It will run through the beginning of the Capetian dynasty to nowadays and will focus on everything related to France and its history.
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Sack gown and petticoat, silk lampas, c. 1730, French,
Uniform worn by Napoleon Bonaparte at the Battle of Marengo.
13th or 14th century (1275-1325) Southern France - Toulouse?
British Library, Royal 10 E IV: I. (1v-3v) Calendarium, II. Decretals of Gregory IX with glossa ordinaria
fol. 77v - bas-de-page detail of a woman with a tabor.
Her hair is braided and loosely fastened on top of her head, forming almost pouches, when viewed from the front. Both the kirtle and the overkirtle are blue and the overkirtle is upturned at the hem - fastening the impractical length of the skirt and showing of the vair lining at the same time. The sleeves are cut to form tippets.
source - British Library catalogues
After the holiday hiatus, Illumanu is back!
Sabot - cuir, fer, bois
© Mâcon, musée des Ursulines, © Service des musées de France, 2010
Uniforme d’académicien d’André Liesse (1854-1944)
The official uniform of a member of the Académie Française is known as l’habit vert, or the green habit. The habit vert, worn at the Académie’s formal ceremonies, was first adopted during Napoleon Bonaparte’s reorganisation of the Institut de France. It consists of a long black coat and black-feathered cocked hat (officially called a bicorne), both richly embroidfered with golden-green leafy motifs, together with black trousers or skirt. Further, members receive a ceremonial sword (l’épée); however, clergymen do not receive swords.
Pourpoint de Charles de Blois / Charles de Blois’ doublet
It is one of the rare civilian costume that survived from the end of the Middle Ages, probably thanks to its “relics” status. According to the tradition the doublet was honored in the Église des Carmes in Angers where it remained until the Revolution, and belonged to Charles de Blois, who claimed the duchy of Brittany and died at the battle of Auray in 1364 - he was considered as a Saint. But there’s no evidence to prove it.
Smallsword with scabbard, hallmarked for 1773–74
Master GG (active Paris, ca. 1744)
France (Paris)
Gold, steel, wood, fish skin
Smallswords, like snuffboxes, were an essential element of male costume in the eighteenth century, and their hilts were appreciated as masculine jewelry. This weapon is a particularly fine Parisian example that combines elements of the older Rococo and the more modern Neoclassical ornamental vocabularies. The hilt and scabbard mounts of this example are cast entirely of yellow and green gold and are modeled with figures of the classical deities Mars, Minerva, Jupiter, and Hercules and with personifications of Justice and Prudence. This smallsword represents the final and most refined stage in the development of civilian swords, shortly before they ceased to be worn in Western Europe as a regular part of a gentleman’s wardrobe.
Cloak. 1580-1600, France. Red satin, couched and embroidered with silver, silver-gilt and coloured silk threads, trimmed with silver-gilt and silk thread fringe and tassel, and lined with pink linen. A cloak was the third item of dress in a man’s ensemble at the end of the 16th century. It was worn with a doublet and trunk hose. While most cloaks were used for protection, those made of expensive fabrics such as this silk were primarily symbols of wealth and social status.
Source: V&A Museum.
Men’s ensemble, ca. 1790
French
Three-piece men’s suit composed of tailcoat, waistcoat, and breeches of green silk velvet with green and yellow silk brocade and ivory silk twill and ivory linen lining
The dualities and contradictions that characterized male fashion in the early Napoleonic period are captured in this spectacularly schizophrenic ensemble. Under the disintegrating forces of the French Revolution (1789–94), the eighteenth-century confidence, some might say smugness, in its uniformity of aesthetic beliefs was to disappear. The restless need for social and political reform, which began in the 1780s and was fostered through the works of the philosophes, resulted in new patterns of consumption and new forms of self-expression. For a time, however, the ideas, values, and aesthetics of the ancien régime competed and coexisted with those of the founding Republic.
This jockeying for position between the old and new elites gave birth to a variety of hybrid or transitional styles of dress, this suit being an outstanding example. Comprising a coat with narrow sleeves and a straight, cutaway skirt, a short vest or gilet, and a pair of breeches that covered the legs below the knees, it recalls the cool Neoclassicism of the Enlightenment. At the same time, its simple lines and complete absence of decoration reflects the Anglomania that had been a feature of male fashions in France since the 1740s, but which came to the fore in the 1780s. The opulence and frenzied frivolity of ancien régime court dress or habits à la française, however, remain in its luxurious fabric and its lurid, effervescent color. Its stand-up collar is also a vestige of the old order, but its exaggerated height anticipates the style of the Incroyables. Like these giddy young men of the mid- to late 1790s, the wearer of this suit was almost certainly an élégant, an “enlightened” aristocrat who hid his anti-Jacobin tendencies by adopting the puritanical design vocabulary of the republicans.
