Designing Women
This article describes historical costume making by the School of Home Economics. This and other articles may be found in the University Archives.
Citation for this article is: Rees, Franceine. "Designing Women," ECU Magazine, Winter 1988, Volume 2, No. 1.
What does a mid-19th cenutry family of tobacco farmers have in common with male servants in a royal governor's household?
All are characters portrayed by living history interpreters at North Carolina historic sites, and they wear authentic costumes researched, designed and constructed by ECU home economists.
Dr. Vicki L. Berger, who heads the clothing and housing department at the School of Home Economics, and two graduate students combine costume design techniques with intensive historical research. The result is an array of historically accurate garments for interpreters at Duke Homestead near Durham and Tryon Palace in New Bern.
Recreating the clothing of the past is not simply a matter of avoiding manmade fibers or using buttons instead of zippers. The location of shoulder and side seams in pre-1900 clothing, for example, differs greatly from modern tailoring.
Assisting Berger on clothing for the Duke homestead staff was Rebecca A. Cornwell, a 1985 MS degree graduate who now teaches at Georgetown College in Kentucky. Her Tryon Palace project collaborator is a current master's degree candidate, Terri A. Riggs '84.
Work on these historic costumes is the subject of each student's master's thesis, and the two projects have been reported at 1986 and 1987 meetings of the American Home Economics Association.
At the start of each project, a specific goal is identified. In the case of Duke Homestead, two sets of clothing were desired: one for everyday wear and one for church, community socials and other special occasions of the type enjoyed by rural middle class North Carolinians in the 1860-70 era.
The purpose of the Tryon Palace project was to produce correct outfits for a blacksmith and a typical manservant employed in the gardens.
"Not only did each project call for garments that were authentic for historical and educational purposes, but each item had to be strong and hold up under heavy use," Berger says."Fortunately, the tailoring techniques of the past resulted in good, serviceable clothing that was made to last."
This is particularly apparent with the everyday cotton dresses she designed and made for Duke Homestead. Each full, floor-length skirt features a hem that is faced and bound with double-fold bias tape, which represents the edging of horsehair braid found on period examples. This braid had a very practical use for a hem that would be constantly subjected to soil and wear from frequent contact with uncarpeted floors and bare ground.
"Also, piping was used in several sections of the dresses. Not only is this an attractive decorative feature, but it makes a very strong seam," Berger says. "We used corded piping to strengthen and accent the armscyes (armholes where the sleeves join the bodice), necklines and waistline seams."
The Tryon Palace blacksmith's outfit is also made with a bow towards practicality: his leather breeches protect him from flying sparks from his forge and are expected to be extremely serviceable and long-wearing.
Berger, Cornwell and Riggs spent weeks intensively gathering ideas for their historical costumes."We studied photographs, portraits and illustrations, such as the pictures in copies of Harper's Illustrated Weekly," Berger recalls. "The documents and pictures we examined were in various libraries and museums, most notably the Library of Congress and the manuscript collections at Duke University and ECU.
"Then we visited museums and costume collections to study actual examples of the type of clothing we were interested in."
Field trips to look at authentic clothing were productive and enjoyable, she says, because of the "wonderful cooperation" of the museum curators."They were so helpful, assisting us in every conceivable way.
"We went to the Smithsonian, to Williamsburg, to the Valentine Museum in Richmond, the Mint Museum in Charlotte, the N.C. Museum of History, and to museums in High Point and Hillsborough," Berger explains.
"We were very well equipped for our visits.Some museums don't permit photographing items in their collections, so we had to take our colored pencils and sketchpads and draw the items that interested us. Some museums did let us take photos, so we took along light gray bedsheets to spread out on worktables so we could lay the garments on them and photograph them front and back.
"Of course we wore white cotton gloves to protect the fragile garments while we handled them, and we always had our tape measures and magnifying glasses.We were quite laden down each time we went to a museum, but we were certainly prepared for thorough examination of these garments."
After this period of preliminary investigation, the ECU designers were ready to sketch plans for their costumes.
"The pieces we produced are not true copies of any one garment we saw, but each has design or construction elements of many garments," Berger says. "You might say they are composites of actual museum pieces. Each item of clothing has components of garment examined in various costume collections."
For the Duke Homestead project, Rebecca Cornwell designed the men's clothing and Berger the women's.
Like his counterpart of more than a century ago, the Duke Homestead man wears a frock coat, waistcoat and trousers of forest green wool with cotton chintz lining. His cotton shirt has a full linen bib. On the farm he wears full loosely-fitted trousers of blue cotton denim (forerunners of modern jeans) supported with suspenders and an unbleached muslin shirt.
The women's everyday cotton calico costumes, one dress in dark brown broadcloth and one in cream-colored muslin, have gathered bodices, each fully underlined, and shoulder seams which slope backward toward the shoulder blades. The side seams are placed toward the back rather than down the sides under the arms as with modern garments.
Each dress has wrist-length bishop sleeves and a full, gathered skirt worn over several petticoats.
"For special occasions, a woman of the North Carolina Piedmont a century ago would have probably worn a dress of finer material with a fitted bodice, pagoda sleeves and a full, gathered or pleated floor-length skirt supported by petticoats or a wire-cage hoop," Berger says.
She designed a frock of this type, but because of budgetary limitations, it has not yet been constructed.At present, the everyday garments can be "prettied up" with detachable lace collars for special tours of the Duke Homestead site.
