Jupon construction

This will be the final post in my series about making an outfit in the style of late 14th century Iberia.  Part 1 and Part 2 covered my look into visual sources from the period and Part 3 recorded my pattern drafting.  

In case you don't feel like re-reading the previous posts, the short version is that I took my inspiration from these guys on the painted ceilings in the Hall of Kings at the Alhambra:

Now, even though these guys are hunting, my outfit was for a more fancy kind of occasion.  So, I was looking for a more luxuriant look.  I ended up choosing velvet - a cotton velveteen, actually, for reasons of cost.  While it does look great, I felt it was a bit more drapey than this project called for.  So, I used a medium-weight linen canvas to back it.  Since I wasn't using totally historic materials anyway, I ended up just using a light-weight cotton for the lining.  I used some bias-cut strips of silk to face the areas where the buttonholes go.

I did not quilt this jupon.  This was not entirely due to laziness, I promise!  I felt that the texture of the velvet, which is what gives it such a marvelous look, would be interrupted by the quilting stitches in an un-pleasant way.  The one surviving garment of this style is quilted (and is made from a silk brocade, so it can't be dismissed as a technique only for "practical" clothing).  Most images of jupons do have lines that seem to indicate quilting.  However, not all of them do.  There's an argument to be made that this could simply be an artistic choice.  But, I also think it's reasonable to choose not to quilt it.

Unfortunately, I didn't take a lot of pictures throughout the process.  The torso, based as it was on a reasonably well-done basic block, fit fine.  I realized on fitting the body before attaching the sleeves, that because of the grand-assiette style sleeves, nearly all of the wearing ease at the chest could be eliminated.  This required a few tweaks to the upper sleeves.  

 

This was my attempt to confirm the size and shape of the gores in the upper sleeve.  I cut the slits and then pinned the sleeves on top of the body.  Ultimately, trying to do this by myself meant that I didn't get very far, but the shapes and sizes of the openings created by pinning it in this way and putting it on seemed to mostly match the shapes and sizes of the gores.  

So, this is how they looked with the gores set into the slits and pinned in place.  I got a friend to help me fit the exact shape of the armholes after this.  I suspect that having done this once, that a second attempt would require even less fine-tuning.  Part of the key here is that the tips of the gores should sit along the line that a "normal" armhole would make on the body.  Because of the way the upper sleeve was drafted, this means that the armhole along the side seam actually has to be a bit further from the "normal" armhole that it does on top of the shoulder.  This can be calculated, but I think there's probably more factors that I haven't realized yet.  I also used the fitting to determine exactly how high the slits at the bottom of the side seams needed to be to allow for full range-of-motion at the hips.  

These are the upper sleeves, one inside-out.  You can see the cone shape that the gores create.  I do kind of like this as a solution to creating a fitted garment which still allows for good shoulder range-of-motion.  

Here is one of the lower sleeves, before being attached to the upper sleeve.  It was constructed in its entirety, including the lining and all the buttonholes before attachment.  Because I did "cheat" with some machine sewing, this was actually a much easier way to do it.  It's also undoubtedly the way one would do this with construction entirely by hand.  I stitched this to the bottom of the upper sleeve, then stitched the upper sleeve lining on and basted it up into place.  This leaves all the seam allowances turned up, away from the elbow, which I think is desirable.  Likewise, I stitched the upper sleeves, lining and all, into the armholes.  This left those seam allowances to be pressed toward the body, which I'm not sure about.  But it seemed to work out ok.  

The body lining was assembled and partially bagged, so I could do some of that stitching on the machine.  But, I did tack the lining seam allowances to the outer fabric's seam allowances.  The buttons are a bit large for this era, but the design of these particular buttons struck me as very suitable for this project.  The spacing is a bit much, too, even for the size - but that's how many I had.  

And, here's the finished product.  Unfortunately, it's hard to photograph velvet and most of the detail of the construction gets lost.  

The hood is made exactly on the pattern of Norlund's type B hoods, out of a changeable silk taffeta with a plain silk lining.  I really should have a plaque belt, but I am not committed to this time period enough to spend that much money on jewelry.  So, I used a somewhat lower class belt that is still appropriate to the period.  The hosen were purchased and are not proper bias-cut hose, though I did use garters below the knee. 

Drafting a gipó

So, I outlined my search for distinctly Iberian 14th century clothing here (links to Part 1 and Part 2).

I decided to use the hunters from the ceiling of the Alhambra as my models.  Here is a link to a reasonably close shot of three of them.  As I discussed in my prior post, I suspect that these close fitting garments (that many re-enactors would probably call a cotehardie) are probably constructed more like the gipó or jupon.  Since the surviving pourpoint of Charles de Blois is an example of this type of garment, this gives me useful information on actual construction.  The pourpoint actually has a very interesting sleeve construction, which I thought might be fun to try (although I'm still not keen on the number of buttonholes this will take!)

I am greatly indebted to Tasha Kelly, who has lots of information about this style on her blog: La cotte simple.  Her articles saved me from a lot of trial and error.  The Charles de Blois pourpoint uses a construction method called the grand assiette, which involves a very large armhole - there is only a few inches between the center front edge and the armhole seam.

I started with a basic block for my torso.  This is meant to be a closely fitted garment, so I used the minimal amount of wearing ease.  I then extended it down to where I think the hem will be.  I added width down to the level of my hips and then just drew lines straight down from there.  I don't need to worry about having extra fullness at the hem to allow for movement.  There are two reasons: the garment is so short that this won't be much of an issue and the side seams will be left open from just below the hips (as seen in the image above).  I'm estimating 11" below the waist for the hem, but I'll double check this at fitting.  Since I will not be recreating the exaggerated pigeon-chested silhouette of Charles de Blois, I didn't think I would need or want the enlarged armholes to be quite as extreme. So, I drew in a curve 2.5" from the armscye on my front and back pieces.  These are the resulting pieces:

Yes, my center front is straight, not highly curved like Charles' pourpoint. He obviously did more situps than I do.  :-)  

There are several features of Charles' pourpoint that I am not imitating.  The first one is that Charles' pourpoint has a horizontal seam across the back piece (but not the front).  The edges of this seam are both concave, essentially creating a fish-eye dart across the back.  This shaping is necessary to shape to the small of the back and then also accommodate the flare of the buttocks.  However, it is also possible to create this shaping with a vertical center back seam.  This is what I did here, since I've mostly got this shape figured out.  If I had more time to make a preliminary muslin, I might try out the shaping with a horizontal seam.   But, one of the Alhambra hunters has a parti-color jupon, so I think that using a vertical center back seam is totally justified.  

