Fake it 'til you make it part 2

Something I can recommend for any museum is to reach out to historical costumers and recreators, are they willing to come and help by showing up in costume? This year we had decided to stage some historical scenes set in 1719. I reached out to my colleagues in Sala, the ones who invited me to my very first 18th century event, since I knew that they are actively working with recreating the 18th century. December is a very busy time for them but two of them showed up in costume.

The man's outfit is based on a picture of a map from 1683, and that is a picture I had as a reference as well when I wanted to create a working man's outfit for the late 17th and early 18th century.

The other reference is the woodcut of Fet-Mats Israelsson, who's the reason we had picked the year 1719 for our dramatizations.

I am pretty happy with the costumes that I managed to fake for "our" characters

In Sweden we don't have any webshops that sell 18th century clothing, but we have a lot of viking/medieval shops. Our miners are actually wearing Torsbjerg-trousers, since they were the best wool trousers we could find. To simulate the trousers being breeches they wore either knitted legwarmers or wool legbinders (also viking but it looked good).The vest is from our storage, and it's really nice with proper copper buttons. It is winter though, so they needed some kind of jacket. I made a very quick unfitted jacket, that was basically just a fabric folded double and cut in a T-shape. I then cut off the sleeves so I could make them a bit more shaped and slimmer, and sewed them on again.

The least accurate costume was for the head administrator. Already when we started planning the dramatizations I said that we would not be able to make or buy an upper class outfit. Everything was resolved when we were told that we could borrow a costume. Phew! Then one week before the fair it was clear that we would not be able to borrow the costume as we had thought, so I had less than a week to come up with something.  Based on the portrait of the head administrator I decided that we needed to get some things done so that people only saw the focus details, and not the rest of the costume. I decided that a wig and tricorn hat, a cravat and a vest in a bright colour would make him stand out against the workers.

I have described the work with the wig here. It is a cheap party wig, sprayed white and powdered. For the vest I found a remnant of fake damask fabric in our storage and made a very simple pattern for an early 18th century vest.

I didn't have enough fabric to get it quite as wide in the skirt as I had hoped. I also found some gold braid, and since this vest was a 2 hour job on Friday afternoon I really cheated. Instead of hemming the vest I just zigzagged the edges and put the trim over it to hide the stitches.

I actually think it looks best from behind

 There was just enough trim that I could also take one of our black round hats, apply the gold trim and turn up the brim to create a tricorne from it. The trousers are simply called "fantasy" trousers, that we had in storage, and he brought his own jacket. The jacket was quite short though so he chose to tuck the vest into the trousers to make it even with the jacket. To finish it all off he wore one of my linen veils as a cravat.

accurate, fake, plausible

I must say that in the end it looked fairly good, as long as you stood some distance away.

The drama is in full swing - Fet-Mats has been found after 42 years.