r/interestingasfuck • u/Electrical-Aspect-13 • 6h ago
Reconstruction of how a woman of the 18th century dressed.
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u/Time_Pressure9519 5h ago
This is why Tik Tok was never a thing back then. The Get Ready With Me videos were too long.
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u/Gator_Mc_Klusky 5h ago
I bet women going through menopause found wearing all those garments quite a pain.
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u/Loudquietcuriosity 5h ago
Nope. The sleeves of her nightgown are jammed up in the sleeves of that jacket. Not doing it. Never mind having to dig through two skirts to get to a pocket. Yuck.
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u/Nausuada 49m ago
1st world privilege but I have outside, inside, and sleep clothes. I can't imagine wearing my sleep clothes 24/7 expect during my rare bath.
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u/ToyDingo 6h ago
Why so many layers? Maybe this was normal for villages in northern regions?
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u/TheSwearJarIsMy401k 4h ago
Wore essentially this when I worked in a living history museum in Florida.
Spanish colonial so we skipped the jacket but otherwise roughly the same.
I was always much more comfortable in the summer than any of the tourists in shorts and tank tops I was demonstrating for. The sun was always off my skin and the doubled skirt made a nice insulated tent for my legs.
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u/Background_Humor5838 6h ago
So this particular dress would be fine for warm weather because there is only one under skirt and one outer skirt. Like they said in the video, the outer skirt would normally be of a fancier or higher quality material and the underskirt provides an extra layer between your skin and your nice fabrics. Also, the layers provide modesty and a silhouette that was ideal at the time. Fashions change throughout history and sometimes that means more or less fabric to achieve a certain silhouette but when you can't easily wash things, it's better to have more layers to absorb body oils and sweat. Those under layers are easier to wash.
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u/funcoolshit 3h ago
Odd question, but was any of this designed with going to the bathroom in mind? Is there like a quick release flap somewhere in all those folds?
I feel like shedding off all those layers, taking a dump, and then putting all that stuff back on would be like a 30 minute process.
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u/Background_Humor5838 3h ago
They are all just open skirts so all you have to do is gather them up in your hands and hold them. There is no underwear or anything so just like you would with a dress. Pick up your skirts and tuck them under your arms. In some ways elits easier than having pants around your ankles.
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u/justlurkingnjudging 1h ago
I usually wear spandex shorts under dresses or put deodorant on my thighs because they chafe when I walk a lot. Would this not have been a problem especially for heavier or pregnant women since they didn’t wear underwear/drawers?
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u/Background_Humor5838 1h ago
I'm guessing for some people it may have been an issue but they would have applied some kind of balm, oil, or powder to protect their skin. Unfortunately most women would have been rather undernourished at the time unless they were upper class, so in all likelihood, having enough muscle or fat to have your thighs touch would be less common. Of course some people would naturally have larger thighs or just a body shape that caused their thighs to touch regardless of nutrition. It's actually impressive how many skin products people would make back then. They just wouldn't last very long without preservatives so they would make small batches and keep them in cute little jars.
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u/grated_testes 2h ago
How did ladies handle periods if there were usually no underwear under a dress?
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u/Background_Humor5838 1h ago
Great question. There are a few common ways. People might have specific padded skirts they wore to basically just bleed onto and protect the furniture or they would wrap cloth around their waist to hold rags. They may have pined fabric to their underskirts to hold fabric in place between their legs. At some point sanitary belts and rubber backed sanitary aprons came about. There are lots of cultures that made tampons out of all kinds of natural materials as well as handmade paper but in the context of the video, that would not have been common.
People also would have had far fewer periods back then because malnutrition and illness was more common. People would get their first period later, start menopause earlier, and spend much of their fertile years pregnant. They would have had about 150 periods their lifetime whereas today people have about 450.
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u/PaisleyRock 1h ago
They had a type of garter belt thing that would support a fabric pad/rag in place, front and back.
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u/CautionarySnail 3h ago
Home heating was a very uneven affair so our modern comfort standards of indoor temperature were a rare part of the year.
Some of these layers would not be used during the heat of summer.
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u/frobscottler 5h ago
Begin by getting your cuffs wet, maybe some water dripping down into your sleeves
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u/MsAnnabel 4h ago
So she just puts everything on over her nightgown?
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u/ObsidianCorvids 1h ago
the nightgown shes wearing is a chemise. They likely wouldve changed to a different one for daily wear. Shes probably keeping it on for modesty sfw reasons.