The photo above does not have any seam allowance on the armhole curves, since I expected that the exact shape and position of those seams will require some tweaking at fitting.  When I cut this out, I left a wide allowance on the armholes and the top of the sleeve.  However, I also learned two things when I fitted the body pieces.  The first is that I have an even flatter butt than I thought - I eliminated almost all the shaping at the bottom of the center back.  The second should have been obvious to me if I'd thought about it, but I didn't.

Usually, I draft a basic block with 4" of ease at the chest level.  For a garment with a standard armhole placement, this ease in the body's side seam is needed to allow for arm movement.  However, the grand assiette incorporates the ease needed for movement into the flared upper sleeve.  Because the armhole seam is so far from the shoulder joint, and because the cutting of the sleeve itself creates all the needed wearing ease, that extra fabric on the sides of the body is no longer necessary.  So, I ended up taking out almost all the ease in the side seams.  

In reality, the armhole sleeve needs to pass over, or even closer to the CF than, the most protruding part of the pectorals (what would be the "bust point" on a woman) in order for the sleeve to do all the work of accommodating the shoulder's range of motion.  In fitting, I ended up moving the armhole seams over by an additional 2 - 2 1/2 inches - and they probably could have been even bigger than that.  Live and learn.  

The sleeves that fit into these large armholes are flared by adding triangular gores into slits in the sleeve cap.  In theory, the points of these gores will sit more or less where a normal armhole seam would have.  This will flare out the sleeve top to cover the pectoral muscles and scapular region, to match the shape of the armholes, and still leave a closely fitted tube to encase the upper arm.  Kelly worked out a set of formulas to draft this upper sleeve and figure out the size and placement of the gores.  Her tutorial can be found here and someone created a web form that will do the math for you.  Basically, the upper sleeve is a rectangle, with its lower corners cut off to taper it to the width of the lower bicep just above the elbow.  The extant pourpoint has a vertical seam along the underside of the sleeve, but this seems to be completely straight and was probably done to conserve fabric.  The gores are set in as shown here to create the flared sleeve top (which will cover the pectoral and scapular areas):

diagram from Adrien Harmand's Jeanne d’Arc: Ses costumes, son armure: Essai de reconstitution, 1929

I did make some modifications to Kelly's draft.  She predicated her formulas on the front gore (the one floating above the rest of the sleeve in the diagram above) being a quarter circle.  This is the case in Charles' pourpoint.  But, when I tried drafting it that way, my back gore came out to be slightly over 1 inch wide.  Maybe my chest is smaller relative to my arms?   Maybe Charles de Blois did more bench presses than I do also?  I don't know, but it really didn't seem right for the back gore to be so narrow.  So, assuming that the narrow underarm gore straddles the body's side seam (which it doesn't in Charles' pourpoint, but this assumption made things easier for me) I dealt with the front and back separately.  Matching the lengths along the armhole seam gave me a front gore with about 60 degrees of arc.  Then the back gore was about 6.5" wide and much closer in proportion to the diagram above.  I'll have to test this out in fitting, but it just makes sense that the front gore can't be that much wider than the back one.  

Another feature that I'm not imitating from the Charles de Blois pourpoint is the cuff.  The Alhambra hunters seem to have cuffs that come down at least to the first knuckle of the thumb (metacarpophalangeal joint).  Charles' pourpoint has sleeves that seem to end at the wrist, since they taper to the cuff and in pictures of it they do not seem to have the flare at the cuff.  In order to extend past the wrist, the sleeves must taper to the wrist and then flare out in order to accommodate the size of the hand and movement of the wrist.  

The lower sleeve is relatively simpler to draft than the upper.  Kelly did not put instructions for this on her blog, but she sells a pattern for recreating the Charles de Blois pourpoint.  Her blog implies that she prefers to drape the pattern for the lower sleeve.  But, since I would have had to drape this on myself I figured drafting would be easier.  I will try to write up more detailed instructions on what I did once I can create some clearer images to illustrate it.  However, those with experience in drafting patterns will probably be able to figure out what I did from this photo:

The flare of the cuff can be accommodated in one of two ways.  What won't work is just adding fabric along the seam/button opening.  What you will see if you put your hand down flat on a table is that the shape of the hand flares mostly on the side of the thumb, not on the other side where the button opening is.  Adding fabric on that side will only create an awkward shape that won't sit well on the hand.  One option would be to cut the cuff as a separate piece.  This would be in the shape of an arc, which would create a funnel shape - and there may be a less extreme version of this going on in Charles' pourpoint.  But, the human hand is not shaped like a cone.  And since these sleeves are just full of inset gores, I decided to put one at the wrist also.  You can seen in the photo where I slit the muslin open along the center line to check the length when I fitted this on my forearm.  

Fitting the sleeve was a bit difficult on my own and I had to employ some help from a friend.  She helped me tweak the exact shape and location of the armhole seam.  With further time or experimentation, I might have adjusted the shape or size of the sleeve's gussets.  But, we just adjusted the armhole shape to suit the sleeve top.  

Construction details to follow!

More Spanish Gothic style

After I shared my previous post about trying to find distinctly Iberian elements in 14th century fashion, a kind Facebook user (Tasha Dandelion Kelly, who has a really great blog as well, which is referended in the first post) shared some photos of an alterpiece from Quejana in northern Spain, which seems to be in Old Castile.  It is currently in the Chicago Art Institute.  The paintings show scenes from the life of the Virgin Mary.  It is dated to 1396.

Photo by Tasha Dandelion Kelly

This piece has a lot of the same problems I encounter in other religious art.  A lot of the saints are depicted in voluminous draperies that are kind of reminiscent of ancient Greco-Roman styles, which I doubt are representative of the artist's contemporaries.  There's the three Oriental Kings arriving for the birth of Jesus, who are also not necessarily a good source for fashion, since their clothes are most likely meant to evoke foreign-ness.  But, there are a few panels with what seem to be representations of contemporary clothing of ordinary people.

