Fig. 77.—A Korean servant (after Hough).
It seems certain, as in the original carving the woman is shown with a burden on her head and in the act of driving a calf before her, that she is a representative of the peasant class. In the Korea at the present day, women of the lower orders, although they adopt a jacket which covers their arms and shoulders, wear so short an one that as there is no garment beneath it leaves their breasts quite bare. (See Figure [77].) Such an arrangement would obviously facilitate the nursing of children, and this fact has been advanced as the reason for its adoption. Still it may be merely a fashion such as some women, at the other end of the social scale, once adopted in our non-tropical country. In the time of James I of England, the noble ladies, while they wore an exaggerated ruff round their necks, nevertheless had their dresses cut away from just below it almost to their waists.
Fig. 78.—A short kilt.
The short kilt now worn in Scotland represents the lower part of the belted plaid, and is in fact a petticoat and specially interesting, seeing that it is a survival of this type as a man’s garment. Of the origin of the sporran which is worn in front of the kilt, little seems to be known, and though it recalls to mind the time when men were clothed in skins, it forms a pouch as well as an ornament, and possibly also may have been useful as a protection. (See Figure [78].)
Having once derived the petticoat, however, from the ancestral shawl, it is a very simple matter to proceed and evolve a pair of trousers. As a matter of fact, the Eastern women, when they fasten their petticoats between their ankles for convenience in walking, demonstrate the first stage in the production of bifurcated garments.
A single row of stitches will give rise to a kind of divided skirt, while two seams and a single cut made between, and parallel, to them, will produce a pair of trousers.