 Hello, thank you for joining me today. This is Rebecca Old of Timesmith Dressmaking. I'm going to present here the talk that I was scheduled to give in Maryland on the 14th of March, which turned out to be on the cusp of the closures surrounding coronavirus, and we literally had notification of the venue closing 36 hours before this talk was due to be presented. I'm representing it here today and hope that it won't be too many months before I can be back in the US and can share the recreated dress to supplement this, but this is a virtual, virtual get-together. Two years ago, I stumbled across a photo on Pinterest of the Isabella McTavish Frasier tartan wedding dress. I hardly knew what Pinterest was, but I was searching for inspiration for my own wedding dress. I fell headlong in love with this dress. At first, my thought was just to make one for myself. But then the more that I learned about it, the more I realized just how little anybody knew about it, especially from the standpoint of how it was made. And it was the how it was made angle that intrigued me the most. And that led me down the path of recruiting a few other like-minded women with a passion for dress history, experience of making historical dress, experience in living history and costumed interpretation. And well, I guess you know where this all went. The key, though, was that somewhere along the way, my personal drive shifted from let's get a bunch of 21st century women to make an 18th century dress, to how did that 18th century dress maker make this dress? Today's session is going to cover a lot of history from several different angles. I will be sharing a lot of images of the original dress, of our recreated dress, of our team working on it, details of other extant gowns that had some lessons to teach us, and references to books and artwork from the period. The starting point is the fact that Isabella McTavish Frazier's dress is what we today call an English gown. So in the period within Scotland and England, this was not called an English gown, it was called a night gown. And as time went by over the 18th century, it actually just became called a gown. If you refer to a gown generically, this is the sort of style, general look, that it was presumed to be referring to. A night gown is distinguished by a closely fitted bodice with a pleated back, and it's worn over boned stays. These gowns derived from mantuas, and they were made by specialist dressmakers called mantua makers. Okay, first history lesson. This is a gallop through dress history. Here are silhouettes, roughly by decade, that are in Janet Arnold's book, Patterns of Fashion, the first in the series of books by that name. Now if you can see my pointer, I'm going to just point out Isabella got married in 1785. So this is the closest to a silhouette time period, 1780. However, the history that we're going to look at also involves features of gowns from earlier periods. So it's worth having a look at what the 1740s looked like as well. Now in another book, Nora Wall, her book, The Cut of Women's Clothes, she outlined how mantuas came about in the first place. Here is what came before, and here is the silhouette of the first style of mantua. What happened was that some point in the 1670s, the aristocrats at the French Royal Court during the reign of Louis XIV, revolted against the heavily boned bodices of the gowns that they had been wearing for decades in favor of a looser gown that involved, instead of cutting fabric into pieces using a pattern, as the tailors had been doing, they wanted to use the material in a more instinctive sort of way and drape it and finish the body by pleating the fabric into the shape fitted on the body. So this molded to the body in a soft fashion, just encasing the body in folds and pleats of fabrics, but then the further lengths of fabrics would fall to the floor in graceful folds. And in the earliest iterations, the fabric was then dripped back to reveal heavily decorated petticoats. This idea actually went down a storm. Women began demanding this. The tailors, this was something the tailors did not do, they did patterning. Women who said, we want this, we will make it, we want to make it. And they succeeded in France. In 1675, a law was passed allowing women to make women's outerwear independent of the tailors. So this was now something mantra makers made, not tailors. It quickly spread throughout Europe. In just a few years, mantras were the fashion in England. Within a few more years, the demand was so high in Scotland that in Edinburgh, licenses were being granted to women trading licenses to set up and advertise their services as mantra makers, making what they called the new dresses. A couple of examples here. Here is an early iteration of a mantra. This one has been dated to approximately 1690. And it is British. It is made of a wall heavily decorated. It's incredible fabric. It's in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And I've given you the accession number if you'd like to look up the details and have a look at that. But as you can see, it is the lengths of fabric just draped over the shoulders joined on the front pleated down the back. A bit of extra for the sleeves and a bit more fullness of the sides, not heavily boned or structured. Here's another one a little later. And this illustrates the point that this new loose flowing fashion came at the same time as new silks that were coming out that were emerging in France. They had very large patterns, very luxurious patterns. The fabric demanded to be shown off and displayed. And these began overtaking the Italian silks in popularity. And then of course in England, when many French Huguenot silk weavers fleeing persecution set up in Spittlefields, then London became a centre of manufacture of these incredible new silks. And this is an example here, another dress, Manchua, that's in this one a little later, approximately 1708, I believe. What also happened fundamentally with this new gown was the division between the visible fabrics and the fashion, and then the underlying foundation or supports. Whereas before the boning was in the bodice, the Manchua was a loose flowing garment supported by stays worn underneath. The Manchua evolved over time, spawning both the nightgown that was popular in England, and also another style called the robe volant or sometimes the robe baton in France. And the difference, the key difference being the nightgown had the plates in the back continued to be stitched down. And in France, they were allowed to flow free and flowing down the back. By the 1720s, these two distinct styles had been established, and the nightgown certainly had formed the basis of the main fashion in England and Scotland for the next 50 years, so that any changes to it were pretty subtle. You had the width of the