Reuse of Garments and Accessories of Latgalian Clothing in the 19th Century (Q1066)

This paper studies how items of traditional clothing in Latgale were reused and therefore were not collected by museums, as well as what effect this had on the formation of the museum collections and what has to be considered when researching traditional Latgalian dress. It analyses evidence of reused garments and repurposed accessories when they were outworn or out of fashion. It is based on a thorough examination of the interviews carried out by the ethnographers of the Monument Board in 1925, 1926, 1937, and 1943, drawings, photographs and garments stored at the National History Museum of Latvia, Archives of Latvian Folklore, as well as interviews carried out by Ieva Pigozne in 2017. This paper reveals one part of the results of the postdoctoral research project “Development of Folk Dress in Latgale in the 19th Century” funded by The European Regional Development Fund. This paper concludes that Latgalian peasant’s festive clothing was usually worn as everyday clothing when it was worn out; many garments were reused as leg wraps or nappies for babies. Footwear was worn as long as possible or kept for funerary attire. Thus there was rarely anything left to be collected by the museums in the first half of the 20th century. Such popular accessories as woollen sashes were usually repurposed and were used as decorative gift wraps, for lowering a coffin into the grave during the funeral, tying babies or as upper parts of slippers. Sashes were still made and kept in many homes till the World War II but they were not used for holding the ladies’ skirts as in the first half of the 19th century. Abundance of sashes contributed to creation of a misconception that they were used together with traditional clothing and thus to unfounded formation of sets of Latgalian traditional clothing.