Costume: Fanciful, Historical, and Theatrical/Chapter 17
CHAPTER XVII
OF MATERIALS, THE CORSET, AND THE CRINOLINE
The material question seems to have been answered in every country save England, where the initiative in manufacture is conspicuous by its absence, though we have through the centuries so successfully begged, borrowed, stolen, or acquired an expert knowledge of the various textile arts, that every manufactured fabric is now grist which may come from our mill.
The art of cloth-making the early Britons learned from the Romans, but their ambition towards this industry died after the departure of their instructors, not actively asserting itself again until, at the suggestion of Philippa of Hainault, some Flemish weavers established themselves at Norwich—a policy evidently successful enough to induce Edward III. in the fourteenth century to invite a Flemish weaver to teach the art to "such of our people as shall be inclined to learn it."
The trade was started at Kendal, spreading to York and thence to many different towns, where there grew up in due course the manufacture of broadcloth, baizes, kerseys, and serges, the North of England then, as to this day, holding the best interests of the cloth trades firmly in the hollow of its hand. It is interesting to note that an Act was passed forbidding all save the King and Queen and her children to wear any cloth but that made in England, for here we may trace surely the work of the legitimate ancestor of our passionate protectionist, Joseph Chamberlain.
But, after all, woollen cloth is dull stuff, and the first on the list of fabrics aiming at the beautiful is cloth of gold, which made its bid for fame in the days of Richard II., whose patronage of the luxury was, however, mild in comparison with that of that past master in the art of prodigality, Henry VIII., who is said to have had as many as twenty-five suits of cloth of gold, securing it at a price of 40s. per yard, which does not seem a very extravagant sum to-day.
A textile used in England during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is imperial, wrought with gold, and credited with being woven at the workshops kept by the Byzantine Emperors; and gold also gave its assistance to the making of a well-known stuff in the Middle Ages christened baudekin, which later came to be a term signifying any rich silk. A variety of the cloth of gold was plunket cloth of gold—plunket, however, being more properly described as a coarse woollen cloth; yet it is authentic that Richard III. had a gown lined with this, and in revels held by Henry VIII. at Greenwich it was registered that there were six ladies in "crimosin plunket" embroidered with gold and pearls, so that fashion seems to have idealised the homely plunket, which in its original state would have been more suitably classed with home-spuns, burnet, russet, and frieze. In the fourteenth century taffeta was introduced into England, and taffy was the name of a watered edition of this, which we owe to the refugees, who crowded here in their numbers, and made us familiar with brocade amongst other novelties. Satin was known in England as early as the thirteenth century, having been imported into Europe from China, but not achieving much popularity owing to its exorbitant price, though later Henry VIII. had a great predilection for it in red. Amongst stuffs associated immortally with history and romance are sackcloth and samite, and the latter, besides bearing its fame down from biblical days, has been credited with possessing every known virtue that the textile is heir to; it was originally, no doubt, a heavy silk material woven with a thread of six fibres, and carrying thick upon its surface most glossy honours. When Sir Launcelot came to King Arthur, the poet says:
Lancelot and the queene were clede.
In robes of a rich weede,
Of samit white, with silver shredde.
And it is in white we invariably picture it, yet more constantly in olden days it was made in red. Suffering much change in its orthography, it was originally written "samits," later "samit," and finally invested with the final "e," and yet while every record grants it a silken surface, some German scholar, owing to the circumstance that to this day their word "samt" expresses velvet, is quite convinced that the samit of old was of velvet substance.
To China was accorded the privilege of persuading us permanently of the charms of brocade and velvet, and the descriptions of the mediæval velvets suggest that this could have been no difficult task, for they include diapered velvets, figured velvets, changeable velvets, velvets figured with white, and velvets worked upon gold, while the Genoese and the French rivalled each other in the best manufacture of these.
The making of linen has been traced back to the early Egyptians, and the art was brought to England by the Romans, but a very fine linen dedicated to altar cloths and shirts in the middle ages was first manufactured at Rennes in Brittany. The English linen trade made no great stride until the reign of Charles I., and lawn and cambric were first greatly used in England in the sixteenth century.
Fur as a trimming appears to have had no popular existence previous to the thirteenth century, but after the reign of Henry III. it bears its part bravely in romance and chronicles, ermine being pre-eminent together with a fur known as lettice, which closely resembles it; there were lettice caps worn by ladies in the reign of Elizabeth, who indeed forbade their wear to any but "a gentlewoman born, having arms," and sable was permitted only to the nobility and to certain officers of the Royal household in the Middle Ages.
