The Hedge Cutter 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.

It's no surprise that the earliest painting

in the National Portrait Gallery is of a king.

It was hugely expensive to commission a portrait,

but by the 18th century, rising prosperity meant

that more people were able to preserve their likeness.

However, it was still really unusual

for people to commission a portrait of their workers.

The history of fashion and also the history of art

largely tell us stories about elite groups of people.

If you were wealthy enough to have your portrait painted,

you were also most likely wealthy enough

to be following the latest fashions.

But if I'd been alive in the 18th century,

I wouldn't have been dressed like a queen

or, you know, even like a noblewoman.

So I'm interested to find out more

about the clothing that people like me would have been wearing.

That's why I'm so intrigued by this rare, full length portrait of a hedge cutter.

And I'm really interested to see what Ninya makes of it.

BELL RINGS

-Hello.

-Come in.

-Thanks.

So this portrait is really fascinating.

It's unusual in art history,

and quite unusual in fashion history.

What are your thoughts on what is being worn here?

I think there are clues to what's going on.

It's difficult to see in the reproduction that we've got.

-It's very dark, isn't it, this portrait?

-It is really dark.

But you can just about, like you say, make out some details,

-like this looks a bit like a mariner's cuff.

-I agree.

And, actually, Harriet did this sketch

to help bring out some of the details and make it easier to see,

and we picked up on that as well.

What that suggests is that this coat was once

a very smart and fashionable garment.

What's likely is that the original person was some generations before,

perhaps a yeoman gentleman, maybe,

and he would have passed it down

to someone slightly below him in status,

and it's probably filtered down two, three, four times, maybe,

before this man actually got it.

And what are our thoughts on what this is being crafted from?

We think that it's most likely to have been leather, actually.

It was both a fashionable fabric, but also, more importantly,

as far as this hedge cutter is concerned, a very functional fabric.

We actually have an original garment here made from leather,

-if you'd like to have a look.

-I would love to have a look.

-These actually belong to my brother-in-law.

-OK.

Who is an avid collector of military clothing.

So these are actually original Napoleonic leather trousers.

-Oh, wow. Oh, my God.

-Which we can use to help us get an idea

about how we might use the material and actually construct the garment.

-Wow, these are incredible.

-Aren't they?

The other striking thing about the portrait is that the jacket itself

looks kind of patched together.

-It's very striking.

-Is that sort of years and years of repairs?

Yes, well you can see that not only is it patched,

but it's very, very tattered.

The stitching of the patches is really incredibly crude,

and I think that maybe the hedge cutter himself

might have sewn those patches on as required.

How do the patches figure into this?

Are we going to make it with the patches?

Well, what I'd be really keen to do is actually to reconstruct the coat

as it would have looked when it was new,

because I think it's going to look really quite different

from the way it's ended its life.

And it would be great to have that illustration of the beginning,

and what I presume would be pretty near to the end of this garment's life.

-Yeah.

-So that's what I'd like to do.

-OK, great.

-So we get to see it as almost an evolution.

-Mmm.

Yeah, I think that's exciting. I think it can be a very nice coat.

Great.

Our hedge cutter is a something of a mystery.

His image has been preserved for over 200 years,

and yet no-one knows who he is.

We're not even entirely sure when the portrait was painted,

or who it was by.

I want to learn more about the painting,

and so I'm meeting art historian Florence Evans at Broughton Castle,

where the portrait has been owned by the Fiennes family for generations.

So, here we have it.

My goodness.

-I knew it was going to be large, but it really is quite monumental, isn't it?

-It is.

-Monumental is a good way to describe it, I think.

-Definitely.

As a fashion historian,

it's proving quite difficult to date this portrait based on the clothing,

because we think it's something that may have been repurposed,

time and time again.

Now, what are your thoughts on this as an art historian?

The aesthetic is harking towards the 19th century.

Whoever painted it has experimented

-and used bitumen in the black pigments.

-Right.

And that was quite an innovative and new way

of getting a rich, dark tone in your paintings.

Stylistically, the way it's been handled,

I really do feel that it's from certainly the 1780s,

probably the 1790s.

