Quote Originally Posted by Pleater View Post
I have various books - and I had more before I became more cautious about lending them, which claim to be comprehensive guides to garments from antiquity to modern times covering all nations - not one has a Scotsman. Not one has an Englishman in a smock or knitted gansey - many of those joining the English Civil War societies have had to be told that they are wearing garments way above the station of an ordinary man or woman of the time.

My own limited research soon revealed that museums tend to be gifted or inherit (or in some cases steal) the garments which are special and striking - so hopefully as more things are digitised it will be possible to discover and analyse the everyday clothing of the masses.

Anne the Pleater
I hadn't really thought about the lack of common clothing from different eras within a museum collection. My university degree is in art, and I worked at the university gallery. I have also seen storage at my hometown's museum of art. What I suspect from these experiences is that most of us will not see even a tenth of a museum's collection of artifacts. I am sure many museums continue to digitize their collections, so there is hope that artifacts that will likely not get displayed will end up available for research online. It might be worthwhile writing to any museum that houses historic costume to enquire if they have artifacts from common people. They may not have any clothes from the commoner of a given era, but one hopes.

After you responded, I had an opportunity to chat with an historian about this a little bit over the weekend. She brought up that clothes produced by the common person's household will likely not be of as high a quality as the finer pieces that end up in museum collections. Also, being common, will see more wear and tear, and will not be kept in the same way as a garment produced for a special event, or will not be kept for the purposes of documentation in the same way as a garment made for a person of power or of historical significance might be.

I would hope that there are still many examples throughout the ages of the common person's clothes. Finding preserved clothes from ages past seems like it would be the result of luck, more than anything else. The cost of analyzing and dating garments seems prohibitive for common clothes. I am thinking, here, about Peter MacDonald's talk at the V&A Dundee last year regarding dating the Glen Affric tartan. Perhaps this also offers hope — that there is a garment in a collection somewhere just waiting for the opportunity to be discovered and celebrated.