Mimic of Modes

Everyone! I am incredibly happy to announce* that I have signed a contract with Routledge to produce a book of patterns of eighteenth-century women’s garments!

* I’ve technically announced this in various places, but not, like, properly.

This is incredibly satisfying to me because, as you may be aware if you’ve been reading my blog for a long time, Regency Women’s Dress began as … well, this. I went around to a number of reasonably local museums in upstate New York and patterned their eighteenth-century women’s gowns, wrote the descriptions, and then started sending proposals to likely publishers.

Likely publishers were mostly not at all interested. (NB: I didn’t try Routledge. I don’t remember why. I think it didn’t occur to me at the time.) Batsford was, to some extent, but felt that a Regency book would sell better due to the period’s fandom, so I had to start from scratch and put the patterns I’d already done on the back burner for a potential sequel if RWD did well.

And, well. It didn’t.

I’ve debated writing about the criticisms of the book for a long time. It felt like something that could be really cathartic, but what would the point be, in terms of publicly discussing my failings? Except to maybe depress sales even more. But now there is a point:

I know Regency Women’s Dress has problems. Eighteenth-Century Women’s Dress will not have those problems.

When I made RWD, I was a recent grad in my twenties, working temp and retail jobs and hoping that having a publication under my belt would lead to being considered for curatorial jobs, and I basically knew nothing about publishing or presenting my work. I know a lot more now. So let’s look at all the issues, and I’ll try to explain what’s going on.

The patterns look sloppy

Diving in! I draw the initial patterns from garments with a pencil on graphing paper — it’s just the best practice, definitely a lot easier than trying to do it directly on the computer (or at least, I assume so, though writing this makes me think I ought to try doing some digital tests).

When I took those initial patterns, I didn’t know anything about digital drafting. I attended a talk by Linda Baumgarten at the Albany Institute of History and Art at that time and she told me that she used AutoCAD to digitize hers, but I’d been baffled by AutoCAD in high school, so I didn’t know how to move forward.

This is such an embarrassing admission, but I just assumed that Batsford would redraw my patterns on the computer for me because they were not publication quality. I redrew them myself by hand in ink so that they could see them properly and sent them off, and then was surprised when I saw the first proofs because they looked like, well, scans of the pages I’d sent. In the end I did talk them into superimposing a digital grid (the light blue-lined grid on the graph paper didn’t really scan), but the patterns themselves are obviously and inexpertly hand-drawn.

The good news is that I now am a pretty dab hand with Affinity Designer, and can draw very clean pattern diagrams more suitable for publication. The patterns included in my next book will be as nice as you would expect.

There are no full-length photos of the garments

Yeah, this was a tricky one. While Arnold and Waugh have limited illustrations (Waugh very limited), modern pattern books are typically lavish. However, this is in large part because most modern pattern books like Costume Close-Up and Seventeenth-Century Women’s Dress Patterns are produced in-house by the museums that own the pieces, written by the museums’ curators. Producing these books is part of the authors’ jobs, and they have access to their large, well-funded museums’ mannequins and photography studios.

As an independent researcher, you don’t have the same kind of support. When I researched and wrote RWD, I was working in a supermarket bakery department while I applied for jobs in museums – so I did not personally have the time to dress and photograph each piece even in ideal circumstances, such as the museums having the space to photograph, materials for dressing (like dress forms in the appropriate size), and/or clean photographic backdrops.

Most museums do not have photography studios. What you see online in publicly-viewable collections databases typically either reflects a museum being really big and capable of dedicating space and staff to photography (e.g. the Metropolitan Museum of Art) or is only a small fraction of items that have been photographed, perhaps for exhibition publicity purposes (e.g. the Albany Institute, at least with regard to clothing). None of the garments in RWD had professional photos I could have paid for, nor was taking photos of that quality something I could have done myself, so I had to resort to illustrations and detail shots taken in suboptimal conditions, while a garment was lying flat or hanging.

The illustrations are very small and not very detailed

So first of all, the illustrations of the garments were done by my mother, which means that you need to be nice about them.

Second, yes, they are stylized. The purpose was to give you a general idea of proportions, shapes, and decoration, but not to be documentation in the way that Janet Arnold’s very realistic drawings replace the need for photography.

Lastly, I did not specify that they should be small. My intention was for the illustrations to be a few times larger than they ended up being, with the fashion plates as a lesser supplement to what the gowns etc. looked like, but you may be picking up on the continuing theme of authorial powerlessness in the publication process. Which leads me to …

The fashion plates don’t match up exactly with the garments

The fashion plates were not actually in my original plan for the book. I don’t know what the process was like at Batsford when their inclusion was decided, but I was shown a draft with pictures entirely chosen by other people from the image library that they pay for access to, with captions already written. Some of the choices were very reasonable, but others seemed almost random.

I went through every file in the image library from the period in order to find the absolute best match possible, and I also did my best to find the date and periodical name for every fashion plate so that readers could contextualize them. I wanted them to be lesss prioritized on the page than the illustrations because they didn’t relate to the garments, but I was overruled.

Okay! I think that covers all of the real issues I’ve seen people post about. I’m happy to answer any questions anyone has about Regency Women’s Dress, but right now what I’m mainly doing is focusing on digitally redrawing all of my eighteenth-century patterns! I’m also busy scheduling research visits to get patterns from garments earlier in the century at LACMA, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Met, which is very exciting. I’m also trying to find an agent and/or publisher for a novella and finish revising a novel (both historical, but the novella is set in the early 1920s and the novel in 1837).

If you want to follow along with my progress (i.e. see me complaining about setbacks and congratulating myself when I get something done), you might want to follow me on BlueSky.

Thank you for reading the whole post! Here’s a picture of Bonnie for your patience.