plates on the back, the fullness of the sleeves, the length of the sleeves. There were trends that came in and out of fashion for how you trimmed these gowns. But the cut and construction were essentially agreed on, and the style was being made by dressmakers all over Europe, including England and Scotland, with an impressive degree of uniformity. Moving forward in time from the Manchua's to Isabella's wedding in 1785, we're going to pause here in the 1740s. Here is the silhouette in patterns of fashion, shows the front of the French style at that time. And then I'm going to show you a couple of extents from this same period, mid-century. These are nightgowns. This one is in the Colonial Williamsburg collection. Note the fronts of each one of them. It is open between robings, and there would be a stomacher to fill in the gap. However, this is the classic pleating of a nightgown in the 1740s that spawned this style to begin with. And here is a close-up of that. So you can see those wide-set pleats come up the back and flow into the straps over the shoulders. Here is the example in the National Museums of Scotland. Likewise, open down the front robings filled in with some sort of stomacher, and the back beautifully pleated, quite wide as they angle up towards the shoulders into the shoulder straps. Now here's a cutting diagram or pattern for this style, this 1740s to 50s nightgown. This is in Norawaz, the cut of women's clothing. And this pattern was taken from a gown in the V&A. But after the mid-century, the 40s and the 50s, there were a lot of changes happening in dress fashion very quickly. In the 1770s, a lot of gowns that had been made like this began to be altered. Here is an altered gown in the Victoria and Albert Museum, where the open front in the bodice, the pieces that had been robings, had been picked down and the fabric then used to create a close-breasted gown. However, the back pretty much untouched. The fashion into the 1770s was for a different front, and lots of people with very expensive fabric, they were going to keep their dresses, they had them remade and updated. This was a really common type of alteration. People scurried to keep up with the change in the cut and style of the front bodice. But leaving the back, as it was, was pretty common too when they were referring to these styles. These rapid evolutions that were happening right through the 70s and into the 80s led to a new variation called an Italian gown. And we do see the term Italian gown in period documents. Here is that silhouette again, 1780, from Janet Arnold's pattern with fashion. And here is the cutting diagram for an Italian gown in nor was the cut of women's clothes. What basically happened was the evolution and style in the back bodice began to change. The pleats became narrow and narrow and narrow, closer and closer to the center back. And eventually they got to the point where it just wouldn't make sense to keep trying to pleat those folds. And they began cutting it. I can show you a couple of Italian gowns. Here is a gown that was owned by Doris Langley Moore, the founder of the Fashion Museum and Bath. This was from her private collection that sold at auction in 2012. There is the front with the at the time fashionable closed breasted front. Close with that. And the back. You can see the back is no longer pleated, but joined with seams. And with that didn't happen all at once all at the same time. But another evolution, another point that marks the later iterations of this construction is a complete severance of the bodice from the skirt. So that there is no longer continuous pleated structure, but there is now separate bodice and skirt with a waistline now. Here's the second example I have. This one is in the U.S. and the D.A.R. Museum. It featured in the exhibition a few years ago entitled, Unagreeable Tyrant. Closed breasted front, seamed back. Now I'm going to go back through these same time periods. Another walk through history. But this time we're going to look at who's making these gowns all along, all through these changes. The Mantua makers. Mantua making as a trade founded in France in 1675. The organization of it as a trade varied greatly country to country, very highly organized in France. Fairly, fairly somewhat organized and protected in Scotland, much less so in England. And in Scotland and England, they did not set up separate companies or guilds the way they did in France. However, this time period with this trade making this style of gown. And it ended almost as suddenly was the end of the 18th century. Where garments began being constructed in completely different way again. So from our vantage point now, looking back, this period of a little over 100 years to 120, 130 years is an aberration. It started with a revolution in fashion and in economic and social spheres. And it opened up new economic roles and opportunities. But it was killed off by yet more revolutions. Again, political, economical, social. The fashions shifted to lighter fabrics. The fashion shifted to a narrower silhouette. Neoclassical lines, which involved much less fabric. And there was a shift from draping to cutting. And this fed into the development of two dimensional patterns. Society also started driving to push women from the public sphere into the private sphere. Needlework had always been associated with women. But then it was being pushed into a private activity, not a commercial enterprise. In the 18th century, it was a commercial enterprise. Meanwhile, developments in education meant more girls were going to school, which is a very good thing. Part of the curriculum was sewing. So this reinforced a push to relegate a lot of garment making to being women's work that all women could do, and it could be done at home, should be done at home. So with the deaths of the Mantua and the gowns that derived from it, the Mantua making trade died too. But throughout its heyday, women's clothing was made, altered, repaired and remade by women who made money doing it. This was a female dominated trade. When we look at apprenticeships in trades overall, statistics from the time show that out of every 10 apprenticeships, no matter what the trade was, one was a woman, whether it was cabinet making, jewelry making, silver smithing, women were represented. In Mantua making, and also in millinery, it was female dominated. You take 10 apprenticeships, all 10 would be female. It was so rare for a man to be involved in this trade that if he did, he would be called a man, Mantua maker. This is somewhat similar to what happened in the 20th century when the word nurse was presumed to be female. And then men began training in that profession and for a long time we were calling them male nurses. Key facts about the trade and the way it was carried out. It was highly skilled. In