Civil War fashion comes to life

WINSTED — East Haddam actress Kandie Carle took her audience on a voyage through fashion history as she presented her program “Civil War Fashion” on Saturday, Jan. 18, at the Beardsley and Memorial Library.Thirty residents attended the program, in which Carle talked about what men and women wore in the Civil War era.“People are interested in what people wore in the past because they are so different from what we wear today,” Carle said. “We also have a bunch of made-up people in novels which are about different eras. Three things tie us together to people throughout history: We all have to eat, we all have to have shelter and we all have to wear something. Although clothes have been shrinking quite a bit in our era.”Carle said that what fascinates her about clothing from the Civil War era is its understructure, which helped to support the outer look of what people wore.“Back then, it was all about the underwear,” she said. “People wore clothes in layers, plus there was plenty of space people took up when they wore these clothes. Posture was also quite important in fashion during that era. There is very little posture going on today. I don’t think the clothes from this era gives us any posture support, unlike fashion from the Civil War era.”Wearing Civil War-period clothing, Carle said she developed her historical fashion programs after being influenced by her grandmother. “On my 12th birthday, my grandmother gave me a beaded handbag that had belonged to her grandmother,” she said. “It came all the way from Czechoslovakia. She also gave me a stack of photographs which were all black and white. I said, ‘What a bunch of funny looking people.’ These were the pictures that looked like they came out of history books and they are all staring back at you. They were funny looking people in funny looking costumes.”Carle said that her grandmother told her that the photographs were of her great grandmother from the 1890s.“She was only 3 years old when she immigrated from Bohemia in 1878,” Carle said. “These photographs were of strong farm folks who looked nice. But they all looked funny because they didn’t look anything like me. When I talked to my grandmother about these pictures, it planted a seed in me. So when I was in school and looking through the history books, I did not see stoic and uptight-looking people. What I saw was real people, they just looked different from me.”Carle said that through many years of research, she now has more than 275 volumes in her library based on anything Victorian and Edwardian, including books on clothing, lifestyles and etiquette. In July, Carle brought a program to the library on Regency fashion in Jane Austen novels.When it comes to historical research, Carle said she trusts books more than she trusts Hollywood movies, despite the fact that movies offer clearer imagery.“Just because something happened in ‘Gone With The Wind’ doesn’t mean it really happened that way,” Carle said. “The only thing that we can be sure of in the movie ‘Titanic’ is that the ship sank.”“Everything that I brought with me today is as non-anachronistic as I can get,” Carle said. “I dressed up as a woman who would be going to the library from that era would look like. Which means no velcro, no spandex, no pantyhose and no zippers.”During the first part of her program, Carle removed a robe to reveal authentic 150-plus-year-old women’s underwear, known as drawers, that she was wearing.She told the audience that she was wearing a body stocking under her drawers to protect it from any sweat.Carle said that while the drawers seemed to be quite heavy for underwear in today’s society, she said that today’s popular underwear styles would probably go out of style many years from now.“What is the point of thongs?” she joked with the audience. “We should all go out and buy thongs and put them in a drawer. In a hundred years from now, someone is going to go into that drawer and go ‘Oh look! Great-grannie had a slingshot in her underwear drawer!’”Carle then went about dressing herself in the same way someone from the late 1800s would, including putting on stockings, garters, and with some help from an audience member, a corset and her dress.As she showed, it was not easy, with an audience member helping Carle fit into and tie up the corset.By the time her program ended, Carle looked like a woman in one of the Civil War pictures she talked about at the beginning.However, before it ended, she took one more shot at Hollywood movies, criticizing the movie “Lincoln” for historical inaccuracies.“The concept that people get their history from movies is troublesome,” Carle said. “We have come a long way in being historically accurate. But for instance, the way they portrayed Elizabeth Keckley in ‘Lincoln’ was wrong. She was not a maid, but if you walk out of the movie and you didn’t know any better you would think she was the Lincoln family’s maid. So many movie reviewers said that, in their reviews, that she was a maid.”Carle pointed out that Elizabeth Keckley was, in reality, a former slave who became a successful seamstress, businesswoman, dressmaker and friend to Mary Todd Lincoln.“Just because [movie director] Steven Spielberg did not put in three or four words identifying her, everybody who doesn’t know walks out of that movie thinking that she was Mary Todd Lincoln’s maid,” Carle said. “Don’t get your history from movies.”Carle encouraged the audience to study history at the library instead.