Welcome to the sixth episode of the A Most Beguiling Accomplishment podcast! In this episode, I’m talking about the changes in making clothes over the Middle Ages that led to the development of tailoring.
The characteristic upper-body garment for both men and women during the Early and High Middle Ages, just to set a grounding for listeners, was one given multiple names during different times and at different places within that broad context. We typically call it a “tunic”, because it’s easier to discuss the history of material culture when we agree on some base terms that can be applied to more than one setting – shoe vs. sandal vs. boot, for instance, each mean something different, and we can apply them to items in cultures where those English terms are/were not natively used to cut down on explanations. “Sandal” works perfectly well, and is simpler than “a foot-garment that is mostly open and less-structured. Likewise, we all generally understand “tunic” to mean an upper-body garment of varying lengths that is unfitted and made of rectangular pieces. That being said, words that translate simply to “tunic” could be used in the Middle Ages to describe more fitted garments.
In the early Middle Ages, defining that period broadly from the decline of the Roman Empire in the fifth century to the tenth or eleventh century, men’s and women’s clothing appears to have been rather loose and unshaped and basically indistinguishable; the sewing and cutting techniques we take for granted, like set-in sleeves, weren’t in use, and neither were the lacing or fastenings needed to make a tight bodice able to be put on and off. This is what you could call “before fashion”, when dressing to impress meant making use of the best and most expensive fabrics in lavish lengths, rather than conforming to the newest cut or construction. This type of clothing is fairly easy to sew – the pieces are generally rectangles or triangles with minor modifications, which is also economical and results in little wasted fabric.
The interest in more fitted clothing first popped up in late tenth century France, where the wealthy, fashionable, and young began to wear the bliaut – a gown/tunic of expensive fabric, made very tight in the waist, so that it created horizontal wrinkles as it pulled across the body. The body of the ordinary bliaut was cut with one length of fabric from shoulder to hem, shaped at the sides. A variation was the bliaut gironé, made with waistline seam so that a fuller skirt could be pleated to the tight bodice. (There was also at this time a similar garment called a chainse – a tightly fitted linen or hemp gown. One could wear either a chainse or bliaut over the unfitted undergarment, or could wear a chainse with a bliaut over it that was cut to display parts of the chainse such as the embroidered neckline or hem.)
(Here there’s an extemporized sidebar on linen/hemp – the two are
indistinguishable and whenever we talk about linen in historical
contexts, we should include hemp as well.)
This remained fashionable through the middle of the twelfth century, at which point it transitioned into being a formal dress for court rather than something to wear regularly; the loose tunic was then the main garment again for the wealthy (as it had continued being for the not-wealthy) until the mid-fourteenth century, when fitting settled back in and became the standard method of making clothes.
So where did this desire for tight clothing come from, after centuries of unfitted tunics?
There seems to have been a new standard of beauty born at this time that spurred a desire for a different type of clothing. At the same time that the bliaut became cutting-edge fashion in France, Christina Frieder Waugh notes that “there was a fundamental shift in attitude … away from the practical and athletic toward what was showy and aesthetic.” Young noblemen wore their hair long and combed, and their sleeves and hems trailed – because, in case it wasn’t clear earlier, these long gowns were worn by both men and women. One factor in this is, according to Waugh, that both men and women needed to use personal attraction as a weapon: new inheritance laws were leaving younger sons impoverished, and they needed to compete in the marriage market for the interest of women of fortune on the basis of something other than money – good looks, charm, and, well, sometimes violence; on the other hand, as patriarchs and eldest sons gained power, noblewomen were losing it too, and being beautiful and alluring was one way to retain a certain amount of control. After a little time, the reason simply became “this is what we do”.
Beautiful bodies were also becoming a more frequent topic in literature of the time, when previously only the face had been described – cause or effect? A lithe body with a narrow waist was prized in young men and women, with “slender at the beltline” becoming a literary cliché; potentially some even wore very tight belts or gowns in order to alter the actual shape of the body, although we can’t say for sure. Women did make use of bands of fabric to press in their breasts, both for support and to conform to the ideal firm, small shape. When poets linked the slender beauty of their heroes with their nobility, they added to the prestige of the bliaut and chainse – the clothing most closely linked with a thin, attenuated beauty.
While some did complain about the blatant sex appeal of the fitted clothing of this period, the “femininity” of the masculine version was a much bigger issue to its religious critics. The pre-bliaut tunic had been longer than anything we’d expect to see on a Western man today, coming to above the knee, but men’s bliauts were typically longer (though not as long as women’s) and the sleeves could be more flared at the wrist (though not as flared as women’s). The long hair that went with the style was also deplored, although to add another caveat, a beard was usually part of the ensemble as well. But this didn’t bother the aristocrats who wore the bliaut much – instead, they sneered at the priests for being so unfashionable. This was an exclusive style that only they could afford to wear due to the expense of the fabric itself, the amounts needed to make it, or the extra time needed to create the pleating or lacing, and due to the impracticality of having trailing sleeves and hair flowing down your back.
But as this trend petered out, it’s not really the origin of the tradition of tailoring clothing to fit the body as seen through the late medieval and early modern periods and beyond. That shift, known as the “tailoring revolution,” took place many years later, in the late fourteenth century.
