but after it started falling apart, I never bothered replacing it. Fed up with the cold mornings, I finally decided that I had to get a new one.

Soft, fluffy and warm! Velour cotton navy blue, with a pair of waist-level patch pockets, sash-loops and sash-belt. Red would’ve been nice, too, but blue seemed to be almost all they had.

At first, I wasn’t even sure if I could replace it. After all, dressing gowns are typically seen as being rather old-fashioned these days. Apart from myself, I only know one other friend who wears them (if he’s reading this, he knows who he is!), and I wasn’t even sure if I’d be able to buy one. But after browsing the websites of two or three major department stores in town, I decided that I’d head out and buy something! I was fed up of constantly shivering every morning, and the weather over the next few weeks was only slated to get even worse.

What is a Dressing Gown?

A dressing-gown, also known as a housecoat, nightgown or dressing robe, is an open-fronted, loose-fitting garment with wide sleeves, typically ranging in size anywhere from knee-length down to ankle-length. It typically comes with two waist-level pockets, a pair of sash-loops, and a fabric belt or sash, designed to hold the robe shut.

Dressing gowns are designed to be worn over the top of one’s other clothes, such as (but not limited to) underwear, sleepwear such as pajamas, or one’s day-wear when around the house. Dressing gowns typically come in two different styles – those worn for comfort, and those worn for style.

Dressing gowns worn for comfort – usually for the purposes of keeping warm – are typically made of cotton or wool in various weaves or finishes. They’re designed to be soft, fluffy, warm and pleasant to touch. Dressing gowns worn for style are usually made of silk. They’re much thinner and are worn more as a fashion accessory than as a way to beat the cold!

What is the Purpose of a Dressing Gown?

Dressing gowns are usually worn for one of three reasons: For warmth, for fashion, or for the sake of modesty. The reasoning behind these three options will be explained later, but basically they’re linked to history, societal expectations, and comfort.

The History of the Dressing Gown

Robes of any description were among the first clothes ever worn by humankind, and in one form or another, their use date back for centuries.

In prehistory, robes were the easiest clothes to manufacture, and the easiest to wear, typically made up of flat, easily measured, easily sewn panels of cloth, ranging from Chinese silk robes, to Middle Eastern robes of cotton and wool, the Japanese kimono, to European academic or judicial robes, and all the way back to ancient Roman and Greek robes such as togas, robes of all kinds have permeated global culture.

Diarist Samuel Pepys in his nightshirt, cravat or kerchief, and draped with his dressing gown (1666).

The dressing gown, and indeed, pajamas themselves, migrated to Europe at the time of the Renaissance during the 1500s and 1600s, originally coming from the Middle East. The word “pajamas” comes from the Iranian words “Pai Jamahs”, originally referring to the soft, loose-fitting pants or trousers worn by people in the Middle East (especially in Turkey, India, and Iran). The dressing gown evolved from the Turkish and Persian “Banyan”, a loose-fitting over-robe worn for the sake of modesty and comfort. In this way, both the dressing gown (and its cousin – the bathrobe), and pajamas, are of Middle-Eastern or west-Asian origin.

The European Dressing Gown

The dressing gown started taking off in Europe in the 1500s and 1600s. For much of Western history, right up into the early 20th century, shirts of any kind – tunic shirts, collared shirts, T-shirts – were seen as underwear, akin to briefs, trunks or boxer-shorts. Shirts were seen as a necessary evil. They were regarded as underwear – to be worn under one’s regular day-clothes, and to be worn in bed as sleepwear. For the sake of modesty, shirts used to be much larger than they are today, and using much more fabric than is now the case.

A film screenshot depicting Ebeneezer Scrooge (of Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol’ fame) in his dressing gown, before the visitation of the Three Ghosts.

As shirts were regarded as underwear, it was considered VERY unseemly, and even rude, to appear in the presence of guests ‘in your shirtsleeves‘, as the literature of the time put it. That being the case, if it was required for you to make an appearance in front of guests in a ‘state of undress‘ as they said at the time, then the socially acceptable thing to do was to throw your dressing gown over your half-dressed body before entering a room. This not only kept you warm, but also preserved modesty.

In the 1800s, pajamas as we know them today – with a matching jacket and trousers – started to replace what was increasingly seen as being the antiquated and frankly -unhygienic – nightshirt, which was the usual sleeping garb for most people since medieval times. By now, the modern button-down shirt (in the form of the ‘tunic shirt’ with a separate attachable collar, which would later morph into the modern dress-shirt) had replaced the up-until-then, ubiquitous nightshirt as daily wear.

Despite this change in status of the humble shirt, the stigma of being seen in your shirtsleeves remained strong throughout the Victorian era, and it was still seen as a major faux pas to be seen dressed in your shirt alone. For this reason, the dressing gown remained popular as a garment, being an acceptable, and later, stylish way of preserving modesty while entertaining company in one’s own home.

The Dressing Gown as a Fashion Accessory

By the later 1800s, leading into the 20th century, the dressing gown started being seen, not only as a necessary evil, but also as a fashion accessory. This was partially spurred on by popular culture such as art, literature, and increasingly – motion pictures in the 20s, 30s, and 40s.

A character famous for his indulgence of luxurious clothes, James Bond did much to associate the dressing gown with sex-appeal and the playboy lifestyle.

It was at this time that increasingly elaborate dressing gowns with quilted fabrics, silk linings, satin exteriors, patterned silks, and carefully woven cotton or woolen fabrics became popular. As dressing gowns started being seen more as stylish sleepwear or casual, household lounging-attire, they continued to be increasingly embellished.

The ankle-length dressing gown owned by President J.A. Garfield.

Dressing gowns were often accentuated with embroidery and piping along the pocket-seams, cuffs, sash, sash-loops and around fastening-points such as straps, buttons and buttonholes. Hollywood films of the 1920s, 30s, 40s and 50s increased the popularity of dressing gowns. People were treated to scenes of big celebrities like Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce, Cary Grant, Sean Connery and Noel Coward, to name but a few – regularly dressed, either in photographs, or on the silver screen, in dressing gowns, lounging around in their bedrooms or living-rooms.

The late Hugh Hefner was famous for being photographed in his silk and satin dressing gowns. This did much to strengthen the associations between dressing gowns, casual lounging and wealthy, idle hedonism in the 20th century.

Noel Coward and Hugh Hefner were particularly famous for lounging around in their dressing gowns, and this gave the gown an air of upper-class luxury, seductiveness, hedonism and relaxation. These connotations have lasted into the modern era, although some might say that the dressing gown as the stereotypical outfit of the gadabout idle playboy has somewhat diminished its appeal.

Dressing Gowns as Practical Accessories

If you live in a country that routinely experiences harsh winters such as northern Europe, southern Australia, New Zealand, or the northern reaches of the United States or Canada, then you’ll readily appreciate why the dressing gown became popular as an article of household attire and sleepwear, and also, why it remained popular for such a long time.

Remember that many houses from the 1600s to the early 1900s – the era when dressing gowns were most popular – did not have any form of central heating. While bedrooms, reception rooms, and private offices or studies might’ve had fireplaces, most other areas of a house – corridors, store-rooms, servants quarters, kitchens, etc, had absolutely no heating at all in the depths of winter. A thick, heavy, well-padded dressing gown was therefore essential for holding back the winter chills – especially if you had to rush out in the middle of the night for any reason.

This was the time of the “Little Ice Age”, an era of history stretching from late Medieval times until the mid 1800s, when global temperatures were significantly colder than they are today. Clothing choices, such as three-piece suits, cloaks, capes and yes – dressing gowns – became not only fashionable, but also vital – to keeping out the cold in houses and buildings where heat was limited, and when the difference in temperatures between indoors and outdoors was negligible at best.

Dressing Gowns: Types, Styles and Elements

There are, broadly speaking, two or three types of dressing gowns.

Dressing gowns designed for warmth and comfort, and those designed for fashion.

Materials and Fabrics

Dressing gowns meant for fashion or style are typically lighter-weight and are made of silk, satin, or lightly-woven cotton fabrics. They’re used primarily just to cover up one’s other clothes so as to present a neat and stylish appearance. They’re also useful in warmer climates where a heavier garment would be uncomfortable.

By comparison, a dressing gown worn for comfort and warmth is typically thicker, and much heavier, made of heavier woven cotton or even wool fabric, ranging from thinner terrycloth, to heavier velour or even velvet fabrics. The gown might be silk or satin-lined for comfort, or may not be. To provide extra warmth, some gowns may even be quilted – that is to say – they’ll have two layers of cloth (the exterior and the lining) and have something else – usually wool or cotton padding – sewn or ‘quilted’ between the two layers like a sandwich, to add bulk and warmth.

Sizes and Styles

Dressing gowns typically come in one of two lengths: Knee- or shin-length, and (although rather rare today), ankle-length. My dressing gown is shin-length. Most which are made and sold today will be knee or shin-length. Longer, ankle-length gowns aren’t as common today, what with the advent of more effective home-heating, so If you want a longer, ankle-length gown, you’ll either have to make it yourself, or ask a tailor to make one for you.

Dressing gowns come in a variety of styles. For more structured, fitted gowns, the more casual, relaxed ‘shawl’-style collar and lapels are popular. For less structured gowns, a simple folded over collar and lapel is common. As dressing gowns were originally inspired by Far East and Middle-Eastern designs, some gowns are deliberately modeled on, or imitate the look of garments such as Japanese kimono.

