Mix and Match

I've decided I'm not going to worry too much about combining different tailors from the same general geographic area, and same general time, as long as the end result looks reasonably like something I might see in a single portrait of the time. So, Burguen + Alcega. It's like peanut butter and chocolate, right?



At the beginning of 2014, I was fortunate enough to attend a doublet-making workshop taught in Dallas by Mathew Gnagy (whose just-published book The Modern Maker should be delivered to my doorstep later today by the UPS fairy). We learned how to flat-draft a man's or woman's doublet from measurements, and then how to construct it using a variety of tailoring techniques. This workshop is the basis for all of the doublets I've made since then.

Below is a picture from the tailoring book of Fransico de la Rocha de Burguen, which he titled 
Geometria y traça perteneciente al oficio de sastres and published in Valencia, Spain, in 1618. The angled center-front line of the woman's doublets are what I've done on all the doublets I've made for myself. During construction, that angle is shrunk down with chain stitches in the seam allowance, causing a bubble to form in the front of the doublet. That's how you accommodate a curving female figure, without having to resort to darts or other seams. It just fits, like a magic trick.

I'm now most of the way through making up a separate skirt that I'll wear with one of the doublets. I'm using a skirt pattern from Juan de Alcega's 1580 book Libro de geometria, practica y traça, as described and re-created by Australian blogger Andrew (he doesn't include a last name I could find) as part of The Alcega Project. You can read the original, scanned book on the website of the Spanish National Library. The skirt pattern I'm using is on page 131, if you're looking at the thumbnails of the scanned book. I had been concerned about whether having a horizontal waistline on the skirt would cause problems with a pointed-waist doublet, but in another section of his project Andrew argues pretty convincingly that, even on garments where the skirt and bodice / doublet are attached, the skirt might be made up with a straight waist, and then the extra material might be cut away, or it might even simply be left in place. It doesn't seem to cause any fit problems, so I'm going to take the simpler route and leave it as-is.


I'm not to the point of having skirt photos ready yet, but here's the doublet. In this photo I'm wearing it over a dress modeled after Eleonora di Toledo's burial gown, as described in Janet Arnold's Patterns of Fashion. You can see the whole making-of album on Flickr.