Not all of these are helpful for me.  The patron and his wife (kneeling on either side of the crucified Jesus, top center) are fashion-forward and seem to be wearing an early form of the houppelande.  This is great, but not one of the styles I'm looking at repicating.  There are a couple of shepherds in the panel left of center in the lower row.  Their clothing seems to be of the geometrically-cut variety (earlier styles that obviously persist in the clothing of lower classes and those that do manual labor.  The scene to the left of center in the top row shows some soldiers who appear to be wearing jupons - but I don't want to extrapolate too much from images of men who are probably wearing armor.

Photo by Tasha Dandelion Kelly

There are 2 figures in this piece that I found very interesting, from the perspective of my current project. The first, seen here, appears to be Joseph from a scene of Joseph and Mary fleeing to Egypt with the infant Jesus. He is clearly not a soldier, but he is wearing what looks like a jupon - a fitted garment, buttoned all the way down the front - that is very similar to the ones the soldiers in the other panel are wearing.  Joseph's garment also has vertical lines marked on it, possibly indicating quilting.  His sleeves are fairly wide and loose, however, with a turned back hem.  This is unlike either the military-style jupons or other depictions of more fashionable civilian jupons.  Of particular interest on this figure is the fact that his hosen are clearly rolled down to just below the knee (where a garter would be holding them up).  This is commonly seen on men who are doing physical work or are otherwise in a situation where they might be partially undressed or trying to cool off.  But what makes it especially interesting here is that it indicates that, despite having a very short, fashionable garment Joseph is still wearing split hosen and not joined hose.

The other figure that I found particularly interesting is this one here.  Tasha's photos didn't have a good shot of this guy so I apologize for the low resolution - this is zoomed in from the photo on the museum's website.  The structure to the right of him seems to be a stable with horses inside and, since he's holding some kid of stick, I'm assuming he's meant to represent some sort of stable-hand.  But he may also be meant to be accompanying the oriental kings, who are on the other side of him.  This fellow is dressed almost exactly like the hunters on the Alhambra ceiling.  Short, closely fitted garment with buttons all down the front; tight sleeves with an obvious flare where they extend past the wrist (though no buttons are visible, this sleeve shape probably has them); a belt riding low on the hips; and a hood with short hem.  The main differences from the Alhambra hunters are the lack of explicitly drawn buttons on the sleeves and the front seam of the hood, and an apparent slight flare at the hem (where the Alhambra hunters have a narrow hem with side slits).  So, I've now got examples of this style from Old Castile, Andalucia, and Catalunya.  It's also very much in line with fashion north of the Pyrenees at the time.  This is pretty solid documentation for my planned late 14th century style Iberian outfit.   Next up will be some posts on construction, starting with drafting a pattern.

What do you call this garment? (or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Just Make the Damn Thing)

So, this is the first construction-focused post on the outfit I am making for Ostgardr's Day of the Decameron.  A run-down of my shallow dive into 14th century Iberian fashion can be found here.

I already have a suitable shirt for this era, so my first step in making this outfit was to work on the "foundation" garment.  Since I was looking at a short style, I intend to wear joined hose.  Joined hose need to be held up by something.  With overgarments as short as what I'm planning, the earlier medieval fashion of just tying individual hose for each leg to a belt or the waistband of the braes isn't suitable.  There was a transitional style of "split hose" where the hose were tall enough to cover the buttocks/pelvis, but each leg was still a separate item.  But, in the interest of not inadvertently flashing my underwear at people (even if I can throw together some period braes), I'm going with joined hose.  So, that means a torso garment to hold up the hose.

There's a great discussion of braes and hosen on this message board.  I highly encourage anyone interested in this era to check it out.  Robert MacPherson, especially seems to have collected a truly impressive number of pictures of men in their underwear - and I'm grateful!  Some of these images are a bit later than my 1390s target.

What the right name for this garment is seems to be a bit of a puzzle.  Possibilities include "doublet", "pourpoint", and "jupon".

Some reenactors prefer to call this a doublet.  I don't like that primarily because it's a term that is used (correctly) for later, more structured, garments from the 15th century proper through the 17th century.  Those garments seem to generally have more internal structure than what I'm going for here.  I'm not trying to shape the body, build a silhouette, or even stiffen the garment itself.  I personally like the term pourpoint.  It comes from French, literally meaning the thing that you tie your points (laces or ties) to.  But this term may also refer to the same type of garment as 'jupon'.  The term jupon derives from a military garment - something with attachment points for armor.  But, many military styles worked their way into the civilian world, inlcuding the jupon - as we saw in my previous post.  But this item is something for under a more stylish garment merely to hold up the hose.  The jupon seems to be a garment that may be worn on its own.  I am definitely not going to settle the debate about what this garment should be called.  So, I'm just calling mine The Blue Thing.

In the end, I will probably not actually use the Blue Thing for my Decameron outfit.  I started making this before I had totally settled on what I wanted the final outfit to look like (rookie mistake - I should know better by now!).  More on that in subsequent posts.  But it was a good test garment that allowed me to get a reality check on fit and will be a suitable foundation garment for more properly 15th century styles, if I ever decide to make them.

My main sources for construction details were Crowfoot, Pritchard, and Staniland's Textiles and Clothing, 1150-1450 from the Museum of London series and Sarah Thursfield's The Medieval Tailor's Assistant.  I used modern drafting methods to make a basic block for the body.  It's meant to simply be a thin, close-fitting layer over the shirt.  So, after checking the fit, all I did to turn my basic block into a final pattern was extend it from the natural waist down to the level of my hipbones and add seam allowances.  I use 1/2" as my default in most places.  The neck was only 1/4".  I added a 1" turn back at the center front and the hem.

The sleeve pattern was started from Thursfield's draft, which I love for creating the proper sleeve cap shape for these later medieval garments.  Her draft is for a one piece sleeve with the seam running down the back of the arm.  There's a lot of evidence for a triangular gore at the top of the sleeve seam in the 14th century.  This is found on all the garments from Herjolfsnes, Greenland with surviving sleeves, and can be seen in artwork of the era from mainland Europe.  I'm not sure if this construction method would be outdated for my Blue Thing.  But I've never tried it before, so I wanted to give it a go.

After drafting the sleeve to Thursfield's instructions, I marked out the under-sleeve half of the seam from the armscye to the elbow (on the right in my photo).  Making sure I had enough width for my elbow and biceps, I then drew a parallel line to this one to represent the over-sleeve side of the seam.  They don't look quite parallel in the photo, but they are.  The sleeve then tapers evenly on both sides from elbow to wrist (cut off at the bottom of the photo).  The portion of the sleeve cap between the new line and the back edge becomes the base of the triangular gore.  I just drew a straight line from the back point of the sleeve cap to meet my new seam about halfway to the elbow.  As you can see from the photo, this has the effect of eliminating width in the sleeve for the upper arm.  So this is a useful technique to create a really slim-fitting sleeve.

