The classic Flemish working woman

A Working Woman's Dress Revisited

Further research into Flemish working woman's dress of the 16th century

For those of you who have spent any time among online costuming circles, you are probably already aware of Drea Leed's article and book on Flemish workingwomen's dress. If you haven't seen it yet, stop now and go check it out--its a real masterpiece! After reading her research, I (like many other costumers) instantly decided that I must have one! However, although I do not claim to have the expertise of Ms. Leed, I personally love doing research as much as constructing the garments, so I decided to build on this wonderful foundation and explore a few areas of Flemish dress not covered as extensively in the original online article.

V-Front Lacing

A closed skirt

The first thing that I noticed when looking at the paintings of Flemish lower-class dress was when the hemline of the dress was visible below the apron, a majority of the skirts appeared to not be split in the front (although quite a few did fit the open style described in the original article). Because the women were always wearing aprons, it is impossible to know for sure how the bodice and closed skirts were constructed, but I set out to discover what was theoretically going on beneath the ever-present apron.

German Gown from 1526

In a Working Women's Dress in 16th Century Flanders, Ms. Leed writes: "In some cases, the skirt front is open, as is the one I'm wearing; in other cases, the skirt has no center front opening and is presumably stitched to either side of the open-fronted bodice, with the center 6 to 10 inches of the skirt crossing between the two sides. This is at present simply speculation, however; the front waistline is, in almost all pictures, covered by an apron" Although this theory is backed up by numerous German examples of a laced bodice and regular skirt, I found this solution somewhat unsatisfying for a peasant gown. There is, of course, the obvious problem of how to get the gown on if it has a closed waistband and front lacing bodice. Presumably, the German gowns had a front or side opening that was hidden by the thick pleats of the skirt. However, when looking at the drape of the Flemish skirts beneath the aprons, these dresses appear most of the time to have pleats only in the back or sides with a flat front, which would make it much more difficult to disguise a front skirt opening. On the other hand, to accommodate a back closing skirt the two articles of clothing would have to be separate, and this leads to problems with gapping at the waistline--an annoyance that a busy working woman probably would not want to deal with! Also, a regular waistband on a skirt would not as easily accommodate a woman's expanding silhouette during pregnancy. To my line of reasoning, it seemed much more logical to have an attached skirt and bodice with a deep V-front laced opening reaching down over the lower belly. This would carry the weight of the skirts up through the bodice, provide a simple means of dressing, and easily expand and contract to fit a woman's frequently changing figure. To support this theory, I set out to find visual evidence that this type of construction was found in Flemish 16th century gowns.

Peasant dress without the apron

This proved to be much more difficult than it might seem due to the fact that I was unable to find one single lower-class woman in a Flemish painting or drawing from the 16th century who was not wearing an apron. This forced me to look to other sources to establish a precedent for this type of gown, and I was finally able to assemble a range of examples of front-laced, V closures from several periods and a variety of neighboring countries.

In earlier 15th century Flemish paintings, women of all social classes were shown wearing front laced gowns with a deep V opening reaching to the bottom of their bellies. Because fashions for the rural lower classes evolved very slowly during the Renaissance, it is not hard to imagine that a similar basic style with slight updates like detachable sleeves and a fuller skirt could be worn as much as a century later. In fact, the image to the right from a German suite of prints in 1611 shows a dress almost exactly like some

Upper-class Flemish woman from 1520

front lacing kirtles from 150 years earlier but with the addition of the pinned on sleeves and partlet associated with 16th century Flemish working women's dress. Across the English channel, wealthy Tudor women were also shown wearing gowns with a similar V-front closure in several sketches by Hans Holbein; with several of the women apparently pregnant. A upper-class Flemish woman from the same time period is also shown in a painting by Lucas van Leyden with this type of gown construction, proving that a V-front closure was at least present in higher social spheres, and therefore, was likely to appear in working class dress as well.

Lower-class Flemish child

Another clue can be found in a Flemish genre painting that I noticed on Drea Leed's site, where next to our working woman, we see a small child who is wearing a V-front garment. Because children of this time period tended to wear scaled down versions of adult styles, this could be the closest we'll ever come to seeing a Flemish peasant gown from the 16th century without the dreaded apron. And finally, I recently found a Flemish painting from 1610 by Hieronymus Francken called The Witches' Kitchen that shows lower-class women in a state of semi-underss. The styles appear to be almost identical to the 16th century versions, and you can see a slit in the top of the skirt similar to the method that I have proposed.