Fastenings

While some dressing gowns (especially back in the Victorian era) came with buttons, straps and hooks for fastening, the accepted stance is that the vast majority of dressing gowns don’t come with any fastenings at all. If you need to keep your gown closed (for modesty, for warmth, etc), then simply fold one side over the other, and use the sash. Typically, the tightness of the sash and the friction of the fabric rubbing against itself will be enough to hold the gown shut.

Gowns which did have fastenings (usually buttons) had embroidered cord buttonholes or strapped buttonholes which were woven and sewn into the design of the robe, adding to the overall embellishment of the garment.

Pockets

Most gowns come with two pockets, usually patch pockets or similar, at waist-level. Patch pockets get their name because they’re simply square patches of matching fabric, which are sewn onto the sides of the garment. Almost all dressing gowns come with patch pockets, whether they number one, two (the most common) or three (not as common, but you can still find them).

While most gowns come with two patch pockets at waist-level, some gowns are also manufactured with a third, breast-pocket at chest level. A gown with a breast-pocket may have the manufacturer’s monogram or logo embroidered or sewn onto it as decoration. However, if the pocket is blank, you can have your own initials or monogram sewn there instead – Noel Coward was famous for doing this.

Sashs and Sash-Loops

Almost every dressing gown is considered incomplete without the soft, cloth belt, or ‘sash’ which accompanies it. The sash is a simple cloth cord, strap or belt that is designed to be wrapped around the waist and tied at the front or side, in order to keep the dressing gown closed.

To help guide the sash around the body of the robe and its wearer, and to keep the sash from sliding or falling away if it comes undone accidentally – most dressing gowns will also have two sash-loops – typically at waist-level, just above and behind the pockets. Sashes are typically made of the same type of fabric as the gown, or are made out of the fabric that lines or edges the gown, to provide a nice contrast.

Buying a Dressing Gown

So, you want to buy a dressing gown, huh? There’s a lot of things to consider.

Firstly – can you even find the style that you like? If you think you can’t, you can either get a tailor to design and make one for you – or if you have the skills – then you can do what I did – and simply make your own. I wore my own creation for five or six years before it started coming apart, but while it lasted, it was excellent!

Secondly – you need to decide why you want your gown. Is it for casual wear? Or for comfort and warmth? This will determine the types of fabrics that the gown will be made of. Gowns are typically made of silk, cotton, wool or velvet in various weaves, patterns and decorations.

Thirdly – How big do you want the gown to be? Ankle-length gowns are rather rare these days unless you can find someone to make one for you. The most important thing to consider when buying a gown is how it fits you. Remember that dressing gowns are meant to be worn over the top of other clothes – so they need to have lots of space to move around. If you’re buying your gown in-store somewhere, don’t be afraid to just throw it over the top of whatever it is you’re wearing on the day.

Fourthly – How much do you want to spend on your gown? Really luxurious handmade silk dressing gowns can cost upwards of $1,000. Whereas more reasonable gowns, typically made of wool, cotton, or less elaborate silks or in plainer styles and patterns, may be purchased for just a couple of hundred…my navy blue number cost me all of $60.00! So they need only be expensive if you want them to be, and can afford it.

Lastly – pick a gown that goes with as many outfits as possible. Think about your sleepwear – what colour pajamas do you have? What would go best with them? Would the gown look just as good draped over just anything else? If the answer to these questions is all ‘Yes’, then buy it. Classic gown colours are typically blue, red, brown, black, and grey. This is just my opinion – but I would seriously avoid buying a dressing gown in white, because then it starts looking far too much like a bathrobe…

Dressing Gowns Vs. Bathrobes

Last, but not least. What’s the difference between a dressing gown and a bathrobe?

While superficially, they look and feel very similar, the differences between the two garments are quite significant.

Bathrobes are made of toweling fabric – a thick, absorbent fabric (usually cotton), used to make floor-mats and towels. Bathrobes are designed to dry and warm the body after having a shower or bath, or after swimming. They’re not meant for long-term wear. Also, bathrobes typically only come in one very generic style, and even fewer colours!

By comparison, dressing gowns are meant for long-term wear, around the house, at night, first thing in the morning, and even during the day. They’re designed to keep the body warm, and they come in a much wider range of styles, colours, fabrics and designs.

Another key difference between a dressing gown and a bathrobe is that dressing gowns are typically meant to be worn over other clothes (either day-clothes, night-clothes or underwear). By comparison, bathrobes are almost always worn against bare flesh.

Concluding Remarks

Anyway, that about sums up this article. I hope you enjoyed reading it and that it helped you pick out what you want, or helped you make a decision about whether you want to buy a robe. I’ve always liked the look of dressing gowns and have always enjoyed how comfortable they are, as well as looking into their fascinating history and their evolution through time and fashion.

 

Sacks to Suits: The Evolution of Clothing

Clothing is pretty important. Chances are, if you’re reading this, you might just, quite possibly, be wearing some.

I hope.

And if you’re not, then I hope that you look better without them than with them.

Anyway, since the dawn of time, mankind has had to wear clothing. Not having excessive amounts of body-hair to keep us warm meant that we had to find something else to compensate for this when the weather turned, or got wet or windy or otherwise unpleasant. In this posting, I’ll be looking at the gradual evolution of clothing from its earliest roots, up to the early 20th century, when the types of clothes we wear today started being created. So, where to begin?

Furs and Pelts

The earliest clothes worn by man were the furs, skins and pelts of the animals they killed while out hunting for food. When hunting was such a dangerous, labour-intensive and time-consuming part of one’s day, absolutely any and every part of a dead animal was used for something. The flesh was eaten, the bones were used to make tools or equipment, and the pelts and skins were used for clothing, or making shelter. The first needles were made out of shards of animal-bone, and the first threads for sewing were the sinews and muscle-fibres taken from these dead animals.

Using rudimentary knives such as napped flints or chunks of razor-sharp obsidian (basically, volcanic glass, which is sharp enough to shave with!), primitive man learned how to skin, cut, and sew together animal pelts to make the first ever articles of clothing – likely loin-cloths (for the covering of one’s loins), or cloaks and capes, for covering one’s shoulders, chests, and backs.

Weaving, Knitting and Spinning: Wool, Wonderful Wool!

Finding enough mammoths, tigers, lions and other furry animals to kill and make clothing is obviously labour intensive and dangerous. The next step in finding ways to make clothing was to grow it! Instead of chasing the sources of your clothing, simply grow it, or let it come to you. Using the long strands and fibres in plants like flax, cotton and hemp, or the strands and fibres in the wool of sheep, mankind realised that if they could utilise these naturally occurring materials, they could make clothing. More clothing, better clothing, and more comfortable clothing! Thus began the domestication and farming of fat, fluffy, woolly sheep!

But, having sheep was not enough. To make fabric from the sheep’s wool, two innovations were necessary – that of spinning the fibres to make a thread, and that of weaving the threads to make cloth.

Unlike cotton and flax, which were seasonal and which were more affected by weather, the wool on sheep was a reliable and plentiful source of material. Because of this, for centuries, sheep’s wool was used to clothe people throughout Europe and North America (in South America, alpaca wool served the same purpose).

Using knives or basic clippers, mankind learned how to shear sheep, to remove as much of this wool as possible for the manufacturing of clothes. It is actually necessary to shear sheep – if you don’t, the wool builds up into unmanageable layers and the sheep can actually die from the weight, the heat, and the infestations of grubs and maggots that get into the wool…eugh.

Shearing and processing wool was a big undertaking. The first step was to wash the sheep. This was usually done by simply dumping the poor animal into a river. The fast-flowing water would blast out all the mud and gunk from the sheep’s woolly fleece, and then you simply trotted it back up onto shore, let it dry out, and then sheared it.

The next step was to shear the sheep, using knives or clippers. You had to get as close to the sheep’s skin without actually nicking it. If you did, tar, pitch or some other adhesive was usually applied to the wound to stop the sheep from getting infected. Sheep were extremely important in Europe, and great care was taken in their maintenance.

Once the wool was removed from the sheep, the next step was to card it.

Carding was the process of combing the wool and cleaning it. This was done by combing it over and over again between two drums or paddles with rows of hooks or needles set into them. The hooks grabbed the wool and stretched out the fibres, combing everything into one direction. This aligned the fibres, but also separated them. This allowed you to clean the wool – picking out any grubby bits that you didn’t want!

A classic, treadle-powered spinning-wheel from the 1600s and 1700s. Being able to sit down while spinning made the job far more comfortable and made production of spun threads and yarns far more efficient.

Once the wool had been carded and cleaned, it could then be spun. Spinning was what compacted and aligned the fibres of the wool, twisting it into a continuous yarn. This was traditionally done on a spinning-wheel, either a small wheel and spindle, at which you could sit and pedal for hours at a time, or at a so-called ‘great-wheel’, which was a huge iron wheel which was spun around continuously, stretching and twisting the fibres of wool that you fed in by hand, into a continuous yarn or thread.

