[HN Gopher] Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part IVa: Dyed in th...
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Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part IVa: Dyed in the Wool
Author : CapitalistCartr
Score : 130 points
Date : 2021-04-04 15:27 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (acoup.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (acoup.blog)
| fab1an wrote:
| Great to see stuff like this on HN.
|
| 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/
| MaysonL wrote:
| Ah, deep obsessive hobbies. My mother once made a couple of
| suits for herself and my sister-in-law, starting from an almost
| raw fleece (she refused to do the cleaning of the fleece to get
| rid of the twigs and other crap). Also, for clothes
| construction and fabric arts, see my sister-in-laws blog, which
| made the front page of HN a few months ago. [0][1] She makes
| clothes, and teaches the art and craft of it.
|
| 0: https://weaversew.com/wordblog/2020/11/07/thats-not-why-i-
| di... 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25195659
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Speaking of books, and Google:
|
| 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...)
| philipkglass wrote:
| There are a lot of books covering historical subjects on the
| web. Their contents usually won't show up in a general web
| search though. I have learned a lot about the past from old
| books. Google Books, the HathiTrust, and archive.org are useful
| here. Newer books are often available on Library Genesis.
|
| 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...
| sillyquiet wrote:
| The depiction of medieval folks wearing drab and dirty and torn
| clothes in black, browns, and and grays is THE biggest peeve I
| have with costume design in 'historical' movies and tv shows. The
| absolute worst offenders in recent memory being Vikings and The
| Last Kingdom, but there are a plethora of others. Not to mention
| the biker-gear-leather-fetish as armor look they all seem to go
| for.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| https://www.tor.com/2014/03/25/how-history-can-be-used-in-fi...
|
| > 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?"
| watwut wrote:
| > Want to costume a princess to feel sweet and feminine?
|
| 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.
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| In the vein of historical accuracy, that article repeats the
| assertion that nobles basically randomly pooped all over the
| floor in Versailles. Does anybody know if that's actually
| true? I feel like I've heard so many conflicting versions of
| this tale (yes there were essentially small mountains of shit
| and nobody batted an eye, no these were basically lies and
| gossip and fabricated by enemies at the time and framed in
| such a way that it is clear by their salacious tone this was
| _not_ normal and very disapproved of, etc.) that I have no
| idea what to believe.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| IIRC it was pretty normal there to throw the content of the
| chamberpots out of the window in the morning. Which led to
| a great stink in the summer.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| I tried to look into that claim a little more and found a
| website claiming there was a single French princess who
| behaved this way on the theory that she was too important
| to have to waste her time visiting bathrooms, and that her
| unusual behavior outraged the palace servants (who had to
| clean it up - the princess wasn't exactly wrong about being
| important).
|
| This seems more plausible than the presentation here.
| DanBC wrote:
| Or it works the other way. Modern audiences don't understand
| the significance of a wool cap in Shakespeare.
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/cZHd4yrC7DV2sdyndn.
| ..
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > If, for instance, a theatre director today put a middle-
| aged man on stage wearing low-slung jeans, everybody in the
| audience would know it was both inappropriate and funny.
|
| Well, that claim didn't age well. It's hard to get non-low-
| rise pants in any variety now.
| sillyquiet wrote:
| Yes, this makes sense, but you can convey what you want to an
| audience without compromising historicity so thoroughly I
| believe.
|
| 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.
| elseweather wrote:
| IF you enjoy this kind of thing, (and you aren't already an
| acoup fan), he wrote an entire article about the biker-gear-
| leather-fetish trope in Game of Thrones:
| https://acoup.blog/2020/12/04/collections-that-dothraki-hord...
| sillyquiet wrote:
| Ah great read! A tad condescending in tone but I imagine they
| _do_ have to deal with outraged fans a lot.
| C4stor wrote:
| The blog is called "a collection of unlimited pedantry", so
| at least some pedantry is to be expected !
| jabl wrote:
| > The blog is called "a collection of unlimited
| pedantry", so at least some pedantry is to be expected !
|
| While we're on the topic of pedantry, the blog is called
| "A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry", not "unlimited".
| Pfft!
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Speaking of Vikings, he covered the latest Assassin's Creed too
| :
|
| https://acoup.blog/2020/11/20/miscellanea-my-thoughts-on-ass...
| jonplackett wrote:
| It's easy to forget, or just not realise, how insanely far we
| have come as a species, and all the shoulders we're standing on.
|
| It makes me very, very grateful for where we are now, but also
| feel really, really spoilt.
| aemerson_ wrote:
| Reading this actually makes me think the opposite: That we
| basically do the exact same processes but with the production
| obfuscated away and at a larger scale.
|
| When you peel back the layers of garment manufacture today it's
| basically the same processes and materials as this series lays
| out.
| ordu wrote:
| I believe, that you both think the very same idea just using
| different words.
| jonplackett wrote:
| What I basically mean is, I'm really glad I don't have to
| spend my time and effort making clothes from scratch or
| smelting iron, or farming wheat. Or any of the many tasks
| that led up to making that even possible.
|
| 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.
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(page generated 2021-04-04 23:00 UTC)