At 73, chintz was still popular in my early childhood yrs, and was popular with my grandparents and great grandparents. My maternal grandmother had chintz wallpaper. My paternal grandmother had a sofa covered with a chintz fabric.
"Dutch protestants, they don't really trust change or the French." That absolutely killed me. Having lived in Holland, hmm, that does sound pretty accurate.
Rabbit hole! I had fallen down it before I even considered that it could be so very deep! The richness of deeply considered history is a delight! Thank you so much.
When I started sewing, and buying fabrics, in the mid 80's, in Lisbon, also when most fabrics sold here were made in Portugal, "chintz" was a home decor fabric, a tightly woven and shiny cotton. like you say, for the Dutch, it was the fabric texture and not really the pattern, that told that fabric was chintz. there was also plain colour chintz available. only recently, I realised that in English, it meant the pattern. thank you for this video, I learned a lot!
Yes, a lot of us (around the world) encountered something called "chintz" during our own lifetimes. As Myrthe mentions in passing in the video, it's a word that has travelled, not strictly attached to the original textile. Certainly for the British, it was floral cottons that were madly popular, so when they managed to completely divert public demand and access to them away from Indian products to British domestic-made products, they used the word "chintz" in a marketing sense and that was the first big "leap" of the word to a substantively different product. But since what the public wanted was the appearance, not the production methods, that totally succeeded. And in America, it continued in the form of "calico" right through the 19th century to the present day. It's ironic that calico, as a pattern or print, is even further away from any Indian origins than the British chintzes of the late 18th century, yet the word "calico" applied to such fabrics is a corruption of another Indian word. ;)
@@TimesmithDressHistory I might add that nowadays, when most fabrics available in Portugal are sadly imported, that it became a fabric very hard to find. I say "sadly" because the quality lowered and the prices increased.
I never knew chitz was such a luxury item or where it originated ! Here in the USA in the modern context usually has a negative association. We even have a term chintzy which means old fashioned and tacky. Thanks to your information though, I now have a new appreciation for Indian fabrics !
Well, if I’m not blown away! But I am, and in such sure, competent hands. You ladies are a wonder. Thank you for this deep viewing of textile so lovingly and astutely contextualized. My love of Rembrandt, and his attention to fabrics, and my growing skills as an embroiderer, drew me here. Chance has nothing to do with it! Pure and delightful karma. Bless both your work.💐
Thanks! We had a lot of fun putting this together, talking about exhibitions we've visited. You'll find a lot more in the books in the list in the description, too.
This is my absolute FAVORITE CoCovid video thus far. So interesting and informative...plus, you are both so knowledgeable and eloquent! What an incredible tale you weave 😉 of material arts culture through a specifically produced textile!
Thank you for this lovely lecture. My family is from India and I have always been interested in Indian textiles. I really appreciated how much you discussed the expertise of the Indian textile manufacturers when they made chintz. I also really enjoyed learning about how important chintz is in Dutch culture. This lecture was wonderfully researched and presented. Thank you.
Hi Sushila, thank you for watching and for commenting. Highlighting the care and skill of the Indian artisans was our main concern here - I hope more people go explore more about this!
How wonderful - with incredibly wide contextual detail. So many aspects of the production, marketing, cultural use/interpretation/adoption and 'aesthetics' of this kind of fabric which has enchanted me for most of my life. This is my favourite CoCovid presentation so far and they have all been great !!
What a truly excellent conversation! Thank you so much for this deep dive. I loved that you included the geopolitical context of the fabric as well as the disambiguation of the term and (of course) where to find good reproductions and modern interpretations of extant designs. This is the sort of content I think we need more of as we work to be a more conscious costuming community. Exceptionally well done!
Oh, wow, thanks so much! I feel the same and am so excited to see more scholars and academics get on board TH-cam. Two that you will want to check out: Dressing History (th-cam.com/channels/UpeCQthjgPKf-J695mldFw.html) and, if you're interested in earlier time periods and proper experimental archeology and crafts: Sally Pointer (th-cam.com/users/sallyinwales). Enjoy!
This just showed up in my feed and it is absolutely fascinating! I really am glad to know how chintz was produced, with such a complicated dye process!
This was really interesting! I really appreciated how much nuance you both brought to this conversation. As a Dutch person who is only just starting to learn about dress history this has been incredibly fascinating, and it's fun to hear so much about my own country for a change. I'll definitely look into the other sources you have provided!
Glad you liked it! The books are really nice, Pronck en Prael is a good one to start out with as it has a good mix of all the pretty pictures and a load of information about the influence of Chintz on Dutch life :).
this is a so useful video!! when i first started watching it i knew NOTHING about Chintz and now i have alot o usful and relevant information! Thank you for posting and beeng a part of CocoVid so that i could learn something new!
@@TimesmithDressHistory It is! I'm here 3 months later and can still learn about chintz. I had no idea what it was before. I only knew it was a fabric. So, thanks from me too, to the both of you.
What a great exploration of this fabric! I have to admit some of these prints freak me out a little, like an acid trip. But I still love them because it is such a great reminder that history is not black & white or just sepia toned like many people imagine!
I do miss all the creators' videos from past years at Costume College, seeing all the beautiful costumes was such a treat. But this year has been so special, in that I'm getting to see the educational side. Thank you!
100% agree! We're also seeing much more content from teachers outside the US. The live panels have included a much more diverse range of voices and experiences. I have really enjoyed seeing this.
Thank you for this fascinating lecture. I was directed here by a friend who works with Indian textiles, and am very glad I came to hear the world-history-spanning context of this work. As an appreciator of the philosophy of the Arts & Crafts movement, which informs my I’m glad I stayed for the end-of-credits sequence.)
This was one of the Cocovid videos I was most looking forward to. This was fantastically informative. But I have so many questions!!! Myrthe mentioned colors for mourning a few times, like how they wouldn't wear red in mourning clothes, or how brown would have been for mourning. Would an all-blue print or a brown-ground print be worn only for mourning or would those colors/prints be worn generally? Also, I've heard that purple colors in extant garments have often faded to brown. Do we know what might have been more popular, brown-ground or purple ground prints? And would either of you know if North American tastes were more closely linked to English styles or Dutch styles (I'm specfically wondering how popular colored-ground prints were in the colonies)? Thank you for doing this video!