France, it was organized into guilds of an equal footing to tailors and staymakers and shoemakers and all of the other sort of garment and textile trades. Mantua makers served apprenticeships. It's typically seven years in France. In England, it fluctuated a little bit and Scotland just indicates that there was not always a set term that you were bound to your mistress to learn this trade. But girls did typically serve at least three years, sometimes four, sometimes five in Scotland. The way they worked, they cut and draped on the body. They were cutting shapes, not patterns. The shape involved reflecting what the fashion was and then draping that and adapting that to the body to fit the individual person. That's to actual stitching. The stitching prowess was not much different from seamstresses, but seamstresses, that was an unskilled trade. That was what everyone as children learned to do, to ply a needle to make even stitches. Literally seamstress meant maker of seams. So seamstresses would come in day labor to get all of the unskilled sewing done in a big, fast project. But this actual stitching used between seamstresses and mantua makers, this actual stitching quality, how tiny or how neat or how messy was pretty much the same. It wasn't that you could look at a mantua maker's work and say, aha, this is a mantua maker because the stitching is so great. But an experienced mantua maker with her knowledge of cut and construction, she could make a nightgown in 10 to 12 hours on her own. This meant she could do a gown, make a gown in one long summer day. If it was winter, it might take two or three days because of the light, but this of course depended on the availability of her client for the fittings. Mantua makers generally defer to their client for decisions on the style and the fashion that was desired. Their job was to make that client's wishes a reality. Nonetheless, their in depth knowledge of garment construction meant that design and making process was somewhat collaborative. Once she completed her apprenticeship, mantua maker had three main career options. She could set up a shop, be a shop mistress. And in Scotland, in particular, this rise in mantua making trade coincided with the rise in small shops, especially retail. So if a mantua maker provided she had the cash of the capital, some sort of resources to either buy or rent premises, then she could then advertise her dressmaking services, but also crucially she could enter the retail trade and stock and sell imported goods, fine goods, fans, watches, jewelry, all sorts of things, including non textile items, things that she wouldn't make herself. And this is what was possible to make profit by selling items for more than it cost her to source them. She could also take on apprenticeships and she could hire seamstresses as that day labor to turn around big commissions with tight deadlines. Losing time meant losing money, so getting the job turned around quickly was crucial to the success of her business. The second career option open to a mantua maker was as a journey woman or freelance. And this is what most of them did by far, and they were mostly very poor. It was a hand to mouth existence what we today would would call a gig economy. There was no guarantee of any work, no ability to predict, control or plan your future income. In reality though, mantua makers in this situation were usually also managing a household raising children, working out of their homes, supporting their husbands businesses, perhaps working from the back of their husbands business premises if he was a tradesman. But these mantua makers spread in all the towns and villages and rural locations as well. They were the backbone for providing clothing for women throughout the 18th century in England and Scotland. And the bulk of their work was often repairing, altering, updating, unpicking and remaking clothes. They were an essential part, an essential cog in the second hand market as well as the bespoke market. And the third career option really was to go into domestic service as a ladies maid. Most of the duties of a ladies maid revolved around looking after the daily needs of the employer. For example, existing hermistress in dressing each day, perhaps a bit of hairdressing, but also looking after the wardrobe for spotting things that might need mending or cleaning. And for sending those items to the laundry or to seamstresses to take care of. It was considered menial. She might from time to time be asked by her ladyship to cut new shapes. For example, her ladyship had experienced pregnancy or childbirth or lost or gained a lot of significant amounts of weight. But then the shapes she cut would be sent off to the city to a fashionable mantua maker where the best clothes were made. How much did a mantua maker charge for making up again? There's been some scholarship into primary sources, especially invoices and bills and receipts, internal documents in the guilds trade and city corporations, also the law courts. Published articles will be in the video description below. For the purpose of this talk, I do not have access to permission to share a lot of the primary source research. And so far I'm unaware of primary sources pinned down to the time and place of Isabella's 1785 wedding in the Highlands. That's something I hope to devote some time to in the future. Meanwhile, I can point you to a few classified ads from London that have been digitized in public collections that give us some insights into prices for a wide range of gowns. The first one here, 1782, a fashionable mantua maker in Berkeley Square, London, could make you a long sack or an Italian gown with matching petticoat for 14 shillings. That's about 60 pounds or 75, 76 US dollars today. Meanwhile, over in Soho, a long sack costs 12 shillings, about 52 pounds, 65, 66 US dollars. An Italian gown or a pollinaze, eight shillings, six pence, whereas a nightgown could be as little as two shillings, six pence. Nightgowns, by this time, weren't the highest fashion. The value of the garment being made lie in the fabric. Going back in time a little bit and back to Scotland, here is a bill presented to Lady Kennedy in 1713 that's held in the archives of Edinburgh City. I can do no better than to quote a post on Edinburgh City Archives Facebook page from October 2019. And I quote, A researcher in the Bailey Court processes, that's the normal civil courts. Today came across this receipt for dressmaking materials, including various types of silks, such as lute string and satin and others is dated 1713 and came to a grand total of 29 pounds and 11 shillings. This struck us as a rather pricey purchase. So we stepped to the currency converter that's available on the website of the National Archives and found that today the sum is equivalent to around 3100 pounds. To put it