About the Cover Illustration
The figure on the cover of Seam in Action is captioned “La Béarnaise,” or a woman from the former Béarne province, a mountainous region in southwest France. The illustration is taken from the 1805 edition of Sylvain Maréchal’s four-volume compendium of regional dress customs. Each illustration is finely drawn and colored by hand.
The colorful variety of Maréchal’s collection reminds us vividly of how culturally apart the world’s towns and regions were just 200 years ago. Isolated from each other, people spoke different dialects and languages. In the streets or the countryside, they were easy to place—sometimes with an error of no more than a dozen miles—just by their dress.
Dress codes have changed since then and ...
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