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Crossdressing! Well, Sort Of.
There's currently a challenge going on in Instagram for Women's History Month: IG 14 from Austria has set out a list with a keyword for each day in March, and ask people to post something Living History or women's history related.
Today's topic was "gender", and, well... here's a picture of me crossdressing, sort of:
I made that dress after Herjolfsnaes 42 (in Norlund's counting) way back, a long time ago. A good while later, having looked at more surviving garments, I realised that middle gores are a men's thing, and not to be found in women's dresses.
Why? You need middle gores in the front and back to keep a riding slit closed when not in use (and there are no riding slits without gores in any archaeological find). This changes the silhouette of the garment. That change, and the status associated with the riding slit, may be the reason why there are also men's tunics without a riding slit that still sport a middle gore, such as the tunic found in the Bocksten bog in Sweden. That, to me, makes a lot of sense. The dresses without a middle gore, by the way, make a slimmer seeming silhouette, and slenderness was - as we know from medieval epics - one of the aesthetic ideals for women. So this, too, does fit the picture nicely.
The dress, by the way, is very comfy and nice to wear, but would be the same without the middle gores. They don't really add anything (apart from some width...)
Comments 9
I thought I understood what you meant by "You need middle gores in the front and back to keep a riding slit closed when not in use" until I got to "and there are no riding slits without gores in any archaeological find", and now I am confused. I have seen period art of mens clothes with a center front ( /- center back) slit, and people today wearing such things, and I guess that counts as a "riding slit", and I can see how adding (a) center gore(s) gives as much room to sit astride as a slit would. But the "no slits without gores" has me trying to picture a garmet that both has a center gore, and an open center slit, and this isn't making sense for me. Help me sort out what you meant?
Florence, even being buried in it does not make it 100% sure that the garment was indeed worn by that person - the garments in Herjolfsnaes were used more like shrouds, so they may have been from another person.
In some cases like the relic dresses of St. Clare and St. Elizabeth, I'd say proportions (length to width) make it quite clear that it was a female garment. We also have no evidence at all of women wearing short tunics like the one found in the Bocksten bog. Overall, though, yes, best evidence for male/female would be a person fully dressed and not in a grave, which is utterly rare.
On the images, seamlines are indeed rarely visible, if ever. The fall of garments, however, is sometimes shown, with folds in the relevant places.
I agree that if a person is buried wearing a garment does not prove that they also wore it in life - just that their family or community deemed it proper for them to be buried in them. And then, as you mentioned, there are the Greenland finds, where the corpses were wrapped in the garments and are not wearing them, so that's another thing altogether.
My point is: Proving a negative empirically can only be done on a large amount of data. Women never wearing short garments: Sure thing, loads of pictorial evidence for that. Women not wearing garments with a riding slit: Also loads of pictorial evidence, including the pictures of women riding astride. Now, women never wearing long gowns with a closed (as in sewn shut) middle gore: I cannot tell from a picture if there is a closed middle gore or not, could you give me a few examples?
In extant garments, we only have a few examples where we are quite sure those were worn by a woman. So, out of less than 5, none have a middle gore. But that's not a lot of data.
(Granted, I'm a physicist, a sample size of n
Oh, I think the second half of my text was cropped. Here ist is:
(Granted, I'm a physicist, a sample size of na associated with a person/corpse of any gender.
So, we just don't know. For a reconstruction, one is on the safe side with sticking to those where we know an association, but as a general claim?
If we come back to the women riding astride in a closed skirt: you need a lot of hem circumference for that. Only achived by side panels or side gores? What are your thoughts about that? I know some statues with pleated side gores. You could fit a lot of hem length into that...
I hope you don't take this as an attack but as the genuine curiosity and interest in academic discourse it is.
Oh gosh, I think the 'lesser-or-equal' sign does strange things with the comment text. I apologize for making such a mess out of your comment section. New try:
(Granted, I'm a physicist, a sample size of n=5 tells you nothing in my field)
I don't even know an extant long garment with a closed middle gore that is a associated with a person/corpse of any gender.