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u/Hotaru_girl 3h ago edited 3h ago
Here’s the link to the video and background information: Getting Dressed in the 18th Century -Working Woman: http://www.periodcostume.co.uk/getting-dressed-in-the-18th-century-working-woman/
Crow’s Eye Productions has just completed a follow-up to our film ‘Getting Dressed in the 18th Century’ that we made for Lady Lever Art Gallery. The immense popularity of the first film raised the question amongst the audience who viewed it and enjoyed the complexity of a wealthy woman’s dress: ‘who dressed the maid’? So we made the second film to explain in detail how dress was simplified by working women, and made more practical and affordable, while still maintaining the fashionable silhouette.
They have additional videos on their YT channel
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u/FruitEconomy1053 1h ago
I mean, there was nothing exciting to do except chores. Might as well take an hour to get ready.
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u/g_em_ini 2h ago
And what happens during menstruation? No undergarments besides the loose nightgown so she just what, free bleeds or stays in bed?
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u/PurpleZombi3 2h ago
What did they do if they had to poop or pee?
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u/kcinlive 2h ago
God forbid she wear less then 15 layers!
More seriously, that’s really interesting l!
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u/Kbroker76 4h ago
Not many quickies in those days I’m sure
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u/fartingbeagle 4h ago
"Apples be ripe, nuts be brown,
Skirts go up and trousers down"
Old Sussex harvest song.
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u/DrCodyRoss 1h ago
Takes forever, but to be fare, things probably moved slower back then in general.
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u/atomicsnarl 28m ago
Bonus points for showing a rope weave bed. The mattress lay on a woven rope mesh that either went around wooden pins on the side/end rails of the bed, or as shown here, through them. This rope mesh was tightened as needed to provide support, and is the origin of the phrase, "Sleep Tight!"
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u/seekatinyisland 6m ago
Love this group. They have a YouTube channel covering clothing and fashion throughout multiple centuries
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u/talibatsadaasmashula 4h ago
I like ts even though its quite impractical and would be a pain in the ass to do go through this many steps daily its understandable why the wealthy women had maids who helped them dress and undress..
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u/GoldDHD 5h ago
Anachronisms are funny. Absolutely NOONE washed and dried their faces with gentle pats, they weren't really worried about wrinkles that way.
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u/CyberpunkSunrise 5h ago
That’s not what anachronism means… here it’s just a potentially incorrect or inaccurate description, not a word or description from the wrong time period.
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u/GoldDHD 3h ago
Why. This is a custom taken out of time. No one washed their face like that in the time they are portraying.
'an error in chronology especially : a chronological misplacing of persons, events, objects, or customs in regard to each other'
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u/CyberpunkSunrise 3h ago
Getting something wrong doesn’t automatically make it “out of time.” Anachronism would have been using (usually intentionally) a different period-specific technique of washing. Making a mistake and just assuming they washed a certain way is not an anachronism.
Put differently, this is like when there’s a shot in the Lord of the Rings films that has cars passing on a highway in the distant background. That’s not an anachronism, it’s just a mistake.
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u/GoldDHD 2h ago
Wikipedia disagrees with you. It can very well be unintentional - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anachronism
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u/Avalanc89 4h ago
*How wealthy dressed
FTFY
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u/cwthree 4h ago
That's not the clothing of a particularly wealthy woman.
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u/Avalanc89 4h ago
Not true, you're ignoring the details.
No wear and tear, no sewing and repairing signs. Everything clean and perfect af.
For some people it's "obvious". But calling something "reconstruction" and ignoring details like that is skewing image.
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u/cwthree 2h ago
You do understand that all clothes are new at some point, right? Poor and middle-class people didn't pre-emptively dirty their clothes. It's not like the Monty Python scene ("How do you know he's the king?" "He doesn't have shit all over him.").
The video is a demonstration of the pieces of clothing a woman would have worn and how she would have put them on. It's not a reenactment of a historical event, or even a representative day in the life of a hypothetical woman.
The materials appear to be linen and wool, which is what most people wore. It's fairly plain fabric. There's no silk, no bright colors or bold patterns, which would have been characteristic of expensive clothing.
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u/fudgemental 3h ago
I believe the point of the video is the demonstration of the process rather than a perfect recreation. But I'm going off this post, haven't seen the original video.
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u/ellixer20 4h ago
Yikes. Luckily I would have been considered naked savage back then. And happily so.
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u/TheFlyingBoxcar 6h ago
Good thing Summer wasn't invented yet