HSM July Challenge: Unexpected

And so to July, and the seventh challenge in this year's roster. The theme for July is Unexpected. Make an item with an unexpected feature. Will it be a snazzy lining, a hidden pocket, or something else? Surprise us! 

I originally thought that finding good examples for this theme would be near-impossible, but they have been cropping up over the last few months and I have been squirrelling them away on my Pinterest board. Hopefully something in this post will give you an idea for your own Unexpected item.

First up, this set of stays from the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum. Unfortunately the museum image is quite small, but there are other views of it on Redthreaded's blog about the Structuring Fashion Conference in Germany in 2018, and also on Laurie Tavan's blog and on Redthreaded and Julia Bremble's Instagram accounts (search for #structuringfashionconference and #structuringfashion tags).
The silk stays are beautiful on the outside, but rather than the plain lining usually seen on extant stays they have a printed lining featuring pomegranates: 

A couple of other examples exist, including this pair of stays with checked lining from the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

This pair has a beautiful silk satin outer fabric, but the tabs are all covered in different silk brocades, a feature which looks very unexpected to our 21st Century eyes. These came through the Whittaker auction house, dated to 1780s Italy.

Staying with corsetry, it is often forgotten that for some time men's corsetry was unexpectedly common, as these two print adverts show. The first one is undated but appears to be very late 19th/early 20th Century. The second dates to 1936. 

Some surprising motifs show up in 18th Century mens waistcoat embroidery. From the recent V&A exhibition Fashioned from Nature comes this c.1780-89 silk example with a beautifully rendered pair of macaques, taken from a scientific book published around the same time. 

We also have more whimsical images, such as these delightful hot air balloons. This waistcoat was sold by Meg Andrews and dates to c.1784.

Embroidery also features in this next item, a pair of woman's shoes from the 1750s, also from the V&A. The look of the shoe is enhanced by the use of straw, with each strand carefully couched onto the base fabric and the floral design applied over the straw.

Straw is also used as the embroidery material on this woman's ball gown c.1865 (Textile Research Centre, Leiden) and on this 1951 Christian Dior dress made for Princess Margaret of Great Britain (with close-up detail). This dress is outside the HSM timeline being made after 1938, however it is an interesting nod to past usage and shows that straw embroidery was still unexpectedly showing up in the centuries following our two main examples.

Fabrics themselves can also be very surprising. Spun glass was an innovation used to great effect in the latter half of the 19th Century. Whole dresses were created from the fibre [usually mixed with another fibre for strength and robustness]. The Libbey Company of Toledo, Ohio had built a crystal exhibition hall of their own and in 1893 attendees at the World's Columbian Fair could purchase souvenirs such as this man's tie made of spun glass fibre, now in the Corning Museum of Glass.

Taking a step slightly back in time, we have this day dress in two parts dated c.1885 from the Musée des Arts Decoratifs. It appears to be a remade wool shawl, but the fabric is cotton and was printed 'a disposition', meaning it was printed specifically to be cut into a dress of this style.

This girl's dress from the late 1770s displays a very unusual feature in the form of scale-like smocking across the shoulders and arms (The Met). 

Hidden or secret pockets were often a feature of historical garments. There are Elizabethan portraits from the late 1500s in England showing what appear to be pockets in the sleeves of fashionable men's peascod doublets. Many clothing items, both male and female, had hidden pockets for small personal items. In the mid-19th Century, women's watch pockets were often skillfully concealed in the skirt waistband or the edge of the front opening. In fact, contrary to today's poor representation in modern garments, in the recent past women's clothing often featured several types of pocket, both concealed and not, including a period in the late 1860s/early 1870s where fan and parasol pockets were a thing. The example below is well-hidden in the bustle of this tennis dress from the 1880s, in the LACMA collections.

This wonderful 17th Century knitted jacket held by the National Museum of Scotland looks unexpectedly modern, with the use of the checked plain-purl pattern at the bottom. It is Venetian and made of silk thread with some gilt thread embellishment.

Possibly one of the more interesting instances of unexpected clothing are items which are deliberately concealed in houses or other structures. These are frequently shoes, but hats, stays, and other items of clothing have all been found hidden in the walls, under floors, or behind fireplaces of old buildings. This doublet was found in Reigate, UK and was dated to the early 17th Century. Possibly the most well-known recent find of concealed garments was the Lengberg cache of underwear, which included what can only be described as a 15th Century bra - an item which itself was completely unexpected!

Deliberately Concealed Garments Project