On Thu, 6 Apr 2006, Sharon at Collierfam.com wrote: > Thanks. In college, our costume teacher made one on the bias. She had > the actress lay down on the fabric and traced around her. I wish I'd > examined it more closely. Would bias have been period, or was it just > theatrical license? The dress moved beautifully.
Definitely theatrical license. I've seen absolutely no evidence for that sort of cut in the Middle Ages. Plus, if you want the dress actually to support you and manipulate your figure (rather than just clinging to what's already there) you need the strength of straight grain at crucial points. There's some information about this dress, including likely constructions, on my not-quite-a-webpage: http://www.netherton.net/robin . Look for the .pdf "FAQ" and the collection of previous h-cost posts. Sue saved me a lot of work by answering your earlier question! Only one slight fix to her excellent summary: > Gothic Fitted Gown (or, alternately, "GFD," for Gothic Fitted > Dress)....that ubiquitous dress found, uhm, roughly from late 13th > century through the 15th on many European women (that's a REALLY rough > time frame). More like mid-14th to mid-15th centuries, I'd say. I think I'm to blame for the term "gothic fitted dress," which was a generic I came up with to deal with the terminology problem (there are many terms used for this general category of dress in the period, varying by time and place, and the terms used by modern costumers are often not the ones used in the period). It coincides with the style art historians call "International Gothic," its key feature is that it's fitted, and it's a dress. It was people on this list who began abbreviating it as GFD, which I would never have anticipated! It was at the Chicago CostumeCon that someone from this list came up to me while I was in costume, and said "A GFD! It's a BFD!" Fortunately she was grinning. (For our non-American readers, "BFD" is an abbreviation for a phrase that begins with "big" and ends with "deal.") --Robin _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list [email protected] http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
