Fig. 46.—An English Lady (c. 1730).

Women’s dress in this 18th century is dominated by the hoop-petticoat which Sir Roger de Coverley recognizes in 1711 as a new fashion and an old one revived. A stiff bodice laced in front, a gown, with short and wide-ended sleeves, gathered up in folds above the petticoat, a laced apron and a lace cap with hanging lappets, is the dress of the century’s beginning. So the women of fashion are compared with children in go-carts, their tight-laced waists rising from vast bells of petticoats over which the gown is looped up like a drawn curtain. By 1750 the hoop-petticoat ringed with whalebone is so vast that architects begin to allow for its passage up London stairways by curving the balusters outward. Great variety of women’s dress appears under George II., but those in the height of the mode affected a shepherdess simplicity in their walking clothes, wearing the flat-crowned or high-crowned hats and long aprons of the dairymaid. At this time a new fashion comes in, the sacque, a gown, sometimes sleeveless, open to the waist, hanging loosely from the shoulders to near the edge of the hoop-petticoat. George III.’s reign saw women’s head-dressings reach an extravagance of folly passing all that had come before it. Hair kneaded with pomatum and flour was drawn up over a cushion or pad of wool, and twisted into curls and knots and decorated with artificial flowers and bows of ribbon. As this could not be achieved without the aid of a skilled barber, the “head” sometimes remained unopened for several weeks. At the end of that time sublimate powder was needed to kill off the tenantry which had multiplied within. At the beginning of the last quarter of the century the feathers grew larger, chains of beads looped about the curls, while ships in full sail, coaches and horses, and butterflies in blown glass, rocked upon the upper heights. Loose mob-caps or close “Joans” were worn in undress, often as simple as the full dress was fantastic. Varieties of the gown and sacque remained in fashion, the petticoat being still much in evidence, flounced or quilted, or festooned with ribbons. Before the ’eighties of this century were over, a new taste, encouraged by the painters of the school of Reynolds, began to sweep away many follies, and the revolutionary fashions of France, breaking with all that spoke of the old régime, expelled many more. The age of powder and gold lace, of peach-bloom brocade coats with muff-shaped cuffs, of bag-wigs and three-cornered hats drew suddenly to an end. Mr Pitt killed hair-powder by his tax of 1795, but before that time fashionable men, who since the beginning of George III’s. reign had been somewhat inconstant to the wig, were wearing their own hair unpowdered and tied in a club at the back of the coat collar. Before the century end the roughly cropped “Brutus” head was seen. The wig remained here and there on some old-fashioned pates. Bishops wore it until far into the Victorian age, and it may still be seen in the Houses of Parliament and in the courts of law. Even breeches were passing, tight pantaloons showing themselves in the streets. The coat, cut away over the hips, began to take a high collar and the beginnings of the lappel. Its cuffs were of the modern shape, showing a narrow ruffle. The waistcoat ended at the waist. Loose neck-cloths were worn above a frilled shirt-front. Great jack-boots were given to postillions, and men of fashion walked the streets in short top-boots of soft black leather. Most remarkable of the revolutionary changes, the round hat came back, sometimes in a form which recalled the earlier 17th century, and at last took shape as the predecessor of our modern silk hat. Court dresses kept something of their magnificence, but men at home or in the streets were giving up in this time of change their ancient right to wear rich and figured stuffs. Laces and embroideries were henceforward but for military and civil uniforms.

Before 1790 women had begun to dismantle their high headgear, returning to nature by way of a frizzled bush, like a bishop’s wig, with a few curls hanging over the shoulders. Over such heads would be seen towering mob-caps tied with ribbon and edged deeply with lace. Skirts took a moderate size and even court hoops were but panniers hung on either side of the hips. Short jackets with close half-sleeves were worn with the neck and breast covered with a cambric buffant that borrowed a mode from the pouter pigeon. A riding habit follows as far as the short waist the new fashions for men’s coats, the wide-brimmed hat being to match. Short waists came in soon after 1790, the bodice ending under the arm pits, “a petticoat tied round the neck: the arms put through the pocket-holes.” With these French gowns came small coal-scuttle-shaped bonnets of straw, hung with many ribbons and decorated with feathers. At last the woman of fashion, dressed by a Parisian modiste after the orders of David the painter, gathered her hair in a fillet and clothed herself in little more than a diaphanous tunic gown over a light shift and close, flesh-coloured drawers. Her shoes became sandals: her jewels followed the patterns of old Rome. Yet the same woman, shivering half-clad in something that wrapped her less than a modern bathing-dress, appeared at court in the ancient hoop-skirt, tasselled, ribboned and garlanded, hung with heavy swags of coloured silk, and this until George IV. at last broke the antique order by a special command.

