Written by Marija Makarović and Milena Kumar, 1989
Abstract
Die Ehre dess Hertzogthums Crain by Valvasor contains illustrations and, in most cases, descriptions of peasant costumes from Upper Carniola, Lower Carniola, the Karst, and the region of Vipava, as well as some other costumes. These illustrations and descriptions belong to the most significant rare source material on Slovene peasant costumes from the last quarter of the 17th century.
In the era, all Slovene peasant costumes looked very much alike, except for women’s costumes from Breg on the Karst. In addition, they had much in common with costumes of the peasant population in Central Europe of that time, as was true to a certain extent of Slovene costumes from the 15th and 16th centuries. The costumes of both regions reflected, with a delay of a few decades, features of Western European Baroque fashions of the nobility. At the same time, some characteristics of older styles were also preserved. For example, the division of the outer part of a woman’s garment into a skirt, gathered at the waist, and with an attached bodice, complemented by a visible white cloth shirt, was an invention of the early Renaissance.
If compared with costumes of the nobility and of the middle class, peasants’ clothes were simpler in design, and the choice of fabric was limited to homemade linen, woolen cloth, and sackcloth, as well as to a frugal use of material. This attitude to clothing seems to be the result of peasants’ circumstances and trends of the rural economy for self-sufficiency in clothes rather than concerning clothing regulations. For, in the second half of the 17th century, clothing laws were still in operation, at least to a certain extent, in Slovene provinces of that time, but they primarily regulated clothes of the nobles and of the middle class, unlike older rules which regulated peasant clothing as well. The quality and colour of their subjects’ fabrics was, at that time, prescribed by the nobles, while certain styles and jewelry, for instance, were even prohibited. One of the first known regulations from 808, issued by Charlemagne, dictates the kind of clothing to be worn by peasants and allowed, for example, six “elbows” of woolen cloth, grey or black in colour, for a peasant garment. According to Maximilian’s provincial regulation from as recently as 1519, peasants and the rest of the lower classes in towns and in the country were allowed to purchase cloth only if its price did not exceed one Hungarian florin an elI. When social conditions changed, such regulations seem to have lost their rationale and justification. So, in the last quarter of the 17th century, Slovene peasantry were evidently making more or less their own decisions as to the style of their garments, and their imitations of the nobles’ clothes went unpunished. Particularly some men’s clothes recall, in their general design, trends of the early, and of the late Baroque fashions of the nobles. Female costumes, however, show less imitation, with the exception of richly gathered petticoats. At least such conclusions can be drawn from depictions in Die Ehre dess Hertzogthums Crain and from comparable material sources.
For the needs of a museum exhibition, we undertook the job of reconstructing some of the costumes that were selected according to the criterion of diversity. We endeavoured to make reconstructions as faithful as possible in terms of quality and colour of fabric, style, and hand-sewing techniques. Since depictions and descriptions of costumes in Die Ehre dess Hertzogthums Crain did not seem to be sufficiently informative, other local and foreign sources from the broader European area were also considered from a comparative point of view while details of male and female clothes were being worked out. Source material from the 17th century was especially taken into account, whereas sources from the 16th, 18th and 19th centuries were referred to only exceptionally if there was a lack of contemporaneous sources. By comparing a number of sources, mainly pictorial in form, we felt more confident about determining individual articles of wear and their styles, and appropriate kinds and colours of fabrics. Reference to direct and indirect sources on clothing made it possible for us to design, with fewer reservations, faithful reconstructions of individual garments of men’s and women’s costumes as is possible today.