THE MEN
Despite the fact that historians allude to the extravagance of this reign, there is little in the actual form of the costume to bear out the idea. Extravagant it was in a large way, and costly for one who would appear well dressed; but the fopperies lay more in the stuffs than in the cut of the garments worn.
It was an age of draperies.
This age must call up pictures of bewrapped people swathed in heavy cloaks of cloth of Flanders dyed with the famous Flemish madder dye; of people in silk cloaks and gowns from Italy; of people in loose tunics made of English cloth.
This long reign of over fifty years is a transitional period in the history of clothes, as in its course the draped man developed very slowly towards the coated man, and the loose-hung clothes very gradually began to shape themselves to the body.
The transition from tunic and cloak and Oriental draperies is so slow and so little marked by definite change that to the ordinary observer the Edwardian cotehardie seems to have sprung from nowhere: man seems to have, on a sudden, dropped his stately wraps and mantles and discarded his chrysalis form to appear in tight lines following the figure—a form infinitely more gay and alluring to the eye than the ponderous figure that walks through the end of the thirteenth century.
Up to and through the time from the Conquest until the end of Henry III.’s reign the clothes of England appear—that is, they appear to me—to be lordly, rich, fine, but never courtier-like and elegant.
