Long time, no see!

[justawench]

Now that we've moved and things are settling down a little, I'm going to dip my toe back in here. One day, I'll get some "after" pics of our house, when all those last little projects (hanging pics and curtains, etc.) are done

Comments

[virginiadear]

I think that's a popular misconceived stereotype, that the lower "orders" wore drab colors. (One historian informed me that "orders" is the correct term, and not "classes," as we tend to say, and I don't really know---one historian [actual PhD, doncherknow] seems an insufficient data base, kwim?---so I tend to use quotation marks around the term in that/this context because I'm uncertain about it.) Of course, there was a point in history (certainly by the early nineteenth century/1800s) when "drab" meant a loose woman, a woman of the streets, a prostitute and for a woman to "go to the drabs" meant she had fallen, indeed!, but a "drab" didn't wear dreary clothing if she had any other option.

And most people, I'm thinking, would have preferred colorful clothing, as long as they had an option.
What a lot of people, from the Middle Ages onward, didn't have (and this holds true for some people even today) was new clothing, and even "new-to-them" clothes would have been previously owned. In the Sixteenth century/1500s and the Seventeenth century/1600s, a "new" garment was bought, by most folks, out of necessity and was considered a treat.

There's a popular belief in the modern mindset that the colors obtained prior to the advent of aniline dyes were...quiet, soft, vague and slightly muddy or cloudy or greyed. Like any dyed fabric, the fabrics or garments dyed with vegetable/animal dyes could and did fade over time, with use, and with laundering, but the colors which could be and which were produced were or at least could be quite vibrant.
What they were not (and many aniline dyes were) was garish, so when you read of medieval, Renaissance or any pre-aniline dye colors in combinations which sound today as if they must be "screeching-screaming-like-to-make-you-vomit" violently clashing, they actually were not at all unpleasant to view, e.g., pumpkin/orange, violet, yellow, chartreuse, and bright ruby or cranberry red, all in one outfit.

I wonder, though, how much of this belief about what colors would have been available to the poor, based on pictorial evidence, has anything at all to do with how readily available were laundry facilities or the time in which to do laundry, depending on one's social "ranking?" (This relates to another misconception about medieval people, and about the Victorians: that they didn't bathe, and therefore must have presented with dreadful, overpowering, all-pervasive Body Odor. It's true that many did not bathe: bathing as we understand it means and meant immersing or partially immersing one's body in a large tub or container of heated water and scrubbing oneself. Fuel was expensive, and how much you could have was, at least in England, regulated by the monarch; the poor were allowed to collect deadfall from the floor of the forest or woods, but not permitted to cut wood for their own use. What wood they did obtain they'd have used for heating their homes, and for cooking. And who had a tub that big, anyway? Maybe a brewer or a dyer or a tanner, but....
(People did, however, wash themselves. Can't have been fun. They did it, though.)

Whew! Long-winded me!
Anyway, I'm voting for availability of color.

[justawench]

Hey, how's it going?

I'm sure there were some truly wretched people out there who had completely grey-ed out fabrics, but even the poor had some ability to replace clothing. In Dress of the People, John Styles names many different sources of clothing for lower "orders" (as you say) such as charity, second-hand dealing, cast-offs from masters, even theft and chance (like shirt or shift races).

One thing I found interesting was how little some relied on their own industry. One lower order woman quoted in the Old Bailey archives (and maybe in his book too) said something like, "I ain't never sewed anything in my life."