Finding the “origin” of a fashion is usually much more difficult than you’d think, because fashion is never simple – it’s rarely or never the case that someone influential accidentally makes a change and others copy it, or that some new technology comes along that suddenly makes people relate differently to their clothes. (Just to be clear, there are certainly ways that technology relates to and influences fashion, it’s just rarely so clear-cut.)
It’s the 1340s when chroniclers, always ready to moralize about indecency in dress, started to discuss the issue of extravagantly fitted clothing (first in men, later in women), as well as extravagantly expensive fabrics. Not only was this clothing shockingly tight, it wasted fabric both by excessive cutting (to shape the clothing to the body, and to create dagged edges) and by having things like loose, hanging ends on sleeves. Fabulous embroidery, jeweled belts, and flashy hats also came into style. All of this seems to have appeared in major European cities around the same time, rather than clearly starting in one place and spreading – although moralists of different countries blamed each other for infecting them with the new style. This was very much related by them to the onset of the Black Death, which was God’s punishment for such foolishness.
However, this period was also the beginning of the Hundred Years War, set off in the late 1330s by Edward III.
This is a war that a lot of people have probably heard of, but my experience is that the actual specifics of it aren’t well-known; it’s kind of the archetypal forever-war perceived as being fought for no reason. However, it ties into one of my other big interests, which is royal history, and particularly the history of royal women, so I do happen to know a bit about it.
Let me give you an extremely brief summary of the initiation of the conflict:
King Edward III’s mother was Isabella of France, sister of the French king, Charles IV, who only had daughters. When Charles died in 1328, his cousin declared that women could not inherit the French throne or pass on the succession to their male heirs, based on a long-outdated piece of Frankish law (called “Salic Law”) and made himself Philippe IV. Edward was willing to go along with the idea that women couldn’t directly inherit, but felt that he had the greater right to the throne as the most closely related man in the family. Philippe was a male-line relation and, probably crucially, as a nobleman actually in France, was able to rally support from fellow French noblemen and take it immediately. Determined to take what he felt was rightfully his, Edward began a war in 1337 that would be continued by multiple generations of his descendants, who considered themselves the true kings of France.
In this time of continual war, more and more men – including aristocratic men serving in command posts on the battlefield – were getting involved with military dress, a central piece of which was the pourpoint. This was a quilted/padded garment worn underneath or in place of the armor. See, the issue isn’t that they had no clue how to cut clothing in ways other than a T-tunic – it is simply that that wasn’t what they generally wanted clothing to look like. But with lots of men wearing pourpoints, and the garments needing to be made to fit rather closely to the wearer’s body to fit properly under armor, they caught on as a more general fashion. The body-shaping allowed by this tight and stiffened garment (when modified beyond what was required for fitting under armor) became widely interesting to people across the continent, men and women, and a new fashion was born.
While the pourpoint began to affect fashion by the 1340s, the real spur to major change was the English victory at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356. They managed to capture the French king and subsequently ransom him back and receive reparations and concessions, which meant the royal family and English nobility were flush with cash. This gave them greater means to show off at the forefront of fashion, and fourteenth century English chronicles are full of criticisms of hoods worn very tight around the neck, male hose laced to the bottom of their jackets, lavish fabrics, the inability to tell men and women apart, and so on.
Aspects of the tailoring of the pourpoint worked their way into everyday dress and changed the way that clothes related to bodies. Instead of having an unfitted tunic that could be belted and tucked up if it were too wide or too long, but would broadly fit anyone within a certain range from its intended wearer, it became expected that clothing would be made to fit a specific person. Eventually, this would lead to the development of garments really meant to shape the wearer, bodices stiffened with quilting, cording, and boning: corsetry.
Having a shaped sleeve and armscye allowed a closer fit in the shoulder and upper arm, while buttons and lacing down the front or sides allowed an upper-body garment to close in on a defined waist. This was rather wasteful of fabric, since more dramatic shaping to the pieces meant that they wouldn’t interlock smoothly on the flat fabric the way that a series of squares and rectangles would, and therefore more scraps would be generated.
We also start to see changes in cut and fit that indicate differences in social status and fashionability. The most fitted garment, worn directly over the body linen, was the cote, often layered with a slightly less well-fitting surcote (by definition), and a mantle/cloak/outer wrap could be worn as well. Fashionable young men adopted short-skirted cotes along with hose joined with a codpiece – hose had previously not come much higher than the knee when male upper-body garments were longer, but . And at the same time, the houppelande was introduced – a voluminous, excessive, sometimes fur-lined garment to be worn with a belt over the fitted clothing, generally with sleeves that were either gathered at shoulder and wrist or else slashed open and worn trailing. In either case, it was a sumptuous display of wealth and style.
Christina Frieder Waugh in “‘Well-Cut through the Body:’ Fitted Clothing in Twelfth-Century Europe” (Dress, 1999)
Odile Blanc’s “From Battlefield to Court: The Invention of Fashion in the Fourteenth Century” in The New Middle Ages: Encountering Medieval Textiles and Dress (2002)
Fashion in the Age of the Black Prince: A Study of the Years 1340-1365, by Stella Mary Newton (1999)
Mimic of Modes 