I actually made a mistake here, which I didn't realize until after I had cut my fabric.  The two sides of my gore are not equal.  This is a problem because it's being set into a seam whose sides are equal before the gore is set into it.  In the end, I had to ease the over-sleeve side of the seam into the under-sleeve side for a bit above the elbow.  This is not necessarily a bad thing from a sleeve-fitting perspective, but it should not have been necessary if I had made the pattern right.  A good reminder to always walk your patterns before adding seam allowance to make sure that the seams match up.  What I SHOULD have done was trace off the curve from the left side of the sleeve top (which is the base of the gore), connect the two ends of the curve with a straight line and then draw a perpendicular bisecting line to that to be the center line of the gore.  Then, the two sides of the gore would form an isoceles triangle with the curve as the base.  I don't think that the fit would change much, but it would definitely have gone together much more easily.

The fabric I used is a worsted wool twill in a light blue.  I'm always thrilled to find wool suiting that isn't in a shade of gray, or pinstripe, or some other pattern that just screams modern menswear.  I ended up paying more than I wanted to for this, but I did haggle the store down quite a bit and I only needed 2 yards (in fact, I needed even less than that, but I hadn't made the pattern pieces when I bought it and wasn't sure just how efficient I could get with it).  The wool is backed by a medium weight linen for body and I stitched a strip of stiff linen canvas to the center front edge for reinforcement to avoid pulling.  I used some light weight linen I had lying around for a lining.  There's an interesting debate to be had as to whether linen is an appropriate lining material for this type of garment in this era.  But, for this project thrift carried the day.

The construction is a mix of more medieval methods and later tailoring techniques such as those described by the Modern Maker in Renaissance clothing.  I did cheat and use my sewing machine for the main construction seams in order to save time.  But all the finishing was done by hand.  As an example of earlier construction techniques, the neck edge and the sleeve cuffs were finised by cutting the lining short and making a double-fold hem over it, which is stitched down with short running stitches.  This is really a more primitive construction method.  But, because I am a bit of a perfectionist, I did proper buttonholes and bar tacks, as seen on later clothing.  I suspect that the use of a bar tack at the top of the sleeve vent might be especially anachronistic for late 14th or early 15th century, but especially given the sleeve seam issues I had, I wanted the extra reinforcement.

The buttons are made as described in Crowfoot, et al.  I stitched a circle in running stitch on a small square of fabric, then pulled that thread up like a drawstring, tucking all the raw edges inside.  With a few stitches across the bottom once it's gathered, the whole thing pulls up into a ball shape.  I started with a 1.5 inch square, made a 1 inch circle with my running stitches, and the finished buttons are about 3/8" (1cm) across.  This is in the range of the ones reported from London by Crowfoot, et al.

There's an important detail in Crowfoot, et al. about the way the cloth buttons they excavated were made that many re-enactors overlook when making cloth buttons for clothing of this era.  Their diagrams and pictures clearly show that these buttons are not just little spheres of cloth.  There are stitches through the entire thing from front to back, forming concentric circles of dimples on the surface.  I only have one stitch in the center and then a ring of 6 stitches around it.  But, even this small amount of stitching does two things: it flattens the button just a bit and it stiffens the button the way that quilting or padstitching do for flat pieces.  Having a button that's just a bit flattened (kind of like a jelly doughnut or sandwich roll) is a lot easier to put through the buttonhole - especially with one hand.  And the extra stiffness also makes it easier to push through.  Squishy buttons don't work well.  The photo on the left shows the buttons unfastened and you can more clearly see the thread shank formed from attaching the button.  This is also important, since if the button sits flush with the fabric, there's no accommodation for the thickness of the buttonhole.  Again, I need to do everything I can to make these buttons easy to fasten with one hand.

I chose to have this garment lace up the front.  Since it is essentially something that is meant to have another layer worn over it, this provides a nice, smooth front surface for whatever I put on top.  If/when I get around to making a proper 15th century outfit, I'll have to put some eyelet holes around the hem for tying up my hosen.  As it turns out, this is really closer to a 15th century type of doublt that what I had planned.  And, my ultimate decision on my Decameron outfit went in a different direction.  So, for now, I'm putting the Blue Thing aside.

Apologies for the less than inspiring background - my only full length mirror at the moment is in the bathroom. 

Indulging my Gothic tendencies

Our local SCA group is having an event centering on the Decameron, an Italian collection of stories from the mid-14th century.  Since our lovely hosts were so enthusiastic about it, I decided to hop on the bandwagon of people dressing for the occasion in proper 14th century style.  Technically, the Moorish clothing that I wear most frequently for SCA events is based on 14th century examples.  But, for this day I figured I'd try out some of the Christian styles of the time.  The Decameron was first published around 1350, so I'm looking at the later half of the century for inspiration.  This is the story of how I started planning an outfit for the Day of the Decameron.

It's a bit of a ride, so buckle up!

I could have just made the standard "cotehardie" style clothing that is seen very commonly among the SCA and other reenactors.  But, since my interests generally slide back and forth along the Iberian timeline, I thought I would see if there was any way to give the style a more distinctively Iberian flair.  This is not as easy as you might think it should be.  The clothing of Spain and Portugal is rarely given more than a passing mention in books on the history of European clothing in general.  While the clothing of Christian people in Iberia is not disconnected from that of the rest of Western Europe, until the late 16th century (when the rest of Europe adopted Spanish fashions) things south of the Pyrenees were always just a bit different.  Sometimes quite a lot different!

Also, it seems like there's a paucity of artwork from 14th century Iberia - or at least artwork depicting people and their clothes.  As in the rest of Europe, much of the artwork from this era is religious in nature.  Saints are often depicted in flowing, draped fabrics, which is likely meant to evoke a sort of old-timey appearance to the viewer.  There's lots of evidence for clothing from the 13th century.  The Cantigas de Stanta Maria and the Book of Games of Alfonso X, El Sabio (both from the mid-13th century) provide dozens of images of men and women in quite a variety of dress.  There are even several surviving garments from royal burials in the 13th century.  And once we get into the 15th century proper, the blossoming of painting associated with the Renaissance provides much more variety of art.  Plus, a lot of secondary sources have focused on the later 15th century, since this is the age of the Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabel.  However, in between those two eras, there's a bit of a gap.

