The costume of married women in Afghanistan must be granted much admiration: they wear a shirt with wide sleeves embroidered with flowers in coloured silks, coloured trousers, and a small cap embroidered in gold threads, and over this, at the approach of a stranger, they throw a large sheet. Beneath the cap the hair is divided into two plaits on either side and fastened at the back. Chains, nose and ear rings are selected at discretion; and the unmarried women are known by their white trousers and loosely flowing hair.
Returning to Western climes, I note that Isabella, Queen of Richard II. of England, included in her trousseau a gorgeous and unique robe and mantle of red grained velvet, embroidered with metal birds of goldsmith's work perched upon branches of pearls and green precious stones. Obviously economy was no object, and her Majesty had determined to do the thing handsomely.
In the sixteenth century English matrons wore a coif or close bonnet, and the unmarried women braided their hair with knots of ribbon. There is a curious record in the history of Chester in Henry VIII.'s time, which includes an order "to distinguish the head-dress of the married women from unmarried, no unmarried woman to wear white or other coloured caps; and no woman to wear any hat, unless she rides or goes abroad into the country (except sick or aged persons), on pain of 3s. 4d." Such an order is almost as unreasonable as ungrammatical, yet there is comfort to be gleaned from the fact that the tax on disobedience was but 3s. 4d.
In the sixteenth century in Scotland the hair of an unmarried girl was bound by a snood or simple fillet, a lock of hair hanging on each side of the face and tied with a ribbon; but, when married, women covered the hair with a fold of linen fastened under the chin and falling in points on the shoulders.
At the marriage of Princess Elizabeth, daughter of James I., in 1613, when the fashion of the time was the stiff stomacher, farthingale and ruff, "the bride wore a crown set with diamonds, a dress of silver stuff embroidered with silver, pearls and precious stones, the train so long that it was borne by twelve or fifteen fair young ladies, the hair flowing freely down as low as the knee, in the style that virgins used to wear their hair at their weddings." After dinner the Princess put on a dress embroidered with gold, and did up her hair.
This description of a Venetian wedding in the eighteenth century was by Lady Miller:—"All the ladies, except the bride, were dressed in their black gowns with large hoops; the gowns were straight-bodied with very long trains, the trains tucked up on one side of the hoop with a prodigious large tassel of diamonds. Their sleeves were covered up to their shoulders with falls of the finest Brussels lace, a drawn tucker of the same round the bosom, adorned with rows of the finest pearls, each the size of a gooseberry, till the rows descended below the top of the stomacher; then two rows of pearls, which came from the back of the neck, were caught up at the left side of the stomacher, and finished in two fine tassels. Their heads were dressed prodigiously high, in a vast number of buckles and two long drop curls in the neck. A great number of diamond pins and strings of pearls adorned their heads, with large sultanas, or feathers, on one side, and magnificent diamond ear-rings. The bride was dressed in cloth of silver made in the same fashion, and decorated in the same manner, but her brow was kept quite bare, and she had a fine diamond necklace and an enormous bouquet."
Lady Miller deserved to have lived in times when the conduct of the fashion paper was amongst the privileges of the high nobility.