OverDressed for Life

Keeping up with my interest in historic clothing and layering, I decided to make a tabard.

Tabards date back to the Middle Ages and are like long vests, but with no sleeves and no side seams. Sometimes a tab of fabric might have been attached at the waist to connect the back and front panels. Monks wore tabards (pictured right) as did the military and later, servants. In the early 18th century, fashionable women sported tabards made of embellished luxurious fabrics such as velvet (see image at the bottom).

I like the look of tabards and fashioned my own out of a loose weave cotton. The simple silhouette isn’t hard to construct; I simply cut the fabric, sewed the two panels together at the shoulders, and finished the edges. The trickiest part was cutting the neckline and that’s not perfect, but luckily it doesn’t ruin the piece. What worked out really well are the tabs, bojagi tabs.

Bojagi is traditional Korean wrapping cloth made out of scraps of fabric. What was an every day necessity is now an art form and the bojagi technique of exposed hand stitching is used for much more than wrapping cloth. I thought the patchwork of color in a medium weight silk would make an interesting addition.

I’m not sure how I will sport my tabard, but I know I’ll have fun creating outfits.

NOTE: Please excuse any blips or inconsistences in the images or the font. WordPress has recently changed their editor platform, which is causing problems.