Once upon a time, there was a brave little tailor … Probably many of you know at least one fairy tale involving a tailor: the brave tailor who went out to fight against flies and giants to marry the king’s daughter in the end or the emperor’s new clothes that also involves a tailor…. remember?
But how many know that well before “once upon a time” there were no tailors (at least in Europe). Before the mid-12 century, it was the responsibility of women at home or nuns in cloisters to produce whatever people wore, which at that time had nothing to do with the well fitted clothes we are wearing today. From what I’ve read they were, to put it plainly- not particular fashion wonders: wide and unshaped fastened with belts around the waist.
And then around the 12th century something changed: along with the cotton fabric, came the Renaissance and a new idea of clothes developed: body-shaped clothes. In fact, some like to say that was the birth of “fashion”.
But what does the Renaissance have to do with fashion and body-shaped clothes? In those times when daily life was strongly regulated by the Church and Christian beliefs the emergence of another style didn’t just happen. You needed a whole new outlook in life and that new outlook were the slowly emerging beliefs of the Renaissance. In the later stages of the Renaissance you can see these ideas in the introduction of 3-D perspective in painting that pulls the viewer right into a picture or the suffering faces of the Christian martyrs, are typical signs of this new European worldview that placed humans and human sentiments in short, the individual into the center of the world. And supposedly with this new consciousness of the YOU and ME came a new consciousness of the personal body and the body as form of expressing yourself.
Thus, one thing led to another and with a new demand for differently crafted clothes, and new technical possibilities (cutting out shapes) clothes making the shift from being a domestic female task to becoming a profession in itself calling for new skills: the birth of the tailor and the tailoring tradition.
I will tell you more about that tailoring tradition and why brave fairytale tailors are pictured as hungrily skinny people sitting cross-legged on tables in my next blog!
In the meantime check out the Renaissance inspired creations at BurdaStyle like almost all of Paranoir’s Renaissance Gown or the Tabard How To.
Photo © National Gallery London
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