The 16th century.
The new England of the 16th century breaks with the past in most of its
fashions. Never again does an Englishman return to the piked shoes. High
fashion under Henry VIII. is all for broad toes, so broad that the
sumptuary laws, from banning long toes, swing about to condemn excess in
the new guise. Under Henry VII. the medieval influence is still strong
in the body-clothing. A bravely dressed man will go in long hose, cut
close to the body, and a short vest under which the shirt is seen at
waist and wrist. Over this he will wear the open gown, lined with fur,
and cut short as a jacket but having the sleeves hanging below the knee.
Such sleeves are commonly slashed open at the sides to allow the forearm
to pass through. Shorter false sleeves of this pattern had become
popular in the age of Edward IV. Graver men will wear, in place of this
short gown, a long one dropping to the broad shoe-toes, the sleeves
wide-mouthed (fig. 37). Sometimes it hangs loosely; sometimes it has the
girdle with purse and beads. Notaries and scriveners add to the girdle a
penner, or pen-case, and a stoppered ink-bottle. Wide hats are found,
crowned with huge plumes of feathers, but the characteristic headgear is
that made familiar by portraits of Henry VII., a low-crowned cap whose
upturned brim is nicked at one side. A few sober men wear coats
differing little from the short gown of forty years before. Among ladies
the butterfly head-dress and the steeple cap passed out of fashion, and
a grave headgear comes in which has been compared with a dog-kennel, a
hood-cap thrown over head and shoulders, the front being edged with a
broad band which was often enriched with needlework, the ends falling in
lappets to the breast. This band is stiffened until the face looks out
as from the open gable-end of a house. The gown is simple in form,
close-fitting to the body, the cuffs turned up with fur and the skirts
long. A girdle is worn loosely drawn below the waist, its long strap
letting the metal pendant fall nearly to the feet. Long cloaks, plainly
cut, are gathered at the neck with a pair of long cords, like tasselled
bell-pulls. While Henry VIII. is spending his father's hoards we have a
splendid court, gallantly dressed in new fashions. His own broad figure,
in cloth of gold, velvet and damask, plaits, puffs and slashes, stiff
with jewels, is well known through scores of portraits, and may stand
for the high-water mark of the modes of his age. The Hampton Court
picture of the earl of Surrey is characteristic of a great lord's dress
of a somewhat soberer style (see fig. 38). The king, proud of his own
broad shoulders, set the fashion to accent this breadth, and it will be
seen that the earl's figure, leaving out the head and hose, all but
fills a perfect square. Such men have the air of playing-card knaves.
Surrey's cap is flat, with a rich brooch and a small side-feather. His
short doublet of the new style is open in front to show a white shirt
covered with black embroidery whose ruffles cover his wrists. His
over-garment or jerkin has vast sleeves, rounded, puffed and slashed.
Under the doublet are seen wide trunk-breeches. He goes all in scarlet,
even to the shoes, which are of moderate size. The girdle carries a
sword with the new guard and a dagger of the Renascence art, graced with
a vast tassel. All is in the new fashion, nothing recalling the earlier
century save the hose and the immodest _braguette_ which, seen in the
latter half of the fourteen-hundreds, is defiantly displayed in the
dress and armour of this age of Henry VIII. Even the hair follows the
new French mode and is cropped close. Other fashionable suits of the
time give us the tight doublets, loose upper sleeves and trunk hose as a
mass of small slashes and puffs, a fashion which came in from the
Germans and Switzers whom Henry saw in the imperial service. Such
clothing goes with the shoes whose broad toes are slashed with silk, and
the wide and flat caps with slashed edges, bushed with feathers, which
headgear was often allowed to hang upon the shoulders by a pair of
knotted bonnet-strings, while a skull-cap covered the head. With all
this fantasy the dress of simpler folk has little concern, and a man in
a plain, short-skirted doublet, with a flat cap, trunk breeches, long
hose and plain shoes, has nothing grotesque or unserviceable in his
attire. The new sumptuary laws, which were not allowed to become a dead
letter, had their influence in restraining middle-class extravagance. No
man under a knight's degree was to wear a neck-chain of gold or gilded,
or a "garded or pinched shirte." Brooches of goldsmith's work were for
none below a gentleman. Women whose husbands could not afford to
maintain a light horse for the king's service had no business with gowns
or petticoats of silk, chains of gold, French hoods, or bonnets of
velvet. This French hood is the small bonnet, two of whose many forms
may be seen in the best-known portraits of Mary of England and Mary,
queen of Scots--a cap stiffened with wires. With its introduction the
fashionable skirt began to lose its graceful folds and to spread stiffly
outward in straight lines from the tight-laced waist, the front being
open to show a petticoat as stiff and enriched as the skirt. The neck of
the gown, cut low and square, showed the _partlet_ of fine linen pleated
to the neck. In the days of Edward VI. and Queen Mary the dress of most
men and women loses the fantastic detail of the earlier Tudor age. In
the dress of both sexes the joining of the sleeve to the shoulder has,
as a rule, that large puff which stage dressmakers bestow so lavishly
upon all old English costumes, but otherwise the woman's gown and hood
and the man's doublet, jerkin and trunk hose are plain enough, even the
shoes losing all the fanciful width. Mary, indeed, added to the statute
book more stringent laws against display of rich apparel, laws that
would fine even a gentleman of under L20 a year if silk were found in
his cap or shoe. Small ruffs, however, begin to appear at the neck, and
most wrists are ruffled. The ruff, which began simply enough in the
first half of this century as a little cambric collar with a goffered
edge, is for all of us the distinguishing note of Elizabethan dress. It
grew wide and flapping, therefore it was stiffened upon wires and spread
from a concealed frame, row on row of ruffs being added one above the
other until the wearer, man or woman, seemed to carry the head in a
cambric charger. Starch, cursed as a devilish liquor by the new Puritan,
gave it help, and English dress acquired a deformity which can only be
compared with the great farthingale or with the last follies of the wig.
