Traditional Scandinavian clothing is one of the few folk dress traditions in Europe that never quite turned into fancy dress. Walk through Oslo on the seventeenth of May and you will see thousands of people in bunad, the Norwegian regional festival costume, worn to a national holiday the way an … Continue reading
Traditional Irish clothing is a subject where the story we all repeat and the story the museums tell are not the same thing. I went looking for the documented version and found a practical history of linen and wool, two centuries of law about what people could not wear, and … Continue reading
Traditional Scottish clothing is a subject where most of what everybody knows turns out to be wrong. Tartan is genuinely ancient, but the tidy system handing one sett to each surname is barely older than the sewing machine. The real story is better than the myth, and it tells a … Continue reading
Traditional Korean clothing has one of the longest continuous design stories anywhere in the world. The hanbok you see at a Seoul palace today, a short wrapped jacket over a high, full skirt, is recognisably the same idea painters brushed onto tomb walls more than fifteen hundred years ago. Korean … Continue reading
Of all the folk dress in this series, traditional Ukrainian clothing rewards a sewist most. The Spanish, French and German posts were largely about silhouette. Ukraine is different. The garment is the simplest shape in Europe, four rectangles and two gussets, and every ounce of the work went into the … Continue reading
Lace has been called the fabric made of air, and once you have looked closely at a fine piece you understand why. It is mostly holes, held together by thread so fine it seems impossible that human hands made it. For hundreds of years lace was worth more than gold … Continue reading
Say traditional Mexican clothing and most people picture a white blouse with red roses round the neckline. That blouse is real, but it is a small corner of a very large room. Mexico has dozens of Indigenous peoples, and many still weave and wear what their communities wore long before … Continue reading
Traditional German clothing, known as Tracht, changes dramatically from region to region. The Bavarian Dirndl is the dress most people picture, but the Black Forest, Saxony, the Rhineland, and the north all have their own distinctive folk costumes. This guide tours the most famous traditional German dresses region by region, … Continue reading
Pick up your fabric shears and you are holding a tool with more than three thousand years of history in it. The scissors on your cutting table have outlived empires, survived a design change or two, and picked up some strange superstitions along the way. Here is the story, from … Continue reading
Ask anyone to name a sewing machine brand and the answer is almost always the same: Singer. For more than a century the name was so dominant that in many countries the word Singer simply meant sewing machine. But the story behind that little red S involves a runaway actor, … Continue reading
Traditional French clothing is best understood region by region. From the bustling streets of Paris to the picturesque villages of Brittany, each part of France has its own folk costume. The traditional clothing worn by women in different regions. Each dress is a reflection of the history, culture and identity … Continue reading
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