On Mon, 25 Dec 2006, Carol Kocian wrote: > Ok, that is very obvious. I see again that there are more > eyelets than are being used by the lace. What's going on there - some > kind of lace shortage? It's not a "get dressed fast" scene, and also > wouldn't that side lace be for adjustment rather than getting into the > dress?
Speculating: This looks like an adjustment lacing to me. I find that if the lace is pulled back and forth through more holes, the lace doesn't slide as much within the holes. Since she's not trying to pull it closed and hold it closed, she only needs enough side-to-side connection to draw the sides against the body so the opening isn't flopping around. If the lacing can slide freely within the holes, the size of the gap will settle to where it's needed. Earlier in the pregnancy, or afterward, she'd presumably want to draw it all closed again, in which case she can use all the holes and the lace won't budge. In general, I wouldn't read a lot into skipped eyelets; you see them in a lot of paintings. Some possibilities: -- When you're dressing yourself, it's easy to skip a few holes. Maybe people didn't really care about it for everyday wear as long as the dress lay neatly and remained fastened. It may be that the only time people cared about perfect lacing was for formal portraits and formal occasions. Certainly if you're being casual enough to be wearing a single layer over a chemise (as in many of these pictures) you aren't in formal circumstances. -- The dresses may have been made under the assumption that you wouldn't use all the holes every time. When you think about it, it might be easier to put in a long row of closely spaced eyelets on each side when you make the dress and not worry about getting them exactly aligned in an offset fashion, and then just lace up using whatever holes are handy that make the sides line up right -- roughly every other one on each side. -- Whether skipping holes was intentional or accidental, the artists may have used this and other signs of casualness as a way to add a little realism and human interest to the picture, so it wasn't so artificially "perfect" the way a formal portrait would be. I remember seeing a picture where the dress was neatly spiral-laced from the bottom about a third of the way up, and then a hole was skipped, and the spiral switched direction for the rest of the way. Thought I, "That's how my dress would look if it were already laced partway up when I put it on, and then I laced it the rest of the way up from the other direction after I had it on, and I wasn't too concerned about it being perfect." --Robin _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list [email protected] http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
