Charles II A Stitch in Time

Clothes are the ultimate form of visual communication.

By looking at the way people dressed,

we can learn not only about them as individuals

but about the society they lived in.

I'm Amber Butchart, fashion historian.

And in the words of Louis XIV,

I believe that fashion is the mirror of history.

So, taking historical works of art as our inspiration,

traditional tailor Ninya Mikhaila

and her team will be recreating historical clothing

using only authentic methods.

Oh, look at that.

It's changing colour in the air.

And I'll be finding out what they tell us

about the people who wore them...

I'm assuming the King wouldn't be dressing himself, though, right?

..and the times they lived in...

..and seeing what they're like to wear.

Oof!

These days, it's royal women who provides the fashion talking points.

But there's one male royal, Charles II,

who, despite being dead for over 300 years,

is credited with instigating a new form of menswear

that's still with us today.

This portrait shows Charles II being presented with a pineapple

by his gardener, John Rose.

Most likely dating from 1677,

the year Charles shaved off his moustache,

it's thought that the portrait could have been painted

as a tribute to Rose, who died that year.

Charles is the Restoration King.

This is absolutely crucial in terms of the way that he's dressing,

the way that he chooses to present himself.

His position is quite precarious,

and he uses dress and fashion throughout his reign

as a means of consolidating his power

and sending particular political messages.

I find this portrait really fascinating.

He's dressed in a very similar way to the gardener.

The King here is essentially saying, "I am like you.

"But, at the same time, you must kneel before me."

So the way Charles is dressed here

is really emblematic of a shift in the male silhouette.

Now what's especially interesting is that this really came about

as the product of political rivalry

between two cousins who were also kings.

So I'm really keen to investigate more about his dress,

and especially about the way that Charles

used his clothing to consolidate his political place.

Given that this is such a rare portrait of Charles

in plain, informal clothes, I'm really interested to find out

from our historical tailor, Ninya,

if there's more to this suit than meets the eye.

So Charles II, Restoration King,

the Merry Monarch himself.

His suit here looks quite simple.

Is it actually such a simple outfit?

He is trying to do the "man of the people, simple suit" look

but, no, it won't surprise you to hear me say

it isn't as simple as it looks.

For a start, you can see all these black clusters

around the waist of his britches

-and around the bottom of his britches there.

-Mm-hm.

Also at his cuffs here and the shoulder.

They're loops of silk ribbon.

They were called knots.

And that would be yards and yards of silk ribbon.

And they're completely without function.

They're just added for the effect.

And you can see all these buttons and buttonholes.

I've counted them.

There are more than 100 buttons that we have to source or make.

That is fiddly work.

It is fiddly and it's time-consuming.

Even when you work quite quickly,

and I'd say I could do a nice buttonhole in maybe five minutes,

-that's more than a day's work just doing buttonholes.

-Wow.

Charles had a thing for encouraging the use of English cloth

but it was really the finest cloth, still very, very costly.

And I think it's quite clear to see that the lining here,

-what the artist is trying to show is that it's a silky fabric.

-Mm.

I think it's what we call shot fabric today,

so the threads going one way are one colour

and the threads going the other way are a different colour.

And at the time, they called it changeable,

because the colour changes.

Like this sample here,

you can see the yellow threads coming out there and the red there.

It is, in fact, changeable.

-It is, in fact, changeable.

-Yeah.

-Yeah.

Even though this looks quite simple, it is still a display of wealth.

It absolutely is.

There's an awful lot of money being spent on that suit,

even though it's not immediately obvious where it goes.

While our suit might be more ornate than first glance would suggest,

the suit Charles's brother, James II,

wore for his wedding to Mary of Modena

is definitely fit for a king.

No longer on display to the public, it's held in storage at the V&A.

But curator Susan North has allowed me to come along and have a look.

It's absolutely incredible.

I mean, the gold and silver embroidery here,

I can just imagine it kind of glinting in the candlelight.

It would have been an absolute spectacle.

Yes, and you can see in areas,

like the inside of the cuff and under the arm,

where it's a bit more protected,

that gives a sense of just how spectacular

the suit would have looked when it was worn.

