On Swedish folk costumes
Folk costumes in Sweden are divided into three categories: preserved, reconstructed and created costumes. The former are those that were
in continuous use until the second half of the 19th century or those who were well documented before that. For these costumes you have all
the original garments in museums and there is often a large variation between clothes worn on greater holidays, lesser holidays, on normal days etc.
Most preserved folk costumes are from Dalecarlia, but you can find them in all parts of Sweden except in
the far north and of course, close to the cities.
The reconstructed costumes are based on some preserved garments and contemporary descriptions of the clothing worn in a specific area.
When a garment is "missing" from the concerned area you use a garment from a neighbouring area or from the time the rest of the costume is from.
The created costumes are made where there are no remnants of an older popular costume, but people still want to have something that signifies their local area.
The costume is then created based on the idea of how a folk costume should look.
Contrary to popular belief the rural population's clothing was affected by fashion. But then for some reason the development halted and the way people
dressed became more static and different from the current fashions in the towns. One theory is that it was during economic prosperity that the fashionable
elements entered the costume of the farmers, and when times changed for the worse the costume became partly fossilized. Which time this happened varies from area to area. In Scania one can see a
lot of renaissance influence, while Toarp in Västergötland is the only costume that retains features from the 17th century. Most common is influence from the second
half of the 18th century and after that.
My folk costume
My folk costume comes from Åse and Viste härad in south-western Sweden. It is roughly were I grew up and
definitely part of the area I call home. It is a reconstructed costume based partly on preserved garments. I will discuss them
separately.
Särk
The särk, or smock/shift is based on a man's wedding shirt from the early 19th century. The people who were responsible for
the reconstruction, which took place in the late 70s, were unfortunately not very knowledgeable in the area of period clothing. They made this shirt into a blouse,
a garment that never was worn in popular costume from the time. As this version is "officially sanctioned" by the concerned local people I didn't want to discard it altogether.
The most common type of shift in the beginning of the 19th century was made in two parts with a seam roughly at the waist, the lower part often made of coarser linen.
This was a good way to be able to use your clothing longer since you could replace the lower part if it got too dirty or worn and still use the embroidered upper part.
So I used the same pattern but added a lower part and turned it into a överdelssärk. The seam can be seen in the lower part of the picture.
The cuffs are embroidered with linen thread and there are lots of small pleats both at the cuffs and at the shoulder of the shift.
Livstycke
The bodice is made after a preserved bodice from the last three decades of the 18th century. My specific bodice says that I'm from Viste rather than Åse,
the other part of the härad. The only difference between the bodices are that the checks in the fabric are slightly different, but the colours are the same.
There is also a blue bodice with similar cut and embroidery. This type of bodice was very common in Bohuslän and Västergötland, two counties in southwest Sweden (Åse and Viste is in Västergötland).
They are influenced by rococo fashion and date from ca 1770-1790. Most of them are red, but you can also find pink and green examples.
The embroidery is made with unbleached linen thread and there are boning in front of the bodice and four on each front side. There is also boning on the back side, but
being an idiot I forgot to take a picture of the backside of the bodice. It will be put up later.
The bodice is rather short, it ends a few cm above the natural waist and the tabs cover the gap between the bodice and the skirt.
When the costume was first reconstructed they didn't keep the embroidery from the original (which is now at Nordiska Museet), since
they thought it was later than the bodice (sic!) and they wanted the dress to be as "old" as possible. Why they thought anybody would make embroidery on a bodice after it went out
of use is beyond me. Since this type of embroidery is so common on other bodices from the same time I really don't know what they were thinking of. I think they did a great job in
gathering all this information about preserved garments from the local area, but this clearly shows the need of someone who knows something about period clothing in
general and especially about folk costume in such working groups. Taking away the embroidery and the boning from the original model they added darts instead. The people who make this
costume nowadays have taken away the darts and returned to the original cut, most leave out the embroidery though. A common mistake
done by women making folk costumes all over the country is that they make their bodices too loose. They want them to fit like a modern waistcoat or jacket and not like they were
fitted in the past. This results either in breasts hanging in the waist region or in people using a bra under their folk costume. Sigh.
Kjol
I don't have a picture of my skirt yet. It is made in red "half wool" twill, the warp is unbleached linen and the weft is thin one ply wool.
