I. Just. Am so tired of "historical women's fashion is impractical and uncomfortable."
Everybody in every culture in history wears the clothing that makes sense for them in their place in culture and time! Sometimes the purpose is to show off that they can afford to wear deeply impractical clothing (this is usually where 'fashion' comes in.) But most of the time, even with middle-upper class everyday wear, if you think it's impractical it's just because you don't understand the differences between what seems practical in your culture and theirs - pretty much every "impractical" daily wear item that gets picked up by serious re-enactors who make it in the original materials and live in it in close to the original spaces is discovered to actually be quite useful and comfortable given the constraints of available materials. (I have always loved long wool skirts, but I didn't realize how much I needed them until I spent a year in a house with an unheated, uninsulated bathroom.)
Also the vast majority of all clothing through history is not fashionable! Some of it may have been fashionable when new, but most of that probably wasn't worn as everyday wear by everyday people. I have an actual late Victorian/early Edwardian dress passed down by my ancestresses, and I can't really date it any better than that because it's just kind of .... a dress. (It's black, so it was probably kept around as emergency mourning wear until my grandmother used it for cosplay in the 1930s, much like the 90s-vintage plain black dress in my closet.)
Hand sewn. The skirt is cut in a way that's obviously more about ease of piecing and sewing than about making a certain silhouette (it's pretty much indistinguishable in cut from the modern 'easy sew' pattern we used for my cat show skirt a couple weeks ago) and can be shaped all different ways depending on underlayers. And the blouse is the 'pigeon front' style that's often described as part of the super-impractical-evidence-of-women's-fashion-being-terrible "Gibson Girl" style, but it's actually super-practical to wear because it looks basically the same regardless of what kind of corsetry (or not) is under it, there's room to store handkerchiefs in the sleeves like grandma taught me, and I can add a hidden expander really easily if I don't want to bother cinching my waist in. And it's got a century's worth of repairs, patches and alterations on it. That's what historical clothing should be like, not copying things out of fashion plates and formal portraits.
(Like, there's nothing wrong with an interest in fashion if an interest in fashion is what you're interested in, but that's not an interest in what the material culture of clothing actually involved for most people.)
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I. Just. Am so tired of "historical women's fashion is impractical and uncomfortable."
Everybody in every culture in history wears the clothing that makes sense for them in their place in culture and time! Sometimes the purpose is to show off that they can afford to wear deeply impractical clothing (this is usually where 'fashion' comes in.) But most of the time, even with middle-upper class everyday wear, if you think it's impractical it's just because you don't understand the differences between what seems practical in your culture and theirs - pretty much every "impractical" daily wear item that gets picked up by serious re-enactors who make it in the original materials and live in it in close to the original spaces is discovered to actually be quite useful and comfortable given the constraints of available materials. (I have always loved long wool skirts, but I didn't realize how much I needed them until I spent a year in a house with an unheated, uninsulated bathroom.)
Also the vast majority of all clothing through history is not fashionable! Some of it may have been fashionable when new, but most of that probably wasn't worn as everyday wear by everyday people. I have an actual late Victorian/early Edwardian dress passed down by my ancestresses, and I can't really date it any better than that because it's just kind of .... a dress. (It's black, so it was probably kept around as emergency mourning wear until my grandmother used it for cosplay in the 1930s, much like the 90s-vintage plain black dress in my closet.)
Hand sewn. The skirt is cut in a way that's obviously more about ease of piecing and sewing than about making a certain silhouette (it's pretty much indistinguishable in cut from the modern 'easy sew' pattern we used for my cat show skirt a couple weeks ago) and can be shaped all different ways depending on underlayers. And the blouse is the 'pigeon front' style that's often described as part of the super-impractical-evidence-of-women's-fashion-being-terrible "Gibson Girl" style, but it's actually super-practical to wear because it looks basically the same regardless of what kind of corsetry (or not) is under it, there's room to store handkerchiefs in the sleeves like grandma taught me, and I can add a hidden expander really easily if I don't want to bother cinching my waist in. And it's got a century's worth of repairs, patches and alterations on it. That's what historical clothing should be like, not copying things out of fashion plates and formal portraits. (Like, there's nothing wrong with an interest in fashion if an interest in fashion is what you're interested in, but that's not an interest in what the material culture of clothing actually involved for most people.)