From a historical perspective......

[Musicforsnorks]

How did people keep the rain off when clothing like in these photos was fairly standard? Or at least in rural parts.

Less people had vehicles (WW2 era? I am no fashion expert)
The elements will have been just as un-predictable, rainy and merciless as today, i presume.
Less central heating, access to modern gadgetry, and so on.

Theres lots of wool and heavy fabrics, im picturing margaret rutherford as miss marple here ❤️.......kinda like Toast and Margaret Howell style.

Its all very lovely but.....practical?
Do you think this resurgence in old-english country style is just a gimmick as opposed to an effort to bring back sustainable/quality pieces?
The images are by Holland & Holland from around 2016-ish.

What i mean is, the use of polyester in stuff like waterproof rain macs & wellies/skinnies when you are stuck up in cumbria through 8 months of rain keeps one a fair bit less damp than wrinkled lambswool socks and blazers.
But not as quaint or pretty!

I think that look is a very modern take on old fashion. Synthetic fabrics like polyester are really recent in the grand scheme of thing - sheepskin, leather, oilcloth etc would all be functional materials to make jackets out of. Even tweed can be quite hard wearing. Scott wore tweed in ten Antarctic - the photos are something

Ok I might have hallucinated Scott in tweed in the Antarctic bit I’m sure I’ve seen pics of mountaineers in teeed

By WWII they had rubber - waterproofs were often made of that at one point. And oilcloth/waxed cloth before that. I suspect they spent a lot of time being damp though.

People probably had a higher tolerance for discomfort and expected they’d be cold and wet at some point.

But they had outer layers - heavy coats or cloaks and capes with hoods. Great coats with layers of cape collars to channel the rain away and high collars were commonly worn by men. A large woollen shawl could do duty as a head protector.

Pretty much everyone wore hats and people still had gloves and scarves. Rubber rain boots were invented in the mud-1800s and umbrellas (to protect from the sun) have been around for thousands of years. Steel ribbed umbrellas were in invented about the same time as rubber rain boots.

I have no evidence, but I wonder if wool in earlier periods contained higher propetions of lanolin, which would help with water-proofing. I’m wearing a hand spun jumper now, and it has a whiff of lanolin about it - it’s also very thick and while it gets wet on the outside, tends to stay dry and warm in the inside.

Wool can be pretty waterproof when the lanolin is left in.

It would have taken an age for wet woollens to dry after washing too. Ive noticed a tremendous difference leaving wool items to dry in a house without central heating turned on. I dont mean slapped onto a heater, just in the same environment as the radiators.

Ive never been a fan of tweed and tend to find it too heavy, uncomfortable but i have been convinced that rain doesnt upset it too much.

I took a gander at that nice dogtooth wool coat currently in Toast, and imagined how often id even be able to wear it, considering not owning a vehicle and spending most days trudging with bags or my super shopping trundle. (i work from home).

My trundle is from ikea, polyester, plastic wheels, fabulous for dragging a heavy shop up and down hills.

Im thinking of all the exciting things you could sew to the inside of that Toast coat, though. Like a Dickensian spectre, or a walking curiosity shop!

Wonderful info, thank you!

Brolly’s dont last too well in gales though.

Special very tight weaves, eg gabardine, helped with water repelling qualities, as did applying extra lanolin to the yarn before weaving.

Burberry and Aquascutum were pioneers of waterproofing fabrics in the mid-19th century.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquascutum

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Burberry

Schoolchildren - including me - in the 1950s/60s all wore gabardine-type raincoats. Never got wet inside them, as long as they were buttoned up properly.

They used wool. It does have some waterproof properties, but keeps you warm or cool depending on the thickness. Once wet it gets very heavy. The army used woollen coats for soldiers in the trenches. They must have been impossible.

It would have taken an age for wet woollens to dry after washing too. Ive noticed a tremendous difference leaving wool items to dry in a house without central heating turned on. I dont mean slapped onto a heater, just in the same environment as the radiators

But proper, old fashioned wool coats, cloaks, etc. wouldn't have got as soaking wet as the modern woollens you're talking about.

In earlier eras (pre 19th century), coats and cloaks were made with dense weave and/or felted natural wool with lanolin left in, extra lanolin and often things like beeswax and honey worked into the wool (especially over the shoulders and hood that get most rain contact), and they would shed water like modern waterproofs. An absolute soaking would dampen the wool but not fully wet it, so it would usually dry overnight in a warmish room (coats and cloaks were usually left to dry near the fire).

They wouldn't be washed. Cleaning involved brushing and spot cleaning with water where needed. It's a useful feature of natural wool that it's self-cleaning: it has alkali salts along with the lanolin, which produces a form of soap when wet, so airing a damp garment is often enough. (Anyone who uses old school wool nappy covers might be familiar with this effect). Really heavy soiling might have necessitated washing areas of the garment with soap or other agents, and then working more lanolin back into the wool, but full immersion was avoided.

They were heavier: that's the main difference of old style wool compared to poly waterproofs. But their performance was similar.

I love mumsnet when clever women come on and tell me interesting stuff that I didn't know.