The 19th century soon made an end of 18th century fashions already discredited by the revolutionary spirit. The three-cornered hat had gone, the heavy coat cuff and the cravat with hanging ends. Civilians had given up the 19th century. ancient custom of going armed with a sword. The wig and even the pigtail tied with black shalloon were abandoned by all but a few old folk. Soldiers cut off their pigtails in 1808. But judges and lawyers wear their wigs in court in the 20th century, state coachmen wear them on the box, and physicians and the higher clergy wore them even in the street long after laymen had given them up. George IV. refused to receive a bishop of London who appeared at court without a wig, and Sumner, archbishop of Canterbury, wore one until his death in 1862. A few powdered heads were seen as late as the ’forties. M. de Ste Aulaire, the ambassador, made, as Lord Palmerston writes, a very deep and general impression in London society of 1841, not because he wore hair-powder but because he used so much of it. It is now used only by a few lacqueys. In the early Victorian period the cropped “Brutus” head was out of fashion, many men wearing their hair rather long and so freely oiled that the “anti-macassar” came in to protect drawing-room chair-backs.

From Fraser’s Magazine, Dec. 1834.
Fig. 47.—Count D’Orsay. Dress of a man of Fashion in Early Victorian Period.

With powdered hair and the pigtail passed away the 18th century cloth breeches. Here again some old-fashioned people made a stand against the change, the opposition of the clergy being commemorated in the black breeches still worn by bishops and other dignitaries of the church. But in the regent’s time pantaloons of closely fitting and elastic cloth were worn with low shoes or Hessians, and pantaloons and Hessians did not utterly disappear from the streets until the end of the ’fifties. Squires and sportsmen put on buckskins of an amazing tightness and walked the street in top-boots. But the loose Cossack trousers soon made their appearance. The regent’s influence made the blue coat with a very high velvet collar, a high-waisted Marcella waistcoat and white duck trousers strapped under the instep, a mode in which men even ventured to appear at evening receptions, although, in the year before Waterloo, the duke of Wellington was refused admittance to Almack’s when thus clad. Long skirted overcoats, fur-collared and tight in the waist, completed this costume. Coats were blue, claret, buff and brown. “Pea-green Hayne” was known among clubmen by a brighter coloured garment. Civilians, like Jos Sedley, would sometimes affect a frock frogged and braided in semi-military fashion. The shirt collar turned upward, the points showing above vast cravats whose careful arrangement was maintained by one or two scarf-pins. Brummel the master dandy of his age, may be called the first dandy of the modern school. Dressing, as a rule, in black, he distinguished himself, not as the bucks of an earlier age by bright colours, rich materials or jewellery, but by his extravagant neatness and by the superb fit of garments which set the fashion for lesser men. To him, according to Grantley Berkeley, we owe the modern dress-coat. An idle phrase in Bulwer-Lytton’s Pelham (1828), that “people must be very distinguished in appearance” to look well in black, made black henceforward the colour of evening coats and frock coats. With the perfection of the silk hat in the ’thirties, English costume enters on its last phase. The coat cut away squarely in front was then out of the mode; it remains but in the evening-dress coat now always worn unbuttoned, and in the dress of the hunting field. The rest is a record of such slight changes as tailors may cautiously introduce among customers, no one of whom will dare to lead a new fashion boldly. For many decades the fashionably dressed man has been eager to conform to the last authorized vogue and to lose himself among others as shyly obedient. The tubular lines of 20th-century clothing advantage the tailor by the tendency of new clothing to crease at the elbow and bag at the knee. In preserving the necessary straight lines of his garments, in following the season’s fashions in details which only an expert eye would mark, and in providing himself with clothes specialized for every hour of the day, for a score of sports and for the gradations of social ceremonial—in these things only can the modern dandy rival his magnificent predecessors. For ornament, other than plain shirt studs, a plain seal ring, a simple watch guard and a rarely-worn scarf pin, is denied him.

