CHAPTER XXXII.
Ladies’ dress—French costume—Madame Recamier—The classical style—“Progress of the toilet”—False hair—Hair-dresser’s advertisement—The Royal Family and dress—Curiosities of costume.
IN LADIES’ dress more allowance must be made for the caprices of fashion; it always has been their prescriptive right to exercise their ingenuity, and fancy, in adorning their persons; and, save that the head-dress is somewhat caricatured, the next illustration gives a very good idea of the style of dress adopted by ladies at the commencement of 1800, some phases of which we are familiar with, owing to their recent reproduction—such as the décolletée dress, and clinging, and diaphonous skirt, as well as the long gloves.
PARIS FASHIONS FOR WINTER DRESS—1800.
However, the eccentricities of English costume, at this period, were as nothing compared with their French sisters. The Countess of Brownlow,[48] speaking, as an eye-witness, says: “The Peace of 1802 brought, I suppose, many French to England; but I only remember one, the celebrated Madame Recamier, who created a sensation, partly by her beauty, but still more by her dress, which was vastly unlike the unsophisticated style, and poke bonnets, of the English women. She appeared in Kensington Gardens, à l’antique, a muslin dress clinging to her form like the folds of the drapery on a statue; her hair in a plait at the back, and falling in small ringlets round her face, and greasy with huile antique; a large veil thrown over the head, completed her attire, that not unnaturally caused her to be followed and stared at.”