Hi Dixie, glad you enjoyed it! You've raised great questions - which open up huge avenues of further discussion. I'm going to make an attempt to outline briefly where the investigations need to go, if you're to find answers. As ever, it's all very much specific to time, place, and "person" (which encompasses individual and community characteristics ranging from racial/ethnic background, social standing, education, income, connections, personal circumstances). For the sake of trying to pinpoint things, I'm assuming you're talking AWI/RevWar era in the British colonies - please correct me if I'm wrong! So the key thing here is that these parts of N. America were British controlled. What people could buy (legally) from Europe came from Britain OR was controlled by Britain. Chintz as we talked about in the video was an Indian-made textile made for the Dutch market, for Dutch tastes. In Britain at this time, INDIAN-made textiles were still restricted (people like to say 'banned' but it's more nuanced than that). What came into American ports were the goods that the British decided should go there, for a variety of concerns, protection/promotion of British financial and industrial interests being paramount. So what the British colonies got in terms of printed cottons were largely those made in Britain, for export to the colonies. These were not chintzes as per the Indian process or as the Dutch would have understood this. As Myrthe and I talk about in the video, British floral printed textiles were printed -- whether block or, (as I understand it) increasingly by the 1770s, copper-plate -- which involved more mechanisation and far less craftsmanship, resulting in much larger production, much faster, than Indian-made chintzes. Faster + more of it + cheaper = higher profits, all of it going to the British economy. As to taste - as we talked about in the video, the British had significantly different tastes than the Dutch did. Myrthe describes the symbolism of colours that made the Dutch request dark grounds from India. The British didn't have that cultural demand for dark colours. And making textiles like that -- much more costly -- would have seriously impacted a still-developing domestic production (protected from outside competition by law but needing to make sizeable profits). For whatever reason, the evidence shows that fashionable wear in Britain favoured white/pale grounds. So that's what you got in British colonies, where your access to cotton was controlled by British regulation, tax and industry. And that's what you see represented at historic sites such as Colonial Williamsburg, in the clothing -- but note there are exceptions that provoke further discussion! (The wealthy travelling to Europe and having access to things ordinary people didn't... and the whole dichotomy between use of floral prints in home decor vs. clothing, for example.) The added complication was that the British "stole" the word chintz to describe their inferior domestic product, quite deliberately trading on the reputation of the Indian textiles to market their own goods. As for the Dutch influence in North America - generally speaking, that's basically limited to time and place - New Amsterdam. Whether Dutch colonists in that area in the 17th century were wearing Indian-made chintzes is an area of study I've not delved into. I'm sure there are dress and textile historians with a particular interest in early New York history who could help with that. That very specific time/location limit to the Dutch foothold in N. America does help explain, I think, the fascination that Anglo/American reenactors have to do with "Dutch" chintz - it's so exotic compared to British goods! :) I would love to host another video talking about floral cottons in N. America, but even that would need to be divided up by colony. I am aware of 18th century scholars/reenactors/historical tailors in N. America also interested in this. Perhaps we can persuade them to do a video presentation on this! (I'm looking at you, @nealhursttailor ...!) P.S. Book sources for what printed cotton fashions were being *worn* in Britain - John Styles ' Threads of Feeling' and Barbara Johnson's Album of Fashions and Fabrics (published by the V&A). Miss Johnson had many gowns of floral printed cottons! It's fun to look at the changes in colours and designs as the century progressed (and her choices from childhood through adulthood and into her later years in the early 19th century).
@@TimesmithDressHistory holy moly what a wealth of information! Thank you so much for this detailed response. Yes, I was specifically looking for options for 1780s and was drawn to the heritage Dutch prints for reasons mentioned in the video (quilting cottons are not the same quality as what would have been used then, some of the colonial Williamsburg prints were from furniture not clothing, etc.). It's hard to find a suitable modern cotton print+fabric. Even the block prints currently made in India, while beautiful, are probably too lightweight compared to fabrics used in the 1700s (although many might work for Regency). I will continue my hunt for a good cotton print! Thank you again!
@@DixieDIY For British-style reproduction cottons, look to Colonial Williamsburg and Burnley & Trowbridge - links to both are in the video description. Yes, CW repros are often based on home decor and often marketed towards modern fabric market, not reenactors. But the descriptions usually refer to which extant pieces the repros are based on, whether textile fragments or a complete object, whether gown or bed hanging. If in doubt and if you've got a little wriggle room for how authentic you need it to be, my rule of thumb is to go for the white/ivory grounds. The motifs themselves are not going to be far off for clothing, even if the extant was furnishings. And don't forget that handful of 18th century prints that Ikea did - American Duchess have got a great blog post about which ones are in fact 18th century accurate and how to calculate yardage from the various bedding sizes: blog.americanduchess.com/2019/05/ikea-costuming-101-making-historical.html There is no real shortcut to training your eye, as well. I love perusing Colonial Williamsburg's online collection with so many examples. Yes, there's a lot of home decor, but there are a lot of complete garments too! Happy sewing!
Thank you! I think Timesmith Dressmaking already covered the North American perspective pretty well. About the mourning: it indeed depends pretty strongly on the region, some towns had other/more strict 'rules' than others. Hindeloopen specifically had a lot of stages for mourning, starting with black wool, then brown ground with no color, dark blue, light blue. Typically speaking, a print without any red would be likely to be for mourning, in the Netherlands. Possibly the more 'empty' blue on white (which you see as well in English cottons) would have been worn out of mourning as well, though I think I've seen these more in England. With the brown and purple, I believe that the genuine Indian prints would not have faded that much (it was mostly the yellow that faded, not the blue or red so much). But I've seen dark brown grounds only in a mourning context (so with very little other color, I can't directly think of any with a brown ground and more than white), and purple in the 18th century definitely exists in an out-of-mourning context. Neither are very common though, for brown I only know some heavy mourning examples, and there's only a couple of purple ground existent I know of. I'd say they are about equally common in existing pieces.
A wonderful discussion especially because of the Dutch focus. Also fascinating to have outlined is the process whereby the desire to monopolise a trade sector by a trading company eventually led to the development of colonial structures at the national level.
That was one amazing talk! I finally got around to it and did save it for further research. I didn't even know the name of that fabric, but once I saw the pattern, I thought "of course I know that", but I didn't know anything about it :) Thank you for presenting it here!
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE DO a video on how to make chintz fabric! Or just add resources to how to do it in the description. I would be an absolute dream of mine to recreate such a historical fabric in a historically accurate waty! I have a love of all historical processes of doing things. Craftsmanship had pretty much died in the modern age.
I love that you love it! As mentioned in the video - Renuka Reddy is the only person we know of, making chintz the historical way. Her details are in the video description.
This has been a really interesting talk and I learned far more than just about chintz. I am sure I will be referring to this video in the future as it holds so much information about a subject I'd not even thought about before but can see that I need to know more.
I know so much about chintz now. It took me ages to figure out how to use the codes though! I had to download all of these random apps to my dinosaur phone, but I made it work. Thank you so much for the video lovely ladies! May your chintz never fray.
Fascinating! While I am not an historical costumer, I do love history, especially textile history. This discussion was incredibly informative. Thank you both so very much.
Thank you both for this absolutely fantastic video! Covered a really wide expanse of not just the textile, but all of the important threads (...heh) connecting to the topics surrounding it. I was lucky enough to see an exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA a few years ago that had some gorgeous chintz garments - really made me appreciate just how much work the hand-painting process would have been.
Chintz fabric remained popular in Charleston SC and the surrounding areas much longer than other parts of the United States, primarily because of quilting. The Charleston Museum did two quilt exhibits in 2017, and many of them featured chintz appliques. I believe parts of the exhibit can still be accessed on their website.
@@TimesmithDressHistory the designs! I just can't find one with the same level of detail that isn't terribly obviously modern. If you know of one, please let me know!!! I love how deceptively simple the historic chintz was, all the layers of color and detail.
@@kyliecunningham8057 We gave several recommendations in the discussion and in the description - my favourite is dutchfabric.nl. Dutch Heritage also does good prints (though the textile itself is a quilting cotton) and is probably easier to find in stores in the USA.
This is so fascinating. I’m German and in Germany chintz is associated with the glaze it had (perhaps just the residue from the resist dyes?) and not at all with flowery patterns.
Yes, we talk a bit about that in the video! Originally, "chintz" referred to textiles made with the process used by these Indian artesans. The actual patterns varied a great deal according to the market the textile was destined for. The Dutch wanted a particular aesthetic or style, the British wanted something else, Indonesia and Malaysia wanted something else - all different. I am not familiar with German tastes and what they were importing from India made with this technique - I'd love to know more about that! Are there any extant examples in German museums you can point us to? Thanks so much!
Loved this discussion! So fascinating! I was forced to stop watching 3/4 of the way through and made myself remember the time stamp so that I could come back and finish! Plus, cleanly and carefully edited. Very well done! I’ve now ordered some books on chintz and the historical motifs and I NEED to make petticoats. What do think about 50’s chintz shirtwaist dresses.....oh I’m in trouble...
Thanks for the compliment! I'm still very much a beginner with the video editing and just strive to do some justice to wonderful content such as this from Myrthe. :) You'll love the books! Happy sewing!
