Clothing Definitions — definitions of garments and clothing terms from Apparel Search
A draped garment is a garment that is made of unstitched cloth, held to the body by means of pins, fibulae or clasps, sashes or belts, tying, or friction and gravity alone. Many draped garments are one-piece garments: the cloth is woven to size and worn as it comes from the loom, its arrangement finished on the wearer's body each time it is put on. Examples of draped garments include traditional kilts and belted plaids, chitons, loincloths, togas, saris, sarongs and pareos. This page explains how draping works as a clothing system, what holds such garments up, and why the draped method dominated dress in much of the world before cut-and-sewn tailoring spread.
Examples of draped garments:
traditional kilts and belted plaids
chitons
pareos
| The above article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/draped_garment). Modified by Apparel Search 2/2/06 |
Draped and tailored clothing rest on opposite ideas. Tailoring cuts cloth into shaped pieces and sews them into a garment that keeps its form off the body; draping keeps the cloth whole and gives it form on the body, at the moment of wearing. The draped method wastes nothing — a rectangle of cloth is never cut, so it can be rewoven, resold or redraped — and one cloth can serve as garment, carrying wrap or bedding. Its cost is skill: a toga or sari arranged badly announces itself at once, and traditional cultures teach the draping of their garments as part of growing up.
The two systems also distribute decoration differently. In a draped garment, pattern is woven into the cloth itself — borders, stripes at the selvedge, checked plaids — because the cloth's edges will be its visible edges. In tailored clothing, decoration can be applied after construction. Reading a garment for which system made it — whole cloth arranged, or pieces cut and sewn — is the first step in understanding any historical or traditional dress, from the Greek chlamys and chiton to the wrapped dhoti and sari defined elsewhere in this section.
A draped garment is made of unstitched cloth held to the body by pins, fibulae or clasps, sashes or belts, tying, or friction and gravity alone. Many draped garments are one-piece garments, formed on the body from a single length of cloth.
Examples include the chiton and toga of the classical world, the sari, sarong and pareo, the loincloth, and traditional kilts and belted plaids. Each uses a different fastening — pins for the chiton, a belt and pleating for the plaid, wrapping and tucking for the sari and sarong.
By the fastening named in the definition: pins, fibulae and clasps at the shoulders, sashes and belts at the waist, knots and tying, or the friction of wrapped cloth combined with gravity. The skill of wearing a draped garment is the arranging — the same cloth can be draped formally or simply depending on how it is folded and secured.