The skirt of a woman of fashion, which had already begun to jut from the
waist, was drawn out before the end of Elizabeth's reign at right angles
from the waist until the dame had that air of standing within a great
drum which Sir Roger de Coverley remarked in the portrait of an
ancestress. Elizabeth herself, long-waisted and of meagre body, set the
fashions of her court, other women pinching their waists into the long
and straight stomacher ending in a peak before. She herself followed her
father's taste in ornament, and on great days was set about like the
Madonna of a popular shrine with decorations of all kinds, patterns in
pearl, quiltings, slashings, puffings and broidery, tassels and rich
buttons. Among men the important change is the disappearance of the last
of the long hose, all men taking to trunk-hose and nether-stocks or
stockings, while their doublets tend to follow the same long-waisted
fashion as the bodices of the women, whose doublets and jerkins,
buttoned up the breast, bring the Puritan satirists against them. Of
these satirists Philip Stubbes is the best-known, his _Anatomie of
Abuses_, published in 1583, being a very wardrobe of Elizabethan
fashions, although false or dyed hair, the ruff and its starch, and the
ear-rings worn by some women and many men draw his hottest anger.
William Harrison sings on a like note about the same time, declaiming
especially against the mutability of fashion, declaring that the
imported Spanish, French and German guises made it easier to inveigh
against such enormities than to describe the English attire with any
certainty. For him women were become men, and men transformed into
monsters. "Neither was it ever merrier with England than when an
Englishman was known abroad by his own cloth and contented himself at
home with his fine carsey hosen and a mean slop; his coat, gown and
cloak of brown, blue or puke, with some pretty furniture of velvet or
fur and a doublet of sad tawny or black velvet or other comely silk,
without such cuts and garish colours as are worn in these days, and
never brought in but by the consent of the French, who think themselves
the gayest men when they have most diversities of jags and change of
colours about them." He adds that "certes of all estates our merchants
do least alter their attire ... for albeit that which they wear be very
fine and costly, yet in form and colour it representeth a great piece of
the ancient gravity appertaining to citizens and burgesses." But as for
the "younger sort" of citizens' wives, Harrison finds in their attire
"all kind of curiosity ... in far greater measure than in women of a
higher calling."
17th century.
The coming of King James is not marked by any sudden change of attire,
most of the Elizabethan fashions running on into his reign. The tight
doublet has stiff wings at the shoulders, close sleeves and short skirt.
The many fashions of breeches are still popular, most of them padded or
stuffed. There are trunk hose that have the air of petticoats rolled
inward half way up the thigh. There is the "great round abominable
breech," pegtop shaped from below the knee to waist, as it appears in
the well-known print of James himself with hawk on fist. Among women of
fashion obtained a remarkable mode of exposing the breast, when the ruff
and bodice were cut away; and the wheel fardingale was still worn, an
order against it in 1613 rather increasing than diminishing its size.
But simpler fashions were setting in, and with the reign of Charles I.
the extravagances of padding and slashing disappear. The ruff gives
place at last to the falling band, a wide collar of lace or plain linen.
