Fake it 'til you make it

I started to write this post, and after a while I realized that it was getting really long, so I have split it up in several parts. This first part is my explanation to why historical costumers quite often get disappointed when visiting museums.

Historical costuming is my hobby, in my professional life I work at a museum. More often than you might think these two aspects come into conflict. The museum I work with is on a journey to provide more living history as part of the experience, and I am one of the persons responsible for doing that. That work has led me to reevaluate my opinion of many other museums, and their attempts at providing historical costumes. I've also seen a few posts lately expressing dissappointment on historical costumes seen on museums.

Living history done well- The publisher's house at Skansen.

The truth is, with very few exceptions museums rarely have the possibility to achieve historical accuracy, instead they have to go for what I have decided to call historical plausability. This is not just a question of time and money, very often it is also a question of knowledge. The museum where I work is very much a technical museum, my colleagues  are very knowledgable, have university degrees and an interest in the past, but they have never studied fashion history. I do not consider myself an expert in the fashion of all time periods, but I can see the difference between a 17th and 19th century outfit, and to be honest most of my colleagues can't. Just like I can't tell the difference between different kinds of window frames, because I don't have an interest or haven't studied them, while my colleagues have done that. This is also a question of training your eyes to see differences in cut and details. I like the to tell the story of when my sister showed me the two dresses she wanted to use as inspiration for her wedding gown, one of them had a pleated skirt and one was a full circle skirt, but to her they looked the same. She didn't see the difference, and that is also the case with many people who have not looked at and studied pictures of fashion like historical recreactors, costumers and cosplayers do. So knowledge is a very large reason why many museums usually don't provide costumes that are historically accurate, they might simply not be aware of it.

Even with knowledge of what a costume should look like, the sad thing is that accuracy costs. I work in a museum that is both old and big enough to have the possibility to have a costuming budget. With old that means that over the years we have aquired costumes or rather pieces of costumes. We have a storage where we have kept things, it's in the size of two movable wardrobes, but at least it's a basis. The pieces are of very varying quality, but there have been some really nice things done, but they are also from very varied time periods. Currently we are working on two tracks when it comes to living history. One will be a permanent thing that will also be set in a time period where there is a big enough interest for historical costuming that there exists stores selling good quality clothes. There I have gotten a budget to buy what we need. The other track is our annual Christmas fair. Since last year we have worked to give it a more historical atmosphere, set in the late 19th early 20th century, but we also add small historical scenes set to a particular year. Last year it was 1695, this year it was 1719, and next year...well it will be a totally different century. It is not feasible for us to spend a lot of money on clothes that will be worn once and maybe not in a long time after that.  This is where I dig deep into the storage and need to come up with ways of basically faking historical fashion.

Living history done well - Lillhärdalsgården at Jamtli

The third issue that affects a museum's costumes is time. Few smaller museums, like ours, have a costuming department. In our case the costuming department is me, and a colleague with a budget that allows her to buy premade things. If we want to produce something though, it generally comes down to what I can do.  I can do it on my work time, but I also have a lot of other things to do so my time is limited when it comes to how much I can spend on sewing. Unlike some of my private costume projects where I don't count the hours at all just make sure that I get things right. Still the fact that my museum has a budget for costumes at all, and have a person that is interested in historical costuming puts us at a great advantage compared to more museums than you migh think. My goal is to make sure that our characters have a plausible silhouette, even if I can't make accurate costumes. I need to take my knowledge of historical fashion and concentrate it into something that workds, even if a lot of it is put together from pieces that are by themselves totally inaccurate. I call this historically plausible rather than historically accurate. (and yes it hurts the historical costumer in me but it is the reality that I live with).

It should also be said that in many cases the museums that are well-known and respected for their living history programs, in Sweden we have Skansen and Jamtli for example, have been doing it for decades (or in Skansen's case more than a century) to build up their knowledge and their costuming departments. I might work at Sweden's oldest technical museum, but we are just beginners when it comes to living history.

With these limitations in mind, in the following posts I will talk about how I worked with the costumes for the characters during our Christmas fair.