What Was Clothing Like In The Middle Ages?

1214 Words5 Pages
What Was Clothing Like in the Middle Ages? In the Middle Ages the tailoring business developed and fashion as a concept was born. There wasn’t much difference among the distinct social classes in the way the clothing were cut, the differences became evident mostly in the colors and materials. The country folk prepared their fabrics themselves and the nobility and the bourgeois had the possibility to buy their own imported fabrics. What Materials Were Used to Make the Clothing? The domestic wool was revised into cloths of different strengths -durable, felt and carded fabrics. The most expensive, the finest and the most colorful cloth was an extremely important merchandise imported for example from the Netherlands, England and Germany. Preparing the fabrics and the threads was a time-consuming and valuable craft. Fabric was extremely valuable despite whether or not it was homemade or imported. The medieval threads were spindled with a distaff (an early part of a spinning wheel). For one whole dress where the density of threads was 12 threads per centimeter you needed as much as 15,000 meters of finished thread; i.e. 30 kilometers of one-filament thread. The thread had to be tightly woven and very durable. The clothes were used all the way to the end -- the parts that were worn-out and broken were mended and patched. When the piece of clothing was totally worn-out, the good parts were used again. This might be a reason why the archaeological findings are mostly church textiles. The looseness of the clothes was received by the using of gussets which were triangular inserts used to expand clothing. This way you could also save the valuable fabric. The colors were important to the contemporary people and by lifting the coating the colors of the underclothes and the lining could be shown. The working cloth of the country folk was a linen shirt. Long,

More about What Was Clothing Like In The Middle Ages?

Open Document