Wonderful talk, thank you both for sharing this! I may have come to the comments too late to get an answer, but I will ask anyway. I am curious about the calendared glaze on the chintz. Does this mean that you couldn't wash the fabric? Would the calendaring wash out? I know that moiré silks should not be washed, and they are also calendared. Is it a different process? Thanks for any insight!
Hi, thanks for coming by! Great question! A full discussion of that was one of the many (!) things we didn't have to go into in this video, but you're right - the "glaze" effect from calendaring is the result of heat and pressure, so it does indeed wash out if saturated in water. Laundry practices in the 18th century were very different from what we are accustomed to today (although no less careful). Gowns, indeed most outer garments, were cleaned in ways that did not involve water, so losing the calendared glaze was not generally a problem. Myrthe and I wonder about all the children's clothing we see surviving today! I don't know much about this - perhaps Myrthe does?
@@TimesmithDressHistory Thanks for answering! I will mentally file chintz garments into the "cleaned but never washed" category. This perhaps is also a reason they were less often worn by working classes, apart from the price of the fabric? And maybe 18th century babies were miraculously clean and didn't spit up on their clothes...
@@emmamarentette It probably wasn't washed much, as Rebecca mentioned, but there are records of 'glazing' shops. So these shops specifically existed to re-glaze fabric that had been washed, indicating that washing did actually happen. It's good to put it into the 18th century perspective where it wasn't 'normal' to regularly wash gowns, but people did value keeping things clean. I think that typically, existent baby's garments have less glaze left than jackets or gowns (just trying to remember back now), so these might actually have been washed. The color would stay very well, it's just the glazing that goes, and you might have cared less about that for baby's garments than for your fancy gown.
@@ateliernostalgia4088 From memory (and a google search confirms), the "kraplap" from Spakenburg as you showed, is starched and pressed to an inch of its life. I remember reading Dutch books on traditional dress as a kid in which this was described in detail. This is of course different than a full garment, but for those who want to go into this particular rabbit hole, such books and the ladies from Spakenburg may be a good place to start. And by the way, I am not a costumer, but I absolutely loved this video. Makes me wonder if my greatgreatgrandparents also wore these amazing prints.
@@annaapple7452 Definitely! I've worn them, and they feel more like plastic sheets than like fabric ;). The starch also gives a glazed appearance, but the calandering is slightly different as it doesn't need to involve any starch. It glazes the fabric while not necessarily making it a lot stiffer.
thanks so much for this great presentation; it was fascinating to learn about the evolution of this textile - I've always loved 'contemporary' ('60s and '70s) Indian block-printed cottons, now I can see where they fit in to history! p.s. the closed captioning is unfortunately very inaccurate (don't know if this is something that can be edited?)
Hi, Pat. Thank you so much for watching. I'm glad you found it interesting. Yes, indeed, I am working on subtitles. TH-cam provides automatically-generated (computer) subtitles but they are obviously poor quality. TH-cam has also had a volunteer-based community captioning service (which I understand has been a mixed bag, in terms of quality, spam and fraud) but has just announced they are discontinuing that. There are a number of paid services - some, like Amara, are a monthly subscription service. Others, like Rev.com, are pay-as-you-go. I've trialled Rev.com on several of my shorter videos and am very impressed. However, the cost of using Rev.com for the longer videos (like this Chintz one) are way beyond my current budget. Meanwhile, someone in the costuming community has volunteered to provide subtitles for the two 1+ hour long CoCoVid videos but she reports the TH-cam platform does not make it easy on her end. She's plugging away at it, though! Hopefully we'll have good subtitles on this video soon! Meanwhile I am researching to find a reliable, reasonably-priced option for all videos going forward. It's one reason I decided to launch a Patreon, to help fund the cost of providing professional subtitles for the channel going forward, as I firmly believe it's a vital aspect of online education yet it will be a significant ongoing expense.
@@TimesmithDressHistory Rebecca, thanks so much for your reply, and kudos to the volunteer who is working through the videos. It was a great presentation, and I just didn't want poor captioning to reflect badly on all your hard work - I'm sure it's doubly difficult when there are a lot of specific/technical terms! I'm working slowly through the Cocovid playlist and am grateful to everyone who contributed, Pat
@@patr3199 Thank you so much! I feel very strongly about accessibility for those who rely on subtitles to any degree, and I hate it when they are bad! Sorting out all the subtitles on videos already on my channel AND ensuring good subtitles on all future videos is a top priority for me.
I'm so sorry you're having these technical difficulties! There is no comment area on your current live attempt, and there is an audio loop back. I will definitely continue to try to tune in. Best! ❤
Thank you Jamie! I've just pinned an update on the video. We'll sort something out and let the CosTube know so they can post an update on their Instragram for you all.
@@TimesmithDressHistory Definitely! I suspect there might be trade secrets in the details, though the general procedure was practiced through-out India and Sri Lanka, so at least some of the techniques were more known I think.
@@ateliernostalgia4088 Yes, I'm thinking it's like guilds ("liveried companies" and "corporations" in England) had trade secrets, whether it was in silk weaving or stays pattern drafting. And of course the practice of trades were often very much family-based, with sons (and daughters!) apprenticed to a parent who had mastered the craft.
@@TimesmithDressHistory If you guys find and resources on how chintz was actually made, I would REALLY love to see a video on that! Or atleast have the resources added to the description box of this video. It is something I would be really interested in recreating. Just as many love recreating extant garments. I am really into recreating extant processes of making fabrics and garments! From creating the thread to weaving the garments, and the other processes like the tente hooks and the other process that tightens up the weave (can't remember the name of it for the life of me, but it before industrial means, women would stomp on the garment in a bucket with stale urine and water, then the first industrial part of making fabric was this part and a water powered "machine" would pretty much just beat the garment over and over with "hammers" in a bath of stale urine and water, this shrunk the weave (so you could no longer see through it) and fluffed up the fabric. i believe they use the same sort of machine nowadays, except now they use amonia instead of stale urine lol), bleached the fabric and prepared it for the tente hooks. And dying the fabrics! So many wonderful historic processes to learn about and recreate!
@@bethanyday3471 India is the place to go! Why don't you reach out to Renuka Reddy's studio as linked in the description and see if perhaps an internship or apprenticeship with her is possible? That would be so cool.
It's related in some way, yes. It is inspired by the traditionally Indonesian process of batik, which is basically that all colors are dyed in the 'resist' way. So by applying wax to those areas you don't want dyed (whereas in chintz, only blue was dyed this way). Ankara fabric is imitation batik (roller printed), mostly Dutch produced (and originated in the mid 19th century), originally for the Indonesian market, but then found a home in Africa where it became popular instead. Most of the visual imagery of the current fabric is related to Africa. So while it is inspired by Asian techniques similar to those of chintz, the prints and aesthetics are typically quite different.
@@ateliernostalgia4088 & @minjenra thank you! As Indonesian, of course I was wondering about batik! It's fascinating to know about Ankara fabric & African version :)
Another element of what is considered "historically accurate" in costuming circles at any given time is that it can lead to everyone looking the same, to an event being filled with versions of the same 4 Williamsburg prints. It gets restrictive IMO
That's a good question! I'd have to check if any of my sources write anything on that, I'll get back to you on that. In any case, it would have differed depending on the quality of the cloth, there were differences in that even then :)
That would be a really cool thing to find out. I know there would be a lot of variables that make it hard to translate into today's money. That kind of question came up on Cathy Hay's lecture on the Worth gown yesterday - trying to equate cost of something "back then" to a monetary equivalent is kind of apples and oranges, but as a starting point if we can find a primary source with a price here in the UK, we could run it through this historical converter and see what it says! www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency-converter/ :)
Barbara Johnson's Album of 18th C fabric swatches at V&A includes printed cottons, many with notes on prices and yardage for this or that gown. The museum has several photos online, but the handwriting in old ink is hard to read from the image - would be so cool to see it in person some day!
