I remember reading a criticism of the TV show Vikings a while ago and one of the comments was on how 'junky' the clothing looked. The author mentioned how medieval people were perfectly capable of fine stitching and sewing.
So I was wondering, what kind of tools did Viking (or "general medieval") tailors use? Did they use metal needles or bone needles, and how thin were they able to get their needles? And how different was their tailoring from modern day tailoring (was it less advanced or about the same)?
They used fine steel needles. A Viking "tailor" was a woman, to whom her needles would be an expensive tool. Vikings could make thread as fine as that used to weave the fabric, because they came from the same drop-spindles. By using a "penny spindle" whose whorl was the size of a modern coin, one could spin very fine thread, especially in flax.
The tailoring is not really from the same planet. We're used to shaping clothing with a lot of curve-to-recurve shaped seams, an art developed in the mid-1300s in Europe. Before then, around the world most costume used narrow-loom square-cut styles, when they weren't just draping big pieces, like saris or togas.
Brun and Tilke's magnum opus on costume shows this a bit, and Max Tilke's solo book, rather than being long strips of figures, does a figure followed by drawings of the various garments laid down flat. I spent hours copying those drawings to find how the panels, gussets, and gores worked.
What it comes down to is a looser style that is often draped in spots, but is built of narrow widths rather than cut out of wide widths. They stay very flat off the body, which is why they were stored folded in chests rather than on hooks or clothes hangers. It's not less advanced: it's different. Someone trained in shaped tailoring just can't reproduce a lot of the styles without sticking in pleats that still don't really work. You have to re-train.
