Danish l-m
braids, ca. 1630-40
Loop-manipulated
braids have now been identified on one of the Danish King Frederik
III's garments in the Royal Danish Collections at Rosenborg Castle, Copenhagen.
Frederik
III (1609-1670) was king of Denmark from 1648 to1670. His father, Christian
IV, had built a little castle, Rosenborg, in Copenhagen - originally
outside the city walls, in a lovely garden far from the noise and smells
of the medieval city. Since it became a museum in 1833 the crown jewels,
costumes, paintings, furniture and art objects belonging to the royal
family have been open to the public. The collection of royal costume is
unique in having such well-documented men's clothing from the 1600s.
This red
dressing gown was described as a "night gown" in an inventory of the King's
garments in 1651 - a comfortable garment to wear at home, like a housecoat
today. Made of red silk velvet, with lining, collar, and cuffs of bright
yellowish-green silk velvet, it is richly decorated with gold and silver
lace, braids, and stitched buttons with tassels. There are sets of the
braided loops along the slits at the sides and center back hem and encircling
the deep cuffs. The gown's edges are also trimmed with silver and gold
bobbin lace. Few dressing gowns as early as this one - or even portraits
showing them - exist anywhere in the world.
The braids,
loop and button closures, were a flexible and convenient solution to
closing a garment: one can avoid cutting buttonholes in valuable, heavy
fabrics or fur; loops are easier to button, and the garment can easily
be remade, let out or the fabric reversed. We might thus hope to find
more loop-manipulated braids on other historical, fashionable European
garments as well as on objects in ethnographic collections. Much of what
has until now been rather lightly dismissed as (generic) "braids" or
"passementerie" may reveal itself as loop-manipulation. The designation
as "primitive technique" can probably be abandoned now that these gold
and silver braids have turned up on royal costume!
The braid
itself is made of groups of gold and silver threads, creating a diamond-shaped
pattern. Some irregularities have been caused by not keeping the threads
together as a group.
Each braid
is a compact 1 cm wide and about 10 cm long, including a tassel. There are
all in all 210 braids on the gown, requiring roughly 21 meters in all. Each
pair of braids consists of one with a button covered with a stitched pattern
in gold and silver thread and one with an integral loop at one end for buttoning.
The structure
of these braids sparked my curiosity after I learned about loop manipulation.
The strange configuration of the groups of threads, passing over and
under like a twill but the groups themselves seemingly dividing and joining
in an unusual pattern had confounded me for years. A fortuitous meeting
with Noémi Speiser, Masako Kinoshita, Joy Boutrup and myself - over various
braids from the Royal Collections - was the inspiration that resulted in
a final identification and Joy Boutrup's suggested procedure for recreating
the braid.
The braids
are all made in short lengths rather than having been cut from one
long piece. This is particularly evident for the braids with the integral
loop for buttoning. Each piece must first be braided in the middle of
the warp for about 5 cm. The whole warp is divided into 5 loops for this
braid, which is made as a typical unorthodox braid with 5 loops. Then the
braid is doubled to create the loop and the two ends of the braid are
connected in a flat braid. No new elements are added but the strands from
both ends of the initial braid are regrouped into 15 loops, 5 loops of
gold and 10 of silver.
The flat
braid was difficult to analyze and we were baffled by the seemingly
irregular structure, the many strands in each loop making the case worse.
When a colleague from Sweden sent us a copy of Elisabeth Strömberg's article
from 1950 with three women loop-braiding (1937), we suddenly made some
progress. This picture, shown in both of Noémi Speiser's books, is
the only photographic documentation of 2 or 3-person loop-braiding known
at present.
Strömberg describes the production of shoulder straps for backpacks
with coarse hemp yarn. It is pointed out that this technique produced straps
that were strong, flexible and did not cut into one's shoulders when the
backpack was heavy. The article is without detailed information about
the braiding itself, but includes pictures of both sides of the resulting
braid.
The similarity
between the structure of the shoulder straps and the gold-silver braid
was immediately obvious. The general description of the braiding procedure
gave the impression of a 3-person unorthodox braid, each working 5 loops,
which was in accordance with the features of both braids. The crucial
point seemed to be the exchange of loops between the workers - there
had to be some twists of the crossing loop to prevent what would otherwise
be relatively long floats. We tried systematically different ways of
exchanging and found the following to be in accordance with both braids.
The loop going outside around the other is twisted after the penetration,
the lower shank turning up in front of the upper shank.
This kind
of exchange is easily achieved by using a variation of the Tollemache method
of exchange (Speiser op.cit., p. 91). The following drawings illustrate this
loop exchange and the structural result compared to that resulting from an
ordinary exchange.
The structure
of the exchange with the extra twist on the obverse side is illustrated
to the left (a) and the ordinary exchange to the right (b).
The two
parallel threads in to the left of the middle of a. are from two different
loops, the long float is broken up by the twist. The details can be
studied in the following drawings.
The curious
thing is the span of time between the braids, one from 1937 and the
other one from around 1630. After we made several reconstructions the
braid�fs features became more familiar and easier to recognize. A 2-person
braid of this type seems to show up on central European relic purses from
13th -14th century. This has yet to be confirmed by a more detailed study
not only of the pictures of the braids but also of the braids themselves.
If this
is true, this particular braid is just the first to be analyzed of
a large group of braids. The technique could have been an established
way of producing flat braids without excessively long floats.
Literature:
Strömberg,
Elisabeth: "Fyrkantiga Snoddar", RIG, Stockholm 1950, p 64-69.
Speiser,
Noémi: Old English pattern books for Loop Braiding, 2000, Published
by the author.
Flamand
Christensen, Sigrid.: Kongedragterne fra 17. og 18. Aarhundrede, Copenhagen
1940.
Johansen,
Katia: (about the dressing gown) "How to read Historic Textiles" i
Brooks, M. ed.: Textiles Revealed, London 2000; and "Polish garments"
and "In the lion�fs den - on nightgowns and dressing gowns" in Lions
of Fashion, male fashion of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, ed. Lena
Rangström, The Royal Armoury, Stockholm, 2002.
