It is pleasing to note in this list that not only the garments and stuffs, but the very colors named, have an antique sound; and we read in other inventories of such tints as philomot (feuillemort), gridolin (gris-de-lin or flax blossom), puce color, grain color (which was scarlet), foulding color, Kendal green, Lincoln green, watchet blue, barry, milly, tuly, stammel red, Bristol red, sad color—and a score of other and more fanciful names whose signification and identification were lost with the death of the century. In later days Congress brown, Federal blue, and Independence green show our new nation.
This wardrobe of Jane Humphrey's was certainly a very pretty and a very liberal outfit for a woman of no other fortune. But to have all one's possessions in the shape of raiment did not in her day bear quite the same aspect as it would at the present day. Many persons, men and women, preferred to keep their property in the form of what they quaintly called "duds." The fashion did not, in New England, wear out more apparel than the man, for clothing, no matter what its cut, was worn as long as it lasted, doing service frequently through three generations. For instance, we find Mrs. Epes, of Ipswich, when she was over fifty years old, receiving this bequest by will: "If she desire to have the suit of damask which was the Lady Cheynies her grandmother, let her have it upon appraisement." Hence we cannot wonder at clothing forming so large a proportion of the articles bequeathed by will and named in inventories; for all the colonists
"... studied after nyce array,
And made greet cost in clothing."
Nor can we help feeling that any woman should have been permitted to have plenty of gowns in those days without being thought extravagant, since a mantua-maker's charge for making a gown was but eight shillings.
Though the shops were full of rich stuffs, there was no ready-made clothing for women for sale either in outside garments or in under-linen. Occasionally, by the latter part of the eighteenth century, we read the advertisement of a "vandoo" of "full-made gowns, petticoats and sacs of a genteel lady of highest fashion"—a notice which reads uncommonly like the "forced sales" of the present day of mock-outfits of various kinds.
About the middle of the century there began to appear "ready-made clothes for men." Jolley Allen advertised such, and under that name, in 1768, "Coats, Silk Jackets, Shapes and Cloth Ditto; Stocking Breeches of all sizes & most colours. Velvet Cotton Thickset Duroy Everlasting & Plush Breeches. Sailors Great Coats, outside & inside Jackets, Check Shirts, Frocks, long and wide Trowzers, Scotch bonnets & Blue mill'd Shirts." But women's clothes were made to order in the town by mantua makers, and in the country by travelling tailoresses and sempstresses, or by the deft-fingered wearers.
New England dames had no mode-books nor fashion-plates to tell to them the varying modes. Some sent to the fatherland for "fire-new fashions in sleeves and slops," for garments and head-gear made in the prevailing court style; and the lucky possessors, lent these new-fashioned caps and gowns and cloaks as models to their poorer or less fortunate neighbors. A very taking way of introducing new styles and shapes to the new land was through the importation by milliners and mantua-makers of dressed dolls, or "babys" as they were called, that displayed in careful miniature the fashions and follies of the English court. In the New England Weekly Journal of July 2, 1733, appears this notice:
"To be seen at Mrs. Hannah Teatts Mantua Maker at the Head of Summer Street Boston a Baby drest after the Newest Fashion of Mantues and Night Gowns & everything belonging to a dress. Latilly arrived on Capt. White from London, any Ladies that desire to see it may either come or send, she will be ready to wait on 'em, if they come to the House it is Five Shilling & if she waits on 'em it is Seven Shilling."
We can fancy the group of modish Boston belles and dames each paying Hannah Teatts her five shillings, and like overgrown children eagerly dressing and undressing the London doll and carefully examining and noting her various diminutive garments.
These fashion models in miniature effigy obtained until after Revolutionary times. Sally McKean wrote to the sister of Dolly Madison, in June, 1796: "I went yesterday to see a doll which has come from England dressed to show the fashion"—and she then proceeds to describe the modes thus introduced.