@@davyd28 Yes, I love that resource! Unfortunately, none of the floral fabrics appear to be Chintz as in Indian-made, mordant/resist dyes/painted, etc. As touched on in the video (and discussed in much more detail in my response to DixieDIY's comment here), the most readily available printed cotton goods available in Britain in this period were domestic, inferior to Indian's product, and yet often called "chintz" as a marketing strategy.
@@TimesmithDressHistory Very true. Still, the person who has asked the question may find it useful to get an idea of the price range for various fabrics at the time. Thank you for the presentation, I look forward to hearing more in the future..
Slavery was just as horrid for slaves on a cotton plantation, but don’t be duped, the harvesting of sugarcane was just as rough on the slaves. Sugarcane is so sharp, without slaves Queen Victoria’s wedding cake could not have been made readily of sugar without those sugar plantations.
Oh, we definitely did not want to imply that sugar plantations were in any way better than the cotton ones! They just have less direct link to the story of chintz, but that obviously doesn't say anything about how horrible they were.
She certainly said a lot but never really described Chintz opposed to other fabrics, just the printing schemes. She didn't talk about the types of resins used, the high polishing technique used that gives Chintz its distinctive hand, nor the weave of the fabric. The title of this blog is misleading.
I am sorry if this wasn't the in-depth *technical* textiles talk you expected. The aspects of dyes, waxes, paints and glazing methodology were all mentioned but unfortunately in a 1-hour (+) talk directed to a general audience, we were never going to be able to dive deep into any one area. There are lists of further resources in the video description which give leads for further research on specific areas. We hope we have whet the appetites of all our viewers to go explore further any aspects that particularly interest them.
I have a request, I was wondering if it would be possible to have captions that are not autogenerated? I understand its a lot of work, but it would help a lot in making the video accessible for me and for other people!
Hi, thanks for the suggestion. I'm brand new to video editing. Could you explain what you mean or what you'd like to see? I did not use any captioning options here -- all the labels you see on the photos are actually type-written right into the image files. I'd love to do better and welcome any pointers as to the editing function I should learn to use. (My editing software is Adobe Premiere Pro 2020.) Just thinking a bit further - since I didn't put captions in, is this something TH-cam is doing for you? (I have no idea how this works!)
We did want to look into it, but ran out of time unfortunately. So far the auto generation seems okay, it just translates 'chintz' to 'chance', but we can look into the possibility of adding proper captions at some point!
@@ateliernostalgia4088 I'm glad you know something about this! I will look into it and find ways to do better in future. I dare not try fixing it on this particular video because it's so long with so many photos. The Upload Gods were pretty hostile, as it was! P.S. I just figured out that by captions, we're talking about sub-titles. D'oh! If there's a way to get into the sub-titles generated by TH-cam and manually edit them, that would be the way to go (no need to further edit and attempt to re-upload).
@@ateliernostalgia4088 I would absolutely be willing to help too! I just did a quick google and it seems like Amara might be a good option and TH-cam has this page on adding your own subtitles: support.google.com/youtube/answer/2734796?hl=en Sadly the auto generated captions aren't really adequate if you're using them to compehrend the spoken words because they're often out of time and the words don't match exactly. (Though that is my own personal experience, it may be different for other people!)
I really enjoyed this but there was an uncomfortable moment where she seemed to do her best to put off blame for slavery. I know I’m late to this and I could be misunderstanding.
I appreciate your honesty. I think you were misunderstanding but you were not completely wrong. The fact is, we filmed this in the summer of 2020. We were uncomfortable about making other people uncomfortable. We are a lot better at that now. 😊
Very interesting video! I enjoyed watching it! 😊 Btw in 18th century descriptions of wanted criminals from Germany, you can find a lot of different chintz being combined.
At 73, chintz was still popular in my early childhood yrs, and was popular with my
grandparents and great grandparents. My maternal grandmother had chintz wallpaper.
My paternal grandmother had a sofa covered with a chintz fabric.
That is so cool!
Oh my goodness...such a wonderful rabbit hole of textile history information. Thank you for sharing your knowledge.
I'm glad you enjoyed it!
I came as a CoCovid completist, just wanting to watch everything, and was delighted to find myself enraptured by fabric. Well done!
Thank you for watching, and glad that you enjoyed it!
Thank you! Your comment has made my day. :)
Me too!! Great descriptive term - CoCovid completist.
@@Ompe8 I'm aiming for "CoCoVid completist" status myself! :)
"Dutch protestants, they don't really trust change or the French." That absolutely killed me. Having lived in Holland, hmm, that does sound pretty accurate.
I know, made me laugh when she said that!
Thank you very much I did find it very interesting. Thank you all for the CoCoVid.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Rabbit hole! I had fallen down it before I even considered that it could be so very deep! The richness of deeply considered history is a delight! Thank you so much.
Glad you enjoyed it. I totally agree! I fell down this rabbit hole a few years ago and it quickly became an obsession!
When I started sewing, and buying fabrics, in the mid 80's, in Lisbon, also when most fabrics sold here were made in Portugal, "chintz" was a home decor fabric, a tightly woven and shiny cotton. like you say, for the Dutch, it was the fabric texture and not really the pattern, that told that fabric was chintz. there was also plain colour chintz available. only recently, I realised that in English, it meant the pattern.
thank you for this video, I learned a lot!
Yes, a lot of us (around the world) encountered something called "chintz" during our own lifetimes. As Myrthe mentions in passing in the video, it's a word that has travelled, not strictly attached to the original textile. Certainly for the British, it was floral cottons that were madly popular, so when they managed to completely divert public demand and access to them away from Indian products to British domestic-made products, they used the word "chintz" in a marketing sense and that was the first big "leap" of the word to a substantively different product. But since what the public wanted was the appearance, not the production methods, that totally succeeded. And in America, it continued in the form of "calico" right through the 19th century to the present day. It's ironic that calico, as a pattern or print, is even further away from any Indian origins than the British chintzes of the late 18th century, yet the word "calico" applied to such fabrics is a corruption of another Indian word. ;)
@@TimesmithDressHistory I might add that nowadays, when most fabrics available in Portugal are sadly imported, that it became a fabric very hard to find. I say "sadly" because the quality lowered and the prices increased.
@@misatopt Indeed that has happened in so many places. :(
I never knew chitz was such a luxury item or where it originated ! Here in the USA in the modern context usually has a negative association. We even have a term chintzy which means old fashioned and tacky. Thanks to your information though, I now have a new appreciation for Indian fabrics !
Thanks for sharing!
Thank you for this video! I love history, fashion, and costume, and this was all three!
Glad you enjoyed it!
Thanks! We, too, love how so much comes together in the story of chintz!
This is one of the most interesting CoCoVid videos I've seen so far. SO MUCH context and information! Thank you for sharing your knowlegde!
Thank you, I'm very glad you liked it!
Thanks so much - that's a huge compliment! So much great stuff on CoCoVid!
Amazing! So much data and pictures! Thank you both so much
Our pleasure!
Well, if I’m not blown away! But I am, and in such sure, competent hands. You ladies are a wonder. Thank you for this deep viewing of textile so lovingly and astutely contextualized. My love of Rembrandt, and his attention to fabrics, and my growing skills as an embroiderer, drew me here. Chance has nothing to do with it! Pure and delightful karma. Bless both your work.💐
Thank you so much!
@@TimesmithDressHistory , with great pleasure.💐
Wonderful discussion--thanks to both of you! (Including the last one!) Thanks also for all the photos and the links.