into context in the year 1713. The next bill is equivalent to the price of five horses or 328 days. It's nearly a whole year of wage for a skilled tradesman. The bill was still unpaid seven years later in 1720. So taking just one item from this bill to Lady Kennedy, there's an item there's a listing there for eight yards of black lute string. That's just about enough for a nightgown of the time. It costs two pounds. That's about 210 pounds or about 270 US dollars. I'd really like to get eight yards of silk for that price. Anyway, the making up cost. Regardless of the fabric. We're back to the menstrual makers advertise services in the newspapers her services for making up the gown. That cost was going to be pretty much the same no matter what sort of fabric was being used. You could make it out of silk you could make it out of linen out of wool her price for making up was going to be the same. A menstrual maker in the fashionable parts of London was going to be able to charge a premium she could charge more than her counterpart in a less. Solubrious part of London like that dressmaker in Soho. Nonetheless, the price was not going to very much, if at all, according to the fabric that a client walked in the door and presented to her. And we can see from the fabrics bill here that the menstrual makers bill was just a fraction of the total cost. So that's the broad context. That's the broad context of clothing and the making of it for women in the British Isles in the 18th century. As for Isabella's gown, what we do not know and may never find out is where her fabric came from, who spun the yarns, who died them, who wove them, who commissioned that we've who decided its colors and pattern. Red means that it was a relatively expensive fabric. Typically, that would indicate someone of a higher social standing or status. There's no indication, however, that Isabella or family wore well off or of a higher status. In fact, I understand it indications are quite the reverse. We don't know the details and circumstances of how Isabella acquired this fabric. Perhaps it was a gift. Perhaps it was received in part exchange or part payment for something. And we also don't know who her man she'll make her was. But she only lived a half days walk bit quicker by horseback from in Venice. She married in a thriving village that almost certainly had at least one female who had been trained and skilled in the arts the mantra maker will come on to this relationship with Isabella and her mantra maker bit later when we delve into the construction of her dress. But first I want to talk about fabric. Specifically, let's talk about tartan. And its history. Was it used for women's clothing. We see it in early 18th century documents. Here is a notice in an Edinburgh newspaper in 1721 listing items stolen from a gentleman's house in the city. We have here a fine tartan nightgown lined with a striped killer manky and a woman's petticoat of Calico quilted. However, other than Isabella's gown, no extent gowns made of tartan survive from this period. And by this period I mean the age of the mantra maker when gowns were being made this way by this trade. And we have a little substantiation in art of the period. And we have to always be wary of political agendas and allegorical depictions, especially after the Jacobite rising had failed. In the immediate aftermath of Culloden and the enacting of the right of prescription observation was made that women known to be Jacobite supporters and sympathizers sympathizers went in a rage for tartan. Using it in gowns, writing habits, bed covers, curtains, even pin cushions and shoes. But again, no extent gowns of tartan from before the mid 18th century. What we do have is evidence that it was common for women to indicate Jacobite sympathies by wearing various accessories with symbolic meaning, such as garters. Here is an example that sold at auction in 2019 after being authenticated by the Victorian Albert Museum. The embroidery reads God bless PC and down with the rump PC referred to Prince Charlie and the rump was a somewhat derogatory slang term for the Hanoverian government at the time. Garters with such slogans were worn by both women and men. So what happened to the use of tartan as a fabric for women's gowns after Culloden. First, let's look at the legal status of tartan after Culloden various restrictions on Highland culture were imposed under the act of prescription. It's this passage that seems to give rise to the widespread notion that tartan was banned. We have here subject of Highland clothes, and then no tartan or party colored played or stuff. However, note that it was not tartan as a fabric or pattern that was banned, but its use in certain clearly named garments, great coats, upper coats, and the ban didn't apply to everyone, nor in every place. What was really happening was that the government saw the wearing of tartan by men and boys for certain clothes in Scotland as military dress. And it's that use. They wanted to reserve only for the British army. The Scots were being put on notice that wearing such dress in such circumstances by anyone else would be construed as rebellion or treason. But that left tartan very much free to be worn by women everywhere, including the Scottish Highlands. Meanwhile, manufacture of tartan for all sorts of purposes, not just clothing, continued unabated and even increased. It was still in the 1760s while the act of prescription was in effect that William Wilson and sons of Bannockburn set up its weaving business. While the bulk of its business was to provide tartan to soldiers serving in the Scottish regiments of the British army. The ones that the for whom the act reserved that right to wear highland dress and tartan coats. Wilson's also and here I'm quoting from Dr Rosie Wayne who curated the Wild and Majestic exhibition National Museums of Scotland last year. She said Wilson's cultivated a profitable sideline of civilian tartans intended for use in women's gowns and cloaks, children's clothing, as well as gentlemen's suits of highland dress. The very garments that were caught by the ban, but if you're wealthy enough, you weren't prosecuted. Tartan demand was driven by growing consumer appreciation for tartans attractive and striking visual appearance, and its practical qualities as it was warm and weatherproof. So women wearing these gowns, if only there were more extant surviving. What style were they? Scottish women had always worn much the same as English women. This had a huge impact on the use of tartan for their clothing, as we'll soon see. English travelers noted in their diaries throughout Scotland and in the highlands, what struck them is different. So they gave a lot of description, gave a lot of airtime to men's highland dress. Edmund Burke, his letters from the north of Scotland