As a chronicler and illustrator of the vagaries of Mode, Punch continues to pay far more attention to the costume of women than of men. But here also one notes a change—a tendency which warrants the labelling of this period as the Age of Approximation, in which in regard both to material and design women were more and more inclined to take a leaf from the fashion books of their brothers. The increasing addiction of girls to athletic pastimes was no doubt largely responsible for a change which could not be better exemplified than in Du Maurier's picture in 1877 of an old gentleman who mistakes the Dean's three daughters for young men and is gravely corrected by the verger. The mistake was venial, for the young amazons in their ulsters and hard hats presented a decidedly masculine appearance. In a word, they were "tailor-made"—a word of vast and epoch-making significance.
The Divided Skirt
References to this approximation recur throughout the 'eighties. In 1880 Sambourne, taking for his text an article in the Journal des Modes, gives us a design of evening dress entitled, "Man or Woman—a Toss Up," and in the same year Du Maurier, in a picture of the "Ne Plus Ulster," represents a customer expostulating with the shop-woman, "But it makes one look so like a man," only to be told, "That's just the beauty of it, Miss." Within limits Punch applauded the change. When short dresses for dances were said to be coming in, in the same year, he dilates in verse on the salutary innovation. To the year 1881 belongs the foundation of the "Rational Dress Society." "Bloomerism," as I pointed out in an earlier volume, never appealed to Mayfair. But the Rational Dress Society claimed a live Viscountess—Lady Harberton—as its President, and recommended the adoption of a "dual garmenture" or "divided skirt" as its cardinal tenet. Punch declared that the "divided skirt" was simply the old Bloomer costume slightly disguised, and saw in the movement only a fresh proof of woman's conscious inferiority:—
True that another skirt hides this insanity
Miss Mary Walker in old days began;
Yet it should flatter our masculine vanity,
For this means simply the trousers of Man!
LEVELLING TENDENCY OF MODERN DRESS
Old Gentleman (shocked beyond description) to Verger: "Don't you think those youths had better be told to take their hats off?"