The theme for the Kingdom of Atlantia’s Twelfth Night 2022 celebration is 14th Century France. Normally I stick to later period, but a proper Gothic Fitted Dress/Cothardie/whatever you’d like to call the basic fitted dresses in Medieval Europe has been on my ‘to sew’ list for a while so I am taking the plunge!
Inspiration
There’s a real dearth of extant garments from the period, so I’m basing my ensemble on images – specifically, from an illumination in Jacques de Longuyon’s Vows of the Peacock, from around 1345 – 1350 (Morgan Library & Museum MS G.24, fols 25v-26r).
In the image, there is a woman in a blue dress with red sleeves in the middle-right area of the illustration, and that is the garment I will be building.
She is pictured in a long blue garment with a white rectangular slit or pocket in the left side. The neckline would appear to be very wide, almost off the shoulders (though I’m thinking my reconstruction may pull that up a bit, for practicality if nothing else). Long sleeves or tippets hang from the elbows or just above, and appear to hang to roughly knee length. Her lower arms are covered in red sleeves, which I’m interpreting to be either the long sleeves of her underdress or pin-on sleeves on her underdress.
Her blonde hair (everyone in the image except an old man has blonde hair) is pulled into a set of braids that appear to start relatively high on her head, with the braids looped towards the front and then back behind her head. This matches the hair of the other women in the image.
The Plan
My ensemble will consist of:
- Underdress, red wool, long sleeves, buttoning up at the wrists and lacing up the front
- Overdress, blue wool, short sleeves, with slit framed in white silk and hanging sewn-on lappets of white linen hanging from just above the elbows.
- Smock of white linen, likely rectangle-construction, maybe sleeveless?
I’ll try to match colors to what is in the source material, depending on what I can source.
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