There was a great sewing sundries shop near me, long ago, called Old Sew and Sew. There’s a possibility that’s what I have become.
I intended to spend the last three weeks before Miniatura, the best Doll’s house show in the Miniverse, sewing for all the doll’s dolls, of which there are many. But I side tracked myself.
I took one of the glass eyed little girls out of the box to dress, to hold one of the doll’s dolls for a photograph. Then I took a different little girl doll to keep her company, then, because they are only about four, I took a couple of mothers to look after them.
The nature of creativity is a hard thing to pin down but it definitely involves following a thought into existence in reality.
Scratting around on the Internet I came across a lovely Tudor portrait of a girl, dressed every bit as poshly as any of Henry’s women. The portrait and information was posted by Philp Mould’s gallery, who, upon examination of the portrait, had discovered writing that indicated that the sitter was only three, or, as it was painted in the corner, ‘in her fourth year.’ How you get a three year old to stay still long enough to paint a portrait, I am not sure. At portraiture, which has sadly closed, sitters for an hour, a break, and then three quarters of an hour, usually gave a list of which bits of their anatomy had gone to sleep, very readily.
The commentary on the portrait of the little girl remarked upon the necessity of Tudors to assert lineage. One instantly thinks of Shakespeare’s second best bed, that he was at such pains to mention in his will. Of course, people had less in the way of possessions of all sorts than we do today and much less chance of getting more easily. However, I think that the emphasis on inheritance had quite a lot to do with the Black Death, which continued to devastate populations of villages and towns from the thirteenth century right up to the eighteenth.
Whatever the cause, that toddlers in Tudor times wore much the same as their parents in well-to-do families, is a fact supported by contemporary illustrations, in portraits and in carvings on tombs.
I have started by dressing a mother and I have done it authentically. She is wearing a sleeveless shift with a leather corset laced at the front, a heavily embroidered underskirt and an over gown, also laced, I realised as I made the over gown how much it is like a dressing gown today, in the manner of putting it on, the closure and the amount of material in the garment to give warmth. At present I have decided not to pin a placard, the stiffened front of the gown that covered the lacing of the corset, to the front of her; she is informally with her little daughter and needs to move quite quickly.
Living near Stratford on Avon I’m familiar with the Shakespearean properties. In one of them, I can’t remember which, there is a handy device for busy mothers. It’s a wooden walking frame with inescapable holes for legs, fastened to one of the wooden upright frames which is holding the building together. The inserted toddler could go round and round, but not away. I wonder if Philip Mould’s portrait was painted that way, catching a look each time the sitter came round the pole.
As usual there is nothing fast about authentic miniature clothing. I have made a rod for my own back. I’d have dressed many more dolls if I’d just got one book with pictures in it of costume through the ages and followed it; I have interviewed doll artists who did exactly that. Using dolls made from commercial moulds and patterns adapted from doll dressing books, they were able to make a very reliable and predictable product and know how much it cost and be altogether business-like about the whole undertaking.
I think the way I do it is more like a branch of art. I have made patterns for my dolls and I do make a toile in kitchen paper for each one but they’re all individual. If I do two the same it’s only to see how the second one will turn out in different fabric or with a different trimming.
The slowness is compounded by the need to do things properly. The bare feet with the glazed toe nails are shod in proper, removable shoes. I wish I had kept a photograph from a newspaper some years ago, when Tudor shoes were discovered in what had been fish ponds at the bottom of the mud. The anaerobic conditions had preserved the leather perfectly and confirmed what we suspected from portraits; Tudor shoes not only had squared off toes, they didn’t have a left and a right.
Of all the difficulties with sixteenth century dress I think, for modern people, the lack of foot specific fitting, in shoes, must be the trickiest. Used to modern fabrics, we would have difficulty at first with wearing linen next to the skin. It does, however get, softer the more you wash and wear it. Leather corsets laced under the bust would be supportive and warm, I could wear them. Several layers of clothing in houses heated by one central fire, would be sensible and there are many cultures today in which the hair is always covered. But the shoes with the squared off toes must have slopped around a lot. Perhaps the Tudors found them an improvement on early mediaeval shoes, those foot tight, thin shoes with the curly toes so long they had to be tied to the shins to stop the wearer tripping over his own toes.
I find costume history fascinating. What people find comfortable depends on what they are used to. Before the close-fitting clothing with various fibres that give stretch, which have characterised the post WW2 years and emphasised the body shape more than any fashion since hosiery for men from the twelfth century onwards, clothing for most people was, above all things, adaptable. Slacker lacing here, moving a button over there, or just not lacing your drawers so tight, allowed clothing to be worn until it ended up as bombast or polishing rags.
Here in the twenty-first century in the Western world we are, in theory, freer than we have ever been, to be ourselves and yet more constrained in the way we look than ever before. Fashion tends to hold a mirror up to prevailing worries. The Marriage of Arnolfini with an apparently pregnant bride (who was not, it’s just gathering on the fashionable dress) reflects depopulation worries following the first surge of the Black Death in Europe. Similarly the burgeoning birth rates that always follow a war, that gave rise to the baby boomers, also generated the androgenous and pre-pubescent favoured body shapes of the Sixties. In the hungry Renaissance well-fed Goddesses lie around every landscape, just as stick-thin models haunt the catwalks of our over-fed times.
It might all be summed up as wanting what you haven’t got. In my case thinner thighs, a flatter tum and a lot more time for doll dressing.
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Tickets are on sale for the best show in the Miniverse. Find out about it here: www.miniatura.co.uk
