> You might also do a GOOGLE search for theatrical costumes and reenactment
clothing suppliers.

I hope you don't mind me stepping in here again, but theatrical costumes and most reenactor clothing bear very little resemblance to the historical clothing of the period. Costumes "suggest" a garment and do not necessarily use the same fabrics or even construction methods. Using them to try and understand the past is like using plastic dinosaur figures to try and understand the age of the dinosaurs. Someone staging a play doesn't care if the clothing is correct (in the recent movie "Gangs of New York" the art director said she used "paintings of gypsies" to construct the clothing of the women in the lower classes, about as absurd a notion as I can imagine, since lower class women aspired to look like upper class women, something that foreign visitors to America like Dickens complained about, since they couldn't keep the classes apart, and because the lower classes here "didn't know their place").

There are very many accurate sources for information and even patterns for period clothing, but very little of this information will have any connection to costumers. I don't mean to sound like a scold, but this is an area of specialization for me.

Bill Cross

To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe please see the instructions at
http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-roots.html