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| 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 Eugénie, 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