The Witches' Kitchen

This evidence was enough to convince that my theory was probable, even if it could never be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, so I then began the much easier task of assembling the dress. Other modifications are detailed below, but the V-front opening was quite simple. I first constructed the bodice and skirt separately with a 6" vertical slit in the front of the skirt to allow me to try it on once the pleats were set to my waist measurement. The finished edge of the skirt was hand stitched to the bottom edge of the bodice, and the lower V shape was then drawn in to connect with the bodice opening. This shape was trimmed to remove excess fabric, a small seam allowance was turned in and pressed, and finally, the fabric and lining of the skirt were whip-stitched together to finish off the bottom of the V opening.

Bodice Construction

Diagonal back seams

In several Flemish genre paintings by Pieter Brueghel the Elder (and also in a few Tudor drawings), you can see unusual V-shaped seams on the back of many women's bodices. These seams are not noticeable on the type of gowns painted by Aertsen or Beuckelaer, but I decide to combine their typical front-laced bodice with a Brueghel style back. Although there has been a good deal of research and speculation about the nature of the Brueghel peasant gown construction (for a few examples, take a look here or here), I decided that I wanted to give it a try on my own Flemish gown to see if I could come up with any new insight. Some costumers suggest that these diagonal seams serve to conserve fabric or to allow for adjustment in size to accommodate pregnancy or weight gain, but I came up with a much simpler theory.

With the seams coming up over the shoulder blades, you can easily take out a small triangular wedge from the top of the side back pieces near the neck, and this shapes the bodice so that it fits smoothly across the slope of the shoulders and eliminates the gapping at the back of the neck that would otherwise occur. Although this method seemed simple and quite obvious once I tried it, it is still purely speculative and could have been combined with other techniques as well. I also noticed that this diagonal seam in several of the Brueghel paintings cut across to the arm hole or continued over the top of the shoulder instead of ending at the neckline like my version. I have yet to try these alternate seam placements to see if a similar effect could be accomplished be removing a triangular wedge, but I think it would work in much the same way. I was, however, extremely happy with the way it made the bodice fit and would recommend this little trick to anyone making a Flemish or Tudor bodice.

Bodice pattern

The next modification I tried falls into the "I'm pretty darn sure they didn't do it like this... but it's still cool" category! When I was laying out the pattern pieces to see if I could discover any tricks to conserve fabric, I noticed that you could line up the side back and front pieces at the shoulder seams, making a single diagonal line from the V-neck back to the bottom of the front opening. This would create a single piece for the front and back sides that could simply be stitched together under the arm, resulting in a bodice cut on the straight grain in the back and bias in the front and shoulders. Bias cuts were also found in other 16th century garments like the bodice worn by Queen Elizabeth I in the Phoenix Portrait, or in the shoulder straps of the effigy corset, although the means of construction for these piece were quite different from my experimental method. However, I was pleasantly surprised with the ultimate success of my oddly constructed bodice. The bias cut straps hugged the outside edges of my shoulders extremely well and were more comfortable than straps with shoulder seams. The front of the bodice stretches slightly to fit smoothly across any curve at the bust or waist, but I did have to use boning on the front edges to keep it from puckering due to the bias cut. Also, I was able to fit the bodice pattern piece into an unused triangular corner of fabric left over by the gored front panel of the skirt. So was this a likely method used in 16th century Flemish peasant dress? Probably not. The unusual method of construction has no real historical precedent that I know of, and I recently noticed that you can see shoulder seams in a few of Brueghel's dresses. But it was a fun experiment, and you could always modify this into a more probable pattern by adding a shoulder seam and placing the front pieces on the straight grain.

Skirt Construction

When I began working on the skirt, I decided to address two final areas that had been a bit perplexing to me when looking at the research and original paintings: how do you combine a gored skirt with heavy pleating, and is it really possible to produce the look of hip padding without the use of a bumroll?

A gored and pleated skirt

Although the easiest way to make a skirt that reproduces the styles seen in Flemish painting is with rectangular panels and rolled pleats, this would not work with the obviously gored styles seen in painting like Brueghel's The Peasant Dance. Since a normal gored skirt would not have enough fabric at the waistline to make rolled pleats, I quickly realized that it would take an impressive feat of geometry to create a pattern like this (not to mention the excessive amount of fabric that would be required). However, I did prefer the way a gored skirt draped when it was flipped up to tuck into the waist, so I decided to try to combine a gored front with a rectangular back as a sort of "cheating" way to create a similar effect.