The belt or girdle ceases to be common wear, save for those who hang a
sword from it. Parties in the state come to be known by their dress, and
we have the Puritan, his crop head covered by a wide-brimmed,
high-crowned felt, without hatband or feather, and his plain falling
band over a staidly-cut coat. Beside him we set the cavalier, lace at
his band edge, wrist and wide boot tops. His hat is feathered, his
doublet lets the fine cambric of the shirt be seen at the waist, his
short breeches are fringed with points or tags. His long hair has one
lock brought over the left shoulder to be marked as a lovelock by a
ribbon at the end. But the clothing of this age has been illustrated by
Van Dyck and by a hundred other portrait painters, who as illustrators
of costume take the place of the monumental sculptors, then less
commonly called on for an effigy in the habit of life. And the time of
the Commonwealth passes without notable change. Those who were in power
favoured a sober habit, although we find General Harrison in scarlet and
clinquant matching with Colonel Hutchinson in courtly apparel, and
before the Restoration the tract-writers find matter of condemnation,
especially in the items of patches, hair-powder and face paints.
[Illustration: FIG. 39.--An English Lady. From a brass of 1605.]
[Illustration: FIG. 40.--An English Lady of rank in 1643. After Hollar.]
[Illustration: FIG. 41.--The English Countrywoman of 1643. After
Hollar.]
So far as the court was concerned, King Charles II. brought in the
extravagant fashions of the courtiers of Louis XIV. The short-waisted
doublets with loose sleeves slashed open at the sides, the short and
wide petticoat breeches, their lining lower than the petticoat edge and
tied below the knee, and the hose whose tops bagged over the garter,
were in England before King Charles returned. He added to the breeches
the rows of looped ribbons, gave falling ruffles to the knees of the
hose and many feathers to the hat. The long, narrow-bladed rapier hung
in a broad, embroidered belt, passed over the right shoulder, and the
high-heeled shoes and knots of ribbons. Lely painted the women of this
court in a studied negligence, but many pictures show us the loose
sleeves turned up to the elbow with bows of ribbon, the close bodice
ending in a loose gown worn over a full skirted petticoat, a wide collar
covering the shoulders.
[Illustration: FIG. 42.--A Squire of a Knight of the Bath at the
Crowning of Charles II.]
Pepys is our chief authority for the remarkable resolution of Charles to
change the fashion of his dress to one which he would never alter, a
decision which the king communicated to his council in October 1666. On
the 15th of that month the diarist noted that "this day the king begins
to put on his vest, and I did see several persons of the House of Lords
and Commons too, great courtiers, who are in it; being a long cassocke
close to the body, of black cloth and pinked with white silk under it,
and a coat over it, and the legs ruffled with black riband like a
pigeon's leg ... a very fine and handsome garment." Rugge's diary
records the same change to "a close coat of cloth pinkt, with a white
taffety under the cutts. This in length reached the calf of the leg, and
upon that a sercoatt cutt at the breast, which hung loose and shorter
than the vest six inches. The breeches the Spanish cut, and buskins,
some of cloth, some of leather, but of the same colour as the vest or
garment." Says Evelyn, "a comely and manly habit, too good to hold."
Later in the same month Pepys saw the court "all full of vests, only my
Lord St Albans not pinked, but plain black; and they say the king says
the pinking upon whites makes them look too much like magpies, and
therefore hath bespoke one of plain velvet." The change, although the
court was fickle, is of the first importance in the history of costume,
for we have here the coat and waistcoat in a form from which our own
coats and waistcoats derive without a break. Another important change
affects dress for a century and a half. Just as costume begins to take
the modern path we have the wig or peruke, strangest of all the
fantasies of fashion, introduced as the wear for all men of standing.
Pepys, the son of a tailor and a man with a shy affection for fine
clothing, may again here be quoted. On a Sunday in February 1661 he
"began to go forth in my coat and sword, as the manner now among
gentlemen is." In November 1663 he takes another step with fashion,
going to the periwig-maker to have his hair cut off and to put on his
first periwig, for which he paid 3^l, another to be made up of the hair
with which he had parted. The next day he wore the periwig to his
office, and "no great matter was made of it." Two days later my Lord
Sandwich "wondered at first to see me in my peruque," but even in church
Pepys found that he drew little attention in the new guise. The same
month the duke of York announced that he would wear the periwig, "and
they say the king also will." Thus began this costly and inconvenient
mode. At home and at their ease men commonly replaced the wig with a
soft silk or velvet "night-cap," and the coat with a "morning gown" like
our modern dressing gown. Powder, which had been dusted about the hair
by a few courtiers and fashionable folk since the reign of Elizabeth,
was used by most wearers of the wig. Hair "dressed with a powder" was
often seen in London under the Commonwealth, and now the great periwig
brought powder into frequent use.
[Illustration: FIG. 43.--A Gentleman of the Privy Chamber at the
Crowning of James II.]
