What can historical clothing reveal that other sources cannot? | Hacker News Reader

What can historical clothing reveal that other sources cannot?

historytoday.com

46 pointsbenbreen16 comments

I recently encountered a couple articles about the Bronze Age collapse. Turns out most civilizations did not contain substantial quantities of both copper and tin, since they appear in very different geological formations. When supply lines were interrupted, everything went off the rails.

The provenance of the materials in an item can say a lot about the geopolitical landscape at the time they were made. Status and fashion tends to contain items where supply lines are a mere trickle.

FWIW, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse says "Archaeometallurgical studies performed by various teams have also shown that trade in tin, a non-local metal necessary to make bronze, did not stop or decrease after 1200".

It lists many other possible causes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse#Possi...

Wikipedia has an article about the specific jacket and portrait mentioned at the start, with a good photo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Layton%27s_embroidere...

The V&A museum's historical clothing exhibit was my favourite part of an already outstanding museum collection.

History is more about political and social history, but the article made me think of the concept of qualia, or subjective experience. I feel like clothing would be a huge resource of individual experiences wearing corsets, suits of armor, togas, and so on, and how they affected daily life and deeper values, too.

There is probably a book out there that compares the Roman toga to the modern business suit and then explains how that is relevant to how political power “feels” today vs. in the ancient world.

My wife points out that wearing corsets may be related to the expectation that a gentleman will pick up a dropped handkerchief (or other item). The lady can't bend because of the corset.

For sure, there are a lot of examples like that, including women’s buttons being backwards (for an assistant to button them, the theory goes) and a knight needing a page to help put armor on. Most clothing today can be put on without any help, which might be a reflection of an individualist culture.

https://nowiknow.com/why-womens-shirts-button-backward/

Those slim little mid-century genre paperback novels (sci if, mostly) fit suspiciously perfectly in blazer/suit outer pockets, without even wrecking the drape. I’d say they were sized—including ideal length of the work—with that in mind.

Older Modern Library kinda works, too. Certain variants (the smaller leather softcover run) are much better than others, and of course many of the books are simply too thick for that.

A funny related story:

Sony co-founder Akio Morita desperately needed to sell the company’s first transistor radio - the first in Japan and the second in the world. So Morita pitched it as being shirt-pocket size.

The only problem was that it was slightly larger than a shirt pocket, so Morita ordered several shirts with abnormally large pockets for his sales force.

https://www.spokesman.com/stories/1995/mar/13/sony-puts-big-...

I have clothing with buttons and zippers that are "backwards" (online tailors will do either way). There's not a huge difference one way or the other, so I don't really buy into the notion that it was done because servants buttoned your clothing. Proponents of this theory leave out the fact that wealthy men had valets up until very recently. Yet valets had no apparent issues buttoning their masters. If this were a class symbol, men would engage in it as well.

If it had a reason, it was probably to distinguish "men's" clothing from "women's".

My theory is that upper class women had much more complicated clothing, with multiple layers. Some dresses had buttons on the back for example,

A man's shirt and jacket was simpler. A man was expected to be more physically active and probably needed to take on/off his jacket several times a day without help.

Lady ought not bend anyway because she’s wearing a skirt and may expose her ankles (or worse). At best she can squat down but the ground is dirty…

Codswallop. Corsets were not the restrictive garments our modern mythology would have you believe. Except for a few specific types of fashions, corsets throughout history were designed to be well-fitting and maneuverable. Women wore these garments while working - including lower class women working fields, factories, and other hard jobs. Corsets were effectively bras for these women, and you could absolutely bend down to get your own handkerchief. These myths have been well documented and debunked by the historical costuming community [0-3].

0 - https://youtu.be/zNwTqanp0Aw?si=3duaZETPo2IZwFqU

1 - https://youtu.be/rExJskBZcW0?si=sx1oClP0avxEMUUB

2 - https://youtu.be/Xpie2GL0M4I?si=HzP2g76ycNLiPCxB

3 - https://youtu.be/4XBLBfWNH7I?si=Kkr7t0y9bINlWsqw

In a former life, I wrote light articles about fashion and style, but from an unspoken view that clothing was an expression of how people percieved and aligned to power. We have smarter models for that now in the current century than the last, but fashion is still upstream of politics by a couple of years, and it's a good leading indicator of who the next influential-coalition will be made up of. For example, I suspect the mythology of Beau Brummel's relative minimalism was mainly about the rise of domestic industrial textile fortunes over the colonial fur and silk trade fortunes that sustained the crown and nobility.

Also, ask any follower of fashion, and whether they understand why or not, they will tell you that a resurgence of cargo pants is very concerning indeed.

Wish these articles would start facing heat for only covering history of certain countries and culture.

Have you considered reading articles that you would enjoy?

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