Introduction

Summary

Anyone who works with historical dress and textiles must in some way refashion them. Artists wishing to depict historical persons or allegorical figures may dress them in an imagined version of the costume of former times, or they may adopt and adapt the dress and fabrics of their own day in order to convey to their audience messages such as opulence, kingship, or degeneracy in their chosen characters. Poets may idealise or invent costumes for their characters, and soft furnishings to surround them; but there may be some truth, however exotic (like rare, colourful foreign furs), behind the imagined luxury. Surviving medieval and early modern garments and other textiles only continue to exist because someone made that possible – for example by placing them in an airtight tomb, keeping them in a moth-free environment, or even by discarding them to be preserved in the damp conditions of an urban rubbish heap. Textiles that were deliberately conserved and protected – because they were innately valuable, because of their usefulness, because of their associations with a saintly or other important person, or simply because they had been acquired among other collectables – often had to be repaired. This might involve patching and darning, replacing lost pearls and gemstones, adding or replacing linings, and sometimes replacing whole sections of cloth. These processes were sometimes carried out sympathetically, sometimes rather more cavalierly, but in each case, they changed the nature of the object, remaking it. When textiles are displayed, these changes are not necessarily flagged up in the succinct identifying cards on their showcases, which may provide the only information the general viewing public learn about the items.

Today many people wish to recreate historical dress and textiles, for theatre or film, for Living History purposes or simply to produce and display something as bright and as beautiful as the original must have been, though it is faded and shabby now. This cannot be done well without meticulous research, and even when that has been carried out, there are unanswered questions which can only be tackled with experiment, trial and error.

The authors in this book have approached the issue of reimagining dress and textiles from very different viewpoints: visual, textual, material, real and fictional.