Before the end of the 17th century the periwig reached its greatest
height and breadth, the curls of a fine gentleman towering in a mass
above the brow and flowing far down over the shoulders or nigh to the
waist. Guardsmen wore them tossing over their corslets, although a
smaller variety, the campaign wig, had been introduced for war or
travel. Many portraits of this age show its locks contrasting strangely
with the soldier's steel breastplate and pauldrons, but it must be
remembered that martial gentlemen would often choose to be painted in
armour although such harness was disappearing from actual use.
[Illustration: FIG. 44.--The Herbwoman and her Maids at the Crowning of
James II.]
Under James II. the coat adopted in the late reign was firmly
established as the principal garment of a well-dressed man. Gowns
remained but to make a ceremonial dress for the great officers of state,
for the judges and the London liverymen, for such, indeed, as those who
wear them in our own days. As for "the comely cloak, altogether used in
the beginning of my time," Randle Holme notes that it was "now scarce
used but by old and grave persons." The coat was sometimes buttoned down
the front but was more often thrown open to display the waistcoat, a
lesser coat with skirts. The great turned over cuffs were now below the
elbow, although there was good space for the display of the ruffle, and
at the neck was the large cravat with laced ends. After the battle of
Steinkirk, in 1692, to which the young French nobles hastened with
disarranged neckcloths, the cravat was sometimes worn twisted, the ends
passed through a ring, although the word Steinkirk was in later years
often carelessly given to the neckcloth worn in any style. For riding,
the big jack-boot of earlier days, with spurs and broad spur-leathers,
remained in fashion, although the bell-shaped tops were turned up and
not down. Boots, however, were riding-gear. Gondomar, the Spanish
ambassador to James I., had laughed over the citizens of London "all
booted and ready to go out of town," but this custom died away, and a
man in boots showed that he was for the road. William III.'s grave court
was not one in which new fashions flourished, but it is remarkable that
feminine modes take curious variety before the century end. Long-waisted
and straitly cut stays were worn, the gown sleeve is short as the
coat-sleeve of a Charles II. courtier. The gown itself has the skirts
gathered to show the petticoat, and small aprons fringed with lace are
often seen. The simple head-dresses of the Restoration are changed for
caps with long lace lappets, or for a cap whose top-knot or commode
stood up stiff and fan-shaped like a section cut out of an old ruff.
When no commode was worn, a loose hood, thrown gracefully over the head
and gathered at the shoulders, sometimes took its place. As a riding or
walking dress, ladies of quality often wore coats, waistcoats, hats and
cravats, not to be distinguished from those of their lords.
The 18th century.
For a distinguishing note of the 18th century, we may take the
three-cornered cocked hat. Even in the Elizabethan age we have the
gallant cocking up one side of his broad-brimmed, high-crowned felt or
beaver and securing it with a jewel. Brims were as wide at the end of
the 17th century, but the crown was lower. From the French court came
the fashion of cocking up three sides, one at least being fastened with
a loop of ribbon from which developed the cockade. A black cockade
became the sign of a military man in England before 1750, and the same
ornament, highly conventionalized, is now at the side of the tall hats
worn by the grooms and coachmen of military and naval officers.
Following varying fashions, the 18th-century cocked hat was laced with
gold and silver or edged with feathers. It was cocked in a hundred
forms, from that which has three sides slightly curled upward to the
great Khevenhueller cock, wherewith a very wide-brimmed hat was flapped
up at the front and rear, a military or martial hat. Wigs, worn by all
the upper- and middle-class men, were generally powdered, but the lesser
or Ramillie wig soon drove out the huge and costly full-bottomed
periwig, even for ceremonial occasions. Of Lord Bolingbroke it is told
that he once attended Queen Anne in haste with a tie or Ramillie wig on
his head. Her Majesty showed her displeasure by remarking that his
lordship would next come to court in a night-cap. Nevertheless, the
tie-wig soon became court wear, secured at the back with a huge bow of
ribbon below which hung the plaited pigtail, worn waist-long about 1740.
But by that time young bloods were leaving campaign-wigs for the bob-wig
which sat yet more closely to the head, the curls leaving the neck
uncovered. Bag-wigs, found early in the century, covered the looped up
pigtail in a black silk bag. Clergymen and grave physicians affected the
full-bottomed wig after it became old fashioned. Subject to slight
changes, eagerly followed by the beaux and mocked by the satirists, the
habit of well-dressed men shows no great variety--the large-cuffed,
collarless coats whose full skirts are now shortened, now lengthened,
the long waistcoat to match, the closely fitting breeches, the
stockings, the shoes and jack-boots. The coat tends to be thrown open to
show the waistcoat, upon which brocade and embroideries were lavished.
Stockings, until the middle of the century, were commonly drawn over the
ends of the breeches and gartered below the knee. By 1740 the long
cravat with hanging ends grows old fashioned. Young men take to the
solitaire, a black cravat which became a mere loop of ribbon passed
loosely round the neck and secured to the black tie of the wig.
