> > On Apr 30, 2008, at 2:23 PM, Julie wrote: >> >> I made a coat dress/Spanish Surcoat which has frogs up the whole >> front opening. I'm trying to get documentation on the use of >> frogs in Elizabethan England. There are a couple of pictures in >> Janet Arnold. Does anyone have some links to either portraits or >> other primary type docs showing use of frogs and/or how the >> specific ones shown were tied? >>
On May 1, 2008, at 5:39 AM, Wanda Pease wrote: > I love Frog closures too but they don't seem to be standard on English > Elizabethans. However, there is a painting of Elizabeth in a white > dress > with frogs, labeled "Polish Dress" and one of the fameous ones > where she is > much older, holding gloves, the dress of a light color with orange > frogging > (?). It depends on how you define frogging. We tend to think of frogs as a fancy piece of knotted cord on each side, one with a knotted ball of cord making a button, the other with a loop. The two examples you give are of a different design. Each has a flat horizontal piece of trim extending out in both directions from the center front with decorative tufts at the outer ends. At the center is a button and loop closure. This style is thought to have originated with Polish coats that had similar decorative fastenings (See Queen Eliz's Wardrobe Unlock'd pp. 136-8. She notes that the term "frogging" was not used in the 16th c.). The only other possibility I can think of is the portrait of Elizabeth of Valois showing knots of pearls down the center front: http://www.mystudios.com/women/abcde/sofonisba_valois.jpg It doesn't look as though the buttons and loops are integral with the knots (and I'm not sure how they could be, since the knots are strands of pearls), so it's still not quite a cognate with modern frogging in a structural sense. But it does have some of the aesthetic idea of decorative knots associated with fastenings. Can you extrapolate from this isolated example to justify modern frogging? Your call. Melanie Schuessler _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list [email protected] http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