from his travels in 1730 are a rich source of written observations by an outsider at that time. Another is James Boswell's 1785 account of his trip to the Hebrides with Dr. Samuel Johnson. Their trip was actually in 1773. Of their observations on women and their apparel, they didn't have much to say except to record oddities, which mainly related to headwear. If a woman or girl was unmarried, she was noted to wear this an item called a snood, very different from what that word means today. This is an engraving from about 1770 of a group of women and girls who may or may not be wearing tartan, but their walking tweed in the Hebrides. Tartan was not waltz because it was worsted spun, but tweed was woolen spun and it did need to be waltz. And that's what we see here. And some of the older women are wearing caps, but the younger women and girls are wearing this. You might consider like a headband, but it was really a ribbon or tie or braid that went over the head, just along the hairline, just holding the hair back, and then it was braided through or twisted into the remainder of the hair, either down the back or coiled back up onto the head. This shows this is some resemblance to what we see in the continent in period art in in the low countries like like what is now the Netherlands and earlier time periods. It seems to be something that hung on a bit in the more remote areas of the Scottish Highlands and the Hebrides. Other noted item of headwear attracted attention from these visitors was the kerch. This was worn by married women who were Catholic. This is a triangular shaped garment that was draped in such a way that three points dropped down to in front of the body on each side of the head and then the third down the center of the back to represent the Holy Trinity. So this was a Catholic married woman's item of headwear. The second area of apparel noted with aerosets as outerwear. Perhaps as an equivalent of to wearing a cloak. This is a lady in the Highlands of Scotland is the title. It's a portrait by a London engraver James Bassier about 1760. She's described as wearing a plate of checkered silk or woolen stuff of about three yards long and two breads wide and falling to the ankles. And the third area of apparel is footwear. And then remarks were only made if it was noticed that a woman was barefoot. Historians have noted that this only really happened at home or in close immediate vicinity of the house, such as when doing chores in the yard, hanging out laundry feeding chickens, gathering eggs. Women in Highlands all through Scotland, in fact, own shoes. And if they're going to venture beyond their own front yard, they put them on, they were not traipsing off to their neighbors or to go to market barefoot. Otherwise, there was really no distinction between English stress Scottish stress, or indeed Highlander and lowlander. Or city dwellers and rural dwellers. Although, as elsewhere, class and income obviously played a huge role in differentiating dress. But the Highlands were not cut off or left behind. Traveling merchants and settlers plied their trade along well established routes in good weather. Markets were held at regular intervals all over the Highlands. Townships and boroughs actually decreed that markets had to be held no further apart than every 16 miles. So markets were regular and with an easy reach, no matter where you lived in Scotland. While class and income were of course factors, access to clothing and information about fashion was not limited. I'm going to show you here a range of sketches by Paul Sandby. He was an English artist and draftsman. If you're not familiar with him, he is well worth an investigation. He was attached as a draftsman to the Duke of Cumberland's army in that period of 1746, right through about a five year, six year period. And Paul Sandby was attached to those troops stationed and lodged in Edinburgh. And he had his official work as a draftsman to do, but he spent a lot of time sketching ordinary people in the streets that he saw going about their everyday tasks. People of all walks of life. So we have here what is obviously on the right, a pleated bag gown, a nightgown. In the middle, we have a servant changing bed linens. She is wearing a bed gown. Notice she's also wearing shoes. And here we have a lady in the street holding a small child. At that age difficult to say a boy or girl, but the child's gown, no different from what English would be wearing. And some more, just street scenes. This one I like because it is obviously a fashionable woman on the right with her skirt supports, adding width to the hips. And then obviously a much lower class woman, whether she's connected to the upper class woman as a servant, it's impossible to know. And here on this side we have pleated bag gown tied up. We have also an open robe obviously here and some sort of garment, possibly one way of wearing an aeroset, it's hard to say. And more here we have quite a fashionable lady here with what is probably a short sack, very large mid-century winged cuffs. And you have basically almost impossible to distinguish women as to their background. French, English, Scottish, you absolutely can't tell. You can just tell whether they're rich or poor, upper class, lower class. The men, there's a bit more distinction. You can spot the highland dress or the wearing of bonnets and the occasional civilian coats or soldiers in some of these depictions. This one I quite like. This is a market scene and this is clearly an aeroset that this lady is wearing, but she otherwise doesn't look really any different. The fact that she is in stays without a gown, she could be a prostitute, speculation in my part, but really there's nothing unusual about any of the women's clothing except for that aeroset there. And here we have a fashionable upper class lady in an obviously silk brocaded gown, classic night gown. You see these in portraits of upper class women all through this time period, English and Scottish. That's an extract from a picture. She's actually having her hair done by a male hairdresser. Okay, Isabella's dress. After all of this history, let's get to this. How does this fit into all this history? The dress history, the tartan history, the trade history. Why is this dress fascinated? Dress historians who have for decades tried to pin down all the things, all the ways that it just seems odd. The key problem. The reason why it just seems odd. In the 1770s, and of course into the 1780s when Isabella got married, by the 1770s, while use of tartan from menswear continued to grow, revolutions in women's fashion, women's wear, meant the fashionable gowns were being constructed a little differently and they were being made of much lighter, thinner fabrics that suited the new styles. See Isabella's dress seems to straddle two sides of