Unsurprisingly, to get enough thread to make anything of significance, you needed to do a lot of spinning. Spinners would walk for miles and miles a day, pedaling or moving back and forth against the spinning of their wheels, to produce thread. As this task was often done by unmarried women with few prospects, the term for an unmarried woman became a ‘spinster’.

Weaving Wool

Once the threads had been spun, the next step was to weave it. This was either done by knitting – looping the wool back and forth against itself to make fabric – or by weaving it back and forth, up and down, using a weaving loom.

Weaving looms were impressive machines, requiring great concentration to both set up, and operate. As the size of the finished fabric was dictated by the size of the loom, some looms could be gigantic! Two rows of thread (the warp) were set up in the loom, moving up and down, alternating back and forth. Between these two rows of thread, the weaver passed a spindle of thread mounted on a boat-shaped device called a shuttle. The thread going back and forth was called the ‘weft’. Together, weft and warp, woven together, created cloth. It was important for thread-tension to be kept even, and for the weaver not to lose concentration, or else the finished fabric wouldn’t hold together…whoops!

For centuries, weaving was done by hand. The weaver operated the levers which shifted the warp up and down, with his or her feet, while their hands operated the shuttle of thread which ran back and forth. This was a slow, laborious task – but one which was highly skilled – it took a lot of concentration to set up the loom, and one mistake would affect the entire outcome of the finished cloth!

Finishing off Fabric!

Once the fabric was woven, and released from the loom, it then had to be finished. Freshly-woven fabric (especially wool) was rough and stiff. This was because of the fibres of wool, and the oils that they contained. To produce a fabric that you’d actually want to wear, the cloth had to be processed or finished-off, in a process called ‘fulling’.

Fulling involved breaking down the fibres of the cloth and cleaning out the oil and grit from the wool, making it softer and fluffier. Ooooh, fluffy!

For centuries, this was done through brute force, and the addition of…human urine.

Do you know anybody with the last name ‘Fuller’? Well, chances are that in the dim and distant past, their great-great-great-great-great…great-great-great…great-great…great ancestors…had the unenviable occupation of being a fuller! A fuller was the person who fulled (processed) cloth. And this was done by dumping the raw fabric into a vat, tub or barrel, and then soaking it in stale piss! The ammonia in the urine dissolved the grease and oil in the wool (produced by the sheep), making it softer and cleaner and easier to use. Once the fabric was drenched in piss, it was the job of the fuller (or if he was lucky, his hapless assistants, or even slaves) to tread the fabric. Constant treading, beating or pounding of the piss-soaked fabric closed up the fibres in the cloth, making it more homogeneous, removing all the little pinprick holes that were left by the weaving.

Once the cloth was softened and finished, it was removed from the piss-vat by the slaves or fuller-assistants (who probably had received a crude pedicure at the same time), then washed, and then strung up! Fabric (especially wool) crinkles up when it’s wet – making it of no use to anybody. To stretch out the fabric and remove any pesky elasticity from it, it had to be stretched out. To do this, it was held in place by small, bent iron hooks or nails.

Ever heard of the expression that someone is ‘on tenterhooks’?

This is where it comes from.

Fabric was literally stretched out on tenterhooks and kept under…tention…or…’tension’, as we’d say today – to remove the springiness from the fabric, to ensure that it didn’t crinkle up again like a ruffle-cut potato chip. Once the tension had been stretched out of the fabric, it was ready for use!

Clothes Throughout History

Once processes for finding fibres, refining them, spinning, and weaving them into fabric had been perfected, what came next was the actual process of making clothes – the results of which were typically dictated by time, price, climate, and of course – fashion!

The process of making clothes has not changed in hundreds of years. Panels of cloth, cut according to measurements, were sewn together with a needle and thread, resulting in a finished garment. What did change, however, was what those garments looked like, over the coming centuries, ranging wildly in colours, sizes, complexities, and fabrics. For a long time, clothing was seen as much more than just something to keep you warm and comfortable.

Clothing in the Middle Ages

We pick up on the saga of clothing in the Middle Ages. One event – one long, wavering event, would affect the clothing of the people of the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, and the Early Modern era, all the way up to the time of the Victorians – and it’s important to know what this event was, to understand the evolution of clothing during this long stretch: An event called the Little Ice Age.

Stretching from about 1300-1850, the Little Ice Age was a weather phenomenon that came and went over the next half-millennium, cooling the earth gradually every couple of generations. This resulted in shorter summers, and longer, and colder winters. So cold, in fact, that major rivers in European cities such as the Thames in London, would freeze solid, right up into the 1840s and 50s, which is not that long ago!

But what affect did the Little Ice Age have on clothing?

Because of the decidedly harsher climate across Europe and America, China and Canada, during this time, clothing was by necessity – thick, and worn in layers. Cloaks, capes, shawls and wraps were common. Women wore layers of petticoats, skirts and bodices, while men wore thick, baggy shirts, woolen britches or leggings called hose, and a jacket or coat known as a ‘doublet’, so-called, because it was quite literally – double-lined in wool, inside-and-out, to provide warmth against the cold.

Clothes like this lasted virtually unchanged in their essentials, from the Middle Ages through to the 1700s.

Edward VI wearing a doublet and hose. This look remained common for men throughout the medieval era and renaissance, until the early 1600s.

While men wore leggings, hose, stockings, tunics (baggy, collarless shirts), with doublets and cloaks on top, women during this era covered themselves with a profusion of fabrics. The first garment was typically a chemise (a light, undergarment), followed by her corset (usually stiffened with wood, or whale-bone), followed by petticoats, skirts, a stomacher (a padded apron), and dozens of pins, all used to hold these various pieces of clothing together. Pins were so essential to dressing, in an age before buttons and zippers, that there was an entire industry devoted to making them, back in the 1500s.

In many respects, clothing like this changed little between the 1200s or 1300s, up to the dawn of the Modern Era, with the generally colder weather around the world meaning that it was just more practical to keep on wearing so many layers.

Clothes Maketh the Man

It was during this era that clothes were seen as a status-symbol. Given that they were so incredibly labour-intensive to produce, most people owned few clothes – at best, maybe two or three full sets each, generally just chopping, changing, darning, patching and sewing them up, over, and over, and over again, to keep them going as long as possible, before they could afford to buy enough fabric to make another set.

Because of this, for a long time, clothing – both the quantity and the quality of it – was a massive status-symbol around the world. Dresses, shirts, skirts and cloaks made of velvet, silk, or satin, instead of cotton or wool, were seen as more luxurious and higher-class.

People of Colour!

These days, we don’t think much about the colour of our clothing, beyond what colours go with which other colours. I mean you’re not gonna wear THAT…are you? Oh god…

But in times past, the colour of the cloth which made up your clothing was actually of great significance. Colours such as red, white, green, black and even purple, were considered highly fashionable and popular. This was partially due to their brightness or contrast, but also because of their expense. Purple, green and white were considered desirable because they were thought to display wealth, power and taste!

Purple in particular, was difficult to make, requiring a chemical reaction, in which crushed seashells were needed to dye the cloth. It was so expensive and labour-intensive to produce that for centuries, only royalty and nobility could wear cloth made of purple. Even today, royal cloaks and robes are a deep purple colour. That’s not an accident.

Red was also popular. A bright, scarlet red was traditionally produced by crushing tiny cochineal beetles. The dye in their shells could be used to stain the cloth red. Red was popular for dresses, cloaks, doublets, tunics…all kinds of things! In the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, cochineal dye was most famously used as the red dye for the redcoat uniforms worn by British soldiers.

Diarist John Evelyn. In the 1600s and 1700s, crisp, white linen collars, cuffs and neckerchiefs were a sign of wealth, since it took so much money to buy such clean white cloth, and then so much effort to keep it clean and white!

Another highly popular colour was white – white cuffs, white collars, white ruffles, neckerchiefs, cravats, shirts and other flourishes and accessories were extremely popular in the 1500s, 1600s and 1700s. The more you had, the more affluent you were. This was because it suggested that, not only did you have the money to spend on such fine, crisp, white linen, but you also had the money to pay servants to keep it clean and white and crisp, sprinkling it with starch to help keep the shape and colour. Being trimmed in white also suggested that you were a man or woman of means – you had your own money, or at least, earned it through means of business and trade – not through such horrible occupations as farming or mining or doing manual labour, which might soil your beautiful white collars and cuffs with grime and dust and sweat!

It’s a huge misconception that people in the past did not care about colour in their clothing. They most certainly did, and they used it as a way to express their wealth and status. And not just in Europe. In China, yellow was only ever worn by the Emperor, red was worn for celebrations, and in Asia, just as it was in Europe – purple was the colour of royalty.

The Renaissance Man and Woman

By the 1400s, 1500s and 1600s, clothing was gradually becoming more refined. For men, separate leggings were now becoming a single garment. What were previously called ‘hose’ were now called breeches, or ‘britches’, knee-length coverings with a sort of drawstring opening at the front, similar to a modern fly. This was augmented with a pouch or flap of cloth known as a codpiece, with which to cover your ‘codware’.