The cuffs suggest that it's an earlier date,

but you would expect a labourer to have clothes that were passed down

and mended and endure over decades.

And is there anything else about this portrait that you think can help us to date it?

If you look at the pipe that he's smoking.

Now, clay pipe bowls are very easily datable by their shape and size.

And in the mid-18th century, for instance,

they had a rather elongated bowl,

and here he has a rather chubbier bowl,

which makes me think it's later 18th century,

and pointing again towards the 19th century.

It's really unusual to have a portrait on this scale

of a member of staff, someone who's working here.

-Yeah.

-Is there anything comparable that you know of?

Well, in 1790, Thomas Barker of Bath did a series

of life-size portraits of pastoral figures,

which caused quite a furore at the time.

Were people just so unused to seeing working people depicted in this way?

Yes. On this scale, it was very unusual

and it would have been startling to an 18th-century viewer, really,

when they were expecting to see polite society on their walls.

And that's really the first time you see that, and in fact,

actually it's the first time I've seen one on this scale myself,

and it really is amazing, as it would have been at the time.

It's great to hear that Florence would situate the painting of the portrait in the late 18th century,

because if we are looking at something that was painted in the 1790s,

then that really tells us a whole lot in many ways

about what's being worn here.

Ninya and I had already discussed the fact that the mariner's cuff

dates from much earlier in the 18th century,

around the middle or the 1760s.

So if the portrait is from the 1790s,

we really get a clear sense that our subject is wearing a garment

that is most likely to be second-hand.

Very few people can afford to get these clothes made new.

Textiles, clothing are some of the most valuable things

that people can own at this point in history.

And we really lost the sense of this in the 21st century.

We're so used to clothing being a disposable commodity.

One of the distinctive features of the coat is its patches,

but they're causing problems for Ninya and Harriet.

I've made a twill for a coat from the 1750s,

that carries a mariner's cuff, so I've drawn the mariner's cuff on.

-Oh, yeah.

-Very attractive.

But I've also pinned on some patches where we can see them.

It's rather interesting where they sit, because in the painting,

-you can't see the shoulder seam.

-No, and that's been really bothering me.

-Yeah.

-That you can't see the shoulder seam,

-but I think it's conceivable that the patch that's right there is just masking a little bit.

-Yeah.

-Because there must be a shoulder seam there.

-Yes, of course.

But obviously, if you've been throwing your body through a hedge with thorns,

-that's probably going to be a big point of wear.

-Yeah.

-It's clearly had quite a lot.

Well, also, I'm really struck by the fact that this whole area

-of patching is exactly where a pocket would be, isn't it?

-Yeah.

And it even looks like a pocket flap.

It's like he's tried to replace the pocket flap.

Caught it on a hedge and ripped it, perhaps.

Yeah, but somehow, the twill underneath the patches is

-really hinting at what's potentially a very smart coat underneath.

-Yes.

If we look at that side of it, you can just see the...

-That's lovely, isn't it?

-It's got a lovely pleated back.

-And I guess he'd have a button up here.

-He would, yeah, yeah.

-I mean, it's actually quite a beautiful shape.

-It is.

-It really...

-It's a classic.

-Yeah. Yeah.

I'm going to want to keep this coat.

-THEY LAUGH

-Should I make it to fit you?

Let's see how much is in here.

Oh, it's quite a good hide.

So, the skin here along what would have been the spine of the animal,

is the strongest part.

-Yes.

-So...

It's still got a good stretch to it.

-Oh, yeah.

-It's nice and thick and you can see the edge there

is much, much puckered.

Yeah, it's much thinner and also, yeah, as you say,

it's puckered and crinkled, so this is where

-we should actually take things like buttons and...

-Bindings.

-..bindings.

-Yeah.

-Facings, things like that,

-cos it'll be much easier to sew.

-Yeah.

We really have to think quite carefully

when you're cutting leather, don't you,

about which bits you're going to end up sewing in which way?

But there's also the joy that,

because we're going to butt the seams together,

we don't have to allow any sort of seam allowance.

It's a very helpful straight edge along the backbone, isn't it?

