On Aug 5, 2007, at 5:46 AM, Frau Anna Bleucher wrote:
I am firmly of the belief that while no one looks you in the eye, they're certainly not watching where their feet are going either. I have a gown that has a very short train (about a foot). In walking very quickly and purposefully in a straight line and following three other people toward my destination through a light crowd, I had my train stepped on no less than 6 times. Not only do people not see trains, but they have no concept of personal space.
If I may interject an anthropological note ... "personal space" is an _extremely_ culture-dependent concept. Everyone has a concept of personal space; they may simply have a very different one from the one you or I is used to. And even within a culture, personal space is highly context-dependent. A distance that would be unthinkable when a second person sits down on an otherwise-empty park bench is perfectly acceptable in a crowded elevator. When it comes to costuming and trains, I think there are several issues coming in that can be problematic. We live modernly in a culture where clothing trailing on the ground is an accidental fault of which the wearer ought to be warned. So our ingrained concepts of personal space really have no _reason_ to take trailing clothing into account. And very often the occasions where we are wearing historic costumes are of the "socializing with friends" type, where the default personal space is likely to be relatively short.
It's quite possible (likely?) that in a historic culture where someone would be wearing a trained gown, both the nature of the event- circumstance and the social standing of the person wearing the gown would result in an expected personal space distance that would make the train non-problematic. (Not meaning to pick on your example, but how likely is it that an Elizabethan lady who was wearing a trained gown would be "walking very quickly and purposefully ... following other people ... through a light crowd"? As opposed to moving in a formal and stately manner in the presence of people of lesser rank whose attention would be focused on her by default?)
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