I'm absolutely in love with this colour of the lining.

It's very similar to the colour of the lining in the portrait

that we're looking at.

You can see almost a familial relationship, I think,

between this and the clothes that Charles is wearing in the portrait.

I love the amount of buttons that we've got going up here -

it's very similar to what we're recreating

and with these buttonholes as well.

It's remarkable that they all survive.

Very often on older garments, you know,

they recycled the buttons into something else,

and they cut them off.

It seems to me to embody some of the contradictions

that we see in some of Charles's wardrobe

at around this time as well.

You've got the wool,

but you've also got the extravagance of the embroidery.

You've got this sort of much simpler,

more workaday silhouette, in a way, but then again,

you've also got this really showy extravagance as well.

The coat itself, of course, was never a fashionable garment.

It was strictly utilitarian.

What Charles does with the suit is he decrees that this is court dress.

Now, you'd never show up in court wearing your ordinary riding coat.

I mean, you just wouldn't do that.

So if you're going to take what is a utilitarian garment

and make it court dress,

well, you have to bling it up a bit.

Charles's finances were tightly controlled by Parliament.

So, while his clothes may have been made

from the most luxurious fabrics, there was no room for waste.

So these britches don't fit on the width of this cloth.

I'm going to do what's called piecing,

which is where the excess of the pattern is folded back

and it means we're going to have an additional seam.

But that's very period.

Even the King is waste not, want not.

It was seven years' apprenticeship

and then you'd have to work as a journeyman,

and then you would essentially have to do an exam.

And a lot of tailors specialised in particular garments,

so they only made coats or they only made britches.

So I do often think when we're doing these sorts of reconstructions

that a period tailor would just find it absolutely laughable

that we attempt to do so many different things.

I probably wouldn't qualify in the period tailors' eyes.

And I'm a woman. I mean, how ridiculous is that?

No, tailors were all most definitely men.

I'm leaving quite small gaps between the patterns

because the seam allowance can actually be very small.

The smaller amount of seam allowance you have,

the less wasteful this process is going to be.

And the happier the King will be.

So these just get backstitched on with linen thread,

and the matching silk thread is saved for things that matter,

like buttonholes and sewing on trims, things that really show.

It breaks quite easily as you sew it through the fabric -

the friction of that action wears away at it quite quickly,

so what you have to do, is run it through a block of wax

and that smoothes down all the hairy fibres

and enables the thread to slide through the fabric easier.

So you can see it will have this strange extra seam on the side,

which is odd to the modern eye, often,

but when it's nicely pressed flat,

it will disappear into the coat and be barely noticeable.

And I think all these funny extra seams

make it more interesting a garment, personally,

because they are there on the original ones.

Charles II had lived through civil war,

exile and the abolition of the monarchy.

More than any other English king,

he understood the powerful political message

a monarch's clothes conveyed,

so most of the time chose to be painted

in classical dress or armour.

I'm keen to find out from historian Rebecca Rideal

how Charles navigated the tightrope between re-establishing the monarchy

and separating himself from the excesses

that had contributed to its fall.

So here we can see Charles II in a way

that is much more typical of how he liked to be represented.

How important was it that he sort of transmitted this very regal style?

Well, he had a really difficult balancing act

because, on the one hand,

he had been invited back as a monarch,

so he wanted to project this image of monarchy and kingship

but then, on the other hand,

he was very aware that his father, Charles I,

had been executed for being too extravagant in his style and tastes

and also being a little bit remote from the people

and aloof in some respects.

So how did Charles II try to distance himself

and his image from his father?

By not actually being that extravagant on a day-to-day basis.

The clothes that he wore were pretty sensible, the colours weren't loud,

and it was only when it came to the ceremonial occasions

that he really upped the ante, as did the rest of the court,

and this is where we get these fantastic accounts from Samuel Pepys

about people being clad in silver, gold,

him not being able to look at the court

because it was hurting his eyes too much.

The other thing to bear in mind as well

was Charles II grew up, spent his teenage years in disguise,

going from various city to city,

across the continent, he mixed with all and sundry.

He was more of a relatable man than his father anyway.

