I’ve been planning on making an 18th century man’s ensemble to go with the Lady Anne Darcy dress for ages.

I started one almost two years ago, but it got set aside in favour of other projects.

The Grandeur & Frivolity talk was the perfect excuse to pull it out again and finish it, but things didn’t go that easily.

First of all, the jacket didn’t look that grand when I fished it out of the bag that it was crumpled in and ironed it:

Not that grand. OK, showing it on Isabelle doesn't help.

Clearly some taking it apart and re-shaping and interfacing is in order.

That was do-able.

Making sleeves out of thin air wasn’t though.  And I mean ‘thin air’ literally.  I can’t find the extra fabric from this jacket anywhere.

And then the waistcoat didn’t fit Daniil, the model for the talk.  And I hated the squidgy synthetic fabric it was made out of.

So basically, all of the stuff that I started with got stuffed back in the bag it came from, and I restarted.

I’m using this suit from Tiden’s Toj as my main inspiration piece:

Man's suit, Tidens Toj

My reasons for this are simple:

1. I have enough sky blue duchesse silk satin to make a jacket, but not enough to make matching breeches and waistcoat, so the coloured jacket/white waistcoat and breeches works well.
2. Minimal embroidery means that if I do a good enough job on the jacket, I can contemplate embroidering it myself without being completely overwhelmed by the task.

I’ll be making a few changes to the outfit.  I’m going to do a double-button front to the breeches, and tweak a few other things to make the date a little earlier than the Tidens Toj outfit.  The jacket I already started is definitely 1780s, and having an earlier example will make my mens wardrobe more flexible.  It will be subtle, and only myself and other historical freaks will notice, but it will make me happy.

So look out for more blog posts about this in the coming days!