So, what sources could I find from the second half of the 14th century in Iberia?

Moors and Christians in Granada

I revisited my main source for Moorish clothing of this era: 3 paintings on the ceiling of the Hall of Kings (Sala de los Reyes) in the Alhambra.  These were probably done in the late 14th century.  There are three sections of the ceiling, each depicting realistically rendered figures.  The central portion shows ten Muslim kings, or possibly judges or courtiers.  However, the two side sections show battle/jousting and hunting scenes, which include people dressed in both Christian and Muslim styles.  This hall was unfortunately closed for restoration when I visited in 2010.  But there are some great post-restoration images on Wikipedia.  Also, Milia Davenport's The Book of Costume includes plates of these.  Those of the two lateral sections appear to be line drawings taken from the painted ceilings.  My guess is that this was done in the 18th century, since there was a surge of interest in the Alhambra at that time.  However, since the condition of the paintings had clearly deteriorated a lot subsequently (as can be seen in this this photo) I suspect that drawings or copies from the 18th century were used by the conservationists to guide the restoration.

Interestingly, the Christian men shown in the lateral paintings of the Hall of Kings all have pretty typical "cotehardie" style clothing.  It's not substantially different from the styles seen in Anglo-French clothing of the mid to late 14th century.  This garment could, in fact, be a jupon, which is a point I'll get to later.

Ceiling from the Hall of Kings at the Alhambra

As seen here, the men have tall hosen.  One figure is shown with his hosen rolled down to below his knees.  The more fancy looking guys have relatively short cotes, suggesting full split hosen or even joined hosen.  (Just when joined hosen came into use is a bit of a contentious subject which I am completely side-stepping here)  People who seem to be more closely involved in the manual labor of hunting (on the right hand side of this image) have less fitted clothing.  The cotes of the more fancy figures are fitted, buttoned down the front, and have long, fitted sleeves with buttons from elbow to wrist.  Most seem to have the extended cuff reaching down to the knuckles that is seen in contemporary art from other areas.

The one feature that I can't recall having seen in art elsewhere is that the cotes seem to have a slit at the bottom of the side seams.  Men's tunics/cotes from earlier in the Middle Ages sometimes have slits.  But, those are generally longer garments, usually coming to below the knees.  Cotes like these, that end at the level of the upper thigh or mid-thigh, don't always need to have a slit for functional purposes and, while they may have dagged hems, slits like this are unusual.

There are several figures wearing hoods, generally with short hems and some indication of a liripipe (the tail hanging off the back), and more than one has what look like buttons closing the center front under the chin.  The mounted figure in this painting (upside down at top right) seems to be wearing a waist-length or hip-length cape, closed by three buttons at the neck.

Another section of the Hall of Kings ceiling

So, if I were to just use these images, I could probably justify styles that are more or less the same as those seen in other parts of Western Europe.  In the 1380s-90s we start to see some new developments in fashion.  In France, England, and Italy some more interesting sleeve shapes and tall collars show up toward the end of the century.  Sometimes these accompany the shift to a more flared body (which essentially is the earliest form of the houppelande).  But, there are plenty of examples with fitted bodies as well.

Transitional styles at the end of the 14th century

Looking for some of these transitional forms in Spanish or Portugese art was tough.  This retable in the Victoria & Albert Museum was painted around 1400.

Retable of St. George by Andres Marzal de Sas, c. 1400

The bag sleeves are a style I've wanted to try out for a while.  I'm particularly intrigued by the square bits hanging from the sleeve seam on the man at far right.  I can't think of another source where I've seen that decorative element.  But then it shows up in a different form in this retable from Tarazona, dated to the 1390s.

Detail from a retable, Tarazona Cathedral

Unfortunately, most of the rest of these two men's outfits is obscured by the toturer in front of them (the image is St. Lawrence on a grill).  They both have tall collars.  They both have red sleeves but a body garment of a different color.  The one in blue has the hint of maybe buttons on his left shoulder - making me think that this could be some sort of cloak or mantle.  I've never seen a cloak or mantle with a tall collar before, but like I said, things south of the Pyrenees are different.  I really can't tell what's going on with the man in black at all.  Both of these fellows, as well as St. George's torturers in the above picture seem to have the looser bodied garments that are new and fashion-forward for this decade.  I think I'd like to stick with the fitted cotehardie-style silhouette, but I'm really looking for some more exciting sleeves (and, to be honest, an excuse not to have to make a million buttonholes for those long, fitted sleeves).  I would love to do a fitted cote with tall collar and bag sleeves like the left-most one in this illumination (from a manuscript of 1395), but so far I'm having no luck finding this style in Iberia.

Adventures in translation, or How different is Catalunya?

This is where my whimsical research started going into rabbit-hole territory. Someone on Facebook made me aware of the existence of a book in Catalan: La Moda a la Catalunya del Segle XIV by Montse Aymerich Bassols.  It's available on Amazon.   Now, I don't speak Catalan.  I can read Spanish, but I'm not fully fluent.  So, with a lot of effort and the help of Google I CAN understand the Catalan writing.  But I really haven't had the time to go through all the text.  Luckily, Aymerich Bassol has included lots of pictures.

So, looking through this book there's a lot that's similar to comtemporary Anglo-French fashion.  There's some Iberian oddities to be sure (a musician wearing a parti-colored cote with one half being a green and white check pattern, for instance, or a birth attendant whose parti-color garment seems to have one half from plaid on the bias).  Aymerich Bassol breaks the ubiquitous cote (cota in Catalan) into three types, plus the cota ardia (seemingly a Catalan cognate to the English cotehardie).  I haven't made it through enough of the text to understand exactly what the distinctions are between her types A, B, and C.  The pictures included in those sections all seem to show tunics similar to the geometrically constructed ones found in the rest of western Europe throughout the Middle Ages (check out my post on geometric clothing for some examples).  There are some with buttons down the front, but they generally don't look fitted enough to need a front opening.  For the most part these images are from prior to 1350, so a bit early for what I'm aiming to replicate.

It's difficult to say without translating the whole text, but Aymerich Bassol seems to be using the term cota ardia to refer to an over-garment with short sleeves that have a hanging part in back.  She uses a word that I think means 'shovel' to describe the shape, which I think is apt.

