In the "Romaunt of the Rose" the dress of Mirth is described as follows:—
"Full yong he was, and merry of thought,
And in samette, with birdes wrought,
And with gold beten full fetously
His bodie was clad full richely."
. . . . .
"A coronell on hur hedd sett,
Hur clothys wyth bestes and byrdes wer bete,
All abowte for pryde."
And now contrast all this with the extreme poverty of the dress of the present day, and turn our thoughts for a moment to those terrible cylindrical enormities the pot-hat and trousers.
Dress? we don't dress—we simply cover our nakedness—as in architecture we are content if we keep out wind and wet. We have forgotten how to dress as we have forgotten how to build, and beauty has forsaken dress as it has forsaken the rest of the decorative arts. Dress is, or should be, one of the decorative arts; the adornment of a "human," assuming that Nature's marvel must be covered, is, to say the very least, as important as the adornment of a brick wall. What is the explanation of the wave of Philistinism which swept not only England but the rest of the world at the beginning of the nineteenth century? Can it be the rise of science, which, bringing in its wake the mechanical fiend, has reduced everything to rule and compass, and thus brought about the death of the æsthetic sense? No other period of the world's history but some country forged ahead and kept alight the sacred lamp of beauty.
Trousers are apparently eternal; they date from the beginning, and will endure, one fears, to the end of sublunary time. Of late there has been a tendency, especially amongst middle-aged and elderly men, to affect the knickerbocker, although whether the æsthetic principle is the mainspring of this tendency, coupled with a natural and pardonable desire to exhibit a well-developed calf, or whether, peradventure, the "too old at twenty" cry is at the bottom of it, is a question which provides food for reflection.
What, then, in view of this eternity of the trouser, can be done to bring it abreast of modern taste and thought? because we do move in matters of taste, although almost imperceptibly. Speaking as a designer, it seems only possible to develop the trouser in one of two different directions—that of the peg-top or the bell-bottom. Bell-bottoms may at once be ruled out of the running, since they have become so identified with the coster fraternity that no man of fashion would dream of adopting them. These, then, are the two extremes or opposite poles. There is, however, as the late Mr. Gladstone would have said, a third and middle course—their columnar character might be retained, and even emphasised. The shafts might be fluted, as in the Corinthian Order, or festooned, as in the "Prentice pillar."