You're welcome, glad you enjoyed it!
Thanks! We had a lot of fun putting this together, talking about exhibitions we've visited. You'll find a lot more in the books in the list in the description, too.
This is my absolute FAVORITE CoCovid video thus far. So interesting and informative...plus, you are both so knowledgeable and eloquent! What an incredible tale you weave 😉 of material arts culture through a specifically produced textile!
Thank you! Very glad you liked it.
Wow, thank you!
Zo gaaf.. ..ben gelijk gaan kijken op de site van dutchfabrics. Thank you for this cocovid contribution.
Ze hebben hele mooie stoffen! :)
Thanks for watching! I'm glad you enjoyed it.
Thank you for this lovely lecture. My family is from India and I have always been interested in Indian textiles. I really appreciated how much you discussed the expertise of the Indian textile manufacturers when they made chintz. I also really enjoyed learning about how important chintz is in Dutch culture. This lecture was wonderfully researched and presented. Thank you.
Hi Sushila, thank you for watching and for commenting. Highlighting the care and skill of the Indian artisans was our main concern here - I hope more people go explore more about this!
How wonderful - with incredibly wide contextual detail. So many aspects of the production, marketing, cultural use/interpretation/adoption and 'aesthetics' of this kind of fabric which has enchanted me for most of my life. This is my favourite CoCovid presentation so far and they have all been great !!
Oh, wow, I'm glad you enjoyed it! And yes, I loved CoCoVid, too!
Shared this video with my mom and she was inspired to put together a quilt project!
That sounds awesome! There are many beautiful chintz quilts, it works really well for that!
Atelier Nostalgia and hopefully someday we'll get to go to Amsterdam and visit Den Haan & Wagenmakers.
Oh, my! Can she make me one, too??? (Just kidding! It's going to be soooo beautiful.)
This was brilliant, thank you so much for taking the time to do this
You're very welcome! Thank you for watching!
What a truly excellent conversation! Thank you so much for this deep dive. I loved that you included the geopolitical context of the fabric as well as the disambiguation of the term and (of course) where to find good reproductions and modern interpretations of extant designs. This is the sort of content I think we need more of as we work to be a more conscious costuming community. Exceptionally well done!
Oh, wow, thanks so much! I feel the same and am so excited to see more scholars and academics get on board TH-cam.
Two that you will want to check out: Dressing History (th-cam.com/channels/UpeCQthjgPKf-J695mldFw.html) and, if you're interested in earlier time periods and proper experimental archeology and crafts: Sally Pointer (th-cam.com/users/sallyinwales). Enjoy!
Timesmith Dressmaking thank you! Checking them out now!
This just showed up in my feed and it is absolutely fascinating! I really am glad to know how chintz was produced, with such a complicated dye process!
Glad you enjoyed it!
This was really interesting! I really appreciated how much nuance you both brought to this conversation. As a Dutch person who is only just starting to learn about dress history this has been incredibly fascinating, and it's fun to hear so much about my own country for a change. I'll definitely look into the other sources you have provided!
Glad you liked it! The books are really nice, Pronck en Prael is a good one to start out with as it has a good mix of all the pretty pictures and a load of information about the influence of Chintz on Dutch life :).
Our pleasure!
this is a so useful video!! when i first started watching it i knew NOTHING about Chintz and now i have alot o usful and relevant information! Thank you for posting and beeng a part of CocoVid so that i could learn something new!
Thank you for watching!
It was honestly a pleasure ^^
Wonderful! CoCoVid is amazing and we are so happy we could be a part of it.
This was so eye opening. Thank you for taking the time to put this together and share it to us all in the E-world. Happy CocoVid!
I'm so glad you enjoyed it. Isn't CoCoVid great?
@@TimesmithDressHistory It is! I'm here 3 months later and can still learn about chintz. I had no idea what it was before. I only knew it was a fabric.
So, thanks from me too, to the both of you.
This was so super interesting! Great talk 👍👍
Thanks for watching! Glad you enjoyed it.
What a great exploration of this fabric! I have to admit some of these prints freak me out a little, like an acid trip. But I still love them because it is such a great reminder that history is not black & white or just sepia toned like many people imagine!
Yes, that's what strikes me, studying this - just how much colour people were surrounded with.
Extremely interesting, and so well presented. Learned so much. Thank you both.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Thank you!
I do miss all the creators' videos from past years at Costume College, seeing all the beautiful costumes was such a treat. But this year has been so special, in that I'm getting to see the educational side. Thank you!
100% agree! We're also seeing much more content from teachers outside the US. The live panels have included a much more diverse range of voices and experiences. I have really enjoyed seeing this.
Thank you for this fascinating lecture. I was directed here by a friend who works with Indian textiles, and am very glad I came to hear the world-history-spanning context of this work.
As an appreciator of the philosophy of the Arts & Crafts movement, which informs my I’m glad I stayed for the end-of-credits sequence.)
Wonderful! Thanks for staying through to our "after credits" musings.... everything is indeed connected! :)
*which informs my overall philosophy,
Now inspired to make a chintz garment! Thank you for a wonderful lecture!
Thanks! Yes, make the thing!
Thank you. I didn't know that I needed to know so much about chintz, but it was fascinating.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Thanks! Always happy to share the love (/obsession) of this fabric!
This was one of the Cocovid videos I was most looking forward to. This was fantastically informative. But I have so many questions!!! Myrthe mentioned colors for mourning a few times, like how they wouldn't wear red in mourning clothes, or how brown would have been for mourning. Would an all-blue print or a brown-ground print be worn only for mourning or would those colors/prints be worn generally? Also, I've heard that purple colors in extant garments have often faded to brown. Do we know what might have been more popular, brown-ground or purple ground prints? And would either of you know if North American tastes were more closely linked to English styles or Dutch styles (I'm specfically wondering how popular colored-ground prints were in the colonies)? Thank you for doing this video!
Hi Dixie, glad you enjoyed it! You've raised great questions - which open up huge avenues of further discussion. I'm going to make an attempt to outline briefly where the investigations need to go, if you're to find answers.
As ever, it's all very much specific to time, place, and "person" (which encompasses individual and community characteristics ranging from racial/ethnic background, social standing, education, income, connections, personal circumstances). For the sake of trying to pinpoint things, I'm assuming you're talking AWI/RevWar era in the British colonies - please correct me if I'm wrong!
So the key thing here is that these parts of N. America were British controlled. What people could buy (legally) from Europe came from Britain OR was controlled by Britain.
Chintz as we talked about in the video was an Indian-made textile made for the Dutch market, for Dutch tastes.
In Britain at this time, INDIAN-made textiles were still restricted (people like to say 'banned' but it's more nuanced than that). What came into American ports were the goods that the British decided should go there, for a variety of concerns, protection/promotion of British financial and industrial interests being paramount. So what the British colonies got in terms of printed cottons were largely those made in Britain, for export to the colonies.
These were not chintzes as per the Indian process or as the Dutch would have understood this. As Myrthe and I talk about in the video, British floral printed textiles were printed -- whether block or, (as I understand it) increasingly by the 1770s, copper-plate -- which involved more mechanisation and far less craftsmanship, resulting in much larger production, much faster, than Indian-made chintzes. Faster + more of it + cheaper = higher profits, all of it going to the British economy.
As to taste - as we talked about in the video, the British had significantly different tastes than the Dutch did. Myrthe describes the symbolism of colours that made the Dutch request dark grounds from India. The British didn't have that cultural demand for dark colours. And making textiles like that -- much more costly -- would have seriously impacted a still-developing domestic production (protected from outside competition by law but needing to make sizeable profits).
