Faking 1695

Every year my work organizes a big Christmas fair. This year I got the mission to come up with an historical pair that could act as hosts for the fair. The challenge of course was that we are not a museum with a big costume department or budget. What I had to work with were some things that have been collected over the years for other projects, what I had in my private costume wardrobe and some small things that I could buy. I realized that the hardest thing would be to find something for my colleague Carl. After all I have enough historical clothes that I could probably wing something together for most eras. There was also the little challenge of having to be outdoors in the Swedish December, when most of my clothes are for summer events.

One thing we have in our storage is a big black wool coat, and I decided to build the couple around that.

This is an illustration from a map of the Falun Mine in 1683, or rather it's a water colour copy, but I have access to a very high resolution image of the original, and it's very close to this. I have said for years that I want to make a costume based on that woman, but now I had to come up with something without the time or budget to make a totally new outfit. The couple in the illustration are a well to do master miner and his wife. The master  miners were upper class, but not nobility and they were hard working, meaning that the master miners were expected to know and be able to work in the mine or foundry and the wives were organising and working on their estates. From the 1690's they were very strongly influenced by pietism, and we know that they kept a fairly low profile and were not into showing off by wearing too fancy clothes, except for visits at the court and similar events.

I decided that our couple should be Harald Lybecker, who was a master miner and appointed as head of the whole mine, and his wife Emerentia in 1695. There are a lot of reasons why I picked the year 1695, and not the year of the illustration, one of the biggest is that the mine drastically changed in 1687 when two smaller open cast mines collapsed and created the Great Open Pit, that is the hallmark of the mine still today. It would have been hard to make a believable interpretation, and pretend that there isn't a big gaping hole in the centre of the area. We wanted to place our interpretation in a year when the rebuilding after the collapse was going on, things were improving, and the family life of the couple was quite good as well.

This is our version of the couple. For him we used the black coat, I bought a long wool cape, a pair of wide linen pants that we could fasten around the knees and a pair of knee socks. From the stash in the museum we found a felt hat and a long white shirt. The cravat is simply a long piece of cotton voile, and the shoes were his own. The most important thing is his walking stick/probing axe that only master miners were allowed to use. The museum has a replica of it that he could use.

I'm wearing a mix of clothes from different eras.

I started off with my 16th century low necked smock and undergown. In the museum I found a white apron. I had my new mitts, and the cap is one of few things that is actually a 17th century model.

I found the Marquess of Winchester's guide to living history Which is concentrating on the English Civil War, it's a bit earlier than our late 17th century goal, but I decided to make the cap nr 4, which seemed like a rather good common cap. It's handsewn from cotton, and to up the status a bit I also added some lace to the front. The lace is a modern polyester lace, but it was needed to give the cap a bit of flair.

In the mseum I also found a jacket, which I would date to more 18th century, but it was fairly netural, and I was happy to find something that fit with all the other layers under. I also wore my new leather pouch, which worked perfectly for holding my phones, keys and insulin pen.

The final outerwear was a white square piece of cloth that I wore as a neckerchief, a wool cape for warmth that the museum bought, my 18th century muff and a hood. The hood is a generic 17th/18th century pattern, basically a long piece that is folded together, the back is sewn together and gathered to shape it, and it has two long pieces of fabric to tie with. The only fabric that I found to work with in the museum was a quite stiff broadcloth, I would have preferred something softer. Also to upcycle it a bit I added a piece of fake fur, it's actually the collar from a modern jacket of one of my colleagues. The fur was really needed, most of the time I wore the hood down and it was so nice to have the fur around the neck to keep warm.

I am actually pretty satisfied with the result, if I consider what I had to work with. Now having spent a lot of time researching 1690's clothing, I can't help but feeling the need for a wool mantua, but we will see what happens. I have done enough research about Harald and Emerentia Lybecker, that I hope we get more opportunities to do interpretations based on them.