# Clothing and Fashion, in the Early-High Middle Ages



## Johnny Cosmo (Aug 29, 2011)

So, I've been reading a book on the middle ages that has a general overview of (mostly) the 1300's to 1400's, which is the late middle ages. It's a great resource, but I was hoping for a broad take. So, I thought it'd be handy to discuss clothing and fashion in the early-high middle ages. Like;

What materials were the most common?
What material was attainable, but rare?
What patterns were available to the rich?
What was 'fashionable' for nobles?
How diverse was the colour spectrum?
How quickly did fashion evolve in those days?

I'm not looking for any specific answers to these questions, they're just discussion points. It would be great for me to look at this thread as a sort of reference to medieval clothing.


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## Ravana (Aug 30, 2011)

In that case, I'll just give general answers, for a change, to start others off:

Assuming, as usual, we're talking mainly about Europe, materials—and believe it or not, certain colors even more—depended on wealth. 

For fabric, "common" is easy: wool or linen (flax). Everybody would wear these. The wealthy could also afford cotton (from Egypt, the Middle East, and India) and silk (and in spite of all the stories involving the "Silk Road" from China—which were true—silk was being produced in Byzantium by the 6th century, and in Italy and southern France not too long after… albeit in quantities that couldn't meet demand, and in generally lower quality).

Colors are even easier: if you didn't have money, there's a good chance you didn't have dyed cloth. Not that there weren't inexpensive dyes, but there weren't many, there wasn't a whole lot of diversity, most localities would only have a couple of options without importing, they often required expensive products ("mordants") such as salt or alum (or disgusting ones such as urine) to get them to set in the fabric—and more importantly to keep them there, against water or fading—and what's the point of dyeing something you're going to be wearing while you work the fields? 

If you _did_ have money, then you might be able to afford colors such as red—the various sources of which remained incredibly expensive until artificial dyes were developed. Purples usually required blending a red, or came from even rarer sources still. Ergo the association of the two with royalty… and the frequent laws against anybody below a certain rank wearing them. Good oranges would generally have required a red as well, but orange is an ugly color for clothes anyway, so who cares?  For the rest, yellow was pretty easy from broom or weld (though the best yellow, saffron, was absurdly expensive); blue was easier than most people are inclined to think—the same chemical that gives indigo its color (and value) is also found in woad, albeit in much lower quantities, which is why indigo eventually displaced it. A very good green was eventually developed by combining woad and weld… you've probably seen it referred to before with the name of the town that produced it: Lincoln. Other greens were commonly available, as well endless varieties of colors resembling shades of mud. 

Most of which were the result of someone trying to achieve black. That's the one color you _wouldn't_ see: true black. Even now it's bloody difficult… which is why it's so hard to get two pieces of black clothing to actually match. Most near attempts involved dyeing the cloth twice, usually with a brown and a blue.

I'll leave patterns and fashion for others to address; suffice it to say that both varied often enough for generalizations to be difficult, and to become more difficult the later you get.


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## SeverinR (Aug 31, 2011)

I have "looked into" clothing and have made some.
I find information on clothes in many SCA sights. (SCA is a world wide re-inactment group, that studies and tries to recreate the time period prior to 1700's.)

here is a good article about cheap clothes(cheap for us and for the people of the time.)

AÃ­bell ingen Dairmata, Garb

Cloth: Wool most common, 
cotton second most common, (Sheep can be raised anywhere, cotton grows better in certain places (common in egypt.)
Linen-more expensive
Silk:rich fabric.

colors: one would place fabric in a dye, then let it dry, for darker richer color they would dye it again.  More dye would be used so it would cost more. Deep rich or bright colors=rich, flat earth tones=poor, which also supports the other persons "Black" dye problem.

AÃ­bell ingen Dairmata, Garb
here is a general SCA sight for information on period dress.

Fashion did not change quickly, 11th century is quite different then 15th, but general clothing did not change much.  They classify clothes according to century, can you try to put a clothing type for the 20th century?

this describes it pretty well:
1300


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## Johnny Cosmo (Sep 1, 2011)

I was going to have a group in my story wear black, but have decided against it for realism. Was it possible to achieve a dark grey? Also, was it hard to darken leather to a near-black?


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## Ravana (Sep 2, 2011)

Dark grey I'm sure was possible... though it may have tended somewhat toward a blue or a brown, depending on just how dark you were reaching for, and what you used. "Near"-black would have been about the same (with the same problems) regardless of materials: the dyes would have been derived from the same plants. 

