Building a Bodice

Introduction

I am not going to try to teach you how to sew. If you have never build a wearable piece of clothing, this is probably not for you (not without some hands on training, I think.) If you find some parts of my abbreviated approach to explaining this method difficult to understand, please let me know and I will try to clean them up.

But, even if you have never sewn in your life, you may find it interesting to see how a flat pattern can be shaped to fit the human body.

What I am going to describe is how to cut a pattern to closely fit a garment to a body. The word "closely" is key here. This garment will not fit anyone else as we are accustomed to with our modern off-the-shelf fashions. This garment is designed to fit only the person measured and if it might be worn by someone else, it will not look well made.

The garment I will be describing is called the 'three piece bodice' because it is made of only three pieces (excluding trim, etc.) This is very simple for the period. Patterns are known to exist that have as many as fifteen pieces. However, it is my opinion that these patterns were derived by draping material on a model rather than direct construction. Please note that once you understand the three piece bodice, draping will almost always result in a superbly fitting garment for men or women.

There is one fundamental assumption to this system that must be understood. Whomever is being measured must be wearing the undergarments that will be worn with the costume at the time the measurements are being taken, at least until you have enough experience to be able to allow for differences and the ability to enforce the silhouette you have in mind. But, even then, it is better to make your subject wear the undergarments for meauring.

For the Renaissance, ladies of upper-class standing must wear corsets or, at least, a "pair of stays" to firm and straighten the torso. Breasts during this period were pressed in and up. This cannot be done with current undergarments. (Go to the Renaissance Costume page and use Ms. Leed's fine pattern generator to build your own corset pattern.)

For men during this period, clothing was often lined with very stiff material to present the proper look.
Wrinkles were out and posture was necessarily rigid. Nobles in particular should be corsetted to achieve the proper silhouette and manner of movement.

In any case, a corset, being tightly fitted to your body, is a convenient place to attach those things that hang from your waist and, thus, can actually make your day more comfortable (after an initial acclimatization period, of course.)

Lower and middle class people could not be corsetted and earn a living. That is why the patterns include references to bust darts.

Please understand that what I am showing you here is a basic pattern to fit to a torso. It has none of the features that go into creating a fashionable garment. However, I believe that once you understand the relationships between the measurements and the finished pattern, you will easily be able to deduce the changes necessary to the pattern to add your design elements. Please, do not forget! The garment lives through its attention to detail. The human body has not changed significantly in shape in its recorded history. It is the range of details by which the body was concealed or revealed that create a style. We normally refer to this as the period silhouette but it is much more than that. If you do not understand this, you should find an historical design you like and copy it as exactly as possible.

Be aware that court costumes were designed to be expensive and to look good. They cannot be made cheaply and still look good. On the other hand, there are materials available to us today which permit us to save the real expense of the most costly materials of the Renaissance so long as it is understood that the garment is a representation of the real thing and not the thing itself. That is, it is a kind of map.

This is an aspect of theater that most people are not aware of. The audience makes your performance possible by allowing themselves to be fooled for the duration of the presentation. This is called the willing suspension of disbelief. This suspension is very flexible but it is also limited to the terms negotiated at the start of the play through the way the story is presented.

I'm sure you have seen presentations where the costuming, acting, etc. was highly mannered and not at all like what you encounter in normal life yet you were able to allow for this and accept what you experienced as a representation of reality. At a Renaissance Faire, the level of reality of presentation is set very close to reality as we normally experience it. This places the presentation in the camps of the Realists or the Naturalists. (If you want to read further, use these labels in a good search engine or visit your library.) This makes the performer's life easier because most of our modern entertainment uses one of these approaches. Of course the two most pervasive art forms today are television and film. You are going to be judged and appreciated according to standards developed during those experiences.

If you think about how you view television in relation to detail of costume, you will see that the size and quality of the image is most representative of distant perceptions. Standing next to a performer in a period setting immediately destroys any distance greater than personal and will often challenge even that..

Film, on the other hand, is often larger than life at the screen and is typically perceived as being about life size from the viewing position. At this distance, detail is not obscured but is known to be artificial by the viewer. Hence the universal question, "Is that sword real?" If the sword were clearly artificial the question would not be asked, it's expected to be artificial. The fact is that the viewer can't tell because of the materials used. This is why I invite the askers to lift my sword while refusing to draw it out. It sets up the kind of message that defines a day at the faire as different from other experiences.

Your costumes must be detailed enough to look authentic at close range. How does the audience know what is authentic? I could cite life experiences, other performances, books, paintings, education, etc., all the things that you explored while researching your costume and which you know from personal experience that they have not. No, what I truly believe is that people have an innate sense of style: they automatically understand the way things are organized and infer what fits and what doesn't. Styles change constantly, but when they do, things which do not fit with them are excluded and things which do, achieve a new prominence. This is not simply a factor of a moment in time. This is dictated by our perception of style. Anyone can understand and appreciate a style. In fact, they may deduce elements of the society from that style that they had not known before.

All this means that building your costume is going to have to include addition of the detail. I will not say any more on this topic here.

These patterns are based on the measurements you take. There will be times when those measurements seem like they must be wrong: persevere, they will eventually work out.

Be aware that the drawings I have provided are for typical people and are not entirely to scale. Be aware that there are no typical people. If you wear non-standard clothing, you can expect that there will be non-standard issues in creating your pattern. That's life, deal with it. I will attempt to answer questions by e-mail, but I don't have time to draw your patterns in order to find out the cause of your issue. Most answers can be found by remembering that the cloth is flat (and somewhat flexible) and the body is never flat.

This next section provides for and describes the various measurements required for cutting patterns for the human body. It is my intention to present basic patterns for all parts of the body, so, this chart is a typical costumer's listing. If you expect to do more than cut a single bodice, I recommend that you take all measurements and label and date the results for your files. Otherwise, simply take the measurements for the "Torso" section.

This requires two people. Go get a friend. The person you are measuring will only be half dressed. If you are a different sex from the person being measured, have someone of the same sex take the measurements as you call them out. Of course, this is not necessary if you are measuring or being measured by a friend.

What I am presenting here is a complete measurement chart. You should take all measurements on the chart if there is any chance that you might need them in the future.

Find the natural waist by bending and tie a string around it to provide some consistency.

Head:

Torso:

Arms:

Legs:

Shoes:

Hands:

Full length:

Feel free to take extra measurements as you feel you need them

I'm not sure this is necessary but here are the steps of drawing the patterns.

There are other methods of getting a pattern.

One of them is the classic method of draping cloth over a model and pinning a garment into shape. This is very time consuming but will produce the best results if the draper has a good sense of period fashion or if you have very good designs in hand.

Consider that every seam, dart, or gore is a place that suggests or requires decoration to enhance of conceal it. In closely fitted garments, emphasizing these seams generally emphasizes the silhouette. Consider how our three piece bodice might become a seven piece bodice. Add contrasting piping to each seam. Imagine the look of this garment.

There is a third way of getting a pattern for a close fitting bodice of as many pieces as you would like with out any finicky measuring at all.

That's it for the bodice, my next entry here will be about cutting patterns for sleeves.

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