Ahhhh Costuming - its happening!
My fellow tailors and costume makers - if you want to have fun while yelling at the TV - watch "100 Years of Fashion" on Hulu (most of the shorts are free on Youtube.) Everything was cool, till I noticed none of the models were wearing the correct undergarments for the time periods which screwed up the lines of the reproduction outfits.
Easy mistake right - you really have to look to find period undergarments, right Glamour magazine? Except at the 25+ stores, I/we can direct people going all the back pre-14th century.
THEN I watched the short about underwear and lingerie and I realized whoever wrote it wasn't aware what period undergarments even looked like, consisted of, or the level of intricacy required to make them which directly effects the line of the period costume. When you hit the 40s-50s-60s and no one is wearing boned girdles, corselets, merry widows, garters and stockings, or those industrial strength bras that were still being sold well into the 80s
All it takes is a little research into period advertisements for said clothes and garments, buying some vintage items and examining them, and doing things like reading books with pictures and copies of old patterns.
So I am sitting here - sure I was a wee babe as the world passed from the 1970s to the 1980s but the fashion standbys of the previous 30 years were still things I had access to - hands on access whether old magazines, ads, commericals, or actual items.
Which means the said millenial or even someone my age who made the series is already doing what people always do - reflect the “knowledge” of the past onto modern constructs while forgetting key elements that really defined the construct of “fashion” in a time period.
Why is it important? Because women’s fashion is directly related to their cultural and economic status. It is also related to safety issues like for years historians (mostly dudes) were all OH CORSETS SO BAD! MADE WOMEN SICK! CRAZY WOMEN FASHION!
Except women didn’t invent corsety and the extreme heights it reached in the 1800s was actually because of women needing protection from men and their grabby hands as well as attempts at assault and rape!
Being encased neck to lower thigh in a steel cage that is laced to your body ontop of a layer of cloth THEN putting two-three more layers of cloth over it is a tremendous defense as much as the bustle kept grabby hands off their bottoms and the hoops and steel cages made it really hard to remove a woman and have access to her body.
So as I think about undergarments here and they missing ones that Glamour forgot in the TV series I just have to realize history will degrade as long as people take everything at a superficial level, feel half-assing an art history or design class is ok, and/or can’t transcend the NOW fro the THEN.
There is so many cool things to talk about ins sociology, culture, and fashion - just running paralelles and revials of style that designers do. Like 1980s was a 40s-50s revival. 90s were an abject attempt at 70s revival which was quite obviously an attempt at 1920s-30s revival! It is all there. You just have see the patterns.
