A Swiss Dress from the 16th Century (2015)

It's not that crazy for models to walk the runway practically naked today in some of the more avant garde shows. I have no reason to believe the fashion industry was any more sane back in the 16th century.

That said, there may be extenuating circumstances for those two outfits. There isn't a lot of context on that page.

Yes. Breasts really weren't considered in the same way for different times in history. A lot of what we perceive about modesty in those times was really a Victorian view of the past, imprinting their morals on the past. Some of the constructs we still might consider rude, at least before the churches started blaming women for so much ill.

Apparently the woodcuts are from a tailor’s pattern book, and the nudes are intended to show a sampling of women’s body shapes, allowing the tailor to match a set of dress styles to a customer’s own shape.

If anyone is interested in serious recreation of clothing from the Middle Ages, a good start would be with the series begun by Janet Arnold, “Patterns of Fashion” vols. 1-5; Jenny Tiramani’s “17th Century Women’s Dress Patterns”, and “The Tudor Tailor” series, by Ninya Mikhaila and Jane Malcolm-Davies. None of those are specific to 16th century Switzerland, but all of them are thoroughly well-researched.

An quintessential Alpine disease if there ever was one.

Ideally, all websites should be respectful of the limits and speed of bandwidth and processing power available for mobiles and limit ads. Unfortunately that's not true. And that's not in our control.

The next very best solution is to install Firefox. Then add UBlock Origin. Now all the websites are fat trimmed and lean. I often endup having 200 pr more open tabs on mobile and it has never been a problem (Open tabs double as ToBeRead list) . May be it has crashed twice in the past 2 years. I have never lost a tab during the crash, a power failure or a restart. Always quite fast.

Actually it makes a lot more sense to have Firefox on Mobile than the desktop as it is the only browser (as far as I know) that allows you to block ads.

Someone who painstakingly recreates, by hand, an object based on 500 year old woodcuts while learning several new manufacturing techniques in the process matches one of the definitions of hacker.

"6. An expert or enthusiast of any kind. One might be an astronomy hacker, for example."

http://catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html

And the result of this hacker matches the second canonical definition of "hack":

"2. n. An incredibly good, and perhaps very time-consuming, piece of work that produces exactly what is needed."

http://catb.org/jargon/html/H/hack.html

The production of this dress was an appropriate application of ingenuity that resulted in a carefully crafted work of art, which is literally hacking:

"Hacking might be characterized as ‘an appropriate application of ingenuity’. Whether the result is a quick-and-dirty patchwork job or a carefully crafted work of art, you have to admire the cleverness that went into it."

http://catb.org/jargon/html/meaning-of-hack.html

It is interesting (to me at least) because it is something I have not seen before, done skillfully, and is not Yet Another Article About Rust or Containers (YAAARC).

I know nothing about dress making, but I find any kind of serious research into the past combined with recreating techniques to be very interesting, especially when our knowledge of the original process is incomplete. It's entertaining, but it's also a kind of doubly informative - it gives information about the past, and it gives information about the present.

HN isn't just about programming. It's about absorbing deep knowledge from a variety of sources, whether that's the field of pharmacology, industrial manufacturing, or what have you.

Maker culture is pretty common on HN.

Someone has spent not only the time to recreate a period correct dress, but also do a well written write up of it for the rest of us.

I'm not particularly interested in sewing, and don't wear dresses (well only on weekends ;) ). But its great that other people are interested in that.

Surely the best thing about the internet is stumbling across some blog about some niche interest you had never even considered before, and being enlightened by it. I much rather this than some web 2.0 social media platform with no vowels in the name.

I suppose you could make the argument that HN is for developers, and so should only contain developer things, I don't think the field would advance very rapidly if no one even brought in anything from outside the field. Just wait, next month some web 3.0 doohicky will be announced, informed by this very article.

This is more or less the equivalent of code archaeology in a different field--how did things get to be the way they are? Why is this or that technique used?

Totally fascinating and worth reading. Or skipping over if it isn't your cup of tea.

You do realize that there is a voting-based algorithm & that's how things make it to the front page of hacker news right? Do you find every article on the front page personally interesting? Do you ask on those other articles why others found it helpful?

I don't think this comment should have been so heavily downvoted. You didn't say "this shouldn't interest people here," which would be obnoxious. Rather you displayed curiosity about why people were interested, which seems neutral at worst.