For those who could afford it, clothes were now being made in a more tailored way – by the 1600s, it became common for men to wear long tailcoats, and long waistcoats to combat the cold winter air. Under this, they still wore their simple, white shirts, however. These shirts were long, baggy and typically made of linen or thin wool fabric. They were worn baggy because part of their function was to act as underwear, and as sleeping attire. At the end of the day, you removed all your coats, waistcoats, cloaks and jackets, and simply went to sleep in your shirt, or ‘nightshirt’ as it became known. This tradition persisted right up into the Victorian era, and even in the later 1800s, to be seen ‘in your shirtsleeves’ as it was called – was tantamount to walking around wearing a jockstrap and nothing else – a MAJOR social faux-pas for the time!

Capt. James Cook in his naval uniform, which consisted of knee-length breeches (buttoned at the thighs), and knee-length white stockings beneath.

For women, the layers of petticoats and skirts remained the norm, although by now, a new innovation which the woman who could afford it, might add to her attire was this newfangled ‘pocket’ thing that people kept talking about.

Pockets had existed before, but it wasn’t until the 1500s and 1600s that they really became a thing. In previous times, a ‘pocket’ was a simple pouch strapped to your belt, and was also called a purse. But these pockets – made in pairs – with tie-strings on them, could be tied to a lady’s undergarments, hidden away from view, in which she might keep her money, scissors, spectacles, or anything else that might fit inside.

Of course, if the straps which tied the pockets to your skirts came loose, then you would literally – lose a pocket…like Lucy Locket…which is the origin of the nursery rhyme.

As I said before, during this time, your clothing was a serious marker of your social and financial status. If you walked around town in your fine dresses, long, flowing, embroidered coats and jackets, or crisp, white linens, you would really stand out as a member of the upper-clasess…which meant you had money…lots of money! Which meant that you could probably stand to lose some, yeah?

Well, others certainly thought so. It was at this time that we are introduced to the character of the ‘cutpurse’, a person who would wander around behind unsuspecting toffs, and quite literally use a small knife to cut the drawstrings on their purses or pockets, catch them before they hit the ground, and then run off with them, without the owner being any the wiser! In time, the cutpurse would attain a new moniker – the pickpocket!

The Start of the Suit

In modern English, a ‘suit of clothes’ is a set of clothing all cut from the same cloth. As we’ve seen, clothing in the past was not. Shirts, jackets, waistcoats, breeches, leggings, petticoats, chemises, dresses and cloaks were made of a wide variety of fabrics – cotton, wool, tweed, silk, satin…the list goes on.

So, when did the suit as we know it – a set of clothing all cut and made from the same type and colour of fabric – first originate?

The suit as we know it is comprised of three components: The jacket, the trousers (a two-piece suit), and a waistcoat (three-piece suit). How far back does this combination, in matching fabrics – go?

The immediate ancestor of the suit dates back to the 1600s. This was when men started wearing breeches instead of separate leggings which were simply tied to their shirts. Originally called hose, breeches were knee-length coverings comprised of a seat, front, fly, and two legs. Indeed, during the 1500s and 1600s, and even into the 1700s, a rite-of-passage for small boys was the transition from wearing baby-clothes (typically dresses or skirts), into wearing breeches (the forerunner to trousers), and it was considered a major point in their lives, since indicated that they were growing up.

Why, you might ask, did little boys wear skirts as toddlers, instead of breeches? Well, it’s a lot easier to clean up a toddler’s bodily motions when they’re wearing skirts. The transition to breeches indicated that they had grown up enough, and were now mature enough, to handle their bodily functions on their own, and were therefore mature enough to wear breeches. This rite of passage was known as ‘breeching’. In one form or another, it remained common into the 20th century. But more about that later…

The Jacket

The first part of the suit is the jacket. Men had been wearing jackets or coats for centuries, and by the 1600s, the long tailcoat with cuffs and pockets with flaps had become an established article of men’s clothing. They varied in length, but at their most extreme, went down to below the knee for winter garments, and around thigh-level for warmer-weather jackets.

The Breeches

As mentioned, breeches descended from hose, which descended from the separate leggings worn in Medieval times. By the 1600s, breeches had become an established part of European menswear, usually matched with a pair of knee-length stockings, typically white, although other stocking-colours were also popular. By this time, pockets, at least for men, started becoming ‘in-built’ into their garments. No-longer were they little sacks or pouches that hung off the side on strings. Now, they were being sewn into, and onto, men’s clothing, such as the pockets in coats and waistcoats, so did early trousers and breeches also have pockets.

Breeches remained popular from the 1600s up to the early 1800s, due to the fact that most men either walked, or rode a horse everywhere, to get from place to place. The poor condition of roads meant that it was highly likely you’d get splattered with mud, rainwater or dust while out riding or walking, or even just getting in and out of your carriage. If your stockings got wet or muddy, you could simply change them, and keep wearing the same pair of breeches for a longer period of time before they too, would have to be washed (in a time when washing clothing was an extremely laborious task, garments were, of necessity, washed as infrequently as possible to save on water, fuelwood, and expensive soap, a commodity which remained taxed in England right up to the Victorian era). Wearing knee-length breeches, which were less likely to be soiled by grime, and a pair of removable stockings, was therefore seen as a matter of practicality, as well as fashion.

The Waistcoat

Arguably, the first instance of a ‘vest’ or ‘waistcoat’ being mentioned in the English language is in Samuel Pepys’ diary of the 1660s, when he describes King Charles II of England, wearing such a garment, and declaring that his courtiers should do the same. Early waistcoats, much like the jackets and coats of the era, were dictated by the ‘Little Ice Age’ at the time. Waistcoats were much longer than modern ones, reaching as far down as the knee in an effort to provide warmth and deal with drafts.

The beginnings of a Suit

With these three components: A coat or jacket, vest or waistcoat, and a pair of breeches with stockings, the suit as we would know it today, was in its infancy. Over time, it would gradually evolve. By the 1700s, the waistcoat would shorten in length and coats and jackets would become less elaborate. The fashion for breeches remained for much of this time, though, due to reasons explained previously. It would not be until the early 1800s that they finally started to be usurped by trousers.

Dandies, Fops and Macaronis

By the 1700s, men’s and women’s daily attire had hardly changed markedly from what it had been a hundred, or even two or three hundred years before. For women, layers of petticoats, shawls and undergarments remained the norm. For men, things had advanced somewhat, but the layers of clothing and elaborate attire remained de-rigeur. Jackets and waistcoats had increased or decreased in length according to fashion and style, and by the Georgian era, it was slowly becoming less and less elaborate…although that is a matter of opinion, in some circles!

Foppish Macaronis!

“Now Sir! You’re a complete Macaroni!” – The over-the-top outfits worn by men in the late 1600s and 1700s were what gave them the nickname of ‘fops’, ‘poppinjays’, or ‘Macaronis’. This dependence on powder, rouge, scent and bright colours was seen by some as being overly effeminate.

By the 1600s, a phenomenon known as the ‘fop’ had arrived on the scene, also called a ‘poppinjay’ or even a ‘coxcomb’…these were all derogatory terms coined to describe the sort of excessively well-dressed, superficial man, typically of wealth or breeding, who spent far too much time concerned with his clothing, makeup, scent, and general appearance in public! These last two terms – poppinjay and coxcomb, aimed to compare the fop with common birds – specifically the parrot, and the rooster (or ‘cockerel’).

Why?

Because, like a rooster or some other exceptionally flamboyant and flowery bird – they were constantly strutting around, heads up, making loads of noise, trying to get others to notice them, while also preening themselves endlessly, with scent, perfume, powder and makeup! Bedecked with jewels, brocade suits, ruffs, frills, overpowering cologne, insanely elaborate wigs dusted over with powder to give them a brilliant, bright whiteness, fops embodied the 17th and 18th century man of means.

Linked closely to the fop was the equally dazzling ‘macaroni’, as in that old nursery rhyme of Yankee Doodle and his hat with the feather in it.

Calling it ‘Macaroni’!

By the 1700s, it became increasingly popular for young men to do what was called the ‘Grand Tour‘ – basically a sort of 18th century gap-year. The idea was that – if you could afford it – you packed up your trunks and bags, and, with a companion, friend or tutor, went off on a tour of Europe – generally encompassing France, Germany, the Netherlands and the Italian City States. This was supposed to be a mind-broadening exercise – to expose clueless young English noblemen to the refinement, style, class, and fashions of the continent!

Having been exposed to all this grandeur and fashion, it was expected that these feckless young toffs would have returned from their travels with a more cultured, sophisticated outlook on life, having learned about the classical societies of Greece and Rome, perhaps learned a foreign language, or developed a greater appreciation for the arts. One thing which these young men developed a taste for was Italian cuisine…you know…pasta. Specifically – this newfangled ‘macaroni’ thing, which most people had never seen before!

Macaroni then became a term used to describe young, clueless men of questionable cultural understanding, who were determined to copy or imitate high European fashion and society. As with anything when people try to imitate the styles, fashions, cuisine or culture of a foreign nation, things get lost, exaggerated, or simply left out, of the translation – and this caused the Macaroni faddists to become ridiculed by their peers.

Fine and Dandy

As you can imagine, all this excess started to get rather…excessive. Especially by the end of the 1700s. This led some to seek a simpler, cleaner, more refined look. Spearheading this new, clean-cut look was George Brummell – better known as ‘Beau’ Brummell. Well-educated and from a decent, middle-class family, Brummell had spent time in the army where he became friends with the Prince of Wales (later the Prince Regent, later George IV).