 I THINK that she's using the term gonella to refer to the long sleeved garment under it, whose sleeves are usually buttoned from the elbow to wrist.  She also uses the term gonella to label the inner garments from the 13th century burials in Burgos.  In Spanish these early close-fitting garments are usually called sayo (or saya, for a woman's garment).  I can't even guess what the origin of the term gonella is.  Aymerich Bassol's cotas ardias are not universally close-fitting.  Even more surprising, none of pictures in this book of cotes with these shovel-shaped sleeves seem to show buttons down the front.  So, despite the obvious cognate, I'm forcing myself to dissociate Aymerich Bassol's cota ardia from what we in the SCA usually call a cotehardie.  The garments comparable to these cotas ardias in the Anglo-French tradition are usually just called cotes or over-tunics.

But, the other surprising thing (compared with fashions north of the Pyrenees) was the prevalance of a garment that Aymerich Bassols calls the gramalla.  This a a loose, flared garment with very characteristic decoration of two hanging flaps at the front of the neck.  This garment shows up in the Anglo-French setting as well.  Mary Houston calls it a 'sclavine' or 'esclavine' but I've seen some sources use the term 'garnache'.  It seems to be exclusively a protective outer garment in more northern countries and is a style more characteristic of the 13th century.  But, apparently these gramallas are all over Catalunya (and possibly the rest of Iberia?) including on pictures of kings.  The same garment shows up on the Moorish kings in the Alhambra ceilings - including with the funny little flaps at the front neck - and on the mounted Moor in the picture I included above.  They are long - pretty much between mid-calf length and ankle length.  They often have an attached hood, but not always.  This is such a ubiquitous garment that Aymerich Bassols calls it essential to 14th century style.  In the pictures, the gonella, cota, and the gramalla are often shown all being the same color - possibly indicating that they were made as, and considered to be, a suit.  Most of the images she shows of the gramalla have the distinctive shovel-shaped sleeves of the cota ardia visible underneath, but she also has a brief section on titled "La gramalla, la gonella i la cota no ardia".  There are a few images of men wearing the gramalla with one or more long-sleeved garments under it that do not have the shovel-shaped pendant.

The other type of garment to consider is the one Aymerich Bassols calls a gipó.  This word is clearly related to the French jupon which seems to get used interchangeably with 'pourpoint' in a lot of writing about Anglo-French clothing of this era.  The Catalan gipó is much the same: a closely fitted, short garment, buttoned all the way down the front.  Aymerich Bassols specifically compares it to the surviving jupon or pourpoint of Charles de Blois.  Note, there are 2 surviving garments attributed to him.  She includes photos of this one which has a narrow skirt with slit side seams.  [edit: I can't seem to link directly to the item on the Musee de Tissus page; type "pourpoint" into the search and it will come up.] The other has a more flared skirt and less complex cutting for the sleeve but is very similar and there's a thorough analysis of its construction in this article.  The surviving garments from Charles de Blois are both quilted.  Likewise, most of the pictures that Aymerich Bassols identifies as gipós have lines or other markings that seem to suggest quilting (see the sculpture included to the left).  Not all the pictures she includes of gipós have close, buttoned sleeves, and some have a weird band of a different color at the waist (like the one below from Tarazona cathedral).  This is not a belt; at least one picture clearly shows a belt over it, so I'm a bit at a loss as to how to interpret it.  But ultimately, this is probably the same type of garment shown on the hunting guys in the Alhambra ceiling.

Retable, Tarazona

Since I'm drawing so much on this Catalan book, I need to step back a minute and ask an important question.  How different is Catalunya from the rest of Iberia?  In the 14th century, Catalunya was already part of the Crown of Aragon.  But, the individual Christian kingdoms of Iberia hadn't yet subsumed their individual identities to the degree that would happen later.  In fact, even now Catalunya still holds onto a distinct cultural identity and its language.  So, how much can I generalize Catalan styles to the rest of Christian Iberia?  The only answer I can give for now is that the styles Aymerich Bassols shows aren't all that different from broader European trends at the time.  She includes some images from Castille and France.  And the characteristics that diverge from fashion elsewhere in western Europe do show up elsewhere in Iberia - the images I've included here are from Tarazona (Aragon), Xèrica (Valencia), and Granada.  So, while there may be a distinctively Catalan style of the later 14th century, most of the characteristics that distinguish it from fashion north of the Pyrenees are probably more broadly Iberian.

Conclusions

So, if I want to create an outfit that demonstrates a distinctly Iberian style from the second half of the 14th century, there seem to be two broad categories to choose from.  (1) The gipó in its various forms, and (2) an ensemble of gonella, cota (particularly the cota ardia), and gramalla.  Aymerich Bassols also has a chapter on a garment she calls the aljuba, which I'm ignoring for now because it's still very unclear to me what this garment is and how it differs from any other garments.

The gipó is very fitted, quite probably quilted to greater or lesser degree, with long, close sleeves buttoned from the elbow to wrist.  The length is often to just barely below the crotch, and there may be slits at the side seams, or a fuller hem.  This short style requires tall hosen - the type that come up to the waist or at least the hip-bones.  Whether they are all joined hose (the kind that are connected along the crotch with a codpiece in front) or the earlier split hose is a bit of an open question to me, and just when joined hose come into use is a topic that is up for debate.  Like elsewhere in western Europe, these close-fitting styles are worn with a belt that rides low on the hips.  The guys on the Alhambra ceiling have characteristic 14th century hoods with liripipes (the long, narrow tail hanging from the point of the hood).  Some of the gipó-wearing men in the pictures from Aymerich Bassols' book have other sorts of soft hats and some are bare-headed.

Men wearing the cota ardia generally have a garment with long, buttoned sleeves under it.  However, the only pictures that Aymerich Bassols shows of men wearing a garment with long, buttoned sleeves without something over it are the gipós.  I'll have to translate more of her text about the gonella to see if she has any indication of the shape of the body of this garment.  It could be similar to the 13th century gonella/sayo which has a distinctive cut-in, square armhole and tight fit.  Or, toward the end of the 14th century, there could be a variation on the gipó under the cota.

The cotas, whether ardia or no, range in length from  just above the knee to mid-calf.  I think that the shovel-shaped cota ardia sleeve would be more distinctive to the second half of the century.  Given the length of the cotas, they could be worn with the earlier style of separate hose or the later split hose.  Again, without any more distinctively Iberian evidence I would have to go by practices in the rest of western Europe at the time.  The addition of a gramalla, especially in a fabric that matches the cota and/or the gonella would be more characteristically Iberian.  Of note is that a belt is never shown over the gramalla.  The two men in the picture I included above have swords hanging from long belts over their shoulder, but the gramalla does not get held in by a belt at the waist.  When we see the cota without something over it, it could be belted or not.

