The Heritage of Dress: Being Notes on the History and Evolution of ClothesWebb, Wilfred Mark
History
The Heritage of Dress: Being Notes on the History and Evolution of Clothes
Webb, Wilfred Mark
Clothing and dress; Clothing and dress -- History
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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