A Genuese outfit from the 1330s

This outfit is based on a leaf from a treatise on vices, owned/comissioned by the Cocharelli family in Genoa c. 1330-1340. This particular leaf is at the Cleveland Museum of Art (link to the manuscript leaf and a high resolution view of the illustration above). A few other pages have been preserved and most of them are at the British Library (link).

The motif is queen Accidia, personifying Melancholy, who can't even be enthusiastic over board games :)

The text at the Cleveleand museum of Art stresses Islamic influences in the textiles, and in the jeweled headdresses of all women except Accidia. They do not mention the gowns worn by the women as specifically ifluenced by Islamic culture, which is wise, since both the type of garments worn together and the way that they are decorated are found in many images from late 13th to mid- 14th century Italy.

I have already written about Italian gowns with high waists, belted and with seams (as well as making one of silk and one of cotton).
Blog post 1.
Blog post 2.
Silk gown
Cotton gown

So high waist seams are definitely something seen in Italy at this time.
The placement on the trim of the two non-striped highwaisted gowns is also rather common, I have given a few examples in this blog post.

As for the headdresses being Islamic inspired I don't know enough about Islamic dress to say anything about it, but one can note that wearing your coronet/crown tilted back is not that uncommon in 14th century Italian art.The added jeweled band seems a little odd though. As for now I'm just wearing a "gold" ribbon with faux pearls and glass bead (a post about it here).


The fabric
I had to look around for a while to find striped brocade, because I didn't feel much like piecing together two brocades to make stripes. To my great joy I found it at Vedah Designs on Etsy, and promptly bought all of it :) I also got lining there, because you don't want to wear unlined brocade with those floating metal threads on the back of the fabric.

The lining is a shot silk mix in bright pink and saffron yellow.

While I do make a lot of my costumes by hand, brocades with metallic threads have a tendency to unravel faster than I can sew, so this the pieces for this costume were zig-zagged as soon as they were cut. They were then assembled by machine, though hemming was made by hand,a s well as sewing on all that trim.

The cotte
The first layer (except obviously, the shift) was a cotte/kirtle, which was also fully lined in the saffron silk mix.

The cut was simple: rectangular pieces with triangular gores at the sides and set in sleeves. There is gold trim around the neck, wrists and armscyes, and along the seam on the back of the sleeve.

The surcoat
The surcoat has a short bodice, cut over the bust, not under it - a long discussion about that can be found on the page that I made for my teal 14th century Italian overgown. The skirt pieces are simple rectangles  and the gown is split front, back and at the sides.