For whatever reason, the evidence shows that fashionable wear in Britain favoured white/pale grounds. So that's what you got in British colonies, where your access to cotton was controlled by British regulation, tax and industry. And that's what you see represented at historic sites such as Colonial Williamsburg, in the clothing -- but note there are exceptions that provoke further discussion! (The wealthy travelling to Europe and having access to things ordinary people didn't... and the whole dichotomy between use of floral prints in home decor vs. clothing, for example.)
The added complication was that the British "stole" the word chintz to describe their inferior domestic product, quite deliberately trading on the reputation of the Indian textiles to market their own goods.
As for the Dutch influence in North America - generally speaking, that's basically limited to time and place - New Amsterdam. Whether Dutch colonists in that area in the 17th century were wearing Indian-made chintzes is an area of study I've not delved into. I'm sure there are dress and textile historians with a particular interest in early New York history who could help with that.
That very specific time/location limit to the Dutch foothold in N. America does help explain, I think, the fascination that Anglo/American reenactors have to do with "Dutch" chintz - it's so exotic compared to British goods! :)
I would love to host another video talking about floral cottons in N. America, but even that would need to be divided up by colony. I am aware of 18th century scholars/reenactors/historical tailors in N. America also interested in this. Perhaps we can persuade them to do a video presentation on this! (I'm looking at you, @nealhursttailor ...!)
P.S. Book sources for what printed cotton fashions were being *worn* in Britain - John Styles ' Threads of Feeling' and Barbara Johnson's Album of Fashions and Fabrics (published by the V&A). Miss Johnson had many gowns of floral printed cottons! It's fun to look at the changes in colours and designs as the century progressed (and her choices from childhood through adulthood and into her later years in the early 19th century).
@@TimesmithDressHistory holy moly what a wealth of information! Thank you so much for this detailed response. Yes, I was specifically looking for options for 1780s and was drawn to the heritage Dutch prints for reasons mentioned in the video (quilting cottons are not the same quality as what would have been used then, some of the colonial Williamsburg prints were from furniture not clothing, etc.). It's hard to find a suitable modern cotton print+fabric. Even the block prints currently made in India, while beautiful, are probably too lightweight compared to fabrics used in the 1700s (although many might work for Regency). I will continue my hunt for a good cotton print! Thank you again!
@@DixieDIY For British-style reproduction cottons, look to Colonial Williamsburg and Burnley & Trowbridge - links to both are in the video description. Yes, CW repros are often based on home decor and often marketed towards modern fabric market, not reenactors. But the descriptions usually refer to which extant pieces the repros are based on, whether textile fragments or a complete object, whether gown or bed hanging. If in doubt and if you've got a little wriggle room for how authentic you need it to be, my rule of thumb is to go for the white/ivory grounds. The motifs themselves are not going to be far off for clothing, even if the extant was furnishings.
And don't forget that handful of 18th century prints that Ikea did - American Duchess have got a great blog post about which ones are in fact 18th century accurate and how to calculate yardage from the various bedding sizes:
blog.americanduchess.com/2019/05/ikea-costuming-101-making-historical.html
There is no real shortcut to training your eye, as well. I love perusing Colonial Williamsburg's online collection with so many examples. Yes, there's a lot of home decor, but there are a lot of complete garments too!
Happy sewing!
Thank you! I think Timesmith Dressmaking already covered the North American perspective pretty well. About the mourning: it indeed depends pretty strongly on the region, some towns had other/more strict 'rules' than others. Hindeloopen specifically had a lot of stages for mourning, starting with black wool, then brown ground with no color, dark blue, light blue. Typically speaking, a print without any red would be likely to be for mourning, in the Netherlands. Possibly the more 'empty' blue on white (which you see as well in English cottons) would have been worn out of mourning as well, though I think I've seen these more in England. With the brown and purple, I believe that the genuine Indian prints would not have faded that much (it was mostly the yellow that faded, not the blue or red so much). But I've seen dark brown grounds only in a mourning context (so with very little other color, I can't directly think of any with a brown ground and more than white), and purple in the 18th century definitely exists in an out-of-mourning context. Neither are very common though, for brown I only know some heavy mourning examples, and there's only a couple of purple ground existent I know of. I'd say they are about equally common in existing pieces.
I have the exact same blouse that Myrthe is wearing. :)
Isn't it pretty? Where does it come from? :)
@@TimesmithDressHistory I bought it a couple of years ago from H & M.
This was absolutely fascinating, I learned so much! Thank you!
Thank you so much! I'm glad you found it interesting.
This talk was absolutely fantastic! Thank you for taking the time to put this together!!
You are so welcome!
A wonderful discussion especially because of the Dutch focus. Also fascinating to have outlined is the process whereby the desire to monopolise a trade sector by a trading company eventually led to the development of colonial structures at the national level.
That was one amazing talk! I finally got around to it and did save it for further research. I didn't even know the name of that fabric, but once I saw the pattern, I thought "of course I know that", but I didn't know anything about it :) Thank you for presenting it here!
Thank you! Glad you enjoyed it! :)
This was absolutely wonderful! Thank you so much!!
You've most welcome!
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE DO a video on how to make chintz fabric! Or just add resources to how to do it in the description. I would be an absolute dream of mine to recreate such a historical fabric in a historically accurate waty!
I have a love of all historical processes of doing things. Craftsmanship had pretty much died in the modern age.
I love that you love it! As mentioned in the video - Renuka Reddy is the only person we know of, making chintz the historical way. Her details are in the video description.
Fantastic contribution! I LOVE chintz, and was so excited to get some deeper/more broadspread history.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Thanks!
This has been a really interesting talk and I learned far more than just about chintz. I am sure I will be referring to this video in the future as it holds so much information about a subject I'd not even thought about before but can see that I need to know more.
So glad you found it interesting and helpful!
Very interesting. I had no idea about the rich history of chintz.
There is a lot of backstory to it! :)
Glad you enjoyed it!
Such a complicated process! Thank you so much for explaining in such loving detail!
Definitely! You're very welcome.
Glad it was helpful!
This was just an excellent overview with so much detail about a complex fabric...loved all the global background you dived into!
Thank you! There is so much to say about this fabric, I'm glad you enjoyed it!
Thanks! It's a huge topic!
Thank you so much for this talk. It was amazingly informative!
Thank you! :)
Glad it was helpful!
I am loving the details of this discussion!
Glad you enjoyed it!
Great video! I live in the Netherlands, but I'm not Dutch, and I really appreciate all the cultural context shown here.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Loved it . Well done Myrthe . Super trots op jou en onze "Sits"
Dankjewel!
I know so much about chintz now. It took me ages to figure out how to use the codes though! I had to download all of these random apps to my dinosaur phone, but I made it work. Thank you so much for the video lovely ladies! May your chintz never fray.
Thank you! I'm glad you figured out the Badge wallet app. :)
I recently started getting into historic costuming and this has been one of the most interesting videos I have seen!
Thank you! Glad you enjoyed it.
Fascinating discussion. So very interesting. Thank you!
Thanks, Nicole, glad you enjoyed it!
Fascinating! While I am not an historical costumer, I do love history, especially textile history. This discussion was incredibly informative. Thank you both so very much.
Our pleasure!
Thank you both for this absolutely fantastic video! Covered a really wide expanse of not just the textile, but all of the important threads (...heh) connecting to the topics surrounding it.
I was lucky enough to see an exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA a few years ago that had some gorgeous chintz garments - really made me appreciate just how much work the hand-painting process would have been.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Chintz fabric remained popular in Charleston SC and the surrounding areas much longer than other parts of the United States, primarily because of quilting. The Charleston Museum did two quilt exhibits in 2017, and many of them featured chintz appliques. I believe parts of the exhibit can still be accessed on their website.
Yes, the appeal of floral printed cotton remains as strong as ever!
