Sleeve

The Sleeve as a Marker of Fashion

Few parts of a garment announce its period as quickly as the sleeve. The definition itself is simple - the part of a garment that covers the arm, or through which the arm passes or slips, a sense carried in its Old English origin, slieve or slyf, a word allied to slip - but the pattern of the sleeve is one of the characteristics of fashion in dress, varying in every country and period. Bodices and skirts change more slowly; sleeves can swell, narrow, shorten or disappear within a few seasons, and a portrait can often be dated by sleeve shape alone. Survivals of early forms persist where dress is deliberately conservative: the different types of academic and other robes still carry long, full or hanging sleeves that everyday fashion abandoned centuries ago. Where the long hanging sleeve is worn, as it has been in China and Japan, it has been used as a pocket, a practical second life for surplus cloth that also gave the language the phrase to have up one's sleeve, meaning to have something concealed ready to produce.

Other expressions record how closely sleeves are tied to feeling. To wear one's heart upon one's sleeve is to show emotion openly, and to laugh in one's sleeve is to hide amusement. A sleeve must also cover a limb that bends, reaches and rotates, so its pattern balances appearance against movement: ease over the elbow, room across the upper arm, and a hang that stays smooth whether the arm is raised or at rest.

Principal Sleeve Types and How They Are Cut

The named types sort largely by length, fullness and attachment. At the shortest extreme, the cap sleeve is a very short sleeve not extending below armpit level, little more than a cover for the shoulder point. The puffed or puff sleeve is a short, full sleeve gathered at the top and bottom, now most often seen on children's clothing. Longer full sleeves include the bishop sleeve, fuller at the bottom than at the top and gathered into a cuff, and the gigot, or leg of mutton, sleeve, extremely wide over the upper arm and narrow from the elbow to the wrist. The batwing sleeve has a very deep armhole and tapers towards the wrist, while the dolman sleeve is very wide at the top and narrow at the wrist, the two often confused but differing in how the fullness is cut. Historical forms include the hanging sleeve, which opens down the side or front, or at the elbow, to allow the arm to pass through, the paned sleeve made in panes or panels that let a lining or shirt-sleeve show through, and the Juliette sleeve, a long, tight sleeve with a puff at the top, inspired by Italian Renaissance fashion.

Attachment decides the tailored types. A set-in sleeve is sewn into an armhole, or armscye, and its round seam gives tailored jackets and dresses their structured shoulder. A raglan sleeve instead extends to the neckline, its diagonal seams freeing the shoulder and suiting sportswear and knitwear where movement matters. The two-piece sleeve, cut in two pieces, inner and outer, is shaped to take a slight L form that accommodates the natural bend at the elbow without wrinkling, and is used in tailored garments where a smooth, pre-bent hang is wanted. Read together, the types show the sleeve doing three jobs at once: covering the arm, signalling the fashion of its moment, and solving, in cloth, the geometry of a moving joint.