So it's a real tightrope that he's walking, isn't it?

Yes, it is, very much so.

Charles had spent time at the French court

while this man, Louis XIV

was establishing it as the centre of fashion -

an idea that still persists today.

Charles envied Louis's wealth, his style and his absolute power,

and Louis fully understood the relationship

between political power and the spectacle of fashion.

There's no doubt that Charles was influenced

by his cousin's sartorial splendour.

SHOUTING

Despite his careful manipulation of his public image,

Charles II's court, with its French tastes,

was still considered profligate.

The public's antipathy was intensified

by three disastrous events - war, plague and in 1666, the Great Fire,

an event which many blamed on the French.

So on the 7th of October 1666, Charles issued a declaration

that his court would reject French fashions

and create an English style,

and this was the long vest worn with the knee-length coats.

This gave the male silhouette a much leaner appearance,

a complete change from the more triangular doublet and hose.

Now, because of this and his championing of the vest,

Charles II is credited with creating the three-piece suit.

What's unusual in fashion history

is that we can place this innovation to its exact date,

and it's all thanks to Samuel Pepys.

8th of October 1666,

the King hath yesterday in council

declared his resolution for setting a fashion for clothes.

It will be a vest.

I know not well how,

but it is to teach the nobility thrift.

Sadly for Charles, according to Pepys,

Louis thought so little of his cousin's vests,

that he dressed his servants in them.

22nd of November 1666.

Monsieur Batelier tells me the King of France hath,

in defiance to the King of England,

caused all his footmen to be put into vests,

which, if true, is the greatest indignity

ever done by one prince to another.

So have there been any particular challenges so far?

No. It's fairly straightforward.

We're really doing the preparation now

to actually begin the epic buttonholing.

And so how many people would have worked on the original outfit?

We've got the King's tailor.

Yes. He would have had probably a journeyman tailor

working with him as well, so the King's tailor is a master tailor.

-Mm-hm.

-He's the one that would have cut out all of the pattern pieces

and decided where the pieces, the seams were going and all of that.

He would have then handed it to his journeyman tailor,

-so let's say that Harriet's the journeyman tailor for today.

-Yeah.

She's doing the actual putting the pieces together

once they've been cut. And then we'd have an apprentice.

That can be Hannah, over there.

So Hannah's got to a stage in her apprenticeship

where she's allowed to put some of the pieces together

but we've given her the linings,

-rather than the expensive top fabric.

-Right.

So would you like to try a working buttonhole?

I would. I would like to try very much.

Great. What you need to do is use this buttonhole cutter.

Oh, wow! Yeah. OK.

So you hold that on there, kind of upright like this.

So I'll just show you that. So following the line like that,

and then you're just going to tap it smartly with the hammer...

-Wow!

-..to make the cut.

This is a lot more tool-heavy than I was expecting.

OK.

-Oh!

-That's it.

There we go.

-Perfect, lovely.

-That's done it.

So then, you take your needle and thread,

so we're going to put the needle through the slits,

so take it all the way through

-so the knot's going to go through to the back.

-Yeah.

And then we're going to go back in

and we're going to come up just beside

where that thread was coming out.

Right, yeah.

That's it, and before you take the needle all the way through,

you're going to loop your thread around the end of your needle,

and this is what makes the buttonhole stitch.

And pull it back towards yourself

so you don't get too much of a tangle and what should happen...

-Oh!

-Pull it back towards...

-Oh, yeah.

-..the edge of the hole, that's it.

And that's made your first little buttonhole knot.

-Great.

-And you keep going

until you get all the way to the end of the slit.

AMBER PUFFS

THEY LAUGH

OK! I feel like it's going to take me

a lot longer than five minutes.

Well, it will, yes. This is, um...

This is why tailors had apprenticeships of seven years,

because there's so many things like that

that you've really got to perfect the art of before you'd be allowed

to get anywhere near the King's coat.

What's incredible is that we're looking

at these tiny details, of which there are hundreds on this garment,

and, I mean, the amount of work and time that goes into

just these tiny details is immense, isn't it?

All that's involved is mere hours of labour.

