Made to measure

Significant attention is paid to the high quality of the seams on all Guillem’s garments, from his undergarments to his bliaut to his hat to his form-fitting chausses. Readers living in the era of mechanized industrial stitching may take seams for granted, but achieving uniformity in hand stitching demands practice, care, and time. Making hand stitches lie smooth and flat is also a challenge, requiring the needleworker to maintain overall control of the whole drape of the garment while manipulating the needle and thread. Good stitching is the mark of the consumer who can afford it, and with the discernment to distinguish the good work from the mediocre. It is a sign of someone who cares enough to spend the time to seek out the best. The Paris metier statutes uphold the importance of good stitching for professions such as the chauciers and embroiderers, requiring double thread and small stitches (“petiz poins souffisant”).184

The passage’s emphasis on Guillem’s choice of specific, high-quality fabrics further underscores his distinction. His undergarments were made of a “muslin” from Reims; his bliaut was of eastern siglaton silk;185 his chausses were silk embroidered with flowers, a doubly rich choice, showing taste both in fabric and in decoration; even his cap was fine linen, rather than more common hemp, and was carefully textured in silk. As will be discussed in Chapter 6, fine new garments were not bought ready-to-wear but required a complex process of choosing fabrics from a draper or mercer, then notions and trim, and having them cut by a tailor and sewn by his assistants or stitchers (couturiers) or a seamstress in the household.186 Fabric selection was an area where personal taste could be exercised. It is emphasized that Guillem’s invisible underwear was of a specific kind of fabric: “toile de Reims.” The addition of a specific place name adds to the prestige of a textile or other object. Specificity increases fashionable value by creating categories of distinction. It was not simply toile, ordinary plain weave; it was woven in a place worth mentioning. It was fabric that had made a journey in order to enter the hands of a knight from Nevers currently residing in Bourbon. The rhetoric of a fashion system requires that choices be made conspicuous (criterion 6). Specifics about fabric, weave, dye, and provenance all provide a lexicon for advertising evidence of choice.

It is interesting that the description begins not with what would be most visible, but with Guillem’s underwear (“camis’e bragas”), which would have been almost entirely concealed by the other garments described. The chemise and braies were generally not a publicly visible part of an ensemble before the fifteenth century.187 Describing them shows attention to detail, particularly intimate details, since Guillem hopes Flamenca will see his fine undergarments when she commits to the liaison they have arranged. This passage represents the second glimpse of his undergarments in the text. He was shown in an earlier passage standing at his window staring towards her tower in a state of undress: “em braias fon et en camisa” (he was in braies and a chemise, line 2191), with a mantle draped over his shoulders. Nudity was rarely represented in this period, and rarely favorably. Showing a character in the relative undress of the chemise seems to have been one of the more titillating poses an author could choose for a character. Women in bed or making love in romances were often said to be “naked in a chemise.”95 Regnier-Bohler has argued that in the romance tradition, masculine nudity is less charged with desire than feminine nudity. Given the particularly well-developed sensuality of Flamenca, however, the unusual glimpses of Guillem’s undergarments are probably intended to heighten the atmosphere of seduction. They are suggestive of what he will be like as a lover, following the principle that fashionable consumption heightens attractiveness (criterion 9). In short, Guillem’s underclothes show that if he were peeled like an onion, each layer removed would only reveal another level of good taste. He was seductive to the core.

The passage as a whole suggests that a display of personal style and good taste were considered to be of the first order of necessity for the successful fin’amant, a hypothesis confirmed by Flamenca’s reaction. She says to Guillaume,

Bel[s] segner, mais Dieus m’a cobit qu’ieu si’ab vos, ja non dires quan de mi vos departires que perdas ren per mon autrei, quar tam bell e tan gent vos vei, e tan cortes e tan adreg que per fin’Amor et per dreg aves mon cor lonc tems avut, e ve. us lo cors aissi vengut per vostre plazer autrejar.96

Handsome lord, since God granted

That I be with you, you may never say,

When you take leave of me,

That you have lost anything by my consent,

For I find you so handsome and so elegant

And so courtly and so refined

That by True Love and by right

You have had my heart for a long time,

And here is my body which has come here

To grant you your pleasure.

She consents to trust him with her body based on his handsome, elegant, noble appearance. This romance demonstrates cointerie’s high potential for soliciting positive reinforcement (see Chapter 4). The young man who stages himself as 188 189 a nobleman of impeccable style and taste is promised a great reward: love and sexual gratification from the most beautiful of women. Whether women regularly behaved this way is less important than the existence of discourses promoting an ideology of socially advantageous care for personal appearance. There is certainly a discourse of distinction present in whatever occitan court milieu produced this extraordinary manuscript. Men were encouraged to fantasize about the positive effects of fashionable appearance.

As a parody of French literary (and, it could be argued, fashionable) conventions, Flamenca represents an apotheosis, a non plus ultra of vestimentary scenes occurring regularly in its Gld French precursors. For instance, amadas’s valet dressed him in distinctive items whose careful, individual tailoring is emphasized:

Garines l’a mult bien caucie D’unes cauces bien decaupees,

De noir et de vermel bendees,

Mult bien seantes a son voel;

Si ot lasnieres ou braioel,

Qui n’estoit pas povre ne vis..

Garinet dressed him very well

In well tailored chausses

Trimmed in black and red,

With a very flattering fit, to his pleasure;

And he had ties around his braies

Which were not at all cheap or vile. . .

Cut-to-measure garments are viewed as similarly flattering in Enfances Vivien, for instance, where the title character is dressed sumptuously by his bourgeois adoptive father in imported silk from “outre mer” sewn with a design in gold thread, all made to measure (“a sa mesure bien taillie et ovre,” lines 868-74). These clothes brought out his innately noble looks: “Molt par fu beaus, cointes et acesmes” (he looked thoroughly handsome, stylish and well-dressed, line 883).