Dressing the Past

by Margarita Gleba, Marie-Louise Nosch

Minoan ladies, Scythian warriors, Roman and Sarmatian merchants, prehistoric weavers, gold sheet figures, Vikings, Medieval saints and sinners, Renaissance noblemen, Danish peasants, dressmakers and Hollywood stars appear in the pages of this anthology. This is not necessarily how they dressed in the past, but how the authors of this book think they dressed in the past, and why they think so. No reader of this book will ever look at a reconstructed costume in a museum or at a historical festival, or watch a film with a historic theme again without a heightened awareness of how, why, and from what sources, the costumes were reconstructed. The seventeen contributors come from a variety of archaeologists, historians, curators with ethnological and anthropological backgrounds, designers, a weaver, a conservator and a scholar of fashion in cinema, are all specialists interested in ancient or historical dress who wish to share their knowledge and expertise with students, hobby enthusiasts and the general reader. The anthology is also recommended for use in teaching students at design schools.

Table of Contents

Introduction by the Editors
Haute Couture in the Bronze A History of Minoan Female Costumes from Thera ( Marie-Louise B Nosch )
You are What You Scythian Costume as Identity ( Margarita Gleba )
"On the Borders of East and West": A Reconstruction of Roman Provincial and Barbarian Dress in the Hungarian National Museum ( Ilona Hendzsel, Eszter Istvánovits, Valéria Kulcsár, Dorottya Ligeti, Andrea Óvari and Judit Pásztòkai-Sze?ke )
A Weaver's Making Reconstructions of Danish Iron Age Textiles ( Anna Nørgaard )
Iconography and Costume from the Late Iron Age in Scandinavia ( Ulla Mannering )
Tools, Textile Production and Society in Viking Age Birka ( Eva B Andersson )
Spotlight on Medieval Scandinavian Sources and Interpretations ( Kathrine Vestergaard Pedersen )
Tailored The Use of Renaissance and Baroque Garments as Sources of Information ( Cecilia Aneer )
Costume in a Museological Dealing with Costume and Dress from Modern Danish History ( Tove Engelhardt Mathiassen and Helle Leilund )
Cut, Stitch and Female Dress in the Past 200 Years ( Maj Ringgaard )
Ancient Female Costume from Silent Cinema to Hollywood Glamour ( Annette Borrell )
Timeline ( Agnete Wisti Lassen )

Genres: Nonfiction, Fashion, History

167 pages, Paperback

First published March 10, 2008

Reviews

[Mary Catelli · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not so much a discussion of what people wore as how people reconstruct, as best they can, what people wore. Observations on everything from Scythian women wearing elaborate headdresses because most of the gold ornaments in their graves had to have been on it, to tracing the history of Hollywood's use of historical accuracy.

[Louise Bahati · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hmm sämre kursbok och några författare skrev med onödigt svårt språk alt flum. Inte jätteintresserad av typ skyternas klädsel så har väl med det

[Heather Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

Originating as a series of lectures at the Design School at Kolding, Denmark, under the auspices of the Danish National Research Foundation’s Centre for Textile Research, this collection uses a variety of viewpoints, including archaeology, history, and technical crafts, to explore the understanding and interpretation of historic costume through a multidisciplinary lens. The eleven papers range from Minoan culture to Hollywood, although the focus is primarily on Scandinavian topics. The five papers covering the medieval and Renaissance periods are typical of the range and scope of the approach.
Anna Nørgaard, a professional handweaver, describes the process of creating reproductions of two of the women’s costumes from the Iron Age Huldremose site to be used as museum displays, complementing the original artifacts. Her article focuses on the technical problems and the practical and economic forces that drive reconstruction decisions. Ulla Mannering takes a more traditional data-driven approach in her summary of her doctoral research on costume representations in late Iron Age Scandinavian art, particularly decorative metallic plaques. Her analysis illustrates the problems of encoding features of a large data set to identify commonalties and patterns of difference. Eva B. Andersson uses textile-related archaeological finds at Birka as a context for a concise overview of cloth and clothing production, from raw materials through finished (and decorated) garment. Kathrine Vestergaard Pedersen returns to the practical problems of reconstructing historic clothing by integrating the information provided by such disparate sources as wall paintings, surviving garments, inventories, and polemical writing to create a hypothetical fourteenth-century costume. Cecilia Aneer, a costume history teacher, examines the research possibilities and problems of surviving garments of the Renaissance and Baroque eras, with an emphasis on the layers of use to which they have been put over time.
The natural market for this collection is the one it was created for: students of costume history and design, beginning their exposure to historic scholarship and as interested in the process as the finished product. The experienced scholar will find relatively little new research but may find the work inspiring as a model for the presentation of focused, technical information to a general readership, combining scholarly rigor and careful methodology with an approachable style and respect for the nontechnical reader.