"Mere hours of labour"! And so you're telling me that this -

that I'm, you know, I'm killing myself over here -

is unskilled labour?

Essentially, it is, really.

It's not worth an awful lot.

That's a shame.

So I think I'm really coming up to the end of this buttonhole.

I've just been finishing the...

-Oh, the little bar across the end.

-The last edge, yeah.

If you lay it down on the surface, then we can snip it off.

-So let's have a look.

-OK.

-Er, I think I might have accidentally...

-Ah.

Yeah, I'm not sure your button's going to go through there.

Shall I see? Shall I have a go?

OK, OK, let's see.

Ooh, ooh, is it going to go?

-THEY LAUGH Just about!

-It's fine, it's fine.

Just about.

It's not complicated but it is very fiddly.

-You have to be very dextrous, don't you?

-You do.

And there's still an awful lot of hours' work,

even in an apparently very simple suit.

Yeah, hours and hours.

I mean, who'd have thought that a suit fit for a king

would take so much work.

I guess it's kind of obvious when you think about it, yeah.

Charles II's wardrobe accounts are held at the National Archives,

and provide a fascinating insight

into his carefully constructed image.

Looking at the actual accounts of Charles II's wardrobe

is quite a strange feeling, really.

It's really exciting seeing all of this stuff, how...

You know, the detail... That it's been documented.

This was clearly something quite important

that money was being spent on

and actually seeing it here in this sort of glorious handwriting

is really amazing. It feels quite special.

So some of the first orders that we can see in the account book,

unsurprisingly, are for his coronation robes of purple velvet,

lined with powdered ermine and laced with embroidered gold lace,

and is really about creating a spectacle of power.

This is what a king looks like.

These accounts show that Charles loved clothes,

ordering on average between 30 and 40 new suits a year.

However, while his cousin, Louis XIV,

might have been able to parade around in diamond-covered clothes,

Charles knew he had neither the money

nor the political clout for power dressing.

We see a lot of plain cuts,

a lot of muted colours as well,

especially grey and also this one I particularly like,

which is references to "sad colour".

So the vest first makes its appearance in the accounts in 1666,

and we see it numerous times here.

"For making His Majesty a purple cloth coat, hose, and vest."

We see "vest" really starting to feature throughout.

However, while Charles was really proclaiming this

as an English style, what he didn't mention so much at court

was that this was actually an order

to his French tailor, Claude Sourceau.

So Claude Sourceau is quite an important character here.

He was Charles's tailor when Charles was in exile.

Charles brought him back to England when the monarchy was reinstated,

and he remained his tailor for the next ten years.

So this really shows that,

although Charles was very keen on promoting English fashions,

he couldn't fully escape the influence of French style.

For me, the most telling and poignant entry

of the wardrobe accounts is the very first.

What's interesting about this is,

despite these accounts beginning in 1660,

the year of Charles's restoration to the throne,

they're stated as being in the 13th and 14th year of his reign.

So what we're seeing here is the reign of Charles II

being dated right back to the time when his father was executed.

So all of those intervening years

have just been written out of this history.

Despite only being at the start of their sartorial journey,

it's easy to recognise the vest and coat introduced by Charles II

as the forerunners of today's waistcoat and jacket.

The britches, however, are another matter.

These are his britches.

They have a waistband.

It's going to have a button at the front.

And, at the back, there's a little gap.

So on the waistband there'll be some eyelets.

So he can sort of put some weight on,

and let the back out a bit for a bit of ease.

But he can't get smaller.

At the moment, I'm putting in some gathering cord,

so that we can draw them up into the waistband.

If I pull this one...

This form of gathering is now called cartridge pleating.

It forms the sort of folds that you can imagine on a cartridge belt.

It's just like where you put the cartridges in.

But these aren't going to fit high on the waist -

they're going to be quite low-slung.

If you look at the painting,

there's a whole abundance of shirt hanging out over the top.

He really does give the impression of someone who...

You know, he's got his coat open, he's got the shirt out,

and the britches are sort of hanging low.

It's really, very, very like he's undressing.

Yeah, a very sort of sensual look,

compared to the slightly more buttoned-up clothes of other eras.

