Clothing also provides protection from ultraviolet radiation. It can protect feet from injury and discomfort or facilitate navigation in varied environments. Clothing can insulate against cold or hot conditions, and it can provide a hygienic barrier, keeping infectious and toxic materials away from the body. Garments cover the body, footwear covers the feet, gloves cover the hands, while hats and headgear cover the head, and underwear for private parts.Ĭlothing serves many purposes: it can serve as protection from the elements, rough surfaces, sharp stones, rash-causing plants, and insect bites, by providing a barrier between the skin and the environment. The amount and type of clothing worn depends on gender, body type, social factors, and geographic considerations. The wearing of clothing is mostly restricted to human beings and is a feature of all human societies. Typically, clothing is made of fabrics or textiles, but over time it has included garments made from animal skin and other thin sheets of materials and natural products found in the environment, put together. While women were spinners and mantua makers, men were tailors and there’s a beautiful sketch by Louis-Philippe Boitard of 11 tailors sitting cross-legged on a bench next to a window (that work needed light) while a gentleman is measured at the front of the shop for a frock coat.A kanga, worn throughout the African Great Lakes regionĬlothing (also known as clothes, garments, dress, apparel, or attire) is any item worn on the body. Loosening or discarding your stays, as in Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress, was an obvious sign of moral dissolution. It was made of finely stitched whale cartilage, less unforgiving than the steel-clad corsets of the Victorians. The most captivating piece was the stays, a wonderfully worked underpinning which, like a corset, held a woman’s figure in and pushed up the bust. Reuse, recycle? The Georgians, like their predecessors, didn’t need telling. Another theme here is that dress was designed to be adaptable the material was so expensive, it had to be repurposed as fashions and figures changed. Nearby, there’s an equally dainty pair of man’s breeches, showing exquisite workmanship: a finely executed darn in the leg and a ribbon at the back for letting the waist out. It would be impossible to wear it without carrying yourself differently. I felt like a heffalump as I contemplated the most exquisite piece (from the V&A), a heavenly sacque dress made from Chinese silk for Eva Maria Veigel, a petite woman, as wide as it was long, with embroidered fabric and a richly decorated train. People were smaller then: dainty and dignified. Most of the exhibition is given to portraits but the costumes and artefacts are fascinating too. ‘St James’s Park and the Mall’, c.1745, British school Indeed one of the themes of the exhibition is how the upper classes slowly appropriated the style of the lower orders – if less dramatically than Marie Antoinette in shepherdess mode. Something similar happened with men’s dress: when you see the portrait of Lord Byron in actual trousers (previously a sailors’ or boys’ thing) in 1807, you feel a transformation under way. Here cotton, a fabric inexorably associated with slavery, tells a larger story. The change resembles what happened in dress after the Great War: bye-bye Edwardian hourglass, hello flapper. Compare the flounces and silk of a portrait of Queen Caroline in 1771 with the simple classical white muslin cotton of Princess Sophia in 1796 and you find nothing less than a revolution. The point that this exhibition makes is that costume spoke volumes about society, particularly in the long 18th century, over the course of the reigns (and regency) of the four Georges. But quite often you’re thinking, ‘Ooh, what a lovely frock.’ Or, ‘Fabulous breeches!’ Here it’s the costumes that take centre stage. Normally, when you look at portraits you feel obliged to focus on the sitter.
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