[Illustration: FIG. 45.--An English Gentleman (c. 1730).]
George III.'s long reign begins with men's fashions little changed from
those of his great-grandfather's time, although his sixty years carry us
to the beginning of all the modern modes. The small wig long holds its
own. The coat begins to show the broad skirts cut away diagonally from
the waist to the skirt edge, and stockings are no longer rolled over the
knee. Perhaps the most remarkable fashion was that which distinguished
the Macaronis, travelled exquisites with whom the wig or long hair was
dragged high above the forehead in a tall "toupee" with two large rows
of curls at the side. This head-dress, clubbed into a heavy knot behind,
was surmounted by a very little hat. The coat with small cuffs was much
cut away before, the skimped skirts reaching midway down the thigh.
Waistcoat flaps were but little below the waist. Breeches, striped or
spotted like those of a Dresden china shepherd, were fastened at the
knee with a bunch of ribbon ends; a watch-guard hung from each fob. The
shirt-front was frilled and a white cravat was tied in a great bow at
the chin. Macaronis wore a little curved hanger, or replaced the sword
with a long, heavily tasselled cane, which served to lift the little hat
off the topmost peak of the toupee. The woman-Macaroni wore no hoop but
in full dress. Her gown was a loose wrapper, the sleeves short and wide
with many ruffles, the skirt pulled aside to show a petticoat laced and
embroidered with flowers. But her distinguishing mark was her
head-dress, which exaggerated the male fashion, towering upward until
the flowers and feathers at the top threatened the candelabra of the
assembly room. The Macaronis appear about 1772 and stay but a short
while, for the revolutionary fashions tread upon their heels.
[Illustration: FIG. 46.--An English Lady (c. 1730).]
Women's dress in this 18th century is dominated by the hoop-petticoat
which Sir Roger de Coverley recognizes in 1711 as a new fashion and an
old one revived. A stiff bodice laced in front, a gown, with short and
wide-ended sleeves, gathered up in folds above the petticoat, a laced
apron and a lace cap with hanging lappets, is the dress of the century's
beginning. So the women of fashion are compared with children in
go-carts, their tight-laced waists rising from vast bells of petticoats
over which the gown is looped up like a drawn curtain. By 1750 the
hoop-petticoat ringed with whalebone is so vast that architects begin to
allow for its passage up London stairways by curving the balusters
outward. Great variety of women's dress appears under George II., but
those in the height of the mode affected a shepherdess simplicity in
their walking clothes, wearing the flat-crowned or high-crowned hats and
long aprons of the dairymaid. At this time a new fashion comes in, the
_sacque_, a gown, sometimes sleeveless, open to the waist, hanging
loosely from the shoulders to near the edge of the hoop-petticoat.
George III.'s reign saw women's head-dressings reach an extravagance of
folly passing all that had come before it. Hair kneaded with pomatum and
flour was drawn up over a cushion or pad of wool, and twisted into curls
and knots and decorated with artificial flowers and bows of ribbon. As
this could not be achieved without the aid of a skilled barber, the
"head" sometimes remained unopened for several weeks. At the end of that
time sublimate powder was needed to kill off the tenantry which had
multiplied within. At the beginning of the last quarter of the century
the feathers grew larger, chains of beads looped about the curls, while
ships in full sail, coaches and horses, and butterflies in blown glass,
rocked upon the upper heights. Loose mob-caps or close "Joans" were worn
in undress, often as simple as the full dress was fantastic. Varieties
of the gown and sacque remained in fashion, the petticoat being still
much in evidence, flounced or quilted, or festooned with ribbons. Before
the 'eighties of this century were over, a new taste, encouraged by the
painters of the school of Reynolds, began to sweep away many follies,
and the revolutionary fashions of France, breaking with all that spoke
of the old regime, expelled many more. The age of powder and gold lace,
of peach-bloom brocade coats with muff-shaped cuffs, of bag-wigs and
three-cornered hats drew suddenly to an end. Mr Pitt killed hair-powder
by his tax of 1795, but before that time fashionable men, who since the
beginning of George III's. reign had been somewhat inconstant to the
wig, were wearing their own hair unpowdered and tied in a club at the
back of the coat collar. Before the century end the roughly cropped
"Brutus" head was seen. The wig remained here and there on some
old-fashioned pates. Bishops wore it until far into the Victorian age,
and it may still be seen in the Houses of Parliament and in the courts
of law. Even breeches were passing, tight pantaloons showing themselves
in the streets. The coat, cut away over the hips, began to take a high
collar and the beginnings of the lappel. Its cuffs were of the modern
shape, showing a narrow ruffle. The waistcoat ended at the waist. Loose
neck-cloths were worn above a frilled shirt-front. Great jack-boots were
given to postillions, and men of fashion walked the streets in short
top-boots of soft black leather. Most remarkable of the revolutionary
changes, the round hat came back, sometimes in a form which recalled the
earlier 17th century, and at last took shape as the predecessor of our
modern silk hat. Court dresses kept something of their magnificence, but
men at home or in the streets were giving up in this time of change
their ancient right to wear rich and figured stuffs. Laces and
embroideries were henceforward but for military and civil uniforms.