There was no extant skirt so the fabric is taken from a quilt, but it is of a type that was very common in skirts in the place and period, and the model is based on a common
skirt type from the end of the 18th century.
Förkläde
The apron is a copy of a wedding apron from the late 18th century. It is from printed cotton, which was popular and fairly exclusive in the period. It has small cartridge pleats and a dart in each side, but the
center front is left ungathered. It is a few centimetres shorter than the skirt and is closed with a hook and eye in one side.
There is also a blue woollen apron with some stripes in red and yellow for more everyday use. You can't buy this but have to weave it yourself, so that will have to be in the future.
Halskläde
This is one of two scarves that belong to the costume. This is for everyday wear and is made of cotton, while the festive one
is in very fine white linen batiste and with lots of tambour embroidery in white linen thread. I haven't got around to make that yet, both because the fabric costs ca 100$ per meter and
because my trials at tambour stitch have been less than a success. The scarf was either worn around the neck or tied over the embroidered silk cap, which was seldom uncovered out of doors.
Bindmössa
The most common headwear with all female folk costumes in Sweden is a hard cap usually made of silk, called bindmössa. They were usually either embroidered, with tambour stitch,
or made of brocaded silk. There are also caps made of printed cotton, usually red, and black caps sometimes worn by widows. These caps and the way they look are not specific for any region.
They were bought ready made and the embroidery was done by professionals. My cap is to be made of thin black wool, although I suspect the original was made of silk. The white lace is called a stycke
and is a separate part that probably is the remnant of what once was a cap similar to the elizabethan coif. The cap is mounted on a hard base made of paper
and it is not done by me. To the right you can see a close-up of the embroidery.
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Material and sewing
There is much ideology when it comes to making and wearing a folk costume. Hopefully I can get back to this later. For the Swedish reader I recommend Ulla Centergran's book Bygdedräkter, bruk och brukare, which is also her doctoral thesis and was printed in Göteborg 1996.The view on how to make a folk costume have changed considerably in the last hundred years, but for now I will speak only of what is the rule now.
The ideal is that the copy (your costume) should look just like the original, the fabric, the construction and the stitches should be the same. In reality it is not that simple. For example my bodice only had five eyelets on each side in the original. Everybody else who makes this bodice slavishly copies this, no matter if their bodice is ten centimetres longer than the original (the original owner was very small). I chose to have the same spacing between the eyelets instead and ended up with many more eyelets since I have at least a 20 cm longer torso than she had. Which is right? Five eyelets would not have been functional on my much longer body, the bodice wouldn't have fit very well. I chose to make a bodice that was similar to the original, the way a bodice for a much larger woman would have been similar, but not exactly the same, in period. The fabric should ideally be hand woven, but it is accepted that linen fabric is machine woven, since it is impossible to get that fine hand woven linen nowadays. The wool fabric is always hand woven however and quite expensive (between 50 and 80$/meter).
In general the goal is to make the clothes the way they were made and to wear them the way they were worn. The latter seems to be a problem for many wearers who can't live without their lipstick though. As with people making historical costumes the things there seems to be the most problem with are: covering the head, not showing your modern hair styles, make-up etc. Shoes are very expensive so a lot of people have discreet modern shoes in the same style (including myself). And of course people make (or rather made, this has changed somewhat) their skirts too short and wear nylon stockings. There are very strong feelings about what is "right" and "wrong" when it comes to folk costumes and a lot of people feel they have the right to be mean to people they don't think meet their standards. For me what is important is what is right for me, and that is a high level of authenticity, even when it means that I have to do things differently than the norm, and that people enjoy making and wearing their costumes (I try not to whine inside about the hair and the make-up). Since making a folk costume is a huge investment in both money, time and emotions people don't discard their old costumes just because the trend is towards more authenticity. We just have to think about that nobody wants to be wrong intentionally and there are as much feeling invested in a costume made thirty years ago with some machine stitching and way too short skirt as it is in a new costume, made after all the "rules".
Probably most people who own a folk costume have more feelings about it than I do. For me it is a nice costume that I look pretty in and that I can wear at all festive occasions (a folk costume is rated on the same level as a parade uniform, but can be used also on less formal occasions). But it is not my only historical costume and it's not my only entirely hand sewn costume. There was a lot of work with it, but not overwhelmingly much. The materials are a bit more expensive of course and if I ever make that linen batiste scarf I will treat it like my most precious belonging.
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