The costumes of Brittany are greatly varied, but all look theatrical, and many of them are remarkably embroidered in multicoloured braid. On all great occasions, feast-days and fairs, on Sundays and on the days of the pardons, many ancient costumes, not modern reproductions, are seen. Particularly is this to be noted at Pont l’Abbé, Pont Aven, and elsewhere in the far west. The coifs of the women and the embroidered waistcoats and velvet-ribboned hats of the men mark them as a species of Frenchmen different from their Norman brethren; lovers of fanciful dress and customs quite Southern in gorgeousness, and not the least like the colder fashions of other dwellers in the same latitude.
At Quimper is an interesting Ethnological Museum, where one may study the subject at length, and in the town one may buy fabrics and stuffs and articles of wearing apparel fashioned in the genuine Breton manner.
The greatest activity of life in Brittany is in the coast towns, for there the populace has for the longest time been in touch with the ideas of an advanced civilization.
Ironing Coifs
By the very geographic position of Brittany this was inevitable, as the country was not in the direct path of any great current of commerce, and had no great navigable river, except the Loire, which bordered it upon the south. There had been malicious critics of things Breton before him, but there could have been no real justification for the lament of Paul St. Victor, who must have had an exceedingly bad dinner at his inn when he delivered himself of the following:
“Breton dialect is full of barbarisms, and Brittany is not even a healthy country for painters. It is a land of monasteries and dull routine; the same types and the same costumes; no men, no women, all Bretons, all of Brittany.”