At the royal governor's palace, the two workmen's costumes feature loose, long-sleeved shirts of unbleached flax and cotton. Instead of a "fly" in front, the blacksmith's knee breeches and the field hand's calf-length trousers have a "fall front" fastened with eight buttons.
Using as models the restoration staff members who would actually wear the garments, the design team took a thorough set of measurements and used them to draft a basic pattern, or sloper, to create pattern pieces for each item of clothing. This was done by a variety of techniques known in designer's parlance as draping, flat patterning and drafting.
With a working pattern of brown paper, they constructed a prototype garment of muslin, fitted it to the model, made any necessary adjustments, then corrected the paper pattern as needed before making the garment again, this time in the selected fabric.
"Our fabric choices were as close as we could come to the textiles we saw in the museums without going to the expense of having fabrics from the museums duplicated to order," Berger says. "We studied several swatches in similar colors and designs before selecting the fabrics we would use."
Berger personally washed the cotton material several times to minimize shrinkage and remove modern factory sizing.
To further contribute to the authenticity of the clothing, the modern fabrics in their wide bolt widths were sliced down to 27-inch widths.This narrow width is a feature the ECU designers observed in period garments. Of course, this resulted in teh need for more seams. "Each of the Duke Homestead calicos needed seven panels of material in this narrow width," Berger says.
The pursuit of historical accuracy also limited the choice of fasteners.Duke Homestead women fasten the bibs of their cotton aprons to their bodices with plain straight pins (no snaps, safety pins, or Velcro)!
Appropriate buttons of leather, wood, metal or mother-of-pearl were chosen for the costumes.All were popular materials for button-makers in the pre-plastic era.
After these preparatory phases, the garments were finally cut out and sewn.Each was turned over to the restoration staff, along with a full-scale pattern so that the garments can be duplicated when replacements or reinforcements are needed.
No attempt was made to hide evidence that the Duke Homestead apparel had been sewn on a machine, since the sewing machine had been invented and was in use during this period. Most pieces of the Tryon Palace costumes, however, were handmade.
Both the Tryon Palace Restoration Complex and Duke Homestead host visitors of all ages, singly and in tour groups, for much of the year.These restorations are two of the 24 state-operated sites located across the state, used to illustrate the life and culture of past eras.
Tryon Palace first served as a colonial capitol and as the residence of royal Governor William Tryon, and was later the capitol of the independent state of North Carolina. The complex includes the mansion house with its nearly 40 rooms, outbuildings, extensive gardens and several nearby restored New Bern residences.
Duke Homestead consists of the dwelling house, farm buildings and primitive tobacco factory where Washington Duke first grew and processed tobacco. A Tobacco Museum at the site holds exhibits which trace the history of tobacco from its cultivation and use by the Indians to the present.
The staff members who wear the costumes are enthusiastic participants in the process of creating living history for their visitors, and are competent practitioners of arts and skills of the past.
Both of the Duke Homestead women were history majors. Valerie Jones '82 minored in housing and management at ECU.She enjoys demonstrating the housewifely art of spinning for visitors to the site. Sheila Harrell, a UNC-Chapel Hill graduate, is an able cook on the farm woodstove; among her specialties are boiled puddings, fried chicken and cornbread.
Costuming historic sites personnel is just one way Berger has been involved with costume design since she joined the ECU faculty five years ago.She has designed costumes for numerous musical comedy productions of the Wilson Shoestring Theatre.
Her creations range from the gingham pinafores of Oklahoma! and Victorian outfits for 37 cast members of a stage version of Dickens' A Christmas Carol to the great variety of outfits for The Sound of Music. She has even dressed dragon and wizard characters for a children's play, Quest of the Amulet.
A previous historical project was serving as consultant to an America's 400th Anniversary Celebration project.Berger assisted the Outer Banks Women's club in Nags Head in the design and construction of several opulent Elizabethan costumes which were later modeled in the Elizabethan Gardens at Manteo for some distinguished guests from Britain.
Her personal involvement with costume design has benefitted her ECU clothing classes, Berger believes."A major benefit resulting from these costume projects is the opportunity to study clothing in museums, libraries and historic sites and to share the knowledge and experience with my students," she says.
"Eventually, every project becomes an example in lecture or laboratory -- the actual cut and construction of a period garment or how to solve a complicated technique."
She has often brought some of her theatrical costumes to class for her students to examine and even try on.A pattern or picture of a costume seen in a textbook comes to life when students have contact with the actual garment, Berger says.
Rapid enrollment increases in Berger's home economics course, History of Costume , attest to the popularity of her class. Sixty-three students took the class in 1982; this year 94 were enrolled.
The course is a chronological survey of the development and characteristics of historic costume from the ancient Egyptian culture to the present. Students learn not only to recognize and identify clothing items but also study how social, political, economic and religious conditions within a period of history relate to that period's costume. Practical instruction regarding the correct display and storage of historic clothing is also given.
Berger received ECU's Robert and Lina Mays Alumni Association Award for Teaching Excellence in 1986.In addition to her teaching and administrative duties, she directs the ECU School of Home Economics fashion merchandising program.
She has placed some 200 ECU students in merchandising internships at retailers in several eastern states and initiates regular student field trips to fashion market events in Atlanta and Charlotte.
