The teacher of the class last weekend had pictures showing a progression. In the earlier stuff, you see really tiny pleats sewn to a band of trim, starting in the 1490s, as I recall. Then the embroidery moved from the band of trim to the pleatwork itself. I think she said the stitches resembled naalbinding and were used to hold the pleats in place. She had several examples of where she'd done some of this work and gotten results that looked just like the paintings. In later periods, in order to get more fabric to pleat to the high necks, they moved the sleeves down the body, forgot about shoulder seams entirely, and pleated the torso part of the shirt right into the neck. That's what those Henry VIII portraits show. After that, during Elizabeth's reign, the need for more fabric to pleat and less bulk under more form-fitting styles led to the creation of separate collars and cuffs, and pleatwork pretty much went out of style. This teacher had a three-inch binder full of full-page images of what she was talking about. She had blown some of the pictures up to life-size and figured out how many pleats per inch and how much fabric would have had to go into the necklines of these smocks, and it was yards and yards pleated into a 16-inch neckline. She said she couldn't get linen fine enough to do that, so her smocks were made of cotton lawn. She really ought to write a book. She had done a lot of work, and it was fascinating. Regarding the Mary of Hungary dress, that smocked blouse looks like it would have a pattern like the one on Dawn's website: http://www.reddawn.net/costume/chemise.htm. According to this teacher's timeline, this pattern would have been developed in order to get more fabric to pleat across the front. I don't think she had any extant examples of the Henry VIII shirt, but she did have references to other historians who thought the same thing she did, and it sure made a lot of sense the way she presented it, as one of the final stages of an evolution. ::disclaimer:: I'm a rank newbie reporting what I learned last weekend, so I apologize if I got any of it wrong. I'll get my materials from the class this weekend and make a better report. Tea Rose _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list [email protected] http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