some very significant changes that happen in fashion. So here we have a classic 1740s back and here we have a classic 1780s front. Isabella's dress has got those two things, the 1740s back and a 1780s front. Why? We can only speculate, and I will a little later on. But thanks to recreating her gown, we can certainly show you how and that as feeds in a great deal to what we think about why this combination. So we're going to walk through the main construction phases of an 18th century gown from the standpoint of a man showmaker to see what she saw, what she did, bearing in mind her training, her remit, and her clients stated desires. So set the scene, it's going to be very, very quick, set the scene. Isabella married in Dora's. This is a small town on the eastern shore of Loch Ness. She got married on 12th of January 1785 in the depths of winter. And this is the tail end of the holiday season, the Christmas period, which was a very popular time for all kinds of social gatherings in rural communities. And that included weddings when there was very little to do on the farms. People got together. These four photos were taken. This is the farm on the Riven estate where Isabella grew up and spent the first few years of her marriage. This farm is about six miles from Dora's where she got married, and it's about 14 miles from Inverness. So I took these photos when I was there in January 2019, just two days after the anniversary of Isabella and Malcolm's wedding. In Doris where they got married. Here's the pub. In 1885, this was a bustling in along the military road that runs along the east side of the Loch Ness. This was the main route. This was a busy, busy thriving town, not the little sleeper commuter town for Inverness that it is now. And as you'll see there are things about the dress that suggest that Isabella was not readily available for fittings at the drop of a hat. Let's start with several general points about the dress. The fabric shows no sign of ever having been anything but the stress. A fabric does not come from any other garment and reused for this. Once made, this dress has never been altered, not even to let it out or let it in. And this was something we examined very carefully in the side seams. This is the main weight gain, weight loss. Those are the seams you hit first to make adjustments and they're constructed the way they are because of that. And they are fine, beautifully made and they've never been touched. Both the lining and the tartan were cut on the straight of grain at the center front in the bodice. Now for the 1780s, that's a little unusual as the shape had become a little thrustier and normally you needed a little bit of bias to mould the fabric to achieve a smooth fit around a three-dimensional torso. There were at least two distinct hands at work, notably in the unskilled fitted parts, like joining all the skirt panels together. And we think one of them was left-handed. The bodice, however, was cut, draped, fitted, according to the skills of a mantralmaker, not by anyone unskilled. There was definitely someone who knew what they were doing. The mantralmaker's default mode, where it didn't show and didn't affect style, were typical 1780s construction, not older construction. Yes, it had a pleated back. Yes, it had a continuous pleat from neckline right down to the hem. But the way the skirt and the bodice were joined was Italian gown methods, not what we would typically see in a night gown. However, Italian gowns were seamed in the back, not pleated. Working with this fabric, that would be impossible. It is just far too thick and heavy to pleat, to seam, to cut and seam. Especially with those seams quite close together from the 1780s, that would just be impossible. With the fabric this heavy, pleating the back was really the only option. And that was something that recreating the dress brought home. Until you do it, until you try it, you can think, well, yeah, that seems likely, but maybe, you know, she probably had options. But once you're working with it, you realize in some cases you don't have any options. It is done the way it's done for a reason. And this man showmaker, of course, she's trying to fulfill the wishes and the remit given to her by her client who wants a beautiful dress for her wedding. So it was Isabella, ultimately, either dictating or maybe taking final decisions on style. So we're going to look at that style. We've already noted the combination of back bodice plates with the center closing front bodice was not entirely uncommon during the 1770s through that frantic alterations of nightgowns that was happening. But this gown was never altered. It was made fresh and new this way. And the alignment of the plates are a style, an aesthetic and a proportion that was typical in the 1740s, not like a 1760s gown that needs to be real. It needs to be altered or updated. So this is a deliberate choice of 1740s, you know, mid-century aesthetic. This could have been Isabella's choice, I think it was. And she put this to her man showmaker. Or if it wasn't back something else that she wanted, it could have been the man showmaker who said, uh-uh, honey, we can't do that with this fabric. We don't know for sure which way it was. At the end of the day, Isabella's the one paying the bill has to be made happy. But if the man showmaker was emphatic and forceful in saying, I can't wrangle this fabric into the current fashion, but I can do this. And you can think about your grandmother. We don't know, but it is a nostalgic old-fashioned approach to pleating a back bodice. The other thing we don't know is back to that contemporary front, we don't know why Isabella chose to go with this. Maybe because it's faster if things were, if it was case of getting a dress made as quickly as possible. Or it's possible that as a girl in her mid-20s, she was used to wearing clothes breasted gown. That would have been the style of the 1780s. It might have been the only style, the only kind of cut and construction that she personally was familiar with. And the idea of robings and stomacher just sounded like too much fuss and pinning differently. And we don't know. But it would have been her choice when we're another. And she may have just wanted to go with what was familiar. And she may also with the tartan wanted the whole front to be showing off the tartan set and those beautiful colors. However, this came about is obviously it's conversations happening between Isabella and her mantra maker under tight time constraints. And once those decisions were made, once Isabella was happy with whatever decisions she had made or been persuaded around two mantra makers suggestions on things. Then it was up to the mantra maker to make it happen to bring that vision to life. So that's where we start looking at the interesting ways the stress was