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BurgundianCostume

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A particularly awful example of what sloppy researchers have made of Burgundian costume. This is from Fashion in History by Marybelle Bigelow, c. 1970. The author professes with authority that not only did women stuff their stomachs with horsehair (an idea perhaps developed from a modern esthetic of slenderness that could not rationalize the somewhat prominent stomach of these dresses without exaggeration- after all, aren’t we all really shaped like Barbie?- and a vague memory of references to men of the time period stuffing thier doublets.) but also that the cone-shaped headdress developed before the end of the 14th Century -it did not- and “was often more than ten feet long.” with ribbons and scraps of veiling, even flags, adorning the tip. Clearly, 20th century costume historians can be just as guilty of misinterpreting this style as their 18th and 19th century predecesors.Burgundian CostumeBeing a study of women’s formal dress of Northern Europe, especially Burgundy and Flanders, in the later half of the 15th century.By Lady Lyonnete Vibert (Marie Vibbert)“When I first joined the SCA,” my friend Li said to me recently, “one of the first things they told me was ‘pointy princess caps didn’t really exist’.” I can understand the motivation of her early, erroneous tutor. From Star Trek to The Wizard of Id, any time a ‘‘medieval” woman is por-trayed without an effort for authenticity she wears the tall pointed cap, usually with a short veil pinned to the tip. Little girls don them at renaissance fairs, com-plete with pink stars and flowers flowing like a fountain from their tips and elastic chinstraps to hold them on. The fashionable dress of the later 15th Century has become iconographic with our modern idea of medi-evalism. Such popular portrayal, largely inauthentic, has linked it with the reenactor’s idea of bad medievalism. It is easy to see why this style has maintained such a pres-ence in public consciousness: it is an enigmatic, singular style that captures attention and was depicted in paint-ings and drawings past its time of popularity. Illus-trations from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that hoped to recall the glory of the tournament age take their images not from the early sources, but their 15th century copies, and so the contemporary dress of the late middle ages becomes the iconographic dress of Arthurian legend and the chivalric epic. Thus a long tradition of tertiary depiction of Burundian costume began, clouding and obfuscating the record to this day. 1 My desire to research this subject grew out of a desire to wear a big, pointy hat and my subsequent surprise that the documentation available for this garment was sparse. The 18th and 19th century books on costume, famous for their sometimes laughably inaccurate drawings, seemed to take their largest leaps of fancy in the depiction of Burgundy and France of the 15th Century, proposing bag-stuffed stomachs, iron counterweights hanging from the front of hats, and the now classic veil pined only at the tip. At every turn of my early research, I found more bad conjecture than actual evidence. This is not to say that good resources do not exist. This paper, if anything, is a condensation of the greater works of talented and dedicated costume and art historians, to whom I owe a huge debt. Here we see the ideal Burgundian couple in their courtly garden from Pavilion Books’ A Medi-eval Flower Garden, page 53. Their source: Giraudon/ Biblioteque de l’Arsenal, Paris MS 5072 f. 71 v.DevelopmentIn her work “Dress and Fashions c.1470”, Anne Sutton quotes an unknown Burgundian chronicler who found the changes in fashion around him worthy of mention. He writes, “In this year [1467] ladies and young gentle-women … put aside the trains they wore on their gowns, and instead they wore … borders on their gowns of grey, lettice and marten, of velvet and other fabrics, as wide and as valuable as they could afford…. And they wore headdresses … in the shape of a round bonnet which narrowed above, some to a height of half an ellor three quarters and some lower….”2 It could be easily to believe, as this chronicler did, that fashion suddenly and abruptly changed in the mid-15th Century. However, with the benefit of hindsight and pictorial evidence we can see that in fact the astounding styles of the late 1400’s were the direct, logical descendents of the clothes worn before them.Let’s go back a bit. The 14th Century ended with the cotehardie, a tightly fitted gown, still prevalent but being augmented with a loose over-gown or robe, especially on older figures. (One can almost see the thought process: “Honey, I ain’t putting something that tight on at my age!”) These loose gowns became more and more ubiquitous and elaborate and thus the houppelande was born. These were sumptuous, heavy gowns, fur-lined and very warm, indicative perhaps of a shift in the climate. By 1420 these gowns had reached the height of their opulence with trailing sleeves and large, turned-back collars to show off their fur. Making trains and sleeves any longer than this extreme was impractical: already courtly ladies appear to be drowning in puddles of fabric in some depictions. It was time for fashion to move in a new direction. Whether consciously moti-vated by practicallity, or a desire to not be doing the same old thing their parents had done, the fashionable ladies of the Fifteenth Century began to modify what they wore. The sleeve became enclosed into cuffs and the voluminous folds were cut down in an effort to make a more fitted garment. Also, almost noncha-lantly, the collar began to open up to show the lacings under-neath.Allow me to borrow a device used by Robin Netherton in her talks on the development of the V-necked gown.3 To illustrate the gradual change in fashion, she provided a series of funerary brasses, placed side by side. Drawn in a similar style and sized to be the same, you can watch the slow progression of the collar as it opens wider and becomes more of a line of trim than a true lapel. The sleeves also tighten, and will get even tighter as the style reaches its ending years. The fur cuffs widen and then, in the last brass, are turned back. The belt has become wider and an emphasis on a slender waist has clearly been adopted. The first brass is clearly a houppe-lande, the last clearly Burgundian, and


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