The typical 14th-century liripipe hood is in evidence on men wearing the cota.  The gramalla sometimes has an attached hood.  There are also plenty of pictures of men with or without the gramalla wearing a hood as a hat (with the face opening rolled up into the brim - a style well-documented elsewhere in Europe at this time).  Some men are bare-headed and some seem to be wearing simple coifs.  There's a few other hat styles in Aymerich Bassols as well.

So, what will I do to join in for our Decameron event?  I have to decide how many layers/items I'm willing to make.  And how "cutting edge" I want to be.  Details, and a construction diary of sorts, will follow once I've put the outfit together.

Itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny sock

Here's my latest adventure in nalbinding. 

I decided to try and replicate this red and yellow sock in pierced looping from the V&A (item # 1287-1904). The idea here was to give myself another "reality check" on gauge. I am happy to say that I have finally gone overboard on doing tiny gauge work! I got some cones of weaving yarn (this one for the curious). When I measured, I got 22 wraps/in, which is what it's advertised as. 

I chose this sock because the museum has very good photos from multiple angles, making it possible to attempt to count stiches and rows.  Based on the V&A's photos, I counted rows and stitches as best I could. This stitch is pretty easy to count, though, in part because it is one of only 2 nalbinding stitches I know that lines up into vertical columns (the other being the typical Coptic stitch). Then, I tried to make a sock with the same number of rows and stitches. 

The V&A's sock is listed as being 12.5cm long, 6.7cm wide, and 4.5cm high. I'm not sure what 'height' means here, so I'm sticking with the other two. Based on counting rows and stitches in the museum's photos, I estimated this sock should be 4.77 st/cm or 12 st/in. I pretty much hit that mark with the weaving yarn. 

My sock, top view - I have stuffed it with a bit of brown paper to mimic the stuffing in the pictures of the V&A sock.

Top view of the V&A's sock

However, my sock is only 12.0cm long (from tip of toe to tip of heel) and 5.3cm wide (flattened out completely, across the instep). As you can see in the photos, it's narrower in relaton to its length than the V&A sock.  So, I may have undercounted the number of stitches around. But, I don't think I've made any error on the number of rows visible on the sole. Which means that I've probably found yarn that's (probably) too thin compared to the archaeological samples. This is useful.  

The sole of my sock

The sole of the V&A's sock

As you can see in the photo below, without something inside the sock, it curls up very tightly in an S-twisted direction. The stitches themselves are Z-twisted (F2 -/O in Hansen notation). I did counteract the twist in the yarn as I was working, but I doubt I balanced perfectly.  Those of you with sharp eyes may notice that the V&A's sock has S-twisted stitches, but I find it easier to work this way.  Regardless, the nature of the stitch leads to twisting, as with all nalbinding.  Since the museum has not posted a photo of their sock unstuffed, I can't compare.  This is unfortunate, since seeing the degree of twisting might have given me some idea about relative tension.  

The other really interesting thing here is that the waffle-like texture is MUCH less noticable at this gauge than in my sample with worsted weight wool. This has a pretty smooth texture in the finished product, though not as smooth as standard Coptic stitch. I would totally consider making a pair of socks in this stitch instead of regular Coptic when I get around to making another full size pair.

So, what did I learn from this little experiment?  I already knew that the gauge on surviving socks in Coptic stitch ranges approximately from 8-12 stitches per inch.  My previous efforts, using fingering/sock weight yarn (which was 16 wraps/inch) got me about 8.5 stitches/inch.  With this yarn (22 wraps/inch) my end result is about 12 stitches/inch.  So, this suggests that the yarns in the surviving socks are generally in the range of 16-22 wraps/inch (maybe as thick as 14, since the 16 wpi yarn gave me something slightly finer than the coarsest of the museum socks).  This is useful information, since yarn thickness is not generally a piece of information that museums report (many don't even report gauge and my figures are based in large part on estimating from reported measurements and photos).  It would be interesting to compare this to information on yarn size in contemporary woven textiles - but that will have to be someone else's project. 

Getting fancy with Spanish Renaissance fashion

 So, I’ve been working on more nalbinding stuff, slowly.  But I drafted a bunch of patterns recently and have been getting a lot of sewing done.  Normally I focus my historical re-creation interests on al-Andalus - the era of Muslim rule in Spain.  However, due to my enthusiasm for Spanish rapier fencing (also called la Verdadera Destreza - my friend Doug has a blog with great info on it) I occasionally slide forward into the Siglo de Oro.

The Siglo de Oro (or golden century) is the Spanish term for the later Renaissance.  It encompasses somewhat more than 100 years of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, roughly corresponding to the era of Habsburg rule.  This is the age of El Greco, Velazquez, and Zurbaran; of Cervantes, Calderon, and Lope de Vega. This is also the age of the rapier, which is one of the things I love about it (though they can keep the Inquisition, thankyouverymuch).  

Over time, as I’ve worked on practicing a progressively more historical style of fencing, I’ve been working on the clothes to match.  I came home from last year’s Ducal Challenge with a linen ruff, made by the wonderful Katerina Falconer (who wrote about the process here). She made it based on the examples in Patterns of Fashion 4.  With lots of help from the Elizabethan Costuming group on Facebook, I set about starching and ironing a proper late-16th century style ruff. Here’s the finished result:

Neck ruffs are very much formal wear.  Just as silly and impractical as modern neckties.  However, unlike modern neckties, the process of starching and setting a ruff is somewhat complex.  Carmen Bernis, in El Traje de Hombre al Uso Cortesano, had quoted an account of 1615 (very loose translation by me, with reference to others' work):

One puts first the loose starch when the water is boiling, stirring always in one direction, because if you turn back across, it breaks and is less strong. To take it off the fire, you must not ignore the appearance, it must turn clear, because until that point it is not cooked.

Half an hour before taking it out, there must be blue powders in the water, which must be put in before it cools, so that they are well incorporated.  How much quantity, certainly it will be enough starch for the collars and enough powders for the starch.  They come out more clear if they dry in the sun; and if it is Spring, you don't have to let them get  to be almost dry, because the starch sits well, and there is danger of breaking if it is left to adhere too much. If done otherwise, at the time you want to open [press] them, even if they are sprayed a lot, the water is not caught in the folds, so that the spraying is the same, nor is the starch and the blue well seated, if not made layers [?], and some portions stiff, some soft.  

