Buttonholes

A hand-stitched shirt at Brakestein, a sleeve from the Palmwood Wreck, and the women who are missing from history. I am very fond of buttonholes, or knoopsgaten in Dutch. It is not a fashionable enthusiasm, but it is a useful one. A buttonhole is one of the few places in a garment where the work of a single pair of hands survives more or less intact.

A handmade shirt

On Monumentendag this September I visited Brakestein House on Texel, a country estate dating from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, whose house and garden are currently being restored. One room was open to visitors, and its interior gave a sense of the style and elegance of the original house.

I was shown a man’s shirt of the period. It was made of striped cotton with fine embroidery and lined with linen, and it had been stitched entirely by hand. The lining would have added warmth while protecting the outer fabric from the wearer’s infrequently washed body. What held my attention, though, were the buttonholes: neat, and worked with a patience that is hard to imagine now.

What buttonholes can tell us

In the study of archaeological textiles, buttonholes carry a surprising amount of information. Their position, size and construction can help researchers to work out whether a garment was cut for a man or a woman, how it was fastened and worn, and sometimes the occupation or social status of the person who wore it.

Buttonholes worked in silk thread are sometimes among the few recognisable parts of a garment to survive, because the linen or cotton around them decays first. Stitching that was meant to stop the fabric fraying ends up outlasting the fabric itself.

The sleeve of the Palmwood dress

Each stitch forms a small twist along the cut edge of the silk dress, locking the threads so that the opening cannot fray. Each is placed at the same distance from the next as if it had been measured. It had not been measured. It had been judged by eye, by someone who had done it so often they stopped thinking about it.

[close-up of a buttonhole on the sleeve of the silk gown from the Palmwood Wreck]

Plain sewing was learned at home, from a mother, an aunt or an older sister, and it was taught to all girls, because a household needed shirts and shifts and sheets, and it needed them to be mended. A girl who went on to earn her living by the needle arrived at her first paid work with some basic skills. She would have started off with tacking, the long temporary stitches that hold a garment together while it is fitted, and only when she could produce an even, straight line of them would she be trusted with an edge that showed.

The Seamstress

Her working day was long and hard on the body, and the work was badly paid. Her time was spent bent over her task in poor light, straining her eyes to produce the small, precise stitches that were expected of her. The costly silk passed through her hands, but it was never intended for her. The finished gown would be worn by a wealthy woman whose name might well be recorded. The seamstress who helped to make it would almost certainly not be.

And yet something of her is still here. When I show visitors the Palmwood dress, I point out those small,

even stitches on the sleeve, more than three and a half centuries old. Whoever worked this sleeve was taught by a woman who was taught by a woman, and so on. Not one of them appears in any record.

We will never know their names, but we can stand in front of the dress and remember the hands that made it.

Sources

Martine Benot-Teunissen, ‘Textiel Uit Hollandse Bodem: Archeologische vondsten uit de 17de en 18de eeuw’.