The old sartorial saying - “Clothes make the man” - also applies to the characters in my books, whether they’re men, women, or children. I take care with dressing them to be not only historically accurate, but also to reflect their personality, financial means, and social status. Sometimes surviving 18thc clothes that I’ve seen in a collection or museum linger in my imagination for years, waiting for just the right character to wear them.
I saw this 18thc woman's jacket in 2017 at the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum of Colonial Williamsburg, when it was on loan from the Mary D. Doering Collection as part of the Printed Fashions: Textiles for Clothing and Home exhibition. The jacket was made from an extravagantly patterned textile that was imported from India to Europe, and there first stitched into a garment around c1750 and later remodeled. The fabric is a mordant-painted and resist dyed cotton, lined in linen. Jackets like this would have been worn over a linen shift and a contrasting petticoat (skirt), and would likely have been accessorized with a triangular kerchief around the neck, with white ruffles pinned to the bottoms of the sleeves. While today we think of cotton as an inexpensive work-horse fabric, in 18thc Britain or America this would have been considered a luxurious garment.
According to the exhibition placard:
This charming jacket is constructed from an earlier India chintz textile, clear evidence that the chintz was sufficiently prized to warrant restyling years later. The center-front closure suggests a date in the late 1770s or early 1780s. Fitted jackets worn with separate skirts called petticoats were practical and comfortable for work and informal occasions. They were more economical than full-length gowns because they did not require additional yards of fabric.
For my practical-minded heroine living in 1780s Virginia, the cotton chintz would have been the perfect solution to steamy summers in the Tidewater. Yet the cost of the imported textile would have served a purpose, too, reflecting her husband’s rising status in the new country in the years after the Revolution.
Above: Jacket, maker unknown, Europe, c1780; textile, India, c1750. Colonial Williamsburg. Photo ©2017 Susan Holloway Scott.
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