Cumming Valerie - Visual History of Costume: Seven Centuries of Costume History in One Volume

THE V ISUAL H ISTORY OF C OSTUME

THE V ISUAL H ISTORY OF C OSTUME

Aileen Ribeiro and Valerie Cumming

original research and text for the Visual History of Costume series

MARGARET SCOTT

JANE ASHELFORD

VALERIE CUMMING

AILEEN RIBEIRO

VANDA FOSTER

PENELOPE BYRDE

Batsford, London

Publishers note

The visual material in this book has been selected from that appearing in the six-volume series A Visual History of Costume.

The authors of that series are:

The Introduction in the present single volume owes a debt to those earlier books, but has been largely rewritten for present purposes, as has the Glossary. The commentaries to the illustrations remain substantially the same.

First published in the United Kingdom as an eBook in 2014 by
Batsford
1 Gower Street
London WC1E 6HD
An imprint of Pavilion Books Company Ltd
Copyright Batsford 2014
Text Aileen Ribeiro and Valerie Cumming 1989

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

eBook ISBN 978-184994-215-7

C ONTENTS

A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

WE are grateful to our fellow authors in the Visual History of Costume series Jane Ashelford, Penelope Byrde, Vanda Foster and Margaret Scott for giving permission to use original material from each of their books.

We would like to thank all of the public and private collections which have assisted us in the compilation of this volume. Detailed acknowledgements relating to the use of illustrations are given in the List of Illustrations.

We are, as always, deeply appreciative of the support and resources afforded us by our respective employers, the Courtauld Institute of Art and the Museum of London.

We would like to acknowledge the help given us by the staff at Batsford, particularly Rachel Wright, Tim Auger, and Clare Sunderland.

The joint responsibilities of co-authorship and co-editorship tested our patience occasionally to the limits, but ultimately our professional association and personal friendship allowed us to find the task both amusing and rewarding.

P REFACE

THE Visual History of Costume is a series devised for those who need reliable, easy-to-use reference material on the history of dress. Each of the six published volumes deals with a specific period in a fair amount of detail, but it was thought that a single work bringing together a selection of key images from 1300 to the present day would provide a valuable visual survey of dress in Britain.

This book follows the successful pattern of the series, by providing contemporary illustrations including sculpture, brasses, manuscripts, oil paintings, line drawings, engravings and original photographs selected from each individual volume in the Visual History of Costume. Each picture is captioned in a consistent way, under the headings, where appropriate, of Head, Body and Accessories; the clothes are not just described but their significance explained in a prefatory Note where relevant. The illustrations are arranged in date order, and the colour plates are cross-referenced with the black-and-white, so that the processes of change can be clearly followed.

The Introduction is, like Gaul, divided into three parts. The first provides background information on the inspiration for fashion through the ages, how styles were communicated, and the ways in which clothing was bought and sold; the second provides an outline survey of dress; and the third part discusses the sources, especially the visual, with some of the problems involved. Much of this introductory section relies on the work of the individual authors in the Visual History of Costume series; as far as possible we have retained each authors opinions and the thrust of our/their arguments. However, in order to avoid repetition and in the interests of a coherent theme, we have had to re-arrange this material, and make some additions of our own, in the hope of creating a reasonably seamless robe. A detailed Glossary has been provided which is designed also to act as an Index. The reader will find a Select Bibliography at the end of the book.

L IST OF I LLUSTRATIONS AND P ICTURE A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The subject is followed by the artist, where known (attr. = attributed) then the medium or nature of the artefact and then the collection or location.

RCHME = Royal Commission on Historical Monuments (England)