Kansanpukujen perivihollinen ja innokas vainooja
Abstrakti
In the 17th century dress in accordance with estate and class was underscored in sumptuary legislation concerning Sweden and Finland that followed European examples. These Statutes mainly concerned the dress of the clergy and the burghers, for the nobility regarded fashionable dress as its sole prerogative. The import of certain luxury goods was banned and there was also restrictions on the import of foreign fabrics through import bans and mandatory stamping. In 1733 a collection of regulations was published in Finnish translation containing the orders on the dress of the common people and hired labour given in the Statutes from 1720-1733 . The clergy's struggle against worldliness and new fashions was also reflected in Nordic broadsheet poems attacking the vices of 17th-century people.
In the province of Satakunta in West Finland, the revival movement of the so-called older Pietism, known as the Prayer Movement, merged with the official position of the Evangelical-Lutheran Church. In the first decades of the 19th century, the dress of the supporters of this layman-led revival was required to demonstrate who belonged to the movement. During the 1810s- 1820s Finland had three major centre of religious revival. In North Savo, a popular revival that had begun in 1796 was still under way, with Paavo Ruotsalainen becoming its leader. In South Savo and Central Finland there was also a lay-led revival movement. In Northern Karelia, the activities of Henrik Renqvist (Kukkonen) assistant pastor to the vicar of Liperi parish launched a movement known as Karelian Prayer Movement or Renq vistianism. In the Kajaani region, Pietism followed the same lines as in Savo. The leaders of the Savo Pietists would arrive each year for the market at Kajaani and their manner of dress became known in the region. The Pietists were said to have followed the orders of their leaders, tearing up their old clothes and altering their dress to stand out from their worldlier contemporaries. The women had long pleats or tails (Fi. körtti) at the back of their jackets. Unlike in Savo, the men's jacket with an upright collar did not have tails. In 1835, Elias Lönnrot published a series of articles on the Pietists of Kajaani in the Helsingfors Morgonblad newspaper, which aroused a great deal of attention and protests.
The körtti costume with short tails, an integral feature of the Pietist revival in Savo, spread along with the movement into Ostrobothnia despite the fact that it was initially opposed by the Pietist clergy. This type of costume is known to have been first used in the Kalajoki River valley in the chapelric of Pyhäjärvi on the border with the province of Savo. A law suit against the Pietists was raised at Kalajoki in 1838. Charges involved, among other matters, a large religious meeting held at Nivala, where Paavo Ruotsalainen was also present. The körtti costume, a feature shared by the Pietists, particularly gave occasion for offence. The costume also spread into the Swedish-speaking regions of Ostrobothnia and around the same time there were legal proceedings against Pietists at Uusikaarlepyy.
In Southern Sweden the followers of Jacob Otto Hoof's revival movement avoided, like the Pietists, colourful and especially red fabrics. The men of the movement wore a jacket with a stand-up collar, while the women had a dark jacket and a skirt with blue stripes. As late as 1914, the dress of the Pietists was regarded as attire of the peasant and farmer class.
The Laestadian revival, which began in 1846, evolved into a joint movement of the Finns, Swedes, Norwegians and Sami of the North Calotte region. Lars Levi Laestadius was vicar of Kaaresuvanto and did not wear clerical costume, only simple grey heavy wooll en clothes, mocked the dress of his parishioners, both common people and members of the upper class, with irony and metaphors in his strongly worded sermons.
Also in Karelia, the clergy interfered with the way in which the common people dressed. Immediately upon taking office as chaplain of Kaukola Parish in 1867, Fredrik Wilhlem Brander is remembered as having ended the custom of young girls wearing the red säppäli headband and the sykerö hair piece of rolled plaits. Henrik Renq vist was appointed chaplain of Sortavala in 1835, and during his term it was officially declared that women were to wear aprons to church, which had not been previously customary in the parish. In 1770 in Jaakkima Pastor Thomas Hulkovius ordered the men of the parish to end their bad habit of taking off their caftans in church and following divine service in their shirtsleeves, which he said was unseemly in House of the Lord. In 1816 Pastor Fabian Bergstein of Jääski forbade the wearing of birch-bark shoes to church. Despite this, the women of Kirvu still wore these shoes in 1829 in winter and on their way to church. While serving as supernumerary pastor at Kirvu in 1865 and 1866, Alexander Johan Kuldan ordered the local girls to stop wearing the sykerö hair piece. The chaplains of Antrea and Pyhäjärvi and their families, on the other hand, supported the wearing of traditional costume. Those who could not make the lace for their aprons would buy them ready-made from the daughters of Pastor Johan Reinhold Winter (1834-1858), the chaplain of Antrea Parish. The daughters of Peter Johan Relander (1840-1866), chaplain of Pyhjärvi Parish made apron lace and fringes for the hems of the handkerchiefs for those unable or lacking the time to do so.
Dress according to estate and class extended to colours, which had a socially classificatory role expressed above all as the difference between the upper classes and the common people. There were class-related colours of a kind, with black worn by the clergy, frieze-cloth grey by the common people, and blue by the nobility and as a colour of honour by the broadcloth-uniformed army of Charles XII of Sweden. The author Zachris Topelius noted the dim boundary between the frieze jacket and the broadcloth coat. According to Elias Lönnrot, who rose to the educated class, upper-class dress was not suited to the common people. In 1848 Lönnrot published the verses of the folk poet Paavo Korhonen who sought to improve the habits of the people by pointing to the vanity of shiny buttons and blue colour in popular dress at Rautalampi. Frieze grey remained the emblem of the people of North Savo until the late 19th century.
