THE HISTORY OF CRINOLINE.*
CRINOLINE has now lasted eleven years, in spite of denunciations from artists, clergymen, and all men who have to pay for women's dresses, or suffer by the inadequate dimensions of modern car- riages, and there seems no reason why it should not last until the end of the century. When the Empress Eugenie, iu her wish • The Son, of Soaps. Divided into Acts and Scenes. Rendered into Terse m the to conceal that she had attained the goal of her ambition, reintro-
ref...Lisa Englah TrauslatIon and other reilli0123, By Joseph Llsmbleton. andon.
duced the fashion, it was treated as one altogether new and tem- porary, but the truth is that the bell dress is the normal English fashion, and the scant skirt a rare and temporary innovation. "Crinoline," in its trade sense, did not last twelve months, the material so-called, which is simply bad muslin, giving way at once to the thin steel hoop, but in its conventional sense it has lasted under different names nearly three hundred years. There is in fact a principle, or we should rather say an impulse, beneath all very radical changes of fashion, Men's dress is affected mate- rially by alterations of political feeling, the present tendency amidst many small changes being obviously towards equality of caste—a tendency so strong that the use of anything very con- spicuous, of costly colours, and in a less degree of costly material, is voted decidedly snobbish. A duke dare not walk down Piccadilly dressed in cloth of gold, or even in the dress in which Mr. Coghlan plays "Sir Caradoc" at the Olympic, though as if to point out the reason of the change, he might wear that very dress, minus the gold-lace frogs, without further notice than a suspicion that he was an artist vain of his pursuit. Politics do not often affect women's dress, though the French Revolution, with its false tone of classicality, revived the habit of stripping, —carried so far sixty years previous that Miss Chudleigh received one morning, after her appearance at a State ball, a fig leaf as a mild hint,—but a theory of dress does. For three centuries the notion has been to drape the female figure so as to show the bust and leave the trunk and limbs completely con- cealed, a notion interrupted at intervals by the more artistic idea that the object of dress is to reveal while concealing. Each fashion has been in turn advocated and denounced on the score of decency, old gentlemen whose wives wore no tuckers, and who quite approved of a fashion which left the gown as tight as a wet bath-dress, now being loud on the impropriety of showing the aucles, which, again, a century ago were as little within or without the limits of " proper reserve " as the wrists now are. Each fashion also has been praised by men on account of its convenience, and each by turns has seemed to the next genera- tion almost inexplicably ludicrous, people now laughing at the high waists and tight dresses of 1800 as the dames of that day laughed at the stately bell-like forms of 1710, or as the half- nude women of 1000 will ridicule the encumbered figures of 1864. On the whole, and over a long course of years, the wide drapery has carried the day, for the simple reason that the sex which has to wear it likes it beat of the two. The tight dress might be all very well for girls of twenty-five, just in their maturity of form, but only one-fifth of womanhood was at any one time of the fitting age, and one-half even of that fifth would have pi-eferred some possibility of padding. The tight dress, too, forbad walking with speed, or sitting with comfort, or stand- ing without formality, or enjoying the luxury, once so outré, of crossing the legs at will, and required above all dresses the aid of tight lacing, a practice which, pace the jesters, no woman ever honestly liked. " Crinoline" therefore prevailed whenever it got a fair chance, and from Queen Elizabeth's farthingale for more than three hundred years, maintained a broken rule. It fell every mow and then under the influence of Continental fashion, but it revived in 1710, when the book before us takes up the tale.
The book is an advertisement simply, but one of a costly and unusual kind. Mr. E. Philpott, " jupon manufacturer," which means, we suppose, in English, maker of women's petticoats, thinks he has made such articles of unmatched quality and design, but not content with saying so, he has published a volume of plates showing the form of the hoop from 1710 to 1864. They are very good plates, very well copied, illustrated with very atrocious letter-press,--trash of the most insufferable kind, —and they really show how little change has occurred in female costume for more than a hundred and fifty years. The " hoop " of 1710, which the Tatter ridiculed, is precisely the hoop of our own day, though covered more tightly by the dress, and thrown out by internal machinery more completely from the hips. A lady in a print of that year is seen descending into a sedan chair through the roof of her odd machine, in a dress which might pass to-day down Regent Street without any remark from the street boys on its oddity or character. The new hoop which Mr. Philpott says had just been introduced, a hoop the whole cir- cumference of which was thrown forwards in a manner at once ungainly and incorrect, has not indeed been revived, but it is scarcely more ugly than the astounding article worn by the lower classes of London,—a single hoop which expands the dress at its hem, and makes the wearer look as if she had covered a clothes-basket with linsey-woolaey and were walking about in that. In 1730 the ladies had dis-
covered that the bell-shaped dresses should be long, and should expand in a curve, but there was no other change, and in 1735 the petticoats, though loss rotund, were again as short as ever. Ten years later the bell had expanded to the shape of an egg, each side of the dress being thrown out in a style which may occasionally be seen in the streets of London, but which fortu- nately has as yet no warrant from fashion. The hoop at this time must either have been constructed of iron or timber, as no whalebone would have sufficed to throw out the petticoat as if extended over a colossal fan. It would have either collapsed altogether as cheap crinolines do, or have subsided into the circular form to which all such devices of necessity tend. In 1750 the dress, again long, was again thrown out artificially on each side of the waist, thrown out so excessively that a man might have sat as comfortably on each side of hie wife's hoops as on a carriage cushion, and women of fashion all looked as if they carried milk-pails under their robes. In 1760 the hoop began to decrease, by 1785 it had reduced itself to what are now called moderate dimensions, i. e., about four times the natural size, and by 1705 the dress had again become straight, a line drawn from the shoulders falling without the hem of the gown, as it is supposed to do in the natural human figure. Thenceforward to about 1820 the steady tendency was towards as little dress as possible, narrow petticoats, high waists, and no tuckers, till at last about 1832 the fashion subsided into the costume which middle-aged men regret and market-women still wear, and which was not seriously changed till the elevation of the beautiful Scoto- Spaniard to the throne of France. The Empress Eugenie, bright, pretty, lucky, and enthusiastic in dress, seized the helm of fashion from the first, and by the aid of her milliners has kept it ever since, regulating the hair, petticoats, sleeves, and bodices of all the ladies iu Europe. Iler Majesty has, we think, only failed once, Englishwomen having declined en mass, to adopt the use of the walking-stick, which conceals and produces a stoop; but then to be sure the sillonercers had no iuterest in supporting her decree, and this is the age when sovereignty means the promotion of material interests.
If Mr. Philpott wishes his advertisement to succeed ho must go to still greater expense than he has already incurred, complete' his collection of plates by illustrations from the time of Anne Boleyn, get his letter-press rewritten by somebody who under- stands dress and history and spells " whimsical" with instead of without an "h," and strike out all the absurd hoops without wearers with which he has degraded a clever puff to the level of a walking Strand placard.
Previous page
