I was recently told in no uncertain terms that the next outfit I made for myself I had to able to sit, bend over, and run in without blowing out stitches or complaining about being uncomfortable. To that end, I've decided that, as soon as I finish my wife's new dress, I need to have something to match it.
I went back to the same sources that provided the meat of the images for the dress, the paintings of Pieter Brueghel the Elder and Pieter Aertsen. The variety of garments on the men is as great in these paintings as that of the women, if not more so. Millia Davenport comments that these Flemish peasants display a "thrift bordering on poverty" in the maintenance and re-use of their garments. There are hose, breeches, socks, shirts, doublets,vests, jackets, and coats in a wide variety of styles and colors.
In looking for a distinctive garment for this outfit, my eye was first drawn to these short jackets in Brueghel's wedding scene. Though they are shown on a piper and a man serving food, I don't imagine that this is any sort of "servant's attire"; these men seem to be the peers of those they are serving. The most perplexing feature on these jackets is the row of lacing holes on the lower edge. Both men display points dangling from beneath their doublets, leading one to believe that their hose are pointed to some other garment. So what purpose do the holes on these red jackets serve? Are they simply normal doublets being worn as an extra outer layer? Are there some outer breeches that point to them?
I next went to look at these coats with pleated skirts, worn open in front. They strongly resemble the closed-front garments seen in the nobility of some decades earlier. The black coat (from Brueghel's indoor wedding scene) is the most interesting of these three. Like the other men in this dance, he is holding back the skirts of his outer garment with his hands, but one side of the coat is coming forward past his right hand, showing a waistline similar to the red jackets of the wedding servers. This leads me to wonder if the skirts of these coats might be pointed onto this short jacket. The top edge of the skirt would have to be fairly sturdy to hold up the weight of the pleated fabric without gapping between points, but the points seem fairly close together on the red jackets.
Lending some credence to this theoretical construction is this Aertsen market scene. Here we see another open grey coat with pleated skirts. It shows a little more embellishment than the other examples, with a tabbed treatment along the edges. What is most interesting here is the tabbed edge at the waist, implying that the skirt is somehow separate from and attached to the upper portion of the garment. This sort of construction echoes other contemporary doublet and hose attachments. There are no points visible, but I propose that the waistline of the skirt is placed with its top edge in line with the bottom edge of the upper jacket (or lacing strip, as in this case), so that the skirt falls down over the points.
This is all of course conjecture, and counter-arguments are heartily encouraged.
After all this peering at peasant paintings, I went back to look in the old Book of Costume. Ms. Davenport informs me that, in the early 16th century, "with the advent of pleated bases, separate and often interchangeable skirts to the jacket, the doublet and jacket become less easy to differentiate." She makes specific reference to the waffenrock, a quilted and pleated skirt, of which there is a picture of an extant example. The waffenrock is a military garment, however, and while military dress is often incorporated into civilian clothing, I haven't been able to find any definitive examples of the bases being separate in civilian dress. This does not mean it isn't the case, of course. The question has now moved into the "mock it up and see if it looks right" stage.