Women at the beginning of the 19th century were clad in those fashions which revolutionary France borrowed from the antique. The simplicity of this style gave it a certain grace; it was at the other pole from the absurdity of the court dress which, until George IV. ordered otherwise, perpetuated the bunched draperies, the flounces and furbelows and even the hoop of the worst period of the 18th century. The gown, lightly girdled near the arm-pits with a tasselled cord, fell in straight clinging folds. Soft muslin was the favourite material, and in muslin fashionable women faced the winter winds, protected only by the long pelisses which in summer were replaced by short spencers. Turbans, varying from a light headscarf of lace or muslin to a velvet confection like that of a Turk on a signboard, were the favourite headgear, although bonnets, hats and caps are found in a hundred shapes. Muslin handkerchiefs or small ruffs were worn about the neck in the morning dress. About the Waterloo period the elegance of the classical gown disappeared. The waist was still high at first but the gown was shorter and wider at the skirt. For evening dress these skirts were stiffened with buckram and trimmed with much tasteless trumpery. Large bonnets were common, and the hair was dragged stiffly to the back of the head, to be secured by a large comb. From 1830 begins a period of singular ugliness. Tight stays came back again, the skirt swept the pavements, a generation of over-clad matrons seemed to have followed a generation of nymphs. The ’fifties showed even more barbarous devices, and about 1854 came in from France the crinoline, that strange revival of the ancient hoop. Plaids, checks and bars, bright blues, crude violets and hideous crimsons, were seen in French merinos, Irish poplins and English alpacas. Women in short jackets, hooped skirts, hideous bonnets and shawls seemed to have banished their youth. The empress Eugénie, a leader of European fashion, decreed that white muslin should be the evening mode, and at balls, where the steels and whalebones of the crinoline were impossible, the women swelled their skirts by wearing a dozen or fourteen muslin petticoats at once. Towards the end of the ’sixties the crinolines disappeared as suddenly as they came, and by 1875 skirts were so tight at the knees that walking upstairs in them was an affair of deliberation. Before 1880 dress-reformers and aesthetes had attacked on two sides the fashions which had halted at the “Princesse” robe, draped and kilted. Both movements failed, but left marked effects. From that time fashion has been less blindly followed, and women have enjoyed some limited individual freedom in designing their costumes. Of 20th-century fashions it is most notable that they change year by year with mechanical regularity. The clothes of smart women can no longer be said to express any tendency of an age. Year by year the modes are deliberately altered by a conclave of the great modistes whose desire is less to produce rich or beautiful garments than to make that radical alteration from loose sleeve to tight sleeve, from draped skirt to plain skirt, which will force every women to cast aside the last season’s garments and buy those of the newer device. But of modern dress it may at least be said that cheaper materials, the sewing machine and the popular fashion papers allow women of the humbler classes to dress more decently and tastefully. Their dress is no longer that frowsy parody of richer women’s frippery which shocked observant foreigners a generation ago.

Underclothing.—Of the underclothing worn next the skin something may be said apart from the general history of costume. Linen shirts were worn by both men and women in the age before the Conquest, and even in the 10th century it was a penance to wear a woollen one. After that time we soon hear of embroidery and ornament applied to them, presumably at the collar which would be visible above gown or tunic. Men added short drawers, or breeches, a word which does not secure its modern value until the end of the 16th century. “Drawers” signified various descriptions of overall, Cotgrave explaining the word as coarse stockings drawn over others although Randle Holme gives it in its later sense. Isaac of Cyprus is named by Robert of Brunne as escaping “bare in his serke and breke.” Henry Christall, who brought four Irish kings to London, told Froissart how, finding that they wore no breeches, he bought linen cloth for them. Medieval romances and the like give us the choice of shirts of linen, of fine Holland, of cloth of Rennes and even of silk, and Chaucer speaks of women’s smocks wrought with silk, embroidered behind and before. Poorer folk went, like Thynne’s poor countryman, in shirts of “canvas hard and tough,” or of coarse Breton dowlas. Under the first Tudors, shirts are decorated with gold, silk and black thread embroideries, the latter being seen in the ruffled shirt worn by the earl of Surrey in our illustration (see fig. 38). Stubbes, in his often-quoted Anatomie of Abuses (1583) declaims against the extravagant sums spent in shirts, the meanest of which would cost a crown or a noble, while the most curiously stitched were valued at ten pounds a piece, “which is horrible to hear.” The Puritans, many of whom, like the later Clapham sect, were careful of intimate luxuries, had a curious fashion of wearing shirts and smocks worked with “holy embroideries,” Biblical sentences or figures, which recall a similar custom among the early Christians. At this time underclothing had increased in quantity, for there are many indications that the men and women of the middle ages were often content with a bare change of linen at the best. The Book of Courtesy (temp. Hen. VII.) orders the servant to provide “clene sherte and breche” against his master’s uprising, but the laundering of the linen of the Percy household, a hundred and seventy people, costs but forty shillings a year in the reign of Henry VIII.

Fig. 48.—A Man-at-arms and a Man in a Shirt (early 14th century). From Royal MS. 19 B. xv.