The clean, sober North
On the great plain running from the Netherlands to northern Germany, dress took after the country: flat, clean, without swagger. The Reformation passed through, and with it a taste for little colour and for an impeccable turnout. People dressed neat rather than rich.
It is also the region of Europe where folk dress survived longest, not out of folklore but out of religious conservatism. In Dutch villages like Volendam, Marken or Staphorst, the coiffe and apron were worn until yesterday, sometimes still today among the oldest.
The paradox is that this dress of discreet people became, with its pointed coiffe and clogs, the image the whole world holds of “Holland”. One village mistaken for a country.
The coiffe, an identity card
If there is a queen piece here, it is the starched lace coiffe. White, stiffened until it stands on its own, it changes shape from one region to the next: winged at Volendam, shell-shaped in Zeeland, laid over a metal helmet in Friesland.
This coiffe ranked a woman at first glance: her village, her religion, whether she was at a feast or in mourning. In Zeeland, a detail of the lace or the gold beneath was enough to say Catholic or Protestant. A whole civil status held on one head.
The upkeep, for its part, was a job in itself. Washing, starching, ironing, fluting with the iron: a coiffe took hours. You did not wear that lightly, and it showed.
The discreet gold under the lace
Sober does not mean poor. Under the lace, the region hides its gold. In Friesland, women wore the oorijzer, a metal band curved around the head, in solid gold for the richest, from which two bright buttons showed at the temples.
In Zeeland, it is gold spirals, the krullen, and heavy necklaces of red coral fastened with a gold plate. The number of strands, the size of the gold, all was counted and all was read. You put your fortune on your head and at your neck, and nowhere else.
It is an elegance well understood here: few pieces, but right ones, and the precious reserved for a single place. The opposite of glitter spread everywhere.
The clog, for wet ground
On the feet, a single answer to a waterlogged soil: the wooden clog, the klomp. Carved from a block of still-green poplar or willow, hollowed with a gouge, it insulates against the cold, takes no water and is replaced for next to nothing.
It was the work shoe par excellence, in the fields as in the byre. You had an everyday pair, muddy, and a Sunday pair, sometimes painted with flowers or carved for a wedding.
Nothing picturesque about it to begin with: just the right answer to a problem of terrain, made with the wood next door. That the clog has become a holiday souvenir takes nothing from its logic.
The Black Forest and its pompom hat
Not all of Germany is sober, happily. In a few valleys, costume kept its colour, and one of them became a picture-postcard image: the Bollenhut, that straw hat topped with big wool pompoms.
It comes from a tiny corner, three villages of the Gutach valley, in the Black Forest. The pompoms are red for girls of marrying age, black for married women. Eleven balls of wool, hand-sewn, that weigh their weight on the head.
It may as well be said plainly: this hat that the whole world takes for “the German costume” is originally worn only by a handful of families. It was the nineteenth-century painters, settled at Gutach, who made it famous. A cliché born of a brush.
What still holds
South-east of Berlin, in the marshes of the Spreewald, lives a small Slavic people, the Sorbs, an island of language in the middle of Germany. They have kept one of the liveliest costumes of the region: layered skirts, embroidered aprons and a huge starched coiffe tied into a butterfly.
It is still brought out for Easter, when riders in black habit make the round of the villages, and for weddings. Among the Sorbs as in the Dutch villages, the costume survives not in the museum but in a few hands that refuse to let go.
That is perhaps the lesson of this plain: a sober garment, well made, kept clean, lasts longer than a spectacular costume. It is passed on because it can still be worn.