Rejecting the powder, wigs, scent, makeup, love-spots and other trivialities of the fop, Brummell strove to create a cleaner, simpler look for the man about town. Instead of breeches, he introduced trousers. Instead of bright, flashy, garish colours, he insisted on darker tones. Navy blue. Black. Grey. He contrasted this with crisp, white linen in the form of shirts, and crisp, white neckerchiefs and cravats – the immediate predecessor to the modern necktie. Brummell was such a perfectionist with his wardrobe, it’s said he took up to five hours to get dressed, and required the aide of his manservant to do such things as tying his cravat.

The Dandy Movement, started by Brummell, spread around Europe in the late 1700s and throughout the later Georgian era of the 1810s, 20s, and 30s. This portrait was painted in France in 1801. The cleaner, simpler lines and less flamboyant colours display a complete departure from the loud, garish outfits of the macaronis and fops, just a few decades before.

The simple, elegant look popularised by Brummell started being copied throughout Europe and North America, spreading around the world with European trade and colonisation. It was easier to tailor, and less elaborate. On top of that, the dandy also presented himself differently to the world: No wigs, no powder, rogue, no makeup of any kind, beyond maybe the occasional spritz of cologne. They kept themselves washed, cleaned and close-shaved and insisted on their clothes being carefully laundered. Brummell himself insisted on polishing his boots with champagne!

Victorian Vanity

By the Victorian era in the 1830s, 40s and 50s, men’s and women’s clothing was becoming less elaborate, and more clean-cut and simplified. Excessive use of colour and flashy fabrics was no longer seen as fashionable and things like frilly collars and cuffs, elaborate ruffs and heavy embroidery started to disappear, to be replaced by a simpler, cleaner look of white collars and cuffs, simpler, solid colour dresses and suits, and an overall more sedate form of dressing. For women, the desire for a curvy, hourglass look led to the agonising fad known as ‘tight-lacing‘, where women would literally be crushed into the tightest-laced corsets that they could possibly stand, and which were tied up phenomenally tight so as to help maintain their figures.

For women, corsets had been a thing for centuries (even some men wore them!), but tight-lacing was corsetry taken to a whole new extreme. Women being unable to eat very much of anything, having having their ribcages deformed, and even fainting from the inability to breathe properly became commonplace, and fainting-couches, fans and phials of smelling-salts were required to combat these fainting-spells. For a long time, Victorian-era policemen would carry, as part of their standard-issue equipment – a bottle of smelling-salts (called a ‘lady-reviver’), to bring consciousness to any fainting females falling in the streets.

For men, by the 1800s, the combination of stockings, breeches, long flashy cloaks, coats and waistcoats were seen as excessive and tasteless, and were replaced by simpler, and more conservative suits, paired with trousers. Gradually the shirt, once considered an unsightly undergarment, also started rising in status.

The Shifting Shirt

Although in Victorian times, it was still considered crude and unsightly to appear in public in your shirtsleeves, shirts themselves went through a bit of an image-improvement campaign. Proper dress-shirts, similar to the kind we know today, started being developed. These had no collars, very long sleeves, and long shirttails and were known as ‘tunic shirts’. They were cheap, mass-produced and could be worn by almost any level of man in society.

Because early manufactured shirts were of a ‘one-size-fits-all’ variety for the most part – the sleeves were often quite long. To adjust the sleeves to your length, you rolled or pushed them up at the elbow, and wore a pair of ‘sleeve-garters’ to hold back the excess fabric, so that the cuffs rested at your wrists in the right position. Sleeve-garters are those elastic-band thingies that you see barbershop quartets wearing on their sleeves.

Ebeneezer Scrooge from Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol’, in his long, flowing white night-shirt.

During the Victorian era, the shirt was seen less and less as a sleeping garment. The concept of the ‘nightshirt’ started to fade away, and break off into a separate entity, to be replaced by dressing-gowns and pajamas, since people suddenly decided that maybe it would be more comfortable to sleep in silk, satin and soft woolens, rather than in a shirt that you’d been wearing all day long…possibly for several days straight!

In the early 20th century, shirts and collars were still sold separately. ‘Arrow’ collars were particularly popular – even appearing in the 1929 song ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’ (“…high hats, and Arrow collars, white spats, and lots of dollars…”)

One peculiarity of shirts, right up to the early 20th century, was that they had no collars! Shirt-collars, and even shirt-cuffs, were detachable, removable, and could be (and were) cleaned separately from the shirt itself. This was because the shirt was still seen as underwear, and washing shirts was expensive, what with the price of soap, coal or wood for the hot water, and the sheer time and effort involved in laundering. You would wear your shirt as long as possible (up to a week or more in some cases), and you only changed the collar and cuffs (held on with studs or buttons) with any regularity, finally changing out the shirt at the end of the week. One benefit of this style of shirt was that you could chop and change your collars as you saw fit. Arrow-point, wing-collars, Eton-collars, rounded collars…the variations you could attach to your shirt were pretty extensive! Shirts with attached collars and cuffs wouldn’t become a thing until after the First World War.

Waisted Shirts!

By the 1800s, clothing for women also began to change. Instead of clumsy bodices, women in the 1800s could look forward to the forerunner to the modern blouse – called a shirtwaist. Made out of cotton shirt-fabric (hence the name), the shirtwaist was basically the female version of the men’s shirt, but with included collars and cuffs, which were sewn, rather than buttoned, on. Shirtwaists remained popular throughout the Victorian era, and extended into the early 20th century.

As the 1800s continued, dresses for women also started to get simpler. Outrageously wide crinoline skirts, and bulky, ludicrous bustle skits gave way to simpler, more flowing designs which ere not only more comfortable, but also far more practical. This was followed, in the second half of the 1800s, by the Victorian ‘Rational Dress Movement’, which encouraged women to cast off the bulky, overladen outfits of their parents and grandparents, and to take on simpler, more comfortable, and sensible clothing styles that made moving, eating, breathing and dressing, much more easy, and also, much more comfortable!

The Rational Dress Movement

The Rational Dress Movement is something most people have probably never heard of, and yet in its day, it was a revolution.

By the mid-1800s, the growing Industrial Revolution was affecting everybody’s lives. Even the lives of women! For the first time, it was possible for women to enter the professional workforce. They became nurses, pharmacists, schoolteachers, nannies, governesses, and dressmakers. No longer chained to the stove and shackled to the broom, women in work decided that they needed more practical, and comfortable clothing. Crinoline dresses and enormous bustles were impractical for serving customers behind a shop-counter, serving diners tea, crumpets, cakes and sandwiches, or tending to the sick in hospitals.

Bloomers and similar, less baggy outfits allowed women to take part in sports and activities such as cycling, which were impossible in the bulkier layers of skirts that they used to have to wear. This advertisement is from 1897.

Because of this, by the 1850s, 60s and 70s, a growing number of women, who would later give rise to the suffragette movements of the 1890s and the early 20th century, decided that a fullscale reform of women’s clothing was necessary! Away with the ridiculous layers and layers of skirts and petticoats and stomachers and bodices! Throw out your hoop skirts and hobbles, your bustles and braces! Instead, from now on, women’s clothing was going to look to comfort, ease of movement, and simplicity to be its guides, rather than frivolous use of fabrics and layers!

Skirts and dresses became simpler, less flamboyant and ostentatious. Ladies’ undergarments became less bulky, and were replaced by bloomers – baggy, divided garments which when together, looked like a full skirt, but which parted in the middle to allow for greater movement. The arrival of the bicycle in the 1880s meant that women could, with their new clothing – actually travel long distances in relative speed and safety – without needing to be accompanied by someone to manage the horses!

The Rise of the Sewing Machine!

You could hardly talk about a history of clothing without the impact of the sewing machine.

Although the first sewing machines were invented in the 1700s, it wasn’t until the mid-1800s that enough people with enough money and enough individual ideas and patents, had discovered enough to build a really, properly-functioning sewing machine. The man who did this was a German-American, named Isaac Merritt Singer.

You…might possibly have heard of him.

Singer did not ‘invent’ the sewing machine, as much as he just stitched it together. He did this by stealing all the ideas from all the other people who had claimed to have had ‘invented’ the sewing machine – and then putting all these different patents together into ONE machine!

Unsurprisingly, all these other guys started trying to sue him, but Singer came up with another idea – Since no one person could make a functioning sewing machine without patents from the other parties involved – they should pool their patents to make sewing machines – and then sue anybody else who tried to copy them!

The other sewing-machine pioneers decided that this was such a fantastic idea that they agreed almost at once, and drafted up a document which created a body known as the Sewing Machine Combination – because it took the combined efforts of all these patent-holders to make a functional sewing machine.

From the 1850s onwards, the sewing machine sped up the production of clothing enormously – what took a seamstress, tailor, dressmaker or shirtmaker half a day to produce, could now be done in a matter of an hour or two, and to a much higher standard of quality. For the first time in history, mass-produced clothing was possible. Shirts, undergarments, jackets, trousers, blouses, skirts, dresses and other articles of clothing could be produced cheaply and efficiently.

Sewing machines were expensive in their day – companies like Singer, Wertheim, New Home, Jones, Wheeler & Wilson, and countless others – typically sold their machines through hire-purchase schemes, since it was almost impossible to buy a machine outright due to the high prices. The sewing machine allowed men and women who made their livings from the clothing trade to vastly increase their output and improve the quality of their wares. A house with a sewing machine, and a person who knew how to use it, would have at least some sort of income even if the main breadwinner had lost his job, because the machine virtually paid for itself.