They might look a little bit short compared to trousers these days.

And obviously quite vulnerably loose.

But he would have had a pair of drawers underneath.

Linen drawers.

And they were drawn in round the leg more snugly.

So there wouldn't have been anything, er...

..inadvertent being displayed.

I think that side of things was kept for private matters.

Although, he obviously had quite a lot of those!

THEY LAUGH

He was a bit free with his private matters.

I've either miscounted or done one extra so...

-Ah, well, then that's a spare.

-There we go.

So is it worth pinning on, say, 16, all just on one front?

Yeah.

Oh, they look really nice.

-Already.

-Mm, they do.

-Aww.

-Look at that.

-That is gorgeous.

-You can imagine him frolicking around.

-Yeah.

-They are merry britches, aren't they?

-Yeah.

You see, that's the joy of it, even though there are original garments

that we can look at, when you make something

and it's got its freshness about it, it's really exciting.

And it is slightly different.

Put the bounce back in the King.

I initially chose this suit

because I was fascinated by its simplicity.

But, as I've learned was often the case with Charles II,

there's much more to it than meets the eye.

Worn on the body, clothes change from lifeless fabric

into a potent means of communication.

I cannot wait to find out what I can learn

from taking a walk in the King's new clothes.

Oh, look at that.

That is amazing.

That is so good.

You've got this real sort of elegance in the arms.

And then these gorgeous cuffs here.

And then these just sit so low down.

It seems really unnatural. So you've got...

Obviously, I knew you had all of this volume here,

but it's just kind of the contrast between the two,

it's quite an odd feeling.

We don't sort of associate this with a men's silhouette,

especially with a king's silhouette.

But it just feels...

And we expect men to be more...

-..built up around the shoulders...

-Exactly.

-..than they were then.

And today the whole point of tailoring, you know,

Savile Row style tailoring, is to create that broad,

sort of triangular torso that we associate with very manly men

and the epitome of the classical masculine ideal.

-And you'd never want to emphasise your hip area.

-No, no.

It's all about narrow hips.

You seem quite comfortable there.

Yeah, I think I would have been very comfortable then.

I think I'd be comfortable wearing this today.

I love it.

You could quite happily kind of lounge about in it.

-And I guess that's kind of the point.

-That's brilliant.

It's the posing. It's...

You can stand still in that and look amazing,

as long as you just open up and have a bit of lining on show.

But that's the effect that it has on you.

Like, feeling these different proportions, feeling the fabrics,

feeling the clothes on you,

actually makes you stand

like we're used to seeing people stand from that time.

It's a very exciting feeling.

Clothes want to be worn a certain way, don't they?

Yeah, exactly.

And the effect that they have on the stance

and the way that we move, it's kind of living history.

I'm particularly enjoying seeing the flash

of the little rows of button when you turn around,

-cos they're just so sweet, aren't they?

-Yes.

And, Hannah, all of those ribbons just look great, don't they?

I know, it is so bizarre to have seen them in a massive black pile,

and then to all of a sudden see them flowing.

You can imagine just all the movement in there.

-It's amazing.

-I think it's less silly.

Cos those britches on their own -

-they're a very silly garment, aren't they?

-Yes.

But with the outfit they make sense.

-Yes, they do.

-On the body.

-It's really nice.

-It makes me feel very elegant.

-Well, you look very elegant.

-Very graceful.

-Mm.

-Mm.

Seeing the outfit of Charles II made up

kind of blew my mind.

When we went to see the portrait, it's in a very dark room

and it can't be lit too harshly because everything's very old.

It's also been above a fireplace for a long time,

so it looks very dark.

And it's difficult to see the detail.

So I was initially just bowled over by really how bright it is -

it just looks exquisite.

And also how you can really see the different details.

You can really see the silk bows.

You can really see the lining.

It just looks incredibly elegant.

We're moving towards the point today in men's fashion

where gender binaries are really being broken down.

So we actually see some contemporary designers designing outfits

not a million miles away from this,

or certainly taking on these ideas around decoration,

around frippery, I guess.

So it's almost like we've come full circle,

right back to Charles II in Restoration England.