Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part IVa: Dyed in the Wool
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Curious: there is an unbelievably huge wealth of this type of "content" that lives almost exclusively in history books, or at least seems profoundly difficult to find on the internet.
Then there's the insane illusion that virtually all knowledge is accessible within the first Google search result page, so I'm always pleased whenever articles like this one find their way to the surface...
Incidentally, if anyone is interested in the general topic of making cloths / tailoring, I just recorded a podcast episode on this - the show is about deep, obsessive hobbies and the first episode is about a neuroscientist who transforms into a tailor at night: https://www.whentheworkisdone.com/
As an example: have you ever wondered about the state of toxicology in the late Victorian era? What poisons were known, what poisons were detectable (and how), and other nuts-and-bolts details of a certain kind of murder mystery? This information is hard to find in modern web pages -- particularly if you don't know enough to tell who is a trustworthy guide to the past.
But a HathiTrust search does the job easily.
Use the "advanced full text search" form. Search for the word poisons. Restrict results to English language documents in the years 1880-1900. You'll get a wealth of books back, like this illustrated 1885 text:
"Micro-chemistry of poisons : including their physiological, pathological, and legal relations; with an appendix on the detection and microscopic determination of blood: adapted to the use of the medical jurist, physician, and general chemist"
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nnc2.ark:/13960/t9d51...
Or from 1883:
"Indian snake poisons, their nature and effects."
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924003195769&vi...
1899:
"Practical materia medica for nurses, with an appendix containing poisons and their antidotes"
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=loc.ark:/13960/t0pr8z...
0: https://weaversew.com/wordblog/2020/11/07/thats-not-why-i-di... 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25195659
So she made you a ghillie suit, or did you end up getting rid of them later?
https://www.wired.com/2017/04/how-google-book-search-got-los...
(Also, funny how these days I am getting better results searching HN directly...)
(I cannot readily find a source confirming the first point. The second is confirmed through a Tweet: http://nitter.cc/searchliaison/status/1282797986863386624)
> Then there's the insane illusion that virtually all knowledge is accessible within the first Google search result page, so I'm always pleased whenever articles like this one find their way to the surface...
The accurate and valuable knowledge humanity has produced is mostly behind paywalls: Books and scholarly journals (and also the best journalism). The masses get the dregs - rumors, speculation, ignorance, disinformation, misinformation - 99% crap is not an exaggeration, IMHO. It also is a massive barrier against anyone, including kids, who try to actually learn. Then the experts wring their hands about all the ignorance and false beliefs held by the public, and how uneducated everyone is.
Reading actual scholarly work - from people who have personally examined the primary evidence, and who have the expertise to put it in context with prior evidence and have the skills to evaluate it - is transformative (as is the best journalism - people who also examine the evidence, etc.). The difference between that and usual Internet information is mind-altering - they are different worlds, and often say completely different things. What seemed reasonable on the Internet immediately becomes ignorant and deceptive, sometimes intentionally, and useless. (An important trick is to remember next time that what seems reasonable and useful is really, no matter how convincing it feels, is really ignorant and useless.) Also, IME the scholarly work usually is easy to read - easier than the BS on the Internet, because people who know what they're talking about and have evidence tend to write clearly and get directly to the point.
I sprung for a personal subscription to the Oxford English Dictionary - I think ~$90 as a special. Just that is transformative: a quick history, at my fingertips, of every concept ever expressed in English - with the primary evidence right there!
...
If we could make all the valuable, accurate information available to the public, it could be transformative for everyone. I wish the Gates Foundation would spare a few billion to buy the IP to the scholarly journals and books and make them open. That may do more than any investment.
People confuse information access with learning. Effective learning, esp for the 6 inch chimp brain wondering around in a dark jungle, always requires a teacher. Someone who is constantly providing feedback to keep the chimp on track, pointing out how to correct blundering, which paths are dead ends, which paths are worth exploring etc etc etc.
Where things start breaking down is the availability of high quality teachers, guides, mentors, coaches etc
However, people also learn things on their own, to a great degree. Most people reading this haven't been in school for a long time.
While we're on the topic of pedantry, the blog is called "A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry", not "unlimited". Pfft!
