Greetings--
Susan B. Farmer wrote:
Their line of thinking is that you have to draw on what was before and
what comes after -- since fashion, back then, didn't change just
because The Great Design Houses issued their new fall collection. It
sort of oozed between styles. Everything before and after the bliaut
is a simple tunic-type garment (yeah, the fit and support are different
between the 11th and the later garments), but they're still 2 or 4 panel
garments (unless you count some of the Herjolfernes garments [and I sure
hope I spelled that correctly!]). It's easier for me to see a shorter
overgarment (we do see shorter tunics -- maybe only a foot or so, but
they're shorter over-tunics) than a waist seam appear out of nowhere
just to disappear again.
This is generally my line of thought as well, and illustrates one of the
problems of using statuary as a source for clothing history. Statuary
is *always* a secondary source, as the detail is subject to artistic
interpretation--although it's also often one of the best sources we've
got. Statues are not photographs, any more than paintings are, even
when there is a fair degree of realism. Sculptors likely did not have
live models posing for them as they chipped away at the stone; even when
they are being realistic, there was always the challenge of representing
what the fabric does in stone, a very different medium. Just as we know
painters "got it wrong", it is possible that so did sculptors. This is
where trying to verify what you see in the statues with other
sources--extant garments, cutting techniques, literary sources, and
other visual sources--leads to a more complete picture. We can't take
any of these sources in the twelfth century in isolation to understand
what's going on.
The problem, of course, is that we lack an extant "bliaut", so theories
are going to remain theories unless someone unearths a big trove of
bliauts somewhere. And I suspect even then there would be questions.....
Susan
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