Personally, I think the tour is one of the most beautiful objects from this region, a typical country costume! Yes, in the Venlo carnival parade on Tuesday afternoon, the posh ladies in peasant clothes march along, but in Venlo people have always worn “city” clothes. Carnival turns the world upside down, that’s why. We find numerous examples of such “urban” clothing in our textile pavilion. I’m going to tell a story about that tour in a number of episodes in the context of “Closed but not locked”.
Just like today, almost 200 years ago, the young girls wanted to look as attractive as possible when they went out to party. So they tied a ribbon around the hat, which they had always worn. Every girl wanted to look even better and wanted to look a little different from her friends and so they started decorating that ribbon. In the long run, the ribbon became wider and more richly embellished with flowers and wads of ribbon and the ends were unraveled. This resulted in complete works of art with colourful flowers and ribbons at both ends. In the middle of the19th century, this grew into the characteristic tour of this region. A fine example of a tour is exhibited in the display case of the “best” room in our farmhouse.
A row consists of a piece of cardboard, covered with fabric. The decorations were attached to this fabric with coarse stitches. At each end, two ribbons hung exactly on top of each other. The most expensive ribbons were made of heavy silk, whether or not richly embroidered and monogrammed, the top ribbon was often made of hand-bobbin lace. The tour was an expensive piece of clothing, because of the amount of manual work, but also because it requires expensive and a lot of material. Hand-made lace has always been very expensive and when it is folded on top, it takes many meters. They were careful with it. The tour was also often inherited by will. Unfortunately, only a few tours have been preserved. They have been killed during carnival or left drenched in beer in a corner of the café.
To be continued!
Marlé de Laat