The Fitted Wrapped Apron Dress--Conclusions

With a belt.

Without a belt

As promised, here are the pictures of my fitted wrapped apron dress. Each photograph should be clickable for a larger version. I have my husband, Eric, to thank for taking these.

Despite the evidence (e.g. from Birka and Pskov) that any dresses that might have been wrapped designs were probably trimmed across the entire top of the dress, I chose to trim this dress only along the area between the brooches. I did that primarily to speed up completion of this project, not because of any theories about how apron dresses were trimmed.

Having gone through the exercise of making this type of dress, I now believe that it is very unlikely that any Viking woman ever made, or wore, such a garment. Why? Because this approach is based less on the existing (and limited) design evidence and more upon certain assumptions about how apron dresses may have been made.

Rear view, unbelted

Rear view, belted

Consider this. There is certainly evidence that can reasonably be interpreted as indicating that some apron dresses consisted of flat pieces of cloth that were wrapped around the body. Some of the Birka finds--particularly the finds from Grave No. 597 that extend in a straight line from brooch to brooch--tend to support this theory, as does the Pskov find. There are other finds, such as the Hedeby fragment, that suggest that some apron dresses were made from specifically shaped pieces of fabric and sewn together to fit the contours of the body.

The concept behind the type of wrapped dress I made, however, is that someone wanted a wrapped garment that would fit the body relatively closely. Why would a Viking care about that? I care about it, because I'm exploring different theories of apron dress design. But a Viking woman would know how apron dresses were usually made--or at least how they were made in the area where she lived. If she decided to explore different designs, it would more likely be for practical reasons. Perhaps she had only a limited amount of the fabric that she wanted to use, or wanted to achieve a tighter or looser fit.

Best view, belted

In other words, if a Viking age woman wanted an apron dress that fitted closely to the body (and it is far from clear that any woman of the period would have wanted such a garment), it's unlikely that she would have tried to fit triangular gores into a sheet of fabric, as I did. Instead, she likely would have abandoned the idea of working with a flat sheet at all, and would have attempted to make a pieced garment rather than seeking to force a wrapped peplos to do a job for which it is not naturally suited. Certainly Viking seamstresses were not deterred by the prospect of piecing together fabric to make a garment.  The Viborg shirt demonstrates Viking ingenuity and willingness to experiment with pieced construction techniques, and the Hedeby fragment does also (though it is unclear whether the garment that fragment came from was made or worn by a local "Viking" or a foreigner).

There are other facts that militate against the use of this apron dress design by the Vikings. One is that it is difficult to make the hemline of the dress come out even. I certainly did not succeed in doing so. My dress is enough longer and fuller on the left side that it looks a bit odd (see photographs). It's also difficult to belt the dress attractively without a full-length mirror--something the Vikings did not have (though I suppose a keen-eyed relative or friend might have been an adequate substitute).

Finally, I note that, to complete this dress, I had to lengthen the back set of loops by at least an inch (2.5 cm). The back loops measure 7 5/8th inches long (about 19.3 cm) from the place where the loop folds at the top to the edge of the apron dress (and they are sewn onto the edge without more than a millimeter's overlap). When I had the loops shorter, the dress tended to cut into my body at the armpits. This may be, as Hilde Thunem has suggested, because this dress is fitted rather than loose (and the very top of the dress is the most tightly fitted part of the garment). The pleated tube-style found at Køstrup and some of the Norwegian graves, which Shelagh Lewins recreated, would be looser and may well require much shorter loops to avoid having the dress shift during wearing. So it's possible, maybe even likely, that the rear loops of apron dresses were of different lengths, based both upon the measurements of the wearer and the style of the particular dress.

Unfortunately, existing grave finds do not preserve the full length of apron dress loops, so this hypothesis cannot be directly tested. It may be useful for me to look at the length of the rear straps on the variety of dresses I have made, to see whether my limited experimentation with different designs supports that idea.

EDIT:  (5/11/2013) To correct the last paragraph.  It originally said that grave finds "do not preserve" apron dress loops which is wrong.  What I had meant is that only a small portion of each loop is preserved, so it's impossible to tell what the full length of the loop was while the dress was being worn.