_European Fashions._--Race, climate, poverty and wealth have all had
their part in the fashion of clothing. A mountaineer is not clad as a
lowlander; the Tirolese in his short breeches, the Highlanders of
Scotland and Albania in their tartan or white linen kilts go with
uncovered knees. The Russian moujik in winter has his frowsy sheepskin
coat, and the Russian prince imitates it in costly furs. While the rich
man's clothing alters with every fancy of the tailors, the poor man's
garments, fewer and cheaper, change slowly in the ages. An old
Lincolnshire peasant wearing his smock frock and leathern gaiters might
pass unnoted in a peasant crowd of centuries ago. Here and there in
Europe we find in the 20th century a peasantry in whose clothing fashion
seems to have been suddenly stayed. A Breton peasant in his holiday
dress gives us a man of the late 17th century, even as an Irish peasant
may keep the breeches, shoes and tailed coat of the early 19th. But the
old fashions are passing from Europe: the sewing machine and the railway
sweep before them the pleasant provincialisms of dress. A shirt with the
bosom heavily embroidered, a skirt with a year's stitching in the hem
are not to be imitated by the dealer in ready-made clothing, who offers,
instead, cheapness and the brisk variety of the town. Old writers, each
in turn, set up their wail that the time was come when you could not
tell Jack from his master, the burgess from the knight. And now that
time has come in some sort, for the town dress of the richer classes of
London or Paris is imitated by all peoples and by rich and poor.
Especially is this the case in England where the clean and honourable
blouse of the French workman is not, a journeyman painter or labourer
often going to his work in a frayed and greasy morning coat after the
cut of that in which a rich man will pay a London morning call. English
fashions for men are followed in Paris. London women follow the modes of
the rue de la Paix. Berlin tailors and dressmakers laboriously
misapprehend both styles. To those who do not understand the
international trafficking of the middle ages and the age of renascence
it is strange to note how little the fashions varied in European lands.
All kinds of folks, crusaders and merchants, diplomatists and religious,
carried between nation and nation the news of the latest cut of the
shears.
Nevertheless, national character touched each nation's dress--the
Venetian loving the stateliness of flowing line, the Germans grotesque
slashings and jaggings. Frenchmen, says Randle Holme in the 17th
century, keep warm and muff themselves in cold weather, "but in summer
through fantastical dresses go almost naked." For the same writer the
Spaniard was noted as a man in a high-crowned hat with narrow brim, a
ruff about his neck, a doublet with short and narrow skirts and broad
wings at the shoulders, ruff-cuffs at his hands, breeches narrow and
close to his thighs, hose gartered, shoes with rounded toes, a short
cloak and a long sword. In all of those points we may take it that the
Spaniard differed from the Englishman as observed by this observant one.
Even in our own days we may catch something of those national fashions.
The Spaniard may no longer walk with his long sword, his ruff and
gartered hose, but he keeps his fancy for sombre blacks, and so do the
citizens of those Netherlands which he once ruled. (O. BA.)