Farthingale. Lady Runsdon.
From Planché’s Cyclopædia of Costume.
It was a time of great expenditure upon clothes; the fashions were rich and costly; the custom was to make what we should call an ostentatious display of wealth. Ben Jonson and the dramatists are full of the extravagance of City madams. Not only did the ladies wear rich dresses; they prided themselves upon possessing a great number—as many as they could afford; in every house there was a room called the Wardrobe, in which the clothes of the household were hung up and carefully watched and kept from moth and decay.
At the beginning of her reign the Queen, who set the fashion, wore a small ruff, with a kerchief about her neck; a kind of coat of black velvet and ermine fastened at the throat only; with a waistcoat and kirtle below of white silk or silver embroidered with black; on the shoulders were humps, and the sleeves were large. Stubbes abuses the fashion because it is “proper only to a man, yet they blush not to wear it.” The cap or coif was adorned with strings of pearls. Lawn and cambric ruffs came in shortly after Elizabeth’s accession. A Flemish woman named Van der Plasse came over and set up as a starcher of ruffs. The mere mention of starch made Stubbes furiously angry; the ruff was a “master devil”; the devil himself invented starch.
LADY IN THE COURT OF QUEEN ELIZABETH, 1559.
NOBLE MATRON OF ENGLAND, 1577.
From Collection of Ancient and Modern Dresses, 1772.
The custom of wearing whalebone to imprison the figure down to the hips also began early in the reign; a long stomacher descended in front, and from the hips stood out the farthingale, horizontally; a hideous thing which was perpetuated in the hoop for two hundred years. As for the gowns they were made, to the indignation of the satirist, “of silk, of velvet, of grograin, of taffata, and of fine cloth, ten, twenty, or forty shillings a yard”; they were decorated with lace two fingers broad, or with velvet edged with lace. The petticoats were also of the finest stuff, fringed with silk, and in addition, they had a kirtle also of fine stuff and fringed with lace and silk. It appears therefore that they had first a gown which was pulled back and showed the kirtle, which itself was pulled back and disclosed the petticoat.