To dry them by the fire, it is suitable to make the starch a bit stronger and more cooked. 

It is very useful (if there is time) to air them out a bit after they are starched, because they soak up the starch and it incorporates better into the cloth, and after you don't have to take it off the fire as much.  Once dry, to open [press] them the most smoothly, they are usually sprayed, and moistening a cloth, they are wrapped in it, placing them in a basket in the way that cloths are arranged for doing laundry.  They are squeezed after this very well, which revives them, and they soften themselves; they come out better if they were sprayed the night before for the following day.  

On opening, one applies the irons according to the width, of course some have more folds than others, and thus they need many molds, of which you must have knowledge, to fix the faults that they have.  One finds various makes, such as squared, round, and others.  

You can see why I was a bit intimidated!   But, once I decided to just do it, it wasn’t actually as bad as I thought it would be - still time consuming, but not quite as bad.

I used cornstarch, since finding plain wheat starch can be a bit difficult and I was really not up to extracting starch for myself.  But otherwise, the process was similar to the above, if a bit simplified. I cooked 2 TBSP of cornstarch in 1 cup of water until it went from cloudy to clear.  I found this seemed a bit too thick and added some more water. But once it’s the consistency of mucus, it’s ready. I did not bother with tinting the starch. The "blue powders" mentioned in the description above might have really been blue. But it could also refer to something more like modern optical whiteners. Since all the Spanish paintings of this period show bright white ruffs, and my ruff's linen is nice a bleached, I didn't bother with any blue tinting.

I then worked it into the cloth of the ruff. Oddly, the otherwise very detailed description above glosses over this part.  It's a bit finicky, since there’s really no easy way to do it. In theory, if one cooked up a large enough batch of starch, the whole ruff could just be dipped into it to let it soak in and then wring out the excess.  I suspect this may have been done in laundries at the time. However, for setting one ruff, that would have been kind of wasteful. So, I ended up spooning the hot starch mixture onto the cloth and rubbing it around with my fingers to cover the whole surface evenly and soak it in.  

Then, I hung the ruff up to dry overnight. The warning in the period description was apt. I let my ruff dry almost completely (there was a tiny bit of dampness in some of the gathered folds by the seam). And the cloth did stick to itself in some places. Fortunately, I was able to gently peel the folds apart and it doesn't seem any the worse for it.

The next morning, I sprinkled the ruff with water and put it in a ziplock bag, instead of wrapping it and putting it in a basket. On the advice of some experts on Facebook, I put it in the fridge for this portion.  I probably could have ironed it that evening, but was busy so left it to the next day, as advised.

Once I took it out of the fridge, it was pretty stiff.  I used a roll of toilet paper as a makeshift ruff stand, pinning the band around it.  At first I had trouble getting the ruff into an approximation of the figure-8 shape that was the goal.  I ended up doing a rough accordion fold to mark the general shape. Then, it was showtime. The curling iron set came with an insulating glove.  This was very helpful to hold the individual setts firmly against the hot iron in order to get them set. The whole thing took a bit of time and concentration, but with a suitable tool it wasn’t more difficult than, say, ironing a shirt.  All done, it was only about an hour’s worth of work - but it was spread out over 3 days.

The folds are not all completely even, but in portraits they aren't always neat and precise either.  

All in all, this was a pretty successful first try. When I have the energy to go through the process again, I may try doing the setts with a smaller barrel on the iron. This is definitely within the range of the sizes and shapes one sees in portraits of this period. But, I prefer some of the less extravagant versions, like this one. There are also some other issues (such as the failure of the edges to meet neatly at the front) which may be an issue of the proportion of the ruff, or may be my inexpert starching - only time and further practice will tell.

In addition to trying the ruff out at a recent SCA event, I also had my first try with what folks on the Facebook group affectionately call the “Elizabethan onesie”.  It was the practice at the time to use cords or laces to tie one’s breeches to a strip of eyelet holes inside the waist of the doublet. While a bit awkward, it worked out surprisingly well.  It was very comfortable, I was never overly aware of my clothing, and I didn't have to worry about having my shirt show between by doublet and breeches when I bent over. I was even able to handle going to bathroom (mostly) unassisted.

This doublet was my first go at using the Modern Maker's draft and methods.  I highly encourage anyone with an interest in late 16th/early 17th century clothes to check out his books, because Mathew is truly awesome. He also has a Patreon page with video tutorials for patrons.  As a learning experience, I did all of the doublet construction by hand. It was interesting, definitely gave me a good understanding of his methods, but there are several steps that I will probably do by machine in future doublets in order to save time.  This was going to be a simple, basic doublet (made entirely from cloth I had sitting in my closet). But this wool twill, while nice, was just. so. red. I felt it needed a bit of something to break up the color. So, it’s got some black silk bias strips for embellishment.  

The breeches are the latest iteration in my pursuit of the super bulbous silhouette exemplified by El Greco’s portrait of Vincenzo Anastagi. The outer fabric is a basic wool twill suiting, but it’s backed with a seriously stiff linen canvas.  The canvas is kind of rough, though, so that is backed with a lighter wool twill as a lining. The gathering thread runs through all three of these layer, creating some nice and fluffy folds. I think it does a decent job of standing out from the body.  But doesn’t quite reach Anastagi’s level. The pattern is also made from the Modern Maker’s drafting system.

The outfit is finished off with a bunch of accessories that are not new and, while passing the 10-foot rule, aren’t QUITE totally historically accurate.  The knitted stockings are cotton, not wool as would be more appropriate for the era. The hat is a kind of in-between creation that isn’t quite any particular period style.  And the shoes are modern clogs because there was a lot of snow on the ground and I needed the thick soles - although I should note that the shape of the uppers is similar to shoes that one can find in late 16th century artwork (and a couple of surviving examples).  While the ruff makes this outfit a bit more formal, there really should be another layer on top of the doublet as well - usually this would be a jerkin/sayo/ropilla of some sort, but could have been a long coat/gown or cape/cloak or some sort. I had a cape but it spent the entire day draped over the back of a chair because the hall was so warm.  You can kind of see it at the right edge of the photo (but I didn't make it, so we'll just leave it aside).