Having escaped from shoelessness, the new fourteen part ladies all now have underwear.
Without even brushing their hair, they all immediately started shopping for shoes.
As you can see they all have substantial knickers. I’ve given them these because the knickers in question are pretty much all-era.
I remember, and have already recorded here, somewhere, in a visit to a Tudor property being told by the guide that Tudor ladies did not wear knickers. This, the guide informed us, was a certainty because no knickers had been found.
This is only true in that no one has found a pair of unmentionables, labelled Tudor knickers; of course they wore them. I am willing to suggest that you could probably see some in situ if you disinterred a few Tudor corpses. They might be in quite a state, here we might recall Elizabeth the First being famous for having a bath once a year whether she needed it or not. We also know that Tudor ladies wore layers and layers of clothing to keep various bodily fluids away from incredibly expensive hand-embroidered overskirts and bodices. Clothing museums can provide evidence that sleeves were removable and ventilated under the arms and that for several centuries ladies carried, or hung from a belt, a pomander, which might be as simple as an orange stuck with cloves. I have made these as a present for various aunties, in the 1950s, when there was a fashion for them. As the orange withers it shrinks, holding the cloves in tightly, without the need for glue. Decorated with ribbon and a hanging loop, this item actually looks very Elizabethan. Hanging in an airing cupboard it does give a pleasant, slightly citrus, air freshener quality. If you only had a bath once a year you would probably want to go around festooned with pomanders.
We do know Queen Victoria wore separate leg knickers, tied at the waist, embroidered with her monogram, because several pairs are in existence. I have myself been offered a pair to purchase, long ago, in an antique shop, whether they were genuinely hers, I cannot say, but they were extremely substantial and had a stout band at the knee into which voluminous quantities of pale cream silk was gathered, making the whole garment resemble silk plus fours, despite being a garment of two halves.
My grandmother liked to sit by the fire in the lounge. In the winter, when there was just me and her, she would turn her skirt up and get her knees warm, without any danger of exposing anything because of the solid nature of her directoire knickers, which were made of pink silk. These were very obviously direct descendants of Queen Victoria’s knickers, which, as my grandmother was born in 1888, is not surprising.
Costume historians will tell you that there is a tendency for underwear to become outer wear over time and that the reverse is sometimes true, however, some arrangements are due to the shape of the body. Women are designed to bear children, the situation of the relevant areas in context with the legs more or less making the engineering decisions for the underwear designer. It is the fragile nature of the textiles which is partly responsible for the undergarments in question not to have survived. Where undergarments are made of more robust materials, they have survived intact.
For hundreds of years the breasts were housed in a shift, a tubular garment, gathered round the top, usually made of linen. Few of these have survived. Over the shift and under the breast went the leather corset, a garment with or without shoulder straps, placed round the upper torso and laced at the front. There are examples in the costume museum at Bath and they are absolutely filthy.
The reason they are there is that for centuries from before Roman times onward, mineral springs at Bath were supposed to be efficacious in relieving many ailments. By Tudor times and into the Regency families who had brought sickly relatives for the cure found that they could defray the cost of dealing with an unexpected corpse by selling the individual’s clothing. Hence the area became a centre for the second hand clothing trade.
Leather corsets, even well worn, must have had a resale value to have ended up in the museum, though I personally would have shrunken from trying them on, even in the interests of costume research.
In these days of online second-hand Roses, it is easy to understand the attraction of pre-loved clothing in the past. As a child I inherited clothing from cousins and did not feel badly done to, it was expected of a garment that had plenty of wear in it that it would be passed on.
In the present we are textile rich, for some of us clothes are almost disposable, a situation capitalised on by the clothing industry, who would like to persuade us, via a catwalk, of the absolute necessity of having new fashion every season.
In the past just having clothing at all was desirable. My mother, winning a colouring competition before WW2, was taken by her mother to the police station to donate part of her winnings to the shoeless children’s fund that was run country-wide at the time by the Police.
Here we come closer to the reason for no knickers surviving from long ago. Not only were textiles unlikely to escape being blasted to bits by the rigours of life, the bits that did survive were too valuable to hoard or throw away. My mother used my father’s old string vests as polishing cloths, because her mother had done the same. Interestingly my father handed on his vests when they developed holes. How could he tell? String vests are made of holes. Inquiring, I was told that the cloth held polish well, and anyway, all old clothes eventually ended up as dusters.
You may not believe this because we live in an age where you can actually buy purpose-made dusters. In the eighteenth century they’d have thought anyone wasting time, energy and resources actually making dusters was insane. Just a couple of centuries earlier any pieces of cloth so disintegrated as to have turned into rags and shreds, were called bombast, sold and traded and used to stuff the inflated legs of Tudor breeches, from which we get the term for puffed up with rubbish: bombastic.
This is where the remnants of the knickers ended up. If John Donne thought it was romantic that a flea who bit his girlfriend then bit him, I am willing to bet that Tudor popinjays absolutely got their rocks off striding round with their girlfriend’s old knickers stuffed up their breeches. If they were that far out they may very well have had the stringy remnants of several previous paramours’ panties up there as well.
So pants to no knickers. My dolls have nicely made silk knickers and lacily clad substantial knockers, because they are two and a half inch, fourteen part original artist porcelain dolls and they deserve the best of everything.
See for yourself this time next week. Details at www.miniatura.co.uk
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