> Even costuming accuracy can be a communications problem, since modern viewers have certain associations that are hard to unlearn. Want to costume a princess to feel sweet and feminine? The modern eye demands pink or light blue, though the historian knows pale colors coded poverty. Want to costume a woman to communicate the fact that she’s a sexy seductress? The audience needs the bodice and sleeves to expose the bits of her [that] modern audiences associate with sexy, regardless of which bits would plausibly have been exposed at the time.
> I recently had to costume some Vikings, and was lent a pair of extremely nice period Viking pants which had bold white and orange stripes about two inches wide. I know enough to realize how perfect they were, and that both the expense of the dye and the purity of the white would mark them as the pants of an important man, but that if someone walked on stage in them the whole audience would think: "Why is that Viking wearing clown pants?"
Taking the Vikings tv show example - Ragnar Lothbroke would have been in richly and boldly colorful, probably embroidered, clothing of wool and linen and maybe even silk or cotton from trade.
He would have been covered in gold and silver jewelry, and his armor and weapons would have been gilt or inlaid with silver, gold, and copper-alloy and intricately engraved.
Instead we get an extra from Sons of Anarchy complete with tats and edgy haircut.
Edit, also 3/4s of those impressions the modern audience does have is from decades of movies and tv shows. I think a project that respects its audience could do its part to start projecting more accurate impressions of past aesthetics and fashion sensibilities.
Outlaw King (netflix movie about Robert Bruce) is bad, but a leap better than other medieval outings - they at least try, the armor is sloppy, ill-fitting, and anachronistic but the weapons, clothing and heraldry are really good.
Others more expert than me have mentioned Henry V (1944) with Laurence Olivier as being the best movie attempt at 15th century armor.
A company that makes clothes and merchandise for 'viking' enthusiasts kick started a short film that is absolutely excellent in terms of language, clothes, and attitude of the very late Viking period, although they too fall prey to the Vikings-as-bad-ass-biker trope on occcasion. (Not to mention the romantic sanitization of all the unsavory activities any early medieval raiders or pirates would get up to).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yqbowUiH-s
In general though, true historical accuracy is very hard to find outside niche youtube videos, even if you aren't terribly nitpicky about what is 'accurate'.
Not to mention there's no way a French crew would be in an American heavy frigate in 1805.
This seems more plausible than the presentation here.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/cZHd4yrC7DV2sdyndn...
Well, that claim didn't age well. It's hard to get non-low-rise pants in any variety now.
I like these a lot: https://www.varusteleka.com/en/product/sarma-worker-pants/55... And in wool: https://www.varusteleka.com/en/product/sarma-worker-trousers...
Wear them with button suspenders, so comfortable. Why did suspenders ever go out of fashion?
Otherwise, find a good menswear store or even a tailor to custom make you proper-waisted pants. It's worth it.
People were already complaining about the impossibility of buying pants that fit years before that program came out.
You are already starting with "I want the princess to be cartoon character rather then human character".
Also, presumably, there would not been a single viking with bright pants, but rather all characters having colors. So one wiking would stand out less.
That doesn't follow at all. The whole concept of "the expense of the dye and the purity of the white mark these as the pants of an important man" is that the pants stand out from what everybody else is wearing. That's how you can tell that the one guy who can afford to wear them is rich and important.
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...
But then these pants also fit the character. And those Vikings are of course highly anachronistic. And wearing something closer to the criticized "Drab barbarian clothes."
https://acoup.blog/2020/11/20/miscellanea-my-thoughts-on-ass...
The wearing of Tyrian purple clothes (made from the murex snails) was just banned for commoners in Rome, and its production was seriously disrupted if not stopped after the fall of Constantinople, to the extent that soon after that Roman Catholic Cardinals were commanded to wear red instead of purple garments, which they had formerly been treated to. This extraordinarily profitable business in dye is why Byzantium is so often coloured purple in video games like Civilization.
It makes me very, very grateful for where we are now, but also feel really, really spoilt.
When you peel back the layers of garment manufacture today it's basically the same processes and materials as this series lays out.
I’m really glad someone else has figured out how to do the many, many extremely time consuming steps (like domesticating sheep and wheat and flax) so that we can now enjoy those benefits.
But I also then feel like, shit, I really ought to be doing something for the world. They literally worked ALL this out for me. I barely have anything I need to do to survive and live an easy life, compared to back then at least.