MAPLEWOOD, NJ — Gabriela Salvador had never sewed before when she decided to dive into Victorian-era fashion and recreate it for herself.
The Maplewood resident has been researching and recreating clothing from the 1800s for more than a decade, a hobby that has taken on a life of its own in the form of a YouTube channel where Salvador posts video tutorials to show viewers how to make the clothes themselves. The channel evolved a little more than a year ago from a blog she wrote.
“I had never sewed or anything, but I was interested in art history,” Salvador said in a phone interview with the News-Record on Jan. 31. “This was at the dawn of the blogging world online, so I wasn’t the only one. There were suddenly lots and lots of costume and cosplay bloggers, and they were posting all of this information online. I learned a lot from that.”
Salvador has settled into one period of time, the early 19th century, from which she concentrates on recreating. She tries to incorporate new skills she picks up along the way into the projects she works on, which she models after whatever old photographs she can find or after paintings from the era. A project manager who works in financial technology, Salvador is very analytical and data driven, which helps with her research. By the 1830s, when printing was more common, home sewing manuals had become household items.
“The sewing terminology is very different and the language is very different, but there are some recognizable pieces,” Salvador said. “The book is designed for home sewers, so it has some very simple, basic tutorials.”
A drawback to the historical sewing manuals is that there are some basic instructions that are missing; written for home sewers in the 1800s, the books assume that the people already knew how to make the basics. But they can also fill in the gaps to the patterns that Salvador can’t figure out by looking at a painting: inside seams and undergarments, for example.
A project can take anywhere from months to years for Salvador to complete, depending on what it is and how comfortable she is with the skills required to make it. She does a combination of hand sewing and machine sewing.
“Some people are on one part of the spectrum where they want to hand sew everything for maximum historical accuracy,” Salvador said. “Some people are on the other side, where they machine sew everything for maximum speed and efficiency. I land somewhere in the middle, where, if I’m copying a garment that is from after the 1860s or 1870s, I’ll machine sew most of it because the sewing machine was a popular household item. But there was still a lot of hand-sewn ruffles, so those pieces I still do by hand. It’s impossible for me to get them to look nice on the machine.”
In recreating the clothes of a time in the past, Salvador has been able to learn much more about the historical context from which they came. Unfortunately, that includes a lot of negative aspects of the past: cotton became more prevalent at one point because of the slave labor that made it cheaper, and the sewing manuals are filled with racial slurs and stereotypes. The rise of industrial industries devalued the women who were doing the bulk of the sewing and textile work, which had effects that reverberated across centuries.
“I was the kind of person who was really bored in history class. I could never remember who was the king or queen and this and that,” Salvador said. “But learning about people of the past in the context of their clothing has really helped. It just makes them seem more human, and I think it’s a great learning tool.”
But the fun that comes out of Salvador’s sewing is the final product. Salvador wears regular, modern clothes most of the time, though she has found that Victorian-era undergarments make excellent pajamas. She’s a member of the New York Historical Costumer Society, a group whose members dress up in their historical garb on museum trips, picnics and other history-themed events.
“Even the most basic petticoats bring me so much satisfaction,” Salvador said. “There’s something so satisfying about the waistcoats and the swish of the hem. I’ve worked on a variety of simple and more complex things in the past two years, but they’re all things that bring me a lot of joy, and everything has tested my skills and abilities in different ways. Overall, I think I’ve really grown a lot.”
Salvador’s YouTube channel can be found at www.youtube.com/c/PourLaVictoire1.
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