Hand-cranked vibrating-shuttle sewing machine, typical of those manufactured and sold during the late 1800s. Made by the Wertheim Sewing Machine Company, ca. 1910.

From the 1850s up to the 1960s, the vast majority of sewing machines were black, cast-iron monsters mounted on wooden bases. Many were heavily decorated with gold decals, brightly painted patterns and decorations, and even mother-of-pearl inlays. Since they were so expensive, sewing-machine companies wanted their machines to look as attractive as possible so that people would feel that they were worth the outlay.

Clothes for a New Century!

By the early 1900s, clothing was changing faster than ever. By now, things like jeans had been developed (in America in the 1850s), as well as cardigans (England, 1850s), and we’ll round off our look at clothing through history, by looking at two staples of the modern wardrobe: T-shirts, and bras.

The Terrific T-Shirt!

The T-shirt, an article of clothing so common today that anyone reading this posting probably has a dozen of them in their closet right now – was first conceived of back in the 1800s – a time when all shirts in general, were considered as unsightly undergarments, not fit to be seen by the eyes of man – and definitely not by the eyes of women! The T-shirt was an undergarment, descending from the one-piece ‘union-suit’ cold-weather underclothes worn during the late 1800s. These eventually split into two separate garments – the top of the union-suit became a T-shirt, with shorter sleeves, and the bottom became long-johns.

T-shirts became popular in the early 1900s, when they were used as undershirts by factory-workers, sailors and soldiers – spreading widely in popularity during the period of the First World War. By the end of the war, the word ‘T-shirt’ had officially entered the dictionary.

A sailor wearing a T-shirt in the U.S. Navy during the Second World War.

T-shirts exploded in popularity in the 1920s and 30s – cheap and easy to manufacture, they were worn by men and boys looking for a lightweight, comfortable upper garment. Initially, their popularity was largely restricted to the army and navy where they had been widely used back in the 1910s, but with the coming of the Second World War, the T-shirt began to spread. Sailors in the US Navy stationed in the Pacific started wearing T-shirts (originally an undergarment) as outer garments while on deployment, due to the tropical heat. This trend carried over into their postwar-lives, and in the late 40s and during the 1950s, the T-shirt increasingly began to be seen as being a flexible garment, suitable for both underwear and outerwear, depending on the weather.

By the end of the 1950s, the T-shirt had become an accepted article of menswear and children’s wear for boys, replacing things like button-down sleeved and collared shirts, which were more expensive to produce, and which were less comfortable in warm weather. As time went on, the T-shirt became seen as a unisex garment, worn by men, women, boys and girls as a casual, easily-washed, cheap garment which could come in a wide variety of colours and designs.

The Beautiful Bra!

For centuries, women have needed to deal with a little problem…up top. And for a long time, to deal with this, they used everything from strips of cloth wrapped around the chest (‘breast bands’), to corsets, braced with everything from wood to whale-bone to steel! These were effective, but could also get pretty uncomfortable. However, by the end of the 19th century – something new came on the scene. From 1899, the first ‘brassiere’ became available! Invented in Germany by Christine Hardt, the Brassiere remained a niche item for over a decade, before mass production of the new undergarment began just before the First World War.

But, in a time when every woman alive would’ve known nothing but the restriction of a corset, what made the bra suddenly kick off?

Actually – we have the First World War itself, to thank for that.

Remember how I said that the corset went from wood, to whale-bone, to steel?

An early bra, worn over a corset, from ca. 1900.

I wasn’t kidding about that steel. By the Victorian era, corsets used LOTS of steel. Steel eyelets for the drawstrings, steel stays to provide reinforcement, and steel wire to help corsets hold their shape. Now, imagine that every single woman in Britain, America, Canada, France, Australia…etc…etc…etc…is wearing one of these steel-reinforced corsets.

That’s a LOT of steel.

A lot of steel, which could be used for making tanks…planes…rifles…field-cannons…

Basically, the bra was introduced just before, and during the First World War, as a steel-saving measure. Bras needed hardly any metal at all, whereas corsets needed loads! Women were encouraged to cast off their corsets and embrace bras! Women everywhere were gradually convinced that it was their patriotic duty to upgrade their underwear, and save steel for the war-effort! Huzzah!

By the end of the First World War, the bra had become an accepted garment of women’s clothing. It was gradually improved in the years that followed, with refinements in design, shape and support introduced in the 1920s and lettered cup-sizes coming in by the 1930s.

Closing the Lid on Clothing

Well, this ends our brief look at the history of clothing, and its evolution from the ruffs, doublet and hose, the bodice, corset and stays, to the arrival of jeans, T-shirts, bras, which, at the turn of the 20th century, heralded the coming of the modern wardrobe!

 

Mad Dogs and Englishmen: Pith Helmets – The Original Sun Hat!

One of the most popular postings I ever wrote for this blog was about hats. It continues to be searched, read, viewed and commented on, much to my disbelief and amazement.

Thanks to everyone who’s visited this blog and likes hats. I like hats too. Hats are neat.

I’m taking this opportunity to write about the fascinating and whimsical story behind one type of hat in particular. A hat which has generally fallen out of favour, ever since the late 20th century, and which has yet to undergoĀ any sort of serious mainstream revival.

I am of course talking about the Pith Helmet.

Boaters, Panamas, Trilbies, Homburgs, Fedoras, flat-caps, panel-caps, Fez-caps, Greek fishing-caps, even the deerstalker hat made famous by Sherlock Holmes, and countless other items of headwear have all survived well into the 21st century. Most men and women would wear them anywhere and everywhere, and think absolutely nothing of it. And yet, the same freedom of movement has somehow never been afforded to the humble pith helmet, which I think is a shame, given its noble history and many excellent qualities.

This post aims to explain the wonders of the Pith Helmet. What makes it such an iconic and fascinating…well…hat…essentially, and why it lasted so long.

What Is a ‘Pith Helmet’?

The Pith Helmet is a hard-shell, high-crowned hat with a wide, sloping brim made of the ‘pith’ (soft heartwood) of the Sola plant. It’s for this reason they’re also called ‘Sola Topees’ or Sola hats. Other names include sun-hats or sun-helmets. Pith helmets are constructed thus: Soft pith from the Sola plant is placed on a mold and glued on, layer after layer, forming the shell of the helmet. The helmets are built up kind of like how you make papier-mache. Once the glue dries and a hard shell has been attained, the helmet is removed from the mold andĀ is swathed in tight-fitting cotton to protect the shell.

Originally, this cotton covering was white, but over time, most pith helmets were stained an earthy sand colour called Khaki. This was originally a form of camouflage in the sandy regions of Africa, India and the Middle East, but soon it became standard on most pith helmets. These days, pith helmets are typically manufactured in two colours – white, and khaki. There is no real distinction between one or the other, except that white pith helmets are used largely for ceremonial roles, and khaki pith helmets are used for more practical roles.

The word ‘Khaki’ comes from the Persian word ‘Khak’, which literally means ‘soil’. Therefore – Khaki-coloured helmets were helmets which were the colour of soil, or dust. Some people in Britain still use the slang-word ‘khak’ to this day, meaning general filth, grit, grime and mess.

What are Pith Helmets Made Of?

Traditionally, pith helmets were constructed of sola pith, although when pith wasn’t available, they were alsoĀ madeĀ of cork. Today, helmets tend to be made out of one or the other, depending on local resources. Pith helmets made in Vietnam (where a lot of pith helmets are made for export) are still made of traditional pith.

What is the Purpose of a Pith Helmet?

OK, they look cool…but…what the hell do they DO??

The Pith Helmet’s design was taken from the German Pickelhaube helmet (Those fancy Prussian ones with the brass spikes on top), and came into being around the mid-1800s. The Pith Helmet was designed for use in hot, dry and humid climates, such as Africa, Asia, the Middle East and India. It has a number of features which make it ideal for these kinds of conditions. Let’s see what they are…

My own pith helmet, made of cork, lined in dark khaki cotton fabric with a neatly folded puggaree around the crown. Leather chin-strap and six riveted ventilation holes. French colonial style.

The pith helmet has a high crown. This keeps the top of the helmet away from your hair and prevents sweat-buildup. The hard shell made of pith means that no matter what happens, it won’t cave in and cause sweat to build up in your hair. The helmet comes with steel-reinforced ventilation holes. The number of vent-holes varies depending on the style of helmet you have. My helmet up above is the French colonial style. These traditionally came with six vent-holes – three on each side, arranged in a triangle. Wind blowing through the vent-holes cool the head down and wick away sweat.

One of the most noticeable characteristics of the pith helmet is theĀ wide, sloping brim. This is designed to keep the sun and rain off your face and neck. The leather belt across the front brim is actually meant to be a chin-strap, stored up there when not in use.

However, one of the most famous characteristics of the pith helmet is that it’s designed to get wet!

Soaking your Helmet

Pith helmets (Well-made ones, anyway), are designed to be soaking wet when they’re used. A good-quality cork, or pith helmet is designed to retain water. On a hot day, dunk the helmet in a bucket of water, or flip the crown upside down and fill it with water and let it soak in for a few hours. Drain off the excess water, shake the helmet to remove the runoff, and then put it on.