Before 1790 women had begun to dismantle their high headgear, returning
to nature by way of a frizzled bush, like a bishop's wig, with a few
curls hanging over the shoulders. Over such heads would be seen towering
mob-caps tied with ribbon and edged deeply with lace. Skirts took a
moderate size and even court hoops were but panniers hung on either side
of the hips. Short jackets with close half-sleeves were worn with the
neck and breast covered with a cambric _buffant_ that borrowed a mode
from the pouter pigeon. A riding habit follows as far as the short waist
the new fashions for men's coats, the wide-brimmed hat being to match.
Short waists came in soon after 1790, the bodice ending under the arm
pits, "a petticoat tied round the neck: the arms put through the
pocket-holes." With these French gowns came small coal-scuttle-shaped
bonnets of straw, hung with many ribbons and decorated with feathers. At
last the woman of fashion, dressed by a Parisian modiste after the
orders of David the painter, gathered her hair in a fillet and clothed
herself in little more than a diaphanous tunic gown over a light shift
and close, flesh-coloured drawers. Her shoes became sandals: her jewels
followed the patterns of old Rome. Yet the same woman, shivering
half-clad in something that wrapped her less than a modern
bathing-dress, appeared at court in the ancient hoop-skirt, tasselled,
ribboned and garlanded, hung with heavy swags of coloured silk, and this
until George IV. at last broke the antique order by a special command.
19th century.
The 19th century soon made an end of 18th century fashions already
discredited by the revolutionary spirit. The three-cornered hat had
gone, the heavy coat cuff and the cravat with hanging ends. Civilians
had given up the ancient custom of going armed with a sword. The wig and
even the pigtail tied with black shalloon were abandoned by all but a
few old folk. Soldiers cut off their pigtails in 1808. But judges and
lawyers wear their wigs in court in the 20th century, state coachmen
wear them on the box, and physicians and the higher clergy wore them
even in the street long after laymen had given them up. George IV.
refused to receive a bishop of London who appeared at court without a
wig, and Sumner, archbishop of Canterbury, wore one until his death in
1862. A few powdered heads were seen as late as the 'forties. M. de Ste
Aulaire, the ambassador, made, as Lord Palmerston writes, a very deep
and general impression in London society of 1841, not because he wore
hair-powder but because he used so much of it. It is now used only by a
few lacqueys. In the early Victorian period the cropped "Brutus" head
was out of fashion, many men wearing their hair rather long and so
freely oiled that the "anti-macassar" came in to protect drawing-room
chair-backs.
[Illustration: From _Fraser's Magazine_, Dec. 1834.
FIG. 47.--Count D'Orsay. Dress of a man of Fashion in Early Victorian
Period.]
With powdered hair and the pigtail passed away the 18th century cloth
breeches. Here again some old-fashioned people made a stand against the
change, the opposition of the clergy being commemorated in the black
breeches still worn by bishops and other dignitaries of the church. But
in the regent's time pantaloons of closely fitting and elastic cloth
were worn with low shoes or Hessians, and pantaloons and Hessians did
not utterly disappear from the streets until the end of the 'fifties.
Squires and sportsmen put on buckskins of an amazing tightness and
walked the street in top-boots. But the loose Cossack trousers soon made
their appearance. The regent's influence made the blue coat with a very
high velvet collar, a high-waisted Marcella waistcoat and white duck
trousers strapped under the instep, a mode in which men even ventured to
appear at evening receptions, although, in the year before Waterloo, the
duke of Wellington was refused admittance to Almack's when thus clad.
Long skirted overcoats, fur-collared and tight in the waist, completed
this costume. Coats were blue, claret, buff and brown. "Pea-green Hayne"
was known among clubmen by a brighter coloured garment. Civilians, like
Jos Sedley, would sometimes affect a frock frogged and braided in
semi-military fashion. The shirt collar turned upward, the points
showing above vast cravats whose careful arrangement was maintained by
one or two scarf-pins. Brummel the master dandy of his age, may be
called the first dandy of the modern school. Dressing, as a rule, in
black, he distinguished himself, not as the bucks of an earlier age by
bright colours, rich materials or jewellery, but by his extravagant
neatness and by the superb fit of garments which set the fashion for
lesser men. To him, according to Grantley Berkeley, we owe the modern
dress-coat. An idle phrase in Bulwer-Lytton's _Pelham_ (1828), that
"people must be very distinguished in appearance" to look well in black,
made black henceforward the colour of evening coats and frock coats.