Perhaps I should have been a bit clearer, SeverinR. I've made "some" period clothing, too... I joined the SCA 28 years ago. It just was never one of my main areas of interest, which is why I don't have a lot of ready knowledge concerning patterns: my garb tended toward either 9th century Viking (simple) or 16th century German (godawful complex--at least if you want to get all those puffs and slashes to work correctly), with not much in between. 

Do not allow yourself to be deceived by modern fabric trends. Cotton doesn't "grow better in certain places"--it _only_ grows in certain places. The closest of which to Europe is Egypt. Why do you think such a labor-intensive, low-yield, soil-depleting crop became the backbone of the American South's industry? Or of the British Indian Empire (along with the indigo to dye it)? Linen would have been far from "more expensive": it can be, and was, cultivated throughout Europe, throughout history... it may in fact be the oldest fiber crop in existence (recent finds have pushed it back to at least 30k years ago). Nobody would have even dreamed of using cotton for underwear until the 18th century--they were more likely to use silk--and even then it still took a long time to displace linen almost completely: that's why they're still _called_ "linens" sometimes. (Same goes for sheets.)

Dyeing isn't a matter only of how much you use or how many times you repeat the process. For starters, there's only so much dye the fabric can absorb, so after a couple passes through, you aren't going to see any improvement (unless your dye solution was too weak to begin with). Nor is it merely a matter of plunking it into a tub of water with some ground-up plant matter--in fact, it is very specifically _not_ so, if the dye is water-soluble in the first place: if you don't use a mordant to set it, you end up with undyed cloth the first time it rains. (Okay, not completely undyed: but your "rich, bright" red would be a dingy pink. Even with all of today's technologies, for some reason red seems to be difficult to make colorfast... at least for cheap or lazy manufacturers who'd rather saturate it with dye to keep the color "fresh" longer and force consumers to wash their reds separately from everything else they own.  ) And if it isn't a water-soluble dye, you need to dissolve it in something else--a fermenting agent, usually, though this will depend on the dye and the fabric--which inevitably costs more than water does, so you aren't going to want to be repeatedly dyeing it anyway if you can at all avoid it. (For that matter, the fabric itself may require considerable preparation before it's ready to take the dye.) Even so, some colors, such as greens, could be made quite "rich and bright" at fairly little expense. "Deep" blue was easier than a bright blue, yellow wasn't too difficult, and if you didn't mind something closer to maroon than cherry, even reds weren't out of the question, so it's not a good idea to generalize. 

I mentioned that the one color you wouldn't see is a true black; the other one I thought to mention, though I'm less certain about, is white. Bleaching agents did exist, but I'm not sure how effective they were... and am even less sure how desirable white clothing would have been considered. (White wedding dresses are a very recent thing: they didn't become popular until the middle of the 19th century, though I'm seeing "white"--probably what we'd call "off-white" in our age of modern chemical bleaching--documented back as far as the 15th, though it was rare.) At any rate, it definitely wouldn't show up on a peasant.

Keep in mind that all the above is for a real-world European setting. If your world happens to have an abundance of berries that yield a bright, medium red, for instance--or a fiber that was naturally black, though note that the wool of most "black" sheep is actually brown, and may not even be a particularly dark brown--then there's no reason it wouldn't be common.


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## SeverinR (Sep 2, 2011)

You obviously know more then me.
I admit I skimmed garb quickly.  

Cotton: I grew up in cotton country(Arizona), So I figured alot of places could grow it.  I did know egypt was the most common,
I didn't know it was the only place near Europe.
Sadly, alot of online resources(SCA) disappear. The articles I found information are deadlinks.
Thats why wiki is one of the links.
I will completely admit I know nothing about dying leather (period dying). I worked with leather, but not dying it.
(Have dyed feathers to make arrows but never further)
Do you have any "live" links good for SCA period garb?


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## Ravana (Sep 2, 2011)

Not off the top of my head... as you say, the majority of such links are put up by people who think they're going to maintain them, then never look at them again after about a month or so. I have one friend locally who does professional fabric merchanting, but she's out of town camping over the weekend. (Probably at an event, but she didn't say. Remind me after the weekend, and I can see if she has any recommendations.)