Out in the heat of the sun, the water evaporating from the helmet will keep you cool. The helmet’s rigid shape will stop the water getting all over you and the hard shell won’t collapse on top of your head. So long as the helmet is regularly re-hydrated, it’ll remain cool and comforting throughout the day. It was the pith helmet’s ability to act as your own personal cooling-device that made it so popular in hot and humid countries like India, Singapore, Vietnam and elsewhere.

The History of the Pith Helmet

Developed in the mid-1800s, the pith helmet was originally military-wear. It was modeled after the German Pickelhaube helmet and was issued to troops stationed in Africa, the Middle East and Asia from the 1850s up until after the Second World War. Apart from soldiers, they were also issued to police-officers in places like China, Hong Kong, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaya and Australia.

Helmets were originally white, but the whiteness made the soldiers which wore them a target to the enemy. To make them less conspicuous, they covered them in dust and sand. This stained them a sandy yellow-brown hue which was named ‘Khaki’, after the Persian ‘Khak’ (‘Dirt’). This led to the helmets being manufactured in both white and khaki. The colours of the helmets issued to soldiers varied according to the uniforms they wore and the ranks they held. Badges of rank were placed on the fronts of the helmets.

The pith helmet soon became popular with Western civilians living in hot climates and it was worn by both men and women. Europeans going to South America, Panama, the Caribbean, Africa, or Asia would buy a pith helmet before going. In fact for a time it was believed that if you were going to these places, you NEEDED a pith helmet because the paler Caucasian complexion was too fragile to bear up under such strong, equatorial sunbeams. A large, broad-brimmed helmet to provide defense against the rays was essential!

Pith helmets continued to be popular, and continued to be military-issued, right up until the 1950s. Due to the wide range ofĀ locales where they saw service, pith helmets gradually developed into about half a dozen different distinct styles, each one associated with a specific country or organisation.

The Types of Pith Helmets

Over time, the pith helmet developed into about six different distinct styles, each one associated with a specific country or organisation. They were, in no particular order…

Foreign Service Helmet

The Foreign Service Helmet is the quintessential Victorian-era British pith-helmet! It conjures up images of the colonial wars of the 1800s, of Safaris in Africa, of the British Raj, of the film ‘Zulu’, and the big game hunters of old. The Foreign Service Helmet has the highest crown. It also has a protruding, beak-like rim and sloping back. These are designed to keep sun and rain off the face and neck. They were available in both white and Khaki.

French-Style Pith Helmet

To protect them from the heat in such places as French North Africa, French Guiana and French Indochina, the French Army adopted this pith helmet. It’s got a low crown, it’s oval-shaped with a wide, turned-down brim. It has six vent-holes (three on each side) for cooling the head.

USMC Pith Helmet

The United States Marine Corps (USMC) adopted the pith helmet as part of its uniform starting in the early 1900s. At first-glance, it looks just like the French one, but it’s got a much higher crown and more vent-holes. Twelve, instead of six.

Bombay Bowler

Winston Churchill wearing a Bombay Bowler

Named after the Indian city of Bombay, this type of pith helmet was more ‘hat-like’ than other helmets and was designed more for civilian wear than military use, despite this, it still had the same characteristics as all the other helmets – it was lightweight and retained water for use in hot climates. While other helmets were more rounded, the Bombay Bowler has a flatter crown and straighter edges.

Vietnamese Pith Helmet

Worn by the North Vietnamese Army during the Vietnam War, this pith helmet is one of the most distinctive styles ever made. It is the only commonly-accepted version of the pith-helmet which isn’t white or khaki – but green, to go with classic Military Green of army uniforms. It’s also the most ‘bowl-like’ of the helmets, having a uniform dome-like crown and rim.

The Safari Helmet

The more generic ‘safari’ helmet

 

The last style of pith-helmet is the safari helmet. This varied significantly in size, crown-shape and height, and the number of ventilation holes. It doesn’t conform to any particular style previously mentioned. It most closely resembles the French-style pith helmet, but the positioning and number of the vent-holes does not always match the traditional three on each side, set out in an upright triangle.

These various styles of pith helmets remained common up until the mid-20th century but are now usually worn only for costumes, parade/ceremonial uniforms, or historical reenactments. That said, a well-made pith helmet is still one which will fulfill its original functions and capabilities as orginally intended. The next time you head out into the wilderness with a break-open shotgun and a yen for some big game, perhaps bring one along. If you go camping in the bush, the desert or the outback, one of these might prove useful. If nothing else, it’ll help hold a small amount of water if you turn it upside-down! They’re whimsical, useful, classic, charming and practical.

 

‘Through the Looking Glass’ – A History of Spectacles

It’s always important to make sure that you have everything you require before you leave the house. Spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch.

Lots of people wear glasses, even if they don’t want to admit to it. Regular glasses, reading glasses, bifocals, sunglasses, pince-nez, monocles, quizzing-glasses…where do all these different types of glasses come from? Put on your favourite pair of specs and let’s see if we can’t focus in on this fuzzy little problem.

Focusing on Lenses

Lenses used for correcting vision or for magnifying small objects, have been used since ancient times. Originally they were polished stones or crystals. When early glass-making was perfected, a spherical glass container filled with water was discovered to have magnifying properties. In the Medieval era, people with poor eyesight might use a “reading-stone” to better examine the words on the page in front of them. Reading-stones were spheres of glass sliced in half and polished, so that they could be slid along a page, magnifying the text underneath.

By the late 1200s, the first two-lens eyeglasses of a kind which we might recognise today, were developed, most likely in Italy in the 1280s. By 1301, Venice, the famous center of glass-blowing and glass-making in Europe, had established a guild to regulate the manufacture and sale of spectacles. Once the blowing and grinding of lenses had been perfected, and had been fully taken-over by glass-makers, mankind could then start focusing on mounting these lenses into frames.

Early Spectacles

Early spectacles were very crude. Two lenses in a pair of frames, joined together.

And that was it.

The frames holding the lenses, if they were identical, might be hinged in the middle, to fold up, or they might have a ribbon or chain about them to catch them if they fell, but from the Middle Ages until the 1600s, most spectacles were simple hand-held things. Like if you took a regular pair of glasses and snapped the arms off it. They might have a small handle on the side with which to hold them, or else you just held them by the frames. Useful, but hardly practical.Ā Because spectacles could be expensive, if you managed to buy a pair, you probably wanted them to look nice. Frames of gold, wood, ivory and bone, or actual tortoise-shell were popular. Those ugly ‘tortoise-shell’ glasses you used to have as a kid? Cheap plastic junk. Real tortoise-shell used to be used back in the old days.

As you can imagine, having to hold your glasses to your face with your hand was extremely impractical. The distance between your spectacles and your eyes changed constantly, pulling things in, and out of focus. It made the hand and arm tired, and it used up one hand, which might otherwise be doing something useful.

The Pince-Nez

The first solution to this was the Pince Nez (French, literally, for ‘Pinch-Nose’, pronounced ‘pas-nay‘).

Solid gold pince-nez glasses. The frames could be pushed apart, and the clip in the middle literally pinched the nose to stay on the face. The handle on the side held a ribbon or string, which would attach to the wearer’s clothing to prevent loss, or breakage if dropped

Pince-Nez spectacles came with a spring-loaded clip between the lenses, and underneath the bridge that held the two frames together. The clip quite literally pinched your nose and held the glasses in front of your eyes, allowing both hands to be free for use. This was an advancement, but constantly having the clamp biting down on the top of your nose was uncomfortable in long stretches. Most people kept their pince-nez on a chain and only put them on when it was really necessary to do so, to prevent the constant pressure and pinching from becoming irritable.

The Lorgnette

Although pince-nez allowed people to use their hands, the constant pinching was irritating at best and distracting and painful at the worst of times. One alternative was the lorgnette.

Antique, gold-mounted lorgnette from the late-19th century. It’s held by the handle on the left. The ring on the side would be for a ribbon, string or chain, with which to secure the lorgnette around your neck, or to your clothes, to catch it if dropped

Like the ‘Pince Nez’, the ‘Lorgnette’ did not come with folding arms. It came with a small handle that stuck out the side of the frame, which you gripped in your fingers and held in front of your eyes. The handle might have a cord or ribbon run through it, to catch it if you dropped it. Lorgnettes were common during the 17-1800s. For fairly obvious reasons, they, like all previous designs, were used as sparingly as possible. Some lorgnettes came with a folding bridge, that allowed the entire thing to be folded up to be more compact. Others came with spring-loaded handle-cases. The spectacles were folded into the case. When they were needed, they popped out on a spring, and the case then doubled as the grip and handle.

The Quizzing-Glass

How can you give someone a quizzical expression without a quizzing-glass??

Yours Truly taking a closer look at his blog through his quizzing-glass…Oh dear! A spulling mistake!

Popular during the Georgian and Victorian eras, the quizzing-glass was a handheld pocket magnifying-glass. It was designed to be small, portable, and to be carried around by the owner so that he or she could whip it out at a moment’s notice and take a closer look at something.