Me too! This is really interesting stuff.

Uniquehornsonly - thank you. Is this something you’ve studied, or teach? Your words create a vivid and fascinating sense of ‘being there’. A pleasure to read.😀

More please!

The original Guernsey sweaters were very tight knitted from thin wool, on fine needles, so they would have been dense and tight like a tweed, and the lanolin would not have been washed out. They were also knitted in parish patterns so if anyone was drowned at sea, the body would have been returned to the parish for identification, and families would have knitted in their own variations. Guernsey jumpers would have lasted 20 years of hard work at sea, and would have been handed down from father to son.

The original waxed cotton Barbour jacket, kept waxed (you don't bother too much about cleaning it, but a Karcher is good) and rewaxed, especially on the seams, is a very sturdy garment.

Music Thank you! It's something I've studied. The tiny details of social history and lifestyles fascinate me - it must come across!

(And nowhere better than MN to offload my largely useless knowledge )

Don’t forget about the old style
Fisherman’s coats which were wool, they must have got very wet but kept people dry

Xingming - ah i have always wanted a traditional guernsey. Closest i can find is a variant at toast, but i highly doubt it would be created to such a high standard.

Thanks again, and to uniquehorns only.
I think i am not alone in definitely wanting to hear more.

Also, wool when wet doesn't make you cold in the way that, say, wet cotton would. You do stay reasonably warm.

I have been finding this thread really interesting.

In the East Riding the sweaters that local fishermen would wear are called ganseys. I think that they are knitted with 5 needles to get the patterns.

You can buy ones from Flamborough at www.flamboroughmanor.co.uk/ganseys/ganseys.htm

They are still handknitted I think.

Did anyone watch Inside the Factory episode about making Barbour coats? They talked about the history a bit.

It's still on iPlayer. Though you do have to ignore Gregg Wallace pulling faces...

On a separate but slightly related note, I've always wondered where the heck Victorian ladies stored their gowns. All that fabric, layers and under skirting and general pouff for just one dress. It'd be like every dress you owned being a wedding dress. Even if they "only" owned five dresses. Where did they put them all?! Did they even fit in a wardrobe? All the wardrobes from Victorian (and even Edwardian/20s/40s wardrobes were tiny and they didn't have clothes rails in them, just little hooks).

And the bonnets/hats/gloves/corsets/bustles... all so big compared to jeans and a top/leggings and a vest/jumper and a small skirt.

Those dresses must have taken some storage. I know people had less clothes back in the day but even so.

This is exactly why people were a bit panic-y in books like Jane Austen about getting wet... stockings and shoes got wet quicker and took longer to dry out, there were no modern over-the-counter cold and flu drugs to keep temps down, antibiotics or inhalers for chest infection, no central heating to dry things out.

I grew up in a freezing very old house with parents who loathed putting the heating on. You got up and got washed and dressed ASAP grabbing layers and more layers. However, once a good fire was on for most of the day in the sitting room, the room itself was really boiling so would have dried things off well had we needed to (we did have a tumble dryer and normal outdoor clothes etc, it wasn’t 1875 or anything ).

Thanks for the information about wool and lanolin uniquehornsonly & Xingming. I had not realised that wool would be more waterproof then.

Birthdaydreamer I think the hoop was separate so the dress itself was easier to store. Although some dresses had built in crinolines, you could also get separate underskirts and petticoats to give the puffed out/bulky look.

Has anyone read Longbourn by Jo Baker? It’s based on Pride and Prejudice but told from the point of view of the servants in the Bennett household. They have a terrible time with housework and laundry - they get especially irritated when the Bennett girls go walking and return with damp and muddy shoes and skirts. You also get a real insight into the work servants had to do to get their employers ready for a ball. Those lovely swirly muslin and silk dresses and tumbling curls took a lot of work!

In the East Riding the sweaters that local fishermen would wear are called ganseys. I think that they are knitted with 5 needles to get the patterns.

I wonder if the knitting needles are really fine to produce a very tightly-knit jumper that would repel water? It would make sense for fishermen.

Knitting needles used to be really, really skinny - very much needles! - and would produce tiny stitches and a very dense knitted fabric. Chunky knits just weren't really used. Even a pair of wool socks would have thousands of tiny stitches each, so small that so you could hardly see the gap between stitches if you stretched it out to the max (which wasn't far - tight knits are not very stretchy). Knitting socks and stockings was very labour-intensive, so it was definitely worth your while darning any holes rather than knitting a new pair.

We tend to think of wool socks nowadays as thick and chunky, but that wasn't usually true. People used sometimes knit thicker socks for warmth in winter using a heavier yarn, but often - particularly for more wealthy people - hosiery were knitted with a very fine yarn. The end result was often a beautifully fine, thin knit that was fairly durable and helped keep your feet warm and dry. Wool still insulates when wet or damp, unlike plant-based fibres like cotton or linen.

The very wealthy, who never had to walk in the wet if they didn't want to, favoured silk instead of wool. It could be woven or knitted even finer than wool, and was still warm, but far more delicate.