@@TimesmithDressHistory if I could find a modern equivalent, I'd probably wear it all the time! Floral will never go out of style! :)
@@kyliecunningham8057 What sort of modern equivalent are you looking for? Colours? Designs? Fibre content? There are a ton of options these days!
@@TimesmithDressHistory the designs! I just can't find one with the same level of detail that isn't terribly obviously modern. If you know of one, please let me know!!! I love how deceptively simple the historic chintz was, all the layers of color and detail.
@@kyliecunningham8057 We gave several recommendations in the discussion and in the description - my favourite is dutchfabric.nl. Dutch Heritage also does good prints (though the textile itself is a quilting cotton) and is probably easier to find in stores in the USA.
Chintz was very big in the 1970's as I remember well.
The 1970's definitely saw a revival of older styles, techniques and patterns :)
Chintz is one of those things that continually goes in and out of fashion. 😍
iwas looking forward to this one, thank you.
I hope you enjoy it.
Fascinating. Love the history and, now, I have lots of research to do. Thank you very much.
Glad you enjoyed it!
You're very welcome!
This was interesting and a great glimpse into it. I'm not a huge floral fan but the history was really interesting.
Thanks for watching! Glad you enjoyed it.
This was an amazing talk to listen to. Thank you. Always wanted to know a little more about Chintz. Absolutely lovely.
Thanks - we are both big fans!
Thank you! :)
This was very interesting. Thank you.
You're most welcome! I'm glad you enjoyed it!
This is so fascinating. I’m German and in Germany chintz is associated with the glaze it had (perhaps just the residue from the resist dyes?) and not at all with flowery patterns.
Yes, we talk a bit about that in the video! Originally, "chintz" referred to textiles made with the process used by these Indian artesans. The actual patterns varied a great deal according to the market the textile was destined for. The Dutch wanted a particular aesthetic or style, the British wanted something else, Indonesia and Malaysia wanted something else - all different. I am not familiar with German tastes and what they were importing from India made with this technique - I'd love to know more about that! Are there any extant examples in German museums you can point us to? Thanks so much!
Thank you!!! Excellent!!!
Glad you enjoyed it!
Loved this discussion! So fascinating! I was forced to stop watching 3/4 of the way through and made myself remember the time stamp so that I could come back and finish! Plus, cleanly and carefully edited. Very well done! I’ve now ordered some books on chintz and the historical motifs and I NEED to make petticoats. What do think about 50’s chintz shirtwaist dresses.....oh I’m in trouble...
A 50's chintz shirtwaist dress sounds awesome! I'm glad you liked it.
Thanks for the compliment! I'm still very much a beginner with the video editing and just strive to do some justice to wonderful content such as this from Myrthe. :) You'll love the books! Happy sewing!
Wonderful talk, thank you both for sharing this! I may have come to the comments too late to get an answer, but I will ask anyway. I am curious about the calendared glaze on the chintz. Does this mean that you couldn't wash the fabric? Would the calendaring wash out? I know that moiré silks should not be washed, and they are also calendared. Is it a different process? Thanks for any insight!
Hi, thanks for coming by! Great question! A full discussion of that was one of the many (!) things we didn't have to go into in this video, but you're right - the "glaze" effect from calendaring is the result of heat and pressure, so it does indeed wash out if saturated in water. Laundry practices in the 18th century were very different from what we are accustomed to today (although no less careful). Gowns, indeed most outer garments, were cleaned in ways that did not involve water, so losing the calendared glaze was not generally a problem.
Myrthe and I wonder about all the children's clothing we see surviving today! I don't know much about this - perhaps Myrthe does?
@@TimesmithDressHistory Thanks for answering! I will mentally file chintz garments into the "cleaned but never washed" category. This perhaps is also a reason they were less often worn by working classes, apart from the price of the fabric? And maybe 18th century babies were miraculously clean and didn't spit up on their clothes...
@@emmamarentette It probably wasn't washed much, as Rebecca mentioned, but there are records of 'glazing' shops. So these shops specifically existed to re-glaze fabric that had been washed, indicating that washing did actually happen. It's good to put it into the 18th century perspective where it wasn't 'normal' to regularly wash gowns, but people did value keeping things clean. I think that typically, existent baby's garments have less glaze left than jackets or gowns (just trying to remember back now), so these might actually have been washed. The color would stay very well, it's just the glazing that goes, and you might have cared less about that for baby's garments than for your fancy gown.
@@ateliernostalgia4088 From memory (and a google search confirms), the "kraplap" from Spakenburg as you showed, is starched and pressed to an inch of its life. I remember reading Dutch books on traditional dress as a kid in which this was described in detail. This is of course different than a full garment, but for those who want to go into this particular rabbit hole, such books and the ladies from Spakenburg may be a good place to start. And by the way, I am not a costumer, but I absolutely loved this video. Makes me wonder if my greatgreatgrandparents also wore these amazing prints.
@@annaapple7452 Definitely! I've worn them, and they feel more like plastic sheets than like fabric ;). The starch also gives a glazed appearance, but the calandering is slightly different as it doesn't need to involve any starch. It glazes the fabric while not necessarily making it a lot stiffer.
Thank you for this!
You're very welcome! Glad you enjoyed it.
I like to use chintz designs on my batik dyed eggs.
That's a great idea!
thanks so much for this great presentation; it was fascinating to learn about the evolution of this textile - I've always loved 'contemporary' ('60s and '70s) Indian block-printed cottons, now I can see where they fit in to history! p.s. the closed captioning is unfortunately very inaccurate (don't know if this is something that can be edited?)
Thank you! As far as I know, Rebecca is working on the captions :)
Hi, Pat. Thank you so much for watching. I'm glad you found it interesting. Yes, indeed, I am working on subtitles. TH-cam provides automatically-generated (computer) subtitles but they are obviously poor quality. TH-cam has also had a volunteer-based community captioning service (which I understand has been a mixed bag, in terms of quality, spam and fraud) but has just announced they are discontinuing that.
There are a number of paid services - some, like Amara, are a monthly subscription service. Others, like Rev.com, are pay-as-you-go. I've trialled Rev.com on several of my shorter videos and am very impressed. However, the cost of using Rev.com for the longer videos (like this Chintz one) are way beyond my current budget.
Meanwhile, someone in the costuming community has volunteered to provide subtitles for the two 1+ hour long CoCoVid videos but she reports the TH-cam platform does not make it easy on her end. She's plugging away at it, though!
Hopefully we'll have good subtitles on this video soon! Meanwhile I am researching to find a reliable, reasonably-priced option for all videos going forward. It's one reason I decided to launch a Patreon, to help fund the cost of providing professional subtitles for the channel going forward, as I firmly believe it's a vital aspect of online education yet it will be a significant ongoing expense.
@@TimesmithDressHistory Rebecca, thanks so much for your reply, and kudos to the volunteer who is working through the videos. It was a great presentation, and I just didn't want poor captioning to reflect badly on all your hard work - I'm sure it's doubly difficult when there are a lot of specific/technical terms! I'm working slowly through the Cocovid playlist and am grateful to everyone who contributed, Pat
@@patr3199 Thank you so much! I feel very strongly about accessibility for those who rely on subtitles to any degree, and I hate it when they are bad! Sorting out all the subtitles on videos already on my channel AND ensuring good subtitles on all future videos is a top priority for me.
I'm so sorry you're having these technical difficulties! There is no comment area on your current live attempt, and there is an audio loop back. I will definitely continue to try to tune in. Best! ❤
Thank you Jamie! I've just pinned an update on the video. We'll sort something out and let the CosTube know so they can post an update on their Instragram for you all.
Thank you!
You're welcome!
