I remember well the sensation I created with a pair of light-grey trousers in a small Pennsylvanian town. Everyone seemed to look at me as if I had been a strange animal; in the hotel the waitresses nudged one another, and scarcely repressed a giggle; and the street-urchins followed me as if I had been a member of the Sioux tribe in national costume. The day after my arrival, one of the local papers announced that "a Frenchman had landed in the town the day before in white trousers, and that his popularity had been as prompt as decisive."
With evening dress, the American gentleman wears no jewellery of any sort; even the watch-chain is generally invisible. Simplicity, rather severity, in dress is a mark of distinction in a man, and the American gentleman is no exception to the rule. This simplicity in the dress of the men serves to throw up the brilliant attire of the women.
American ladies dress very well, as a rule; but there are a great number who cover themselves with furbelows and jewels, and, so long as each item is costly, trouble themselves little about the general effect. The tailor-made gown is worn in New York, as in Paris; but there is a proportion of women, even among the cultivated classes, who have the most sovereign contempt for all that is not silk, satin, or velvet. On board the Germanic we had two American ladies making the journey from Liverpool to New York in silk dresses, one a moiré! They were known to belong to good society.
Yes, in the large cities they dress well; but they lack the simplicity of style which the Princess of Wales has so happily inculcated in the Englishwomen who surround her. American women have plenty of style of their own, and have certainly also a great deal of distinction and grace; but they always look dressed for conquest. It is well to be it, but not well to show it. They are apt to laugh at the toilette of Englishwomen, and model their own dress more on French lines. For my part, I think that nothing can surpass a fresh young English girl in a cotton dress and simple straw hat.
The fashionable headgear, during my sojourn in the States, was a high, narrow construction, perched on the top of the head, and surmounted with feathers. At a certain distance it gave its wearer the look of an irate cockatoo. These monuments looked very heavy and difficult to maintain in equilibrium, and the ladies wearing them walked like grenadiers in busbies. There are French milliners in New York, I believe. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes pretends that they deteriorate on American soil. I remember we got upon this subject during a pleasant chat about his early days in Paris, and he said, "By the time a French milliner has been six months in New York, she will make a bonnet to frighten a Choctaw Indian."
At the theatre, women wear silk, which prevents one from hearing, and hats a foot high, which prevent one from seeing.
An American was once asked what a play—which he might have seen—was like. "Very much like the back of ladies' bonnets," he answered.
Boston ladies are an exception to the general rule. They are a great deal more English in style, eschew show and glitter, and wear diamonds very sparingly, even in the evening.
But the most striking contrast may be seen by going straight from New York or Chicago to Canada. "Here we are in England once more," I thought, as I looked at a bevy of Canadian girls disporting themselves at an afternoon dance in Montreal. Half-a-dozen New York women would have had on the worth of all the fifty or sixty toilettes in the room.
I fell to talking with a Canadian of the New York belles, their extravagant elegance, and their feverish love of society turmoil.