Entry tags:
Clothing sweatshop
Some time last summer we were invited to provide music at a Venetian Carnavale, a 16th-century-Italian SCA event in February. Now, we don't do a lot of 16th-century Italian, or 16th-century anything, but there's plenty of good music easily available, by people with names like Bassano, Gabrieli, Dalza, Palestrina, Monteverdi, Vecchi, not to mention all the English, French, and Flemish musicians who were working in Italy at the time. And the dance treatises of Negri and Caroso. So last fall ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
shalmestere picked out a bunch of music and we had an all-day rehearsal to decide which pieces we liked best, which worked best with whom on which instrument on which part, etc. We'll probably add some more pieces with more and fewer parts, so we can have some of us playing while others eat, or have people from other ensembles sit in with us.
But there was the question of clothing. Naturally, we have The Tudor Tailor and Alcega and Patterns of Fashion and class handouts from various 16th-century clothing classes we've attended over the years, but it's all a little foreign to us. We decided that if we're "the hired band of minstrels", we should be dressed somewhat similarly, and since such hired bands in period seem to be all-male, our group are all wearing boy-clothes (despite two of us being genetically, anatomically, and socially female). In November or December we took an expedition to the Manhattan garment district and came home with some luscious shirtweight white linen, some luscious black linen for linings, and some luscious black wool for fashion layers. We've made poufy white shirts with cuffs and collars decorated with blackwork, redwork, and/or linen ruffles. We've (mostly) made Venetian-style poufy knee-britches. And we're in the middle of making cassocks, sorta. In most of the pictures, cassocks are crotch-length outer shirts, but the pictures of hired bands show people wearing short cloaks over cassocks, so we're cheating a little, conflating the cassock and the cloak by making the cassocks loose and thigh-length. And we are not making doublets; that sounded more fiddly than we wanted to deal with. Cutting and sewing all this stuff, from an era that we don't normally do, has been occupying much of our evenings and weekends. The clothes are looking good so far, but we're not sure where else we'll wear them after this event.
shalmestere picked out a bunch of music and we had an all-day rehearsal to decide which pieces we liked best, which worked best with whom on which instrument on which part, etc. We'll probably add some more pieces with more and fewer parts, so we can have some of us playing while others eat, or have people from other ensembles sit in with us.But there was the question of clothing. Naturally, we have The Tudor Tailor and Alcega and Patterns of Fashion and class handouts from various 16th-century clothing classes we've attended over the years, but it's all a little foreign to us. We decided that if we're "the hired band of minstrels", we should be dressed somewhat similarly, and since such hired bands in period seem to be all-male, our group are all wearing boy-clothes (despite two of us being genetically, anatomically, and socially female). In November or December we took an expedition to the Manhattan garment district and came home with some luscious shirtweight white linen, some luscious black linen for linings, and some luscious black wool for fashion layers. We've made poufy white shirts with cuffs and collars decorated with blackwork, redwork, and/or linen ruffles. We've (mostly) made Venetian-style poufy knee-britches. And we're in the middle of making cassocks, sorta. In most of the pictures, cassocks are crotch-length outer shirts, but the pictures of hired bands show people wearing short cloaks over cassocks, so we're cheating a little, conflating the cassock and the cloak by making the cassocks loose and thigh-length. And we are not making doublets; that sounded more fiddly than we wanted to deal with. Cutting and sewing all this stuff, from an era that we don't normally do, has been occupying much of our evenings and weekends. The clothes are looking good so far, but we're not sure where else we'll wear them after this event.