I wouldn't be surprised if the dyeing techniques were a craft secret, only passed on to one family generation to another
Possibly? it would be great to get more information from the India side of things.
@@TimesmithDressHistory Definitely! I suspect there might be trade secrets in the details, though the general procedure was practiced through-out India and Sri Lanka, so at least some of the techniques were more known I think.
@@ateliernostalgia4088 Yes, I'm thinking it's like guilds ("liveried companies" and "corporations" in England) had trade secrets, whether it was in silk weaving or stays pattern drafting. And of course the practice of trades were often very much family-based, with sons (and daughters!) apprenticed to a parent who had mastered the craft.
@@TimesmithDressHistory If you guys find and resources on how chintz was actually made, I would REALLY love to see a video on that! Or atleast have the resources added to the description box of this video. It is something I would be really interested in recreating. Just as many love recreating extant garments. I am really into recreating extant processes of making fabrics and garments! From creating the thread to weaving the garments, and the other processes like the tente hooks and the other process that tightens up the weave (can't remember the name of it for the life of me, but it before industrial means, women would stomp on the garment in a bucket with stale urine and water, then the first industrial part of making fabric was this part and a water powered "machine" would pretty much just beat the garment over and over with "hammers" in a bath of stale urine and water, this shrunk the weave (so you could no longer see through it) and fluffed up the fabric. i believe they use the same sort of machine nowadays, except now they use amonia instead of stale urine lol), bleached the fabric and prepared it for the tente hooks. And dying the fabrics! So many wonderful historic processes to learn about and recreate!
@@bethanyday3471 India is the place to go! Why don't you reach out to Renuka Reddy's studio as linked in the description and see if perhaps an internship or apprenticeship with her is possible? That would be so cool.
lovely video!! so loved watching it
Thank you!
Glad you enjoyed it!
Is Ankara fabric related to Chintz? Could it be used as a good substitute?
It's related in some way, yes. It is inspired by the traditionally Indonesian process of batik, which is basically that all colors are dyed in the 'resist' way. So by applying wax to those areas you don't want dyed (whereas in chintz, only blue was dyed this way). Ankara fabric is imitation batik (roller printed), mostly Dutch produced (and originated in the mid 19th century), originally for the Indonesian market, but then found a home in Africa where it became popular instead. Most of the visual imagery of the current fabric is related to Africa. So while it is inspired by Asian techniques similar to those of chintz, the prints and aesthetics are typically quite different.
@@ateliernostalgia4088 Thank you. This was an informative vlog and your love of the subject really comes through. Stay safe and well.
@@ateliernostalgia4088 & @minjenra thank you! As Indonesian, of course I was wondering about batik! It's fascinating to know about Ankara fabric & African version :)
Glad you enjoyed it. It was so hard to not cover more in the time we had. It truly is the tip of the iceberg.
love this 😍😍😍
Thanks!
Excelente tutorial👍
Glad you found it helpful!
Another element of what is considered "historically accurate" in costuming circles at any given time is that it can lead to everyone looking the same, to an event being filled with versions of the same 4 Williamsburg prints. It gets restrictive IMO
How much did a bolt of chintz eventually cost way back then per metre
That's a good question! I'd have to check if any of my sources write anything on that, I'll get back to you on that. In any case, it would have differed depending on the quality of the cloth, there were differences in that even then :)
That would be a really cool thing to find out. I know there would be a lot of variables that make it hard to translate into today's money. That kind of question came up on Cathy Hay's lecture on the Worth gown yesterday - trying to equate cost of something "back then" to a monetary equivalent is kind of apples and oranges, but as a starting point if we can find a primary source with a price here in the UK, we could run it through this historical converter and see what it says! www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency-converter/ :)
Barbara Johnson's Album of 18th C fabric swatches at V&A includes printed cottons, many with notes on prices and yardage for this or that gown. The museum has several photos online, but the handwriting in old ink is hard to read from the image - would be so cool to see it in person some day!
@@davyd28 Yes, I love that resource! Unfortunately, none of the floral fabrics appear to be Chintz as in Indian-made, mordant/resist dyes/painted, etc. As touched on in the video (and discussed in much more detail in my response to DixieDIY's comment here), the most readily available printed cotton goods available in Britain in this period were domestic, inferior to Indian's product, and yet often called "chintz" as a marketing strategy.
@@TimesmithDressHistory Very true. Still, the person who has asked the question may find it useful to get an idea of the price range for various fabrics at the time. Thank you for the presentation, I look forward to hearing more in the future..
Slavery was just as horrid for slaves on a cotton plantation, but don’t be duped, the harvesting of sugarcane was just as rough on the slaves. Sugarcane is so sharp, without slaves Queen Victoria’s wedding cake could not have been made readily of sugar without those sugar plantations.
Oh, we definitely did not want to imply that sugar plantations were in any way better than the cotton ones! They just have less direct link to the story of chintz, but that obviously doesn't say anything about how horrible they were.
It was indeed. More and more videos are coming out on TH-cam on those issues. 👍
She certainly said a lot but never really described Chintz opposed to other fabrics, just the printing schemes. She didn't talk about the types of resins used, the high polishing technique used that gives Chintz its distinctive hand, nor the weave of the fabric.
The title of this blog is misleading.
I am sorry if this wasn't the in-depth *technical* textiles talk you expected. The aspects of dyes, waxes, paints and glazing methodology were all mentioned but unfortunately in a 1-hour (+) talk directed to a general audience, we were never going to be able to dive deep into any one area. There are lists of further resources in the video description which give leads for further research on specific areas. We hope we have whet the appetites of all our viewers to go explore further any aspects that particularly interest them.
I have a request, I was wondering if it would be possible to have captions that are not autogenerated? I understand its a lot of work, but it would help a lot in making the video accessible for me and for other people!
Hi, thanks for the suggestion. I'm brand new to video editing. Could you explain what you mean or what you'd like to see? I did not use any captioning options here -- all the labels you see on the photos are actually type-written right into the image files. I'd love to do better and welcome any pointers as to the editing function I should learn to use. (My editing software is Adobe Premiere Pro 2020.)
Just thinking a bit further - since I didn't put captions in, is this something TH-cam is doing for you? (I have no idea how this works!)
We did want to look into it, but ran out of time unfortunately. So far the auto generation seems okay, it just translates 'chintz' to 'chance', but we can look into the possibility of adding proper captions at some point!
@@ateliernostalgia4088 I'm glad you know something about this! I will look into it and find ways to do better in future. I dare not try fixing it on this particular video because it's so long with so many photos. The Upload Gods were pretty hostile, as it was!
P.S. I just figured out that by captions, we're talking about sub-titles. D'oh!
If there's a way to get into the sub-titles generated by TH-cam and manually edit them, that would be the way to go (no need to further edit and attempt to re-upload).
@@TimesmithDressHistory Yes! I'll check if I can find out a bit more on it!
@@ateliernostalgia4088 I would absolutely be willing to help too! I just did a quick google and it seems like Amara might be a good option and TH-cam has this page on adding your own subtitles: support.google.com/youtube/answer/2734796?hl=en Sadly the auto generated captions aren't really adequate if you're using them to compehrend the spoken words because they're often out of time and the words don't match exactly. (Though that is my own personal experience, it may be different for other people!)
I really enjoyed this but there was an uncomfortable moment where she seemed to do her best to put off blame for slavery. I know I’m late to this and I could be misunderstanding.
I appreciate your honesty. I think you were misunderstanding but you were not completely wrong. The fact is, we filmed this in the summer of 2020. We were uncomfortable about making other people uncomfortable. We are a lot better at that now. 😊
Thank you for such a fabulous research .
Very interesting video! I enjoyed watching it! 😊 Btw in 18th century descriptions of wanted criminals from Germany, you can find a lot of different chintz being combined.