A MAN OF THE TIME OF GEORGE III. (1760-1820)
The cuffs have gone, and now the sleeve is left unbuttoned at the wrist. The coat is long and full-skirted, but not stiffened. The cravat is loosely tied, and the frilled ends stick out. These frills were, in the end, made on the shirt, and were called chitterlings.
Number twelve shows us an ordinary gentleman in a coat and waistcoat, with square flaps, called dog’s ears.
As the drawings continue you can see that the dress became more and more simple, more like modern evening dress as to the coats, more like modern stiff fashion about the neck.
The drawings of the women’s dresses should also speak for themselves. You may watch the growth of the wig and the decline of the hoop—I trust with ease. You may see those towers of hair of which there are so many stories. Those masses of meal and stuffing, powder and pomatum, the dressing of which took many hours. Those piles of decorated, perfumed, reeking mess, by which a lady could show her fancy for the navy by balancing a straw ship on her head, for sport by showing a coach, for gardening by a regular bed of flowers. Heads which were only dressed, perhaps, once in three weeks, and were then rescented because it was necessary. Monstrous germ-gatherers of horse-hair, hemp-wool, and powder, laid on in a paste, the cleaning of which is too awful to give in full detail. ‘Three weeks,’ says my lady’s hairdresser, ‘is as long as a head can go well in the summer without being opened.’