Suffering from myopia as I do, my own 5x quizzing-glass is an essential piece of kit. I carry this with me where-ever I go. Vital for reading stuff like labels, menus and price-tags. There’s no reason a disability can’t have some flashy accessories

Although they were supposed to be visual aids, quizzing-glasses were also very fashionable, and it was common for men and women to keep one about their persons. Along with its better-known cousin, the monocle, peering at someone with upper-class disgust through the lens of your quizzing-glass has become a stereotype of aristocracy, nobility, old money families and the Nouveau Riche the world over! The quizzing-glass was born in the 1700s and lasted well into the Edwardian era. You can still buy them today, if you know where to look.

The Monocle

I say! When it comes to showing upper-class disdain, genuine curiosity, attempting to keep up appearances or finishing off that last bit of kit for your steampunk party-outfit, the monocle is considered the king of eyewear!

The monocle is the younger brother of the quizzing-glass. It differs in two ways:

1. It’s held in the eye-socket, and not away from the eye.Ā 
2. It’s custom-cut and ground to fit its owner’s eye-socket.Ā 

From the Georgian era of the 1700s until the mid-20th century, monocles were worn by almost everyone, from upper-class dandies, fops and toffs, to jewellers, gentlemen, ladies, aristocrats, the well-to-do, and German, Prussian and Austrian military officers peering down at maps, while they decided on their next move on the Western or Eastern Fronts during the Franco-Prussian War, WWI and WWII.

A monocle mounted in a gold-filled gallery-frame

The monocle was designed to be worn by people with poor eyesight in only one eye. It seemed silly and a waste of money to buy lenses for BOTH eyes when only one had a vision-issue. So the monocle was invented.

Properly cut and measured for its owner’s eye-socket, the monocle was designed to be held in-place by the cheekbone and the eye-socket and eyebrow. Fitted properly, it wouldn’t (or was less-likely) to drop out of one’s face and shatter on the ground, or land in one’s drink, if you saw something that shocked or surprised you.

Monocles have died out a bit in recent years, mostly due to advances in optometry, but you can still buy them, and wear them. And sometimes they’re still prescribed, due to customer not requiring a full set of glasses for his or her particular eye-condition.

Monocles come in one of three different styles. First is just a plain glass disc with ridges around the edge for grip. This is the simplest and cheapest form. Next is the metal-framed monocle, typically framed in gold or silver.

The last form of monocle is one with a gallery-frame, shown above. Galleried monocles were designed for people whose natural bone-structure or facial-structure did not work well with regular monocles. The lens itself was not held in the eye-socket. Rather, the extended gallery was held in the socket, and the lens was held to the gallery. This allowed a person to wear a monocle even if his personal bone-structure wouldn’t allow him to do so naturally.

Modern Spectacles

Modern spectacles or eyeglasses as we recognise them today, with identical frames, a bridge, nose-pads, and hinged, folding arms on the sides to rest on one’s ears, were invented in the 1700s. Throughout the 19th century, they were in constant competition with the other forms of eyewear previously mentioned in this posting.

Having to wear spectacles all the time was seen as a form of weakness. Physical weakness, because it suggested to others that the wearer did not have sufficient vision to handle regular tasks. But as attitudes changed in the 1800s, the weak stigma of spectacles began to be replaced by one of studious intelligence. And wearing permanent spectacles instead of carrying around occasional eyepieces such as lorgnettes, became more acceptable and stylish as the 1800s progressed.

Bifocals

Famous American inventor, printer, founding-father and general brainiac, Benjamin Franklin is credited with inventing a pair of spectacles with lenses of two different powers. Franklin suffered from both near-and-farsightedness. It was extremely frustrating for him to constantly have to change his spectacles while he worked. One pair for regular use, one pair for close-up use. Imagine having to repair his printing-press with one pair of glasses, then stopping, removing them, and putting on his other pair, to read the type in the print-bed.

Franklin solved these frustrations by cutting the lenses in half. His resulting creation meant that he could simply shift his eyesight up or down, to look through either the top, or bottom of his glasses, depending on what he wanted to read. The term ‘Bifocals’, or spectacles with two different types of focusing lenses, was coined in 1824.

Sunglasses

The first sunglasses of a kind were invented by the Chinese in the 12th century, using thin slices of smoky quartz crystal, polished until translucent. Sunglasses again appeared in Italy in the 1700s, made of tinted glass, they were worn by those who wanted to protect their eyes from the strong Mediterranean sun, or from the reflections of the sunlight coming off the sea, and were first made in Venice, the glass-blowing capital of Europe.

However, sunglasses as we would know them today – tinted glass or plastic lenses in a dark plastic, metal, or brass frame, are a relatively recent invention. They became popular in the 1910s and 20s, and were worn by film-stars to protect their eyes from the glare of early studio-lights, and the blinding flash of early flashbulb-cameras.

Ray Ban ‘Aviator’-style sunglasses

Sunglasses became more and more popular during the 1930s and 40s. One group of people who came to rely on sunglasses were early airplane pilots. Due to the un-tinted windows and windshields of early airplanes (or in some cases, due to the complete absence of windshields altogether), they required sunglasses to block the glare from the sun.

Among the most famous types sunglasses out there are ‘Aviators’, developed in 1936, for fighter-pilots in the United States Army Air Force (USAAF), to protect them from the glare of the sun while flying missions. Before, during and after WWII, ‘Aviator’-style sunglasses became popular with American youth, something which has not changed in nearly 80 years. Their sleek, simple, minimal design has ensured their popularity well into the 21st century.

Ā Want a Closer Look?

The History of Eyeglasses

“What Man Devised that he might See”

Quizzing Glasses

The College of Optometrists – Quizzing Glasses

The College of Optometrists – History of Various Glasses-Styles

 

 

A Little Wooden Jeeves – My Vintage Clothes Valet

The Valet Stand

I have wanted one of these things for years, to keep my clothes organised, instead of hanging them on hooks or draping them over the backs of chairs. Ever seen one? It’s called a clothes valet, or a valet stand…

Valet stands were once common in households of the well-to-do, typically, the Middle Class and upwards, who could afford nicer clothes, and could spend the money required for a stand to keep them neat and tidy.

Such stands were common from the 1800s up to the mid-20th century. When men’s daily fashion steered away from trousers, jackets, suits, sport-coats and blazers in the decades after the Second World War, valet stands became less and less useful, and eventually people stopped buying them, and making them. But they are handy pieces of kit for those who still tend to dress in a more conservative or traditional, vintage style.

Valet stands can range from the incredibly simple, to the amazingly elaborate. A really simple stand might just have a coat-hanger on top of a pair of legs with three connector-bars at the base to serve as a coat and shoe-stand. A really elaborate valet-stand can come with a coat-hanger, trouser-bar, shoe-rests, compartmentalised jewellery-caddy, tie-bar, hat-stand…even a chair with built-in nick-nack drawer!

The Backstory

A stand like this would’ve been typical of the style popular from the last quarter of the 1800s up to the postwar period, up to around the 1960s, when men’s fashion took a serious turn. I bought the stand featured in these photographs, today, at an antiques fair, for $5.00!

The clothes valet was standing outside one of the tent-stalls at the antiques fair, with some sort of advertising poster or sign clipped onto it, and it was obviously being used as a sandwich-board or an advertising-stand. And initially, I didn’t think it was for sale. But when I got right up close to it, I noticed a white price-tag hanging from it, which said: “$5.00”.

And my heart just went pitty-patter. I tracked down the stallholder and inquired about this amazing andĀ under-appreciatedĀ piece of woodwork standing, unloved and ignored, outside her tent. She said that the price was indeed correct. $5.00. Once she’d removed the clips and the poster, I was welcome to take it, she said. So I coughed up a fiver and walked off with the stand.

The best five bucks I’ve ever spent. You’ll never find one of this vintage, of this style, in this condition, for that kind of money, not even if you tried. This was a real vintage score :D.

The Features of the Stand

So, let’s show you around the stand, such as it is…

Up the top here, we have the tie-bar, then below it, the shoulder-width coat-hanger. Underneath that is the recessed tray for things like watches, cufflinks, collar-bars, tie-bars and other such masculine jewellery.

Beneath the jewellery-tray is the trouser-bar, for hanging your trousers on. And right at the bottom is the…

…shoe-rest.

You simply can’t find beautiful vintage household pieces like this anymore, and I consider myself very lucky to have this, for such a super-low price. It’s in perfect condition, barring a few dings and scratches. Apart from that, it looks almost brand-new.

A valet-stand made today, brand-new out of the workshop, would probably cost you hundreds of dollars, even for a simple bog-standard one. A mid-range stand, looking something like this…I don’t even want to guess! Even antique ones aren’t cheap. I got this for a song, and I couldn’t be happier.

In retrospect, the song should probably be: “Top Hat, White Tie and Tails“. Hahaha!!

It’s absolutely beautiful, it’s been something I’ve chased after for at least five years, and I finally have one, for possibly the lowest price that one of these has ever sold for, barring one that was given away for free. And I don’t ever see something like that happening!

Clothes Valets Today

You can still buy clothes valets today. You can order them online and such. But nothing beats one that was built back in the days when they were an essential for any well-dressed man about town, and might’ve been found in almost any man’s bedroom. The quality, the style and the sturdiness comes as standard, and you can be assured that whoever used this thing before you was just as snappy a dresser as you are.