Long time, no see!

[justawench]

Now that we've moved and things are settling down a little, I'm going to dip my toe back in here. One day, I'll get some "after" pics of our house, when all those last little projects (hanging pics and curtains, etc.) are done

Comments

[porridgebird]

HelllloooOOOoooOOoooOOOooo!!

That's an interesting article. I'm poor now but I've been poorer, and homeless. My fellow homeless folks and I loved colorful things we might find in our various ways of finding things, and would gift them to each other, or trade with each other. It is just a little thing that makes life so much more cheerful! I had a pocket sewing kit, and when we'd come across a nice fabric scrap I'd sew it onto my sweetie's jeans. This went on for years, even after the denim was all worn away and nothing was left but the patches. I wish I had a photo of those jeans!

[justawench]

Hello!

Those jeans sound cool! Not many people use patches in our disposable society these days.

[heidilea]

What I find fascinating about the (heartbreaking) Threads of Feeling exhibit is the evidence of literacy and skills considered upper-class (like embroidery). The most mind-blowing thing--for a lot of us, I think--was the prints! But, I digress.

I've kind of seen evidence that undyed fabrics were only really used in institutional or slavery situations, and even then, not always. The orphans may all be drab, but not the fishwife on the street.

[virginiadear]

I think that's a popular misconceived stereotype, that the lower "orders" wore drab colors. (One historian informed me that "orders" is the correct term, and not "classes," as we tend to say, and I don't really know---one historian [actual PhD, doncherknow] seems an insufficient data base, kwim?---so I tend to use quotation marks around the term in that/this context because I'm uncertain about it.) Of course, there was a point in history (certainly by the early nineteenth century/1800s) when "drab" meant a loose woman, a woman of the streets, a prostitute and for a woman to "go to the drabs" meant she had fallen, indeed!, but a "drab" didn't wear dreary clothing if she had any other option.

And most people, I'm thinking, would have preferred colorful clothing, as long as they had an option.
What a lot of people, from the Middle Ages onward, didn't have (and this holds true for some people even today) was new clothing, and even "new-to-them" clothes would have been previously owned. In the Sixteenth century/1500s and the

[justawench]

Hey, how's it going?

I'm sure there were some truly wretched people out there who had completely grey-ed out fabrics, but even the poor had some ability to replace clothing. In Dress of the People, John Styles names many different sources of clothing for lower "orders" (as you say) such as charity, second-hand dealing, cast-offs from masters, even theft and chance (like shirt or shift races).

One thing I found interesting was how little some relied on their own industry. One lower order woman quoted in the Old Bailey archives (and maybe in his book too) said something like, "I ain't never sewed anything in my life."