27 DECEMBER 1856, Page 13

NEW PARIS FASHIONS.

AMONG the important items of news from the Continent is one that will flutter many a dovecot : the hoop and all its congeners are to be abolished, and the bonnet is so far to be developed that it will once more cover the head ! Dressmakers will welcome changes which are good for trade ; but these are changes that many others might welcome besides dressmakers. Not that our hoop had ever expanded to its full proportions, or that the bonnet in disappear- ing had ever taken the proportions of a great enormity. It had indeed degenerated to a collar. The " doctor's boy," who is the Pasquiu of Punch, might sarcastically exclaim while passing the fair slave of fashion, as if he were reading the definition from some dictionary—" Bonnet, a covering for the head " ; and the ab- sence of covering might be inconvenient in our wet and windy cli- mate, but that matters little in these days of umbrellas and car- riages. If the fair preferred to go without covering, the hair streaming like a meteor to the troubled air, it was at least a picturesque caprice ; and before we can welcome the bonnet that covers the head, we must see it. There were iu ancient days strange customs of actually placing upon the head a silken coal- scuttle.

The hoop with its abortive parallels—the crinoline, the corded petticoat, and the inflated—has not been naturalized in our day. It never was developed to the proportions which reconciled it to taste—for it was reconciled after a fashion. It was ugly, as Leigh Hunt says, in so far as it interfered with the mind's idea of the body's shape—when it made the hips appear dislocated, the body swollen, and the gait unnatural. But when it expanded to its domelike perfection, it was " not an habiliment but an enclo- sure,"—a hemisphere through which Venus was ever rising. Canopied from the waist downwards, Marie Antoinette seemed in the eyes of Mr. Burke to swim ; and to the bard of the Seasons, in his youthful days, the hoop was the crowning beauty of Edin- burgh—

" With ladies there my ravished eyes did meet, That oft I've seen grace fair Edina's street, When their broad hoops cut through the willing air, Phased to give place unto the lovely fair.

Sure this is like those blissful seats above Where all is peace, transporting joy, and love "

It is as difficult for the modern mind to conceive that the hoop should be thus "transporting," as that it should be, what the ascetic called it, alluring and dangerous. A lady in a silken meat-cover is not an idea for pictures either of heaven or Armida's bower. But if the hoop is bad, the abortive hoop is infinitely worse. The corded contrivance made the lovely fair look not like Venus rising through a fairy hemisphere, but like a Jack-in-the- box just risen on the removal of the lid. The inflated, which was subject to ludicrous fillings, never attained to being anything but a joke, and a very bad joke—nothing becomes it like its ending. " Fashion " there always will be among us ; it is born of a false emulation and of mercenary pandering. The homely " fair one" thinks that she would like to resemble the distinguished and the lovely ; and the dressmaker promises to effect the metamorphosis, if she have a sufficient allowance for materials, trimming, and' talent. The dressmaker is paid ; and the mirror says that she has succeeded. She is the more certain of her trade if she can induce the lovely and the distinguished by nature to abdicate and descend to the common level. All cats are grey by twilight ; all womankind may be Helen when concealed by the " enclosure,"— Helen herself being no better than the average while she is still concealed in half of the egg-shell. In our day Fashion has been promoted to a higher grade by being abated : the best of fashions is no fashion—especially when the fashion to be negatived is some brummagem compromise of the hoop.