made, knowing the mantra maker was working using her skills to make her client happy. She was not going to make something the client would then say that's not what I wanted. I refuse to pay you. And we noticed several interesting things that several interesting ways of working several things this mantra maker did that are really quite special. I'll explain why. One of the things we noticed was actually a series of mistakes, which supports the general impression that the dress was made in a hurry and that Isabella may not have always been right there on the spot for fittings right when she was needed. This was a mantra maker who was experienced enough to deal with those challenges, obstacles, something comes up that didn't expect. Figure out what her options are way of the pros and cons calculate how much time she had choose the most expedient way of dealing with it and then just not waste any time going about fixing it and getting it done. So the big mistake that we spotted was in the slaves. This is a slave that ends with a cuff at the elbow. However, the slave itself has two parts. And it's not a two part, which we did see in the 1780s of two seams running the length of the sleeve, perhaps one sort of oriented toward the front and one closer to the back. It's not two parts like that. It is a slave that is too short and then extended. It's possible that Isabella knew what length she wanted. She also knew whether she wanted cuffs or the outside and she might have ordered cuffs right. Yeah, so we don't know that. But what we can tell from the seam allowances was that the slave was initially cut in one large full rectangle of a link that would hit just above the elbows. That's 1740s. We're back to that mid century cut of construction again. For whatever reason, the decision was taken that they needed to be slimmed down and they needed to be lengthened. Given that the mantra makers ways of working other ways indicate that she was a modern woman used to 1780s things we don't, we don't know why the sleeves were clearly obviously cut. Big rectangles. And then the seam allowance to show that the, they were taken in. Now my suspicion is that the sleeves were cut in advance for fitting rather than draped on the arm. The mantra maker got these sleeves cut everything ready for the next fitting and then found that either they didn't fit quite right or Isabella just wasn't happy and said this isn't what I had in mind. But then his extensions were pieced in, and it's just a simple seam turned back seam allowance, and that produced, you know, more typical 1780s just below the elbow, kind of three quarter length. We don't know how many fittings this took, but at some point these sleeves were put on for fitting. There's the extension sitting there ready to be put on because we knew this was going to be necessary. We weren't caught out at the last moment and the cut sitting that ready as well. And there we go already for a fitting. And the problem was disaster. The sleeves were too tight. You can see here the sleeve comes down to here. There's the seam. There's the extension. We're reverse engineering. We knew what the mistake was and how it happened and needed to demonstrate that to our audience in the course of making this gown. So Georgia here that she's going to find when impersonating a bride that she can't raise her arm. Can you imagine a bride in 1785 in her finery sitting there in her vibrant red gown everyone around her is raising a glass and giving giving toasts to the beautiful bride. And she's unable to respond to that and left a glass to drink herself. Now we could think of a number of ways to fix this. There's obvious ways that could have been prevented, but however it happened once we went down this road. This is the situation the manchal maker with Isabella. This is where they found themselves. We're not sure that it would have chosen the solution that was gone for, but this was what tipped us off as to what had happened. The manchal maker took a pair of scissors. And she just snipped into that extension piece bottom of the sleeve to release it. But that was the giveaway and studying the extent gown was that clip. And we're thinking, what is that? Why? And then you go through walking through the process of fitting a practice gown. And you go, ah, that's why. And that, of course, means you put cuffs on them. Cover that up. We don't know if cuffs were intended all along. We knew we were going to need those. We made them up beforehand. Or over the course of the day before this fitting. Intended or not, they became necessary. So I'm going to talk about one other main construction feature that, again, you see the end result and you wonder how did that work? Okay, moving on to the bodice. What we noticed was that on the inside front bodice front, the lining is continuous. It's cutting one, the whole bodice front and then up over the shoulder. So that becomes the shoulder strap and then the end is attached to the top of the back bodice. That's not that unusual. It's a little interesting for whatever reason that the tartan on the front wasn't cut the same way. Normally you would have a separate piece for your shoulder strap for fitting reasons because the grain line of your fabric of your shoulder strap often is significantly different from your bodice front. However, with Isabella, this is an interesting quirk is that she had quite straight shoulders and it didn't need to be a change. So this may have been a just a cutting decision piecing in and that seam is done like piecing with the seam allowance just turned one way. It's not a lap seam as you would have where shoulder straps are a key component of fitting to correctly to the body where you adjust that seam and the seam on the back as to fitting points. This is not a fitting point. Again, that's not too unusual. But here's where it gets interesting. Once this has been pieced in. So you've got your bodice front extending up over the shoulder, both the tartan and the lining. When it comes around over to reach the back. Normally, you have your back bodice, your front bodice. You hope the sleeves into the lining of the shoulder strap and then lay the shoulder strap your tartan your fashion fabric over the top and then lap them down on each end. But we noticed this this line of stitching here this this is sitting on the back bodice top edge. There's the fold of the fabric of the bodice and that told us that something different had happened here. And what actually happened was that the sleeve was pleated or the pleats are very slight. It's more slight tucks just because slightly almost easing in the sleeves were put up there in the normal way, but they were slipped in between the bodice lining and the tartan bodice. So she slipped between the two layers like that. And then the shoulder strap area is slid down