After experimenting with the pattern on a very small scale, I settled on making the front panel out of a quarter circle that reached to each hipbone at the waistline. The sides and back were made out of the remaining fabric in a very long rectangle, and this was pleated into a length that was equal to my waist measurement minus the width of the top edge of the front panel. This construction method worked well, but the bias section of the gored front panel has begun to stretch slightly, causing the hemline to be a tad funky (not that this matters much since I wear the skirt front flipped up at all times). But if I had it to do ever again, I think I would have made the front out of several smaller gored pieces with twill tape reinforcing the seams to keep the hem from stretching.

The final issue I set out to address was the theory that no form of hip padding would have ever been worn with this type of dress (you can find an excellent article by Sarah Goodman refuting the use of bumrolls here). Although I agree that lower class dress in the 16th century was probably worn without hip padding a majority of the time, I do believe there were exceptions, as I was quite skeptical that the extremely curvy silhouettes found in several Flemish paintings by Joachim Beuckelaer could be achieved by pleating alone.

Nice bum!

To test the pleated vs. padded theories, I first attempted to construct a skirt that would have an appropriate spring from the waist without a hip pad. The pleats in my skirt were created by using thick, triple rolled pleats that were then stacked to create as much bulk at the hips as possible. In cross-section, the pleated edge of the skirt was an inch thick, and this was then hand-stitched to the bodice like cartridge pleating to create the most spring from the waistline as possible. However, when I tried my dress on, the weight of the skirt pulled so heavily on the top of the pleats that it in effect canceled out this supposed "spring" and fell almost straight down from the waist in a more naturalistic silhouette. Although the heavy pleating did add bulk to my hips, it had none of the characteristic "poofing" out from the waist that I was trying to reproduce. I also experimented with padding the pleats with rolls of cotton batting and wore the dress with a variety of underskirts to see if that might help, but I was unable to get anything even close to the right look without the use of a small, separate hip pad.

But in hindsight, I think a lot of my problem came from the fact that used linen for the gown. It is a very heavy fabric without a lot of crispness, and I have come to agree that a fulled wool would probably create much more "spring" from the hips. However, many women in the later 16th century Flemish portraits have much wider hips than you typically see in the earlier styles (although both styles would undoubtedly be made from wool), so I don't think it would be outside the realm of possibility to suggest that their hips could have been augmented with rolls of batting within the pleats or some other type of padding beneath the skirt. But these big-bummed peasants seem to be more of the exception than the rule during most of the 16th century, and we will probably never know for sure what was going on beneath their skirts. I actually ended up wearing this outfit both with and without additional hip padding, but I ultimately decided that prefered it without the extra curves.

Aertsen's version: pleating alone			Beuckelaer's version: worn with a small pad

Images:

Aertsen, Pieter. "Market Scene", Alte Pinakothek, Munich 1550.

Aertsen, Pieter. "Cook in Front of the Stove", Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels 1559.

Beuckelaer, Joachim. "The Cook", Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna 1574.

Beuckelaer, Joachim. "Making Waffles", 1565.

Beuckelaer, Joachim. "Market Scene", Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest.

Brueghel, Pieter the Elder. "The Harvesters", Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 1565.

Brueghel, Peiter the Elder. "The Peasant Dance", Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna 1568.

de Bry, Johann Theodore. "Illustrationen aus den Emblematica Secularia", Oppenheim 1611.

Cranach, Lucas. "Portrait of a Woman", The Hermitage, St. Petersberg 1526.

Francken, Hieronymus. "The Witches' Kitchen", 1610

García de Benabarre, Pedro. "Banquet of Herod", Museo de Arte de Cataluña, Barcelona 1470-80.

Hillard, Nicholas. "Phoenix Portrait", National Portrait Gallery, London 1575.

Holbein, Hans the Younger. "Sketch", British Library, London.

Holbein, Hans the Younger. "Sketch of Thomas More's Family", 1527.

Holbein, Hans the Younger. "Two Views of a Woman Wearing an English Hood", British Museum, London 1528-30.

Lotto, Lorenzo. "Lucretia", National Gallery, London 1528-30.

Lucas van Leyden. "Card Players", National Gallery of Art, Washington 1520.

Memling, Hans. "Donne Triptych", National Gallery, London 1475.