The Heritage of Dress: Being Notes on the History and Evolution of Clothes

by Wilfred Mark Webb

When speaking of footmen, we shall find that those who dress in the costume that was in fashion when hair powder was in vogue still wear it, and the custom has been traced to the days of Rome, when gold dust was put upon the head. It has been suggested that our Saxon forerunners used coloured hair powder or else dyed their hair, but the evidence comes from Saxon drawings in which the hair is often painted blue, and this may be due merely to the caprice of the artist. It is well to be wary also in studying the colour of clothes at early periods, by looking at pictures, to remember that the illuminators may have followed their own fancy, and made garments of such colours as fitted in with their own ideas of ornament.

Though the use of wigs is extremely ancient, the origin, which is customarily ascribed to the peruke, is interesting. Many curious fashions have arisen through royal peculiarities or temporary indispositions, the courtiers having imitated their royal master or mistress, out of compliment. Louis XIV had, when a child, remarkably beautiful hair, which fell in curls on to his shoulders, and to imitate this, his courtiers put on false hair, while later in life the king himself adopted the fashion which they had set.

The obvious use of artificial additions to the hair has now been discontinued for very many years except in a few cases. Judges and barristers with a few Parliamentary and other officials still wear wigs, as do also certain coachmen and footmen, but these we shall consider elsewhere.

It will prove of no small interest after recalling the various modes of doing the hair which ladies have adopted during the last twenty or thirty years, to compare them with the fashions in Egypt in Roman times about two hundred years before the Christian era.

The reason why we can do this so well is that the Romano-Egyptians put on the top of their coffins a model of the head of the person who was buried in it. Professor Flinders Petrie has shown that the effigies were really portraits, and even a glance at some of them would go far to prove the statement. Professor Petrie made composite photographs of the face on the outside of the coffin and of the skull within, and both in the profile as well as in the full-face pictures it was seen that the plaster model clothed the skull, as it were, with flesh.

To return to the question of hair dressing, if one examines Plate [VII] we shall see first of all a lady with corkscrew curls, which were more prevalent in the last century than they are now, though they have not yet died out. Then we have a lady with a very elaborate fringe, another who allows her hair to fall in waves on her forehead, and it forms a chignon at the back. Lastly (Plate [VII], Figure B) a little girl with a small bun on the top of her head. Another specimen, not figured here, and also contained in the celebrated Myers Collection, shows the bun exactly as it was worn at the end of the last century.

We have included two heads (Plate [VII], Figures A and F), one of a boy and the other of a man, showing the great likeness that exists between the way in which hair was done more than two thousand years ago and at the present day.

Besides the methods of hair arrangement which have survived or been revived, there are certain little features still to be seen here and there in modern dress which owe their origin to the ways in which hair or wigs were dressed.

A remnant of the bag-wig, with its great bow of black ribbon, we may find in the army. For a long time on the backs of the collars of the officers and staff-sergeants of the Welsh Fusiliers there have been fixed some ribbons which hang down their back. These, which are few in number, are called the “flash,” and are said to represent the bow which used to ornament the bag-wig. A hundred years ago the officers of the regiment wore their hair turned up behind, and it was then tied with a bow. This is in keeping with another explanation which Mr. R. Simkin has given us, which is that the flash is the survival of a bunch of ribbons that were sewn on the back of the coat-collar to protect it from the pomatum and powder of the “clubbed” or “queued” hair. The privilege of wearing the “flash” has recently been extended to all ranks of the regiment (see Figure [109]).