The "elbow hinge" tailoring of the Charles de Blois cotte Applying it to close-fitting sleeves on masculine and feminine gowns

The well-preserved, so-called "pourpoint of Charles de Blois", found today in the Musée des Tissus in Lyon, France, has been remarkably under-studied by clothing historians. There exist many recopies of the original pattern diagram published by Adrien Harmand in his Jeanne d'Arc et ses costumes, son armure: Essai de reconstitution, from 1929, but very little detailed discussion of the tailoring techniques used to create this extraordinary garment.

One particularly noteworthy tailoring technique employed on this close-fitting garment is a two-section sleeve pattern that I like to call the "elbow hinge", as it gives the wearer a skin-tight fit through the arm while maintaining built-in bend-ability at the elbow. The original Blois cotte's sleeve pattern looks like this (if we're to believe Harmand and all his copiers):

The top portion, the much-celebrated but little-understood grande assiette, is the subject of this other page. The bottom portion, however, is the focus here. It lends modern-day historical clothing sleuths a method for tightening our fashionably-buttoned late 14th- and early 15th-century sleeves while also providing built-in room to fully bend the elbow. The diagram below shows what the pattern would look like if you connect the two vertically-cut pieces and take out the wrist cuff (a tailoring element which can be added or left out, depending on one's preferred time,place, and the sex of the clothing).

This piece (when adjusted for size and shape of forearm) attaches to the upper portion of a sleeve, giving the effect of built-in space for the bent elbow.

The pattern above is for the left arm, as the placement of the buttonholes on the right side will create a downward-facing flap over the buttons, seen often in the art of the times and also on the Charles de Blois cotte itself.

This is a back view of the left arm on the Charles de Blois cotte. The red dotted line makes clear how the pattern piece appears in 3-D form. Note the backward-facing (or downward-facing, depending on position of the arm) buttonhole flap.

To apply this patterning technique on any close-fitting sleeve with button closures, observe the following:

These pattern pieces are the result of fitting cloth directly on the left arm of Sheree, the model for the gown fittings found in this web site's section on bust-supportive fitting techniques. The top pattern piece is a typical s-curve sleeve cap, which means that the vertical seam traveling down the arm will begin on the back of the arm and go to just above the pointiest part of the elbow. This kind of tailoring allows the button closures to lay in the best place for fashionable visibility as well as least physical impediment. This sort of tailoring is found on clothing for both men and women of the time. The bottom piece is a real-life example of how differently-shaped someone's arm can be in comparison to the original Charles de Blois cotte's lower sleeve pattern. The stars and asterisks are recommended so that you can keep track of how to match the pattern pieces up to each other, since they are both asymmetrical.

For the straight-front-seam gown I sewed for Sheree, we decided on tight, buttoned sleeves. To get an exact match to her arms, I pinned fabric around her arms to get the pattern above.

The final sleeve pattern, when pinned/sewed together, looked like this:

This is the inside view of the sleeve pieces connected at the elbow.	This is the general shape of the sleeve, with the vertical seam pinned.	This is the back view of the sleeve, also pinned and clearly showing the accommodation of the elbow.

The final sleeve works nicely and does not draw a lot of attention to the horizontal seam across the middle of the arm.

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Copyright © 2004–2009 Tasha Kelly McGann. The author of this work retains full copyright for this material, except the excerpt from the Harmand book and the photographic images of the Charles de Blois cotte. Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this document for non-commercial private research purposes provided the author's name, the copyright notice, and this permission notice are preserved on all copies. Linking to this site is allowed without permission. Questions and comments can be directed to tasha@cottesimple.com.