With the perfection of the silk hat in the 'thirties, English costume
enters on its last phase. The coat cut away squarely in front was then
out of the mode; it remains but in the evening-dress coat now always
worn unbuttoned, and in the dress of the hunting field. The rest is a
record of such slight changes as tailors may cautiously introduce among
customers, no one of whom will dare to lead a new fashion boldly. For
many decades the fashionably dressed man has been eager to conform to
the last authorized vogue and to lose himself among others as shyly
obedient. The tubular lines of 20th-century clothing advantage the
tailor by the tendency of new clothing to crease at the elbow and bag at
the knee. In preserving the necessary straight lines of his garments, in
following the season's fashions in details which only an expert eye
would mark, and in providing himself with clothes specialized for every
hour of the day, for a score of sports and for the gradations of social
ceremonial--in these things only can the modern dandy rival his
magnificent predecessors. For ornament, other than plain shirt studs, a
plain seal ring, a simple watch guard and a rarely-worn scarf pin, is
denied him.
Women at the beginning of the 19th century were clad in those fashions
which revolutionary France borrowed from the antique. The simplicity of
this style gave it a certain grace; it was at the other pole from the
absurdity of the court dress which, until George IV. ordered otherwise,
perpetuated the bunched draperies, the flounces and furbelows and even
the hoop of the worst period of the 18th century. The gown, lightly
girdled near the arm-pits with a tasselled cord, fell in straight
clinging folds. Soft muslin was the favourite material, and in muslin
fashionable women faced the winter winds, protected only by the long
pelisses which in summer were replaced by short spencers. Turbans,
varying from a light headscarf of lace or muslin to a velvet confection
like that of a Turk on a signboard, were the favourite headgear,
although bonnets, hats and caps are found in a hundred shapes. Muslin
handkerchiefs or small ruffs were worn about the neck in the morning
dress. About the Waterloo period the elegance of the classical gown
disappeared. The waist was still high at first but the gown was shorter
and wider at the skirt. For evening dress these skirts were stiffened
with buckram and trimmed with much tasteless trumpery. Large bonnets
were common, and the hair was dragged stiffly to the back of the head,
to be secured by a large comb. From 1830 begins a period of singular
ugliness. Tight stays came back again, the skirt swept the pavements, a
generation of over-clad matrons seemed to have followed a generation of
nymphs. The 'fifties showed even more barbarous devices, and about 1854
came in from France the crinoline, that strange revival of the ancient
hoop. Plaids, checks and bars, bright blues, crude violets and hideous
crimsons, were seen in French merinos, Irish poplins and English
alpacas. Women in short jackets, hooped skirts, hideous bonnets and
shawls seemed to have banished their youth. The empress Eugenie, a
leader of European fashion, decreed that white muslin should be the
evening mode, and at balls, where the steels and whalebones of the
crinoline were impossible, the women swelled their skirts by wearing a
dozen or fourteen muslin petticoats at once. Towards the end of the
'sixties the crinolines disappeared as suddenly as they came, and by
1875 skirts were so tight at the knees that walking upstairs in them was
an affair of deliberation. Before 1880 dress-reformers and aesthetes had
attacked on two sides the fashions which had halted at the "Princesse"
robe, draped and kilted. Both movements failed, but left marked effects.
From that time fashion has been less blindly followed, and women have
enjoyed some limited individual freedom in designing their costumes. Of
20th-century fashions it is most notable that they change year by year
with mechanical regularity. The clothes of smart women can no longer be
said to express any tendency of an age. Year by year the modes are
deliberately altered by a conclave of the great _modistes_ whose desire
is less to produce rich or beautiful garments than to make that radical
alteration from loose sleeve to tight sleeve, from draped skirt to plain
skirt, which will force every women to cast aside the last season's
garments and buy those of the newer device. But of modern dress it may
at least be said that cheaper materials, the sewing machine and the
popular fashion papers allow women of the humbler classes to dress more
decently and tastefully. Their dress is no longer that frowsy parody of
richer women's frippery which shocked observant foreigners a generation
ago.
