The people who dress up in public
There is a group of people who meet in the park across the road from our house every couple of months. The first time we saw them gather, we thought it was for a wedding. Early in the morning, small marquees were erected, then they put up a kind of flower-and-foliage covered arch and two large, carved chairs, like thrones.
But as the morning continued, the event looked less like a wedding: people began to arrive wearing linen shifts tied loosely at the waste, others were dressed in flowing gowns embroidered at the neck, while some of the men wore colourful stockings and fitted jackets, and carried swords at their sides.
Later in the day, while I was outside dead-heading the roses, their voices carried across to me from the park. I couldn’t catch all of it but “Huzzah!” occurred at irregular intervals.
Years ago, just before I moved home from New York, my husband and I took his two oldest girls to a medieval fair at The Cloisters. The girls were tweens at the time and joyfully dressed up in their own interpretations of “Middle Ages”. Among that crowd, my husband and I were definitely among the minority in our jeans.
And every September in the beautiful town of Bath in the UK, hundreds of people dress up in Regency costume for the Jane Austen Festival.
But they don’t just dress up at the Jane Austen Centre, where costume makes sense, or even just outside the locations of the festival events, where costume is suggested as “welcomed but not required” on the program.
When our family was in Bath last month, we also met people dressed in full- or part-historical costume while sharing beers at the pub, or shopping for homewares and books, or waiting for take-out at the local Indian restaurant, and even buying toilet-paper at Waitrose.
The children invented a game called “Regency Bingo” that involved competitively spotting the costume-wearers. I became a little bit obsessed with finding them, much to my family’s amusement.
But the reason I was quite so obsessed was because I couldn’t answer the question for myself of, why? Surely you can’t truly suspend your reality: surely it doesn’t feel like time-travel when you’re surrounded by cars, shops, iPhones and onlookers. So, why?
I started to google “historical dressing” in search of answers, which inevitably led me to “cos-play,” and onwards to something called “history bounding,” which I discovered meant dressing with reference to, or elements of, historical periods, but not necessarily dressing in full costume (I think that’s what it means? Anybody?)
And as it turns out, “historical costumers” are all over the world. I learned about UK-based Zack Pinsent, who make his own Regency era clothes and wears them every day, everywhere. And US-based Cheyney McKnight (Not Your Momma’s History), who dresses in historical clothing as a form of performance art, through which she opens up conversations around America’s slavery history. Also in the US, husband and wife couple Sarah and Gabriel Chrisman live (almost) entirely in the Victorian era (except that they also maintain a website and YouTube channel about their lives).
I even came across a handy article on costuming etiquette in case anybody else wants to try dressing up, by New Zealand-based “costumer” and textile historian Leimomi Oakes.
If you are a historical costumer, or if you know somebody who is, I’d love to know how it makes you feel. I want to know why you do it, and how it brings joy to your life.
On our last evening in Bath, we walked past a bookshop that was hosting an event, and must have seen 30 or more Regency-era guests lining up on the stairs, waiting to go in. And, ping!, just like that, there went a little light-bulb inside my head...
Community!
Not long ago, Sara Tasker posted a brief thread on her Substack Entre Nous, in which she said the two biggest influences on her life (chronic illness and childhood trauma) had also been key, common factors that tied her to the online community she had built and nurtured.
And as I looked at all those long dresses, feathers, stockings and top-hats lining the stairs of the bookshop in Bath, I thought that maybe “community” was part of the answer here, too. Because when you’re walking alone or in pairs through along a busy street or in the pub or buying toilet-paper at Waitrose, your costume stands out and you are possibly the subject of shy smiles, pointing fingers, and requests for selfies. But when you are climbing the stairs of a bookshop among 30 other people who are dressed the same as you and clearly share at least some of your important interests, you belong.
You have found your people. You’re part of a like-minded community, and that’s always going to be something special.