It is, although we haven't got enough straight edge

to get all four pieces, have we?

We might have if we're very careful.

But this is a good big piece, so we should be fine.

The fashion and textiles collection at the V&A Museum contains over 75,000 objects.

Fashion curator Susan Nourse is going to show me a garment

that could shed a light

on the early life of our hedge cutters coat.

So what we have here is a great example of a frock coat.

What's the provenance of this?

Well, it's a rather informal style of coat.

This one probably dates from about the 1750s,

although the style comes in earlier.

The first examples that we see show up in the 1730s.

This coat is actually kind of emblematic

of the second-hand trade, isn't it?

Because there is also a label in here for a costumier.

-Yes.

-Which is very exciting, I think,

to be able to see a couple of different lives

that this coat has had.

Absolutely. What we've discovered about the 19th-century theatre,

at least in London,

was that when you look at photographs of actors in costumes,

say from the 1870s, and they're in a production that's 18th century,

they're wearing real 18th-century clothing.

And it was probably cheaper to go down to Seven Dials

and buy something that fit you

than it was to hire a tailor to make something for you.

And, of course, this is a time when the actor is responsible for his costume.

He's got to pay for it.

And one of the reasons I chose this portrait was because

I was really keen to explore more everyday dress,

like, something that someone like me, maybe, would have been wearing.

Now, it's very, very difficult to actually find that out

through museum collections.

So why do you think there is that lack of working dress?

Most of the fashion museums obviously want the glamorous things,

so that's part of the bias.

But then the other bias is what people save.

We tend to save the most expensive things,

the most beautiful things,

most working-class clothing would have gone through five, six life cycles,

getting ever more bedraggled,

to a point where really the only person who's interested in it is the ragman.

Now, the ragman buys linen and cotton

that's really just too decrepit for anything.

He takes it away and they make paper out of it.

He gets money for it.

Even when it was a rag, there was somebody who was willing to pay you for it.

Anything we do have, I would say, really is an accident.

It's benign neglect. Somebody forgot to recycle this.

-Lucky for us.

-Lucky for us.

The hedge cutter is such a fantastic character.

We really get a sense of his personality in the portrait.

So I'm looking forward to seeing his clothing come to life in 3-D form.

Now, in the painting, of course,

his clothing is old, it's dirty, it's used, it's patched.

So seeing it as it would have been when it was a brand-new garment

is going to be quite fascinating.

It's also going to be interesting from a practical perspective

for me to have a go working with the leather.

It's not something I've ever worked with before,

so that is going to be quite eye-opening.

So, what's going on?

Well, this might sound a bit weird,

but my brother-in-law's trousers have been speaking to me

quite a lot for the last few days.

-They have lots to tell me.

-Yeah.

Let's see if they'll share any information with you.

Looking carefully, I can see that there is

very particular seam treatments for very particular areas.

-Right.

-You see this seam here?

-Yeah.

This around here looks very complicated.

It's a seam called a butt stitch.

-Right.

-Which you see more normally on much thicker leather.

And it's where you need the leather to just butt up

-one edge to the other.

-Yeah.

The way we actually sew the butt seam

-is that the holes have to be made in the leather first.

-Right.

The hole is going through the top and out the side of the leather,

-out the middle.

-Oh, crikey.

Which is why you're then able to kind of butt the edges together,

like that.

So the first thing you have to do is use an awl,

which is this tool here.

-It's like a kind of pointed blade.

-Yeah.

And I'm going to push the hole from the side

and then slide it out like that.

And that takes a bit of practice.

-Yeah, it looks really difficult.

-Yeah.

And it's quite easy to tear

-a leather that this...

-Thin.

-..thin.

-Gosh.

-So, do you want to try one in the actual sleeve?

I guess. OK.

So...

Oh.

Yeah, that's good.

Am I going too far?

My holes seem to be bigger than...

No, that's fine,

cos it kind of closes back again.

I'm slightly losing the straightness of the line that you had.

-OK, well, let's stop there.

-THEY LAUGH

-Would you like to try actually sewing them together?

-OK.