In any case, the knowledge I have of fabrics and dyes (as well as some notes on textile manufacturing techniques, though I'd have to find them) for the most part didn't come from being in the SCA, but rather from doing research to set up the game economy in Machiavel. Which is another reason I can't say a whole lot about patterns and styles: they didn't matter for what I was doing. I've been back to some of the Wikipedia articles I used to start my searches, and I could swear they said more at the time than they do now... on the other hand, I may be confusing some of the information gathered from other references with what I picked up there. (It's a great place to start--just don't ever confuse it with "authoritative."  ) I'll try to poke around and see if there are any reliable SCA costuming links I can locate easily, but I suspect in the end you'd have as much luck finding good ones as I would. Just never take one person's word for anything, when it comes to the internet... not even if they're SCA, where there are a lot of people with solid research backgrounds, but there are also a lot of dabblers who'll say just about anything.


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## Ravana (Sep 12, 2011)

This isn't the time period you're looking for, but I'm told by my SCA fabric-merchant friend that it's pretty much the "ultimate" reference to Elizabethan-period costuming--patterns, fabrics, dyes, accessories, underwear, baby clothes, cosmetics, you name it; a quick count of the "chapters" came up to 55 at about a quarter of the way down the page, so call it 200-odd subreference links overall: 

Elizabethan Costuming Page

While I don't see any obvious links to costuming from earlier periods, I'd bet that some of the links that are given will themselves have broader time periods or else links to sites that do... and there are multiple links to online costuming books and related resources. (The link "the Dye Woorkes," for instance--the one example I looked at--takes you to a page with a list of online references dating back to 300 AD!) 

The site is part of a larger group of user-generated sites called the "Costume Ring"; the link at the bottom of the page takes you to a 404 page, but the links out from there are good, and the other links (previous, next, etc.) work as well. Here's what the "Costume Ring" link _would_ have taken you (directly) to, in olden days:

La Couturire Parisienne

Don't be thrown by the French name: the site is available in two languages... English and German. (So if you _wanted_ French, you're out of luck.  )

Hope you can find something in there that helps.


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## Shadoe (Sep 12, 2011)

I don't know if you've fully answered Johnny's questions, but you've given me a lot of information I can use! Thanks!


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## Johnny Cosmo (Sep 12, 2011)

Ravenna: That second link you posted looks great, but I haven't gone through the first yet. 

Shadoe: It's been a great help, but we should try and keep this topic alive regardless! I'm fairly certain a lot of people would benefit from it.


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## mythique890 (Sep 13, 2011)

@Johnny - the best reference for this (besides Ravana) would probably be a book.  I got one from the library a while back that was specifically written for authors writing about the middle ages, especially the British isles.  It covered fashion, food, housing, and even had some slang.  There are a ton of similar books out there.

I looked for the title of that book, but I can't find it.  If  I do, I'll post it.

Fashion did change more slowly back then, but you'd still be able to tell if someone was wearing, say, their mother's old dress (especially amongst the rich).  Something else to keep in mind is that, instead of having a completely new dress made, it was cheaper to alter the one you had to follow current trends.  Also, peasants wouldn't have owned a closet full of clothes.


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## Johnny Cosmo (Sep 13, 2011)

Yeah, I did grab a book but it covered a later time period than I would have liked. I know there's a wealth of easily found information online too (that I have read), but it's nice to have a thread where people can get a general overview and some really useful links.


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## Ravana (Sep 14, 2011)

mythique890 said:


> the best reference for this (besides Ravana) would probably be a book.



LOL!--but thank you. No, in this case, I'm afraid I'm more of a reference to references: what I know is pretty much limited to what I needed to know at some particular moment, and the rest I look up whenever it comes up again. The stuff on fabrics and dyeing, I collected recently as part of building the Machiavel economy, which is why I had it off the top of my head; even that isn't particularly in-depth. Yes, a book would be better, several books better still, since there are few good one-volume references on Medieval costuming--if any: I don't know of one, though, again, I'm not the correct person to ask about it. (At a guess, considering the number of external links and references on the good costuming pages, there probably aren't. Which itself ought to tell you something about how much things changed over time, even if it took 50 to 100 years for obvious differences to arise.)

At any rate, hopefully those pages will at least lead you to what you're looking for, even if they don't contain it themselves. Glad I could be of assistance, folks.


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## Lawfire (Jun 11, 2012)

Great discussion. Does anyone have any new links or information?


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