Historical Sewing Through the Age of Plagues

[dubsartur]

Continued from https://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=7001.msg159305 Tired

Sleeve caps and sleeve fitting are rather tricky for me, too. In bespoke dressmaking I was taught to always add a few centimetres to the sleeve cap on a mockup sleeve and then pin/fit it in while you/the person is wearing the dress/jacket/whatever, so the few centimetres extra allow you to let out some length at the top if needed and provide you with a bit of wiggle room to make it sit right. And once it does, you mark the seam line and transfer that to the final pattern piece.

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Here's what I mean by adding a few centimetres (random sleeve I grabbed from the internet), usually 3-4 at the top of the sleeve and tapering at the sides. Crappy MS Paint picture, but you get the idea.

Then again, this is geared towards modern aesthetics on how a sleeve should fit, it might be vastly different for historical dress. The 18th century for example has a quite different sleeve look in women's dress due to the undergarments: A pair of stays usually will make your torso cone-shaped and draw your shoulders back, all of which impacts the fit, obviously.

If I am unsure whether a sleeve will fit am armhole, I add a wedge on either side of each lengthwise seam in the sleeve. 

I think suits and similar female clothing might not be the best point for a conversation between contemporary tailoring and other styles because most modern clothing has conventional sleeve caps / sleeve heads and armholes / armscyes, its just some formal styles with the very deep sleeve cap which creates problems for arm mobility unless you make other unconventional choices.

German and Austrian news sites tend to be terrible, endless trackers and login walls.  Müller und Sohne's website seems to come from the same school.  Their books would probably be easier to use.

Laying the red satin lining into the lapels with felling stitch.

[The Seamstress]

Nice! What material is it?

[dubsartur]

The black cloth is wool coating that has passed through two people's stashes.  The red silk satin is from Sartor in Prague.

[The Seamstress]

Sartor's cool, such beautiful fabrics! I've never bought anything from them, though. Maybe one day!

[dubsartur]

Here is a doctrine which I have heard before from Cathy S. Raymond the FOSS person.  This is a low-grade podcast transcript, I have seen them mangle technical words in the past.

Look at period dramas and look for the men's shoulder pads. Like, why? Why? It's because they're using a modern blazer block, and just adding other shapes to the bottom to make it more like a tailcoat or something, because it's a construction thing. Oh, the people in the shop, they know how to do this. And the sleeves. There's nothing more ugly than a modern sleeve. They just don't look nice. They're not very elegant. Now, it's not to say that there aren't some lovely suits with some lovely sleeves. Sure. But as a concept, the men's modern suit sleeve is a bit meh.

Guy Windsor: Yes. And you can't move your arms properly while wearing it.

Zack Pinsent: Exactly. Well, that's because of the very low armscye. So once you have an idea.

Guy Windsor: What is an armscye?

Zack Pinsent: An armscye. And good luck on the spelling, because I always get it wrong. An armscye is basically the armhole. So, for example, here I'm holding up my hands. So we kind of assume that it's a circle. But no, actually, it's more of a more of an oval where your arm is. So basically what you want to do is you want to bring the armhole as close to that point as possible where it will fit snugly all the way round, because actually it's the same thing we have with sportswear. If it fits closer, you have a much wider range of movement. If you have to hold down that which you do with modern suits, because the way you can do that is you can mass produce it for more people and guarantee a better shoulder fit. It means that once you lift your arm, the whole suit comes with you.

Guy Windsor: Right.

Zack Pinsent: Rather than in no period clothing because it's made for you with a nice high armscye for full movement, you can lift your arms and do court dance ballet or even sword practice. And the coat stays exactly where it is. Fred Astaire has the same thing done with his suits. He had a very high armscye. So once you see him dancing around, he's wearing, I think he had some done in Anderson Sheppard, but they gave him a very high armscye from his request and he can move his arms about and everything and it stays where it is. It's a bugbear I have with conductors.

Guy Windsor: Because the back of their jackets keep flapping up and down.

Zack Pinsent: You aren't a bat. But there's also a thing that you can do. It's in a tailor's manual and it's literally called the conductor's sleeve. It's cut slightly differently for your arms being pretty much constantly raised. And then when it's down, it creates a little bit of creasing. But you are going to have your arms up more than you're going to have them down. And I think that's really fascinating. And with that means you can look at any period representation of a conductor, even in the late 19th century where there's an orchestra and there's someone conducting, the coat is down, the arms are up. Now it's a case of let me bring my entire jacket with you and distract you.

Now my off-the-rack suits don't have notably low armpits, but they do have wide shoulders and a very steep sleeve cap so the sleeve naturally hangs almost vertically.  I think the broad, stiff shoulder and the steep sleeve cap are the main reasons why the bodice of a modern blazer or sport coat wants to rise up when you do anything active with your arms.  But some modern tailors tell a different story and one day I would like to talk it over with some.  Unfortunately, good books on tailoring are mostly out of print and are mostly 'case studies' not general principles.  You can get someone to walk you through how to alter a pattern after fitting, but not a treatise on the armhole-sleeve cap system or the pros and cons of sleeves with back seams, sleeves with underarm seams, and sleeves with two longitudinal seams..

I wish I knew who taught this doctrine, because one of my favorite intellectual tools is to ask "what is the original form of the argument that everyone parrots? was it convincing or just confident?"

I may follow up with some photos and drawings, but making things with my hands is almost always infinitely better than talking about them on the Internet.  The Internet has infinite hunger for your time and attention.

[The Seamstress]

That's cool, thanks for sharing! (The podcast goes on my "To Listen" list.)

And it reminds me, Hilary Davidson did state a few years ago (it was back in the Twitter days) that she always adds an inch to modern sleeve/bodice patterns because the armscyes are so low you drag the whole dress up with you when raising your arms, so it's a thing in womenswear as well. I definitely want to experiment with that extra inch some time!

I was trained as a ladies' dressmaker and despite attending an introductory course on menswear pattern drafting I'm not very knowledgeable in that field, alas; but it certainly is interesting.

[dubsartur]

Even today, in clothes meant to allow free motion like a down jacket, sleeve caps are usually 5 to 10 cm deep (ie. if you unstitched all the seams and laid the sleeve flat, the longest part of the sleeve would be 5 to 10 cm longer than the shortest part).  On suits they are usually about  20 cm.  So tailors are drafting the armscye-sleeve cap system differently.

Like a lot of neurodivergent folks I have to be careful about letting myself geek out online instead of doing avoidant chores, work, homework, etc.  I don't want to become a pundit just pronouncing on things I hardly ever practice!

Zack PInsent has some event scheduled with the School of Historical Dress or MEDATS in England.

[dubsartur]

We have a local Jane Austen Society which holds costumed events.  My understanding is that Regency men's clothing is very complicated, its own alien thing to medieval or 20th-century eyes, and also published in expensive out-of-print books.  So said a YouTube vlogger anyways.

One reason I make fourteenth-century clothing is that they were teaching themselves tailoring too so many things are relatively simple and easy to build up to.