Wearable Prints: History, Materials, and Mechanics

For those of you that saw The Great Gatsby and want to dress like Daisy Buchanan, you’re right to think that people in the 1920’s were better dressed. But keep in mind that the clothes of era were class-specific; everything was top-quality or low-quality. You didn’t have plastic running shoes that wear out in three months, nor cheap jeans and tee shirts from Kmart. Fabric dyes were costly, and brightly-colored shirts were for those who could pay. Nowadays you buy a $10 shirt in garish colors, made cheaply in Asia, but you wouldn’t have had that in the F. Scott Fitzgerald era. Brightly colored print fabric was costly at the time. In fact, there were once laws restricting who could wear what. Check out Medici Money by Tim Parks, and you’ll see how Renaissance Europe used clothes to maintain class barriers. Multicolored clothing was worn only by the middle class, and only the wealthy were allowed to wear furs!

Wearable Prints tells the long and colorful story of the textile business, and how cloth makers from Europe to the USA turned colors into a science. As I mentioned before, brightly colored clothing was costly, but if you wanted a dress with patterns, then you’d better come from money. Patterned fabric had to be embroidered by hand, and skilled dressmakers didn’t come cheap. But soon the men in the business found ways to put flowers on fabric by stamping them on. If you want to say “well done gentlemen, you discovered something my kids did in Kindergarten,” then you won’t be surprised at how crude some of the cloth looked.

As time passed, fabrics would be less crude and have beautiful designs. The Industrial Revolution brought heavy metal waste, and in the process new colors were discovered. Metal oxides went from rusty reddish brown to dark blue, light blue, yellow, and green, and soon affluent women wore beautiful patterned dresses in cancer-causing colors. Dyers learned the wax-resist methods from Asia, and found ways to “print” the wax resist onto fabrics, then immersed them in dyes, giving them deep-blue cloth with white flowers. But the more colors on the cloth, the more times it had to be painted with wax and immersed in dye. That meant added cost, and since the rich are going to want quality, these dyers knew they’d better do a great job!

Some of the costumes in this book were preserved from antiquity, but a think a lot of them were reproduced from paintings. The evidence in Wearable Prints comes from fabric swatch books that were preserved, so we have lots of samples from cloth from earlier times. Paintings from our countries early days show what the people wore, but thanks to the 160 year old fabric swatches, we can see how intricate the clothes were. Whoever preserved these swatches has collected some great historical sources.

Keep one thing in mind, however. Historical sources are usually from portraits, and because they were costly, the subjects always wore their best clothes. The images rarely detail what the people wore when they worked.