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About Us

A little bit about us…

Miss Ramsay in a Red Dress circa 1760-65 by Allan Ramsay 1713-1784

Custom Made Historical Costumes.

We are research mad at this company; books, paintings, garments and letters all get scoured to glean a bit more of an understanding of the costumes that we see in the museums and on the internet. And there are some wonderful images out there. From beautifully contained corsets to rough linen shifts, the garments that have survived are some of the most exciting items anybody could ever get to study. This company grew from that original desire to study and replicate some of these garments – as accurately as we could. The more research we got into, and the bigger the treasure hunt got, so the more the possibility began to grow that there might be others out there like ourselves, others that want the historical element as well as the beauty of some of these garments.

You can click on any of these following links that will lead you to some of the stuff we do!

Online Shop
Costume Research
– Bespoke Garments

We have an unwritten rule with our business (well…it’s kind of written now!) but that is, that we won’t work on an item unless we’ve properly handled an original, looked at techniques and have studied them in depth. This is not us being fastidious – there is no way to catch the essence of an item by merely copying a general shape. We want to make it clear from the start that research is the base upon which all the gowns and garments on this site are started from and that we are not blending historical with fantasy but, as much as we can, are keeping to the true originals.

This is not always easy – fabrics are not always available and unless there is a massive desire to pay thousands for each garment; the hand sewing methods are not always possible.
But, we have studied their techniques…

Where there is a way of using a sewing machine to do the same job then we will gladly use it. There is much with some garments that just cannot be done on a sewing machine. For more questions please feel free to email us, we’ll happily explain what we mean and can even talk you through the development of your garment. We have put a lot of effort in to get behind the construction idea of a garment – and in that lies the secret to getting it as similar as possible to the original.

sewing

For example, the eighteenth century pair of stays would have been originally sewn by hand by the stay-makers of the day. So we decided to start our research into eighteenth century stays by replicating a completely hand sewn pair. Let me assure you that we learnt a few things along the way. Like it takes over 300 hours of work to hand sew a pair of fully boned stays. Or that cane isn’t as strong as whalebone to be pushed into the tightly pre-sewn channels. That plastic won’t steam. That cane will. That pre-sewn channels, when not tight enough, create a ridge effect – like a ploughed field. O, we were so excited when we found a way to blend all these lessons learnt and apply it to the sewing machine. The Georgian stays on this site are made using Georgian techniques – not the Victorian methods that most modern corsets are made from. It was a real delight to find that there was a way to sew the boning channels that created a flatter topside and that were still tight and snug, and because it’s cane, we could finish it all off by shaping it with steam and heat. (see Norah Waugh – Corset and Crinolines, p 41).

It took six samples to get it right! But we are incredibly happy with the result.
Our hope is that when you receive your garment, you too can feel the time, concentration and love that has gone into each of these garments.