-So here I've got one piece of thread with a needle on each end.

-Right.

So this needle is going to go in that hole there.

-This one here?

-Yeah.

OK. And before you pull too tight, put that needle down.

-Pick this one up.

-Yeah.

So this one is going to go back through that same hole

that you've just sewn through.

Oh.

NINYA LAUGHS Yeah, I've done it.

OK, and then you can pull the two threads away from each other

to get the tension and tighten it up.

Probably have to pull it quite close to the leather. Yeah, that's it.

OK. Gosh.

That's an awful lot of work, isn't it, to join two bits...?

-Mm.

-..of leather together.

OK. Fun as this has been...

I might leave the rest of it to you for now.

-Are you sure?

-I'm sure, yeah.

Well, that's nice of you. Thanks.

Thank you.

So I'm keen to see what you're up to over here.

This looks very exciting.

Yes, it's nice when you start to get the finished garment coming out.

Now, we did debate whether to have the edges just left raw,

because leather doesn't fray

and it would have made sense to just have the pocket flap

-made without any sort of binding on it.

-Yeah.

-But...

Guess what happened.

-Oh!

-Brother-in-law's trousers.

The trousers speaking to you, too.

-Yes.

-They said, "Excuse me, that's wrong."

Yeah, if you remember,

when you looked at the edge of the fly flap...

-Yeah.

-..it's got a bound edge made with the same leather.

-Yeah.

-And so we've done that with the pockets.

-Right.

And it's made it much stronger and it just...

-It looks...

-It looks lovely.

-..right, doesn't it?

-It looks really nice.

-Yeah.

-Lovely.

So the binding gets stitched on as you would with a cloth binding.

You stitch on one side and then turn it over.

-Aw, nice.

-And stitch the other side down.

-Aw.

-And when you've done that, it's a little bit bulky,

so we don't do it with an iron, we do it with a hammer.

-Oh. That's exciting.

-Yeah, that is exciting.

It is exciting. It's quite satisfying.

-Because it melds all the bits of leather in together.

-Right.

So I haven't done this one yet,

but you can see where it's sort of folded into the corners,

-it's still quite big and bulky, isn't it?

-Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

-So...

-Oh, look!

If you just hammer it flat like that, it immediately...

-Makes such a difference.

-..sits down.

-Yeah. Really nice.

-Do you feel...?

-Yeah, go on, then. Great.

You can see it's sort of flattening out, can't you?

-That is exciting.

-It is.

-That's really good fun.

-It's a quick result.

-Yeah.

-It's immediately exciting.

-Oh, look at that!

-That's so great.

-That's lovely.

-Is that flat enough, Amber?

THEY LAUGH Sorry.

All of the effects of ironing but much more fun. Yeah.

Not only do we have very few portraits of working people,

but we have even fewer surviving examples of what they wore.

But what we do have is an amazing collection of 18th-century everyday textiles

from here at the Foundling Museum.

What we are seeing here are records of children,

often babies, who were left at the Foundling Hospital.

Much of the time, when they were left,

they would be accompanied by a textile token.

This could be part of their mother's clothing

or maybe a specific textile,

but the purpose of it was so that if the mother found herself in better circumstances,

she could return and identify her child by this textile token.

25th June 1764, female.

Now, what we can see here is a beautiful example

of an 18th-century printed cotton textile.

But then stitched onto it on the back

is this heart-shape on cardboard.

It says, "Anne Smith was born January 4th, 1764."

John Bedford, Anna Chamber, Elizabeth Hodeley.

Sarah Hanley. Francis Summons.

Charles Mallet. Mary Allen. John Payne.

The collection is hugely historically important.

What we can see here is a lot of printed cotton textiles

which were becoming more and more fashionable

as manufacturing techniques improved and enhanced.

These replicate the embroidered patterns

that you could see at this time on very expensive Spitalfields silks,

so this is almost like the equivalent of

the high street designer knock-off.

We're used to associating fashionable dress

with court circles, the aristocracy, throughout history.

But now we're really beginning to see that members of the urban poor

are able to start engaging in this fledgling consumer society as well.