_Underclothing._--Of the underclothing worn next the skin something may
be said apart from the general history of costume. Linen shirts were
worn by both men and women in the age before the Conquest, and even in
the 10th century it was a penance to wear a woollen one. After that time
we soon hear of embroidery and ornament applied to them, presumably at
the collar which would be visible above gown or tunic. Men added short
drawers, or breeches, a word which does not secure its modern value
until the end of the 16th century. "Drawers" signified various
descriptions of overall, Cotgrave explaining the word as coarse
stockings drawn over others although Randle Holme gives it in its later
sense. Isaac of Cyprus is named by Robert of Brunne as escaping "bare in
his serke and breke." Henry Christall, who brought four Irish kings to
London, told Froissart how, finding that they wore no breeches, he
bought linen cloth for them. Medieval romances and the like give us the
choice of shirts of linen, of fine Holland, of cloth of Rennes and even
of silk, and Chaucer speaks of women's smocks wrought with silk,
embroidered behind and before. Poorer folk went, like Thynne's poor
countryman, in shirts of "canvas hard and tough," or of coarse Breton
dowlas. Under the first Tudors, shirts are decorated with gold, silk and
black thread embroideries, the latter being seen in the ruffled shirt
worn by the earl of Surrey in our illustration (see fig. 38). Stubbes,
in his often-quoted _Anatomie of Abuses_ (1583) declaims against the
extravagant sums spent in shirts, the meanest of which would cost a
crown or a noble, while the most curiously stitched were valued at ten
pounds a piece, "which is horrible to hear." The Puritans, many of whom,
like the later Clapham sect, were careful of intimate luxuries, had a
curious fashion of wearing shirts and smocks worked with "holy
embroideries," Biblical sentences or figures, which recall a similar
custom among the early Christians. At this time underclothing had
increased in quantity, for there are many indications that the men and
women of the middle ages were often content with a bare change of linen
at the best. _The Book of Courtesy_ (temp. Hen. VII.) orders the servant
to provide "clene sherte and breche" against his master's uprising, but
the laundering of the linen of the Percy household, a hundred and
seventy people, costs but forty shillings a year in the reign of Henry
VIII.
[Illustration: FIG. 48.--A Man-at-arms and a Man in a Shirt (early 14th
century). From Royal MS. 19 B. xv.]
With that modern period of dress which may be said to begin with the
Restoration, shirts increased in number. Women shifted their smocks when
coming in from field sports, fine gentlemen became proud of the number
of their shirts, as was that 18th-century lord who boasted to Casanova
of his changing a shirt several times in the day, his chin being shaved
on each occasion. A valuable document concerning the underclothing worn
by a citizen in the reign of Charles II. is afforded by the evidence of
the man who helped to strip the body of the suicide Sir Edmond Berry
Godfrey. "I pulled off his shoes," says Fisher, "three pairs of
stockings and a pair of socks, his black breeches and his drawers." His
coat and waistcoat, his shirt and his flannel shirt are also named. The
knight came by his end on an October day. He was therefore warmly clad.
His three pair of stockings will be noted: two pair are worn at the
present day by most men in court dress. The socks are a rarely named
addition, and the flannel shirt may be remarked. Loose ruffles of lace
were attached to shirt cuffs until during the great part of the 18th
century, and the ruffled or goffered shirt-front, which became common
under George III., continued in use in the early Victorian period, the
stiffly starched shirt-front taking its place at last even in evening
dress. The last quarter of the 19th century, breaking through the
strange mock-modesty which spoke of breeches as "inexpressibles," saw
the question of hygienic underclothing a subject much in debate, and now
most men other than the poorer sort wear, besides the shirt, a light
woollen vest and short drawers or long pantaloons of wool or wool's
counterfeit. Woollen shirts are worn by bicyclists, cricketers and
tennis players. In morning dress the inconvenience of the starched
shirt-front is commonly avoided. A goffered shirt-front worn with
evening dress is the mark of a foreigner in London, but some few men
venture to clothe themselves for the evening in a shirt whose front is
pleated and but slightly starched. Loose collars, formerly known as
false collars, descendants of the Puritan's "plain band," have been
attached to the shirt by studs at least for the last fifty years. Their
fashions often change, but the older type turned down at the edge is not
often seen. To women's underclothing drawers have been added in the 19th
century. Brantome, writing in the 16th, speaks of this garment as then
lately introduced since the time of Henri II., but the fashion,
apparently, did not long endure in France. In England they are noted as
in occasional use at the Restoration. After 1820 a sort of trouser with
a frilled edge was worn for a time by fashionable women in England. The
pantalette which afterwards appears in pictures of young girls was a
mere legging fastened by tapes above the knees. Many women of the better
class only adopted drawers at the end of the 'forties, and it may be
presumed that the fashion reached the humble sort at a much later date.
Towards the end of the 19th century both drawers and smock or "chemise"
were commonly exchanged for a more convenient "combination garment."
[Illustration: From Hottenroth, _Trachten der Volker_, by permission of
Gustav Weise Verlag.