underneath the bodice, the back bodice, and then the back bodice is stitched down. So the stitching is just one last layer of spaced back stitch through all the layers. And the complicating factor is that when the sleeve was put in there, it was slipped up in here as well. Here's the sleeve inserted down here. I am actually doing a video about this particular aspect, a separate talk specifically about that because it's tricky to replicate. Once you've got all this constructed this way, then the last step back on the inside is to fold the lining of the bodice back, fold it under and whip it down. One final observation on the original gown and the reconstruction. It's heavy. It's swear words heavy. If any of you have watched the mini documentary that American Duchess made about the project from their standpoint, they both talk about the sheer weight of the fabric. And this impacted the way we had to work far more than we had planned for in advance. The skirts were so heavy that during the fittings, it required someone, in this case you can see here Lauren, to hold all of those skirt panels up. Otherwise, the weight of the skirts put so much pressure on the narrow strip of fabric running through down through the center bodice and into the skirts that once the scary cut had been made, there was a very real danger the weight of the skirts could just cause that fabric to just rip and just tear the entire the skirts completely off the bodice. The entire weight is hanging this very narrow strip of fabric. And once the skirts were attached, then the weight had a serious impact on the fitting of the bodice. And this photo here shows before the skirts were actually attached here over the hip. The bodice fit very smoothly was Abby had no difficulty getting a nice lovely fit. Once the skirts were attached, the fabric just buckled and wrinkled and was impossible to get it smooth. Now there was lacing strips inside the bodice and we were pretty sure it seems logical on our observations that those were actually inserted not for any kind of bodice fitting, but to try to control the weight of the fabric pulling the back of the bodice away from the body. But those lacing strips actually then didn't help in controlling the tension in the center of the bodice front. Isabella's mantra maker encountered exactly the same challenges. These are sort of things that we stumbled into in the aha, we didn't know in advance this is what's going to happen but it happened these things happen. However, that mantra maker 1785 would have had a lot of experience working with fabrics like this, because she no doubt had done lots of alterations and repairs on older gowns made of heavy walls. She certainly had some solutions that really worked because we were trying to decipher how she did things in following her footsteps, we could see it just made so much sense. All these things that puzzled us beforehand and a puzzled other observers. Once you're doing it, it makes sense. And some of these are things that we don't see in any other 18th century extent gowns. Because there are no other extents made the fabric like this. So why this style? Because of that choice of fabric. Isabella as I mentioned before she was a young woman in her mid 20s she was familiar with contemporary fashions. But heavy wool tartan can't be narrow pleated or seen in line with those fashions. A few more general thoughts on this project. Reconstructing an extent garment. You can take two approaches one of two approaches really. You can try to replicate the original as closely as possible try to cookie cutter it copy it. Or you can try to decipher the processes that were used in making the original garment and try to then walk in the footsteps create a new object using those same processes. You might say we were ambitious in trying to do a little of both and combining those two approaches. Our foremost priority from the beginning was to identify. Test and recreate the process the focus was on the process and learning how this happened. But we had agreed there were certain features of the original gown that we wanted to copy if we could. And one of those was the way the appearance of the back bodice pleats. That's just so iconic that once you've seen that to pleat to pleat reproduction fabric somehow differently would create a different impression. And it was really important to us to honor that iconic look that was the result of the process in the original gown. But this did mean making some arbitrary decisions in how that back fabric panel was pleated. Some of these then impact fitting those pleats would have been arranged that way guided by the pattern guided by the alignments in the tartan. But they would have been done to ensure the fit on Isabella. So the way these things went together would be the natural result of the fitting. So the original way of working meant that form followed function. But in our project and our exercise, we fixed some of the aspects of form in place before we could pursue function. And this, if I can use the phrase bit us in one key area, and that's the shoulders that construction where. As you can see here, Abby trying to insert the sleeve head tuck the shoulder strap in underneath the back bodice. And then finding it wasn't going to line up with the pleats. The way it did on Isabella because Georgia is not Isabella her body is different. You can take basic measurements, bust waist hips, that sort of thing, but everyone is built differently. And in the end, Abby had to put those straps where they worked on Georgia. And that was quite different from how they had fit on Isabella. This was perhaps inevitable. What we were doing was making a new gown bespoke for one living, breathing woman. But we were modeling that gown on another gown that wasn't made new and bespoke for a different woman. And that is the nature of mantra making. It is a combination of skills and art and experience and the interaction into play. The maker brings to the table the wearer, the client, the commissioner, the woman who's going to wear that dress. And then what the fabric demands to be done. I like to refer to this as a kind of love triangle between wearer, maker and fabric. And there is the end result after two frantic days of a team working closely together with a live audience, asking questions all the way through. We didn't have allocated times to take questions and answers. We talked with our audience all the way through. And then we enjoyed the fruits of our labor. But there will be more information coming. I have got a number of different tutorials and zooming in on specific aspects to share with you soon. I hope you've enjoyed that. If you have any questions, do pop them in the comments below. And hopefully we'll see you again soon once it's safe to travel and to get together in groups like this again.