From a historian's perspective,

this collection is just absolutely invaluable.

What we're left with here is about 5,000 textile swatches.

And it's now the largest collection of everyday 18th-century textiles

that we have in the country.

From a human perspective,

it's actually a very difficult collection to look through.

Just the hope that is bound up in these.

Less than 1% of mothers were able to return and reclaim their children

from the Foundling Hospital.

But what we can see here is

that so many of them really had the belief

that they would be able to come back.

While cheap printed cottons meant that working people had a choice

of fabrics for the first time,

our hedge cutter was looking for function rather than fashion.

So we've been working with this leather

and discussing how soft and pliable and beautiful it is

and actually questioning its defensive properties,

so I thought I'd come to the back of my garden,

where I know there is a really viciously spiky rose

and I'm just going to see whether it actually tears

if I give it a good go on these spikes.

So let's see.

Oh.

I'm going to pretend we're really getting into this hedge.

Right, so we can see there's lots of scratch marks,

but nothing like anywhere near tearing.

Which is really interesting, it's still really intact.

You can imagine that after repeated days and weeks and months

of going in and out of hedges,

you might get a particularly vicious one

that would finally go through a very worn patch,

but that's impressive, actually.

And what's happened is it's actually broken off the tops of a lot of these thorns,

the leather has done more damage to the rose

than the rose has done to the leather,

which is really interesting.

So what I'm doing here,

I'm attaching my pre-covered buttons to the front of the coat

so that the pocket flap can be fastened.

The base of the button would have been either horn or wooden.

So I just put a circle around,

gather it up and then stitch it in place.

Like with anything, your first button is always the worst button.

And then you get quicker and also better.

Luckily, my worst button isn't terribly chunky,

but you can tell that it is chunkier

because it sits on one side rather than central.

So now it's the moment of truth.

Having lived for so long with the shreds and patches

of our hedge cutter's coat,

it will be intriguing to discover what it would have looked like

in its pristine state.

Oh.

Look at that. Oh, wow, look at that.

Oh, the back is amazing!

And also that...

Just that particular 18th-century men's shoulder, as well,

it doesn't have any of the squareness

that we associate with men's jackets today, does it?

It's a much rounder look.

It's kind of interesting cos it shows how our ideas

about sort of manliness and masculinity changes, doesn't it?

I'm just so surprised by how soft it is already.

I thought it was something that would need to be worn in,

but it's actually really easy to move.

I was impressed how thin the leather can be

and still do the things that we wanted it to in a defensive way.

Oh, it's absolutely beautiful, isn't it?

-I remember hammering some of these.

-Yeah.

-Yeah.

Yeah, I love those Mariner's cuffs.

-Just such a great detail, isn't it?

-A really great detail, isn't it?

Really great detail.

This leather, when new, has this kind of bright, soft yellow light colour.

-Yeah.

-Which we don't see in the portrait.

And this kind of leather, over time, being outdoors in the sun,

getting oil from hands and stains and everything,

-would have become much, much darker.

-Yeah.

So give that another 40 years or so,

and the colour, the tone of it would change quite a lot.

Well, I think that just adds even more weight to this idea

that it was definitely a second-hand garment, doesn't it?

I love the movement when you swoosh.

I wasn't expecting it to be so swooshy.

I must admit.

I thought there would be no swoosh at all.

I am pleasantly surprised.

I feel like I don't want to take it off.

It just immediately does become like a second skin

and you could kind of do anything in it.

-Coat for life.

-A coat for life.

-A coat for many lives.

-It's very now.

-Indeed.

-Yeah.

I really wanted to investigate the clothing of working people,

clothing that regular people,

the majority of the population would have been wearing.

Seeing this coat in the flesh has been invaluable

because it's absolutely reinforced our theory

that this is a second-hand garment.

The fact that this likely didn't come new to the hedge cutter

is really clear when we see it.

It's an exquisitely made coat,

it's unlikely that a working man would acquire something

that's such a light colour

that would immediately get very, very dirty.

And it just feels very elegant to wear, as well.

This is something I would totally wear today.

It's really very dapper, indeed.