Lace has paid for its success in a disputed birthplace, for both Flanders and Italy claim its first manufacture, the experts declaring in favour of the latter, and asserting that Italy bore the art to Spain and passed it on to Flanders. In any case Venice must be granted the first prize for the beauty of its lace, which in early days was enriched with gold and silver. Caen is accorded the honour of having first introduced blonde lace, while France and Switzerland and Belgium have all contributed their share towards the perfecting of "the most fascinating of all fabrics," and different events of history have brought no small influence to bear on the popularity of different laces in different periods, the foreign-made bone-lace obtaining the distinction of being banished from England by royal order. In the reigns of the Stuarts, lace adorned alike feminine and masculine attire, and the collar of the luckless King Charles I. in his many pictures by Vandyke has stamped the fact indelibly on our minds. The Commonwealth greatly affected the manufacture of lace in England, though some of the most rigid Puritans continued to wear Flanders lace, and the dead body of the Protector was "robed in purple velvet, ermine, and richest Flanders lace"—not so bad for the simple cerements of the greatest socialist who ever lived! The passion for wearing lace reached its height in England in the reign of William and Mary, when lace was indispensable to the most exalted wearers of the commodes, and its influence was essential on the full cravats and ruffles. In the reigns of George I. and George II., Brussels lace grew especially popular; but English lace reached a pitch of perfection at this period, Devonshire being especially famous for the industry. In its delicate meshes lace has held captive to its charms many earnest students who have set down its biography in various volumes, and to skim these hurriedly is to do them wrong; so in passing I would recommend their pages to the leisured, while chronicling that we have known lace needle-run or pillow-made for nearly four centuries, and that it was preceded by the "cut out," the appliqué and an embroidery worked in stiffly conventional design on net with cords of thread.
The most faithful and punctilious archæuologists confess that the origin of the corset must be written down to the credit or discredit of man, for they find the birth of its existence may be dated in the far antiquity, when the savage made his hunting belt of leather stiffened with bone or hard stick held with a thong of hide, and as decorative as useful, since it was adorned with shells and quills and served to hold the knife or quiver. Ovid recommends the fair ones of his day to wear those ingenious constructions which give lines to the bust and all it lacks, while Homer describes Juno as wearing a ceinture ornamented with a thousand fringes, and we are, of course, convinced of the fact that she borrowed from Venus a famous cestus wherein were all the pains and penalties of love.
The ancient Greeks and Romans sternly opposed the corset, and yet they yielded to the necessity for bands and belts to support the bust, this band being usually made of embroidered leather. There is indisputable proof that in the earliest days of civilisation there was in use a variety of contrivances for the reduction of the feminine figure, and in a most interesting chronicle I read that "Amongst the works of art discovered amongst the ruins of one of the mysterious forest cities in South America is a bas-relief representing a female figure which, in addition to a profusion of massive ornaments, wears a complicated and elaborate waist bandage, which by a system of circular and transverse folding and looping confines the waist just below the ribs to the hips." What could be more conclusive? Here is obviously the ancestress of the straight-fronted Specialité corset.
The origin of the word "stays" comes from stay, to support; the term "corset" may have been developed from "corps": the term "corse," however, must not be confounded with it, and Planche considers this should apply merely to the bodice of a gown. The earliest method of making the stay was with pieces of cane, and this may be compared favourably with a variety obtaining as lately as in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. This was made of steel with broad pieces of steel shaped to the hips, and clamped or hinged under each arm, being straightly stiff at the top of the front and the back, where it reached up to the shoulder-blades. These frames, however, were not primarily used to reduce the waist, for they were worn over a corset, so that the dress might yield not to the weakness of a single fold, and that the stomacher might. present a front of unruffled smoothness. A development of this stay showed it curved at the top, front, and back, somewhat in the outline of those we wear now, but clamped together down the back, and made of the stiffest of iron, and decorated with countless meaningless-looking little holes and apertures. This was the style adopted by Catherine of Medici, which permitted her the questionable joy of reducing her waist to thirteen inches.
Christine of France, we are told by Jacob the bibliophilist, wore a "justaucorps" embroidered in gold and studded with precious stones; this was a remarkable shape, not defining the waist at all, and finished off with an indented basque.
The first mention of what may rightly be termed the corset is at the end of the fourteenth century, when the dresses cut low in the front introduced by Isabella of Bavaria were responsible tor the innovation, and made popular the wearing of the new garment, which was made in all kinds of materials laced either at the front or at the back. At the end of the fifteenth century the basquine was adopted, a corset of stout linen or cotton with a busk of wood or metal at the front. Rabelais says, "The ladies at the Court of Francis I. wore basquines, and a silk camlet over their chemises," and it is needless to say that they incurred the displeasure of the preachers of the day; indeed Charles IX. and Henry III. issued several stringent laws with regard to the corset, being convinced that it was highly injurious to the health of its wearers, and the corps pique which was worn in this reign was neither more nor less than an instrument of torture, compressing the body into a hard unyielding mould, the splinters of wood often tearing the skin. Until the end of the sixteenth century the tailor had the monopoly of corset-making, and his methods seem to have been anything but tender. It was in the seventeenth century that Ben Jonson pathetically complained
The whalebone man,
Who quilts the bodies I have leave to span.
In the reign of Louis XV. corsets were cut away on the hips and laced at the back, the long busks of wood or steel being only in the front; whalebone was used to stiffen the corset, which was sometimes made in two pieces and laced under the arms, and it was invariably supplied with shoulder-straps, and began in those days to take unto itself such rich materials as brocade and satin embroidered in gold chenille or silk. The Directoire period produced a classic zone worn outside the dress, a mode that soon gave place to the boneless corset, a fleeting fancy, for all costume worn in the time of Louis XVI. owes its greatest charm to the stays, the bodices being cut into long points and fitted tightly from bust to waist. In some instances these bodices were sewn on to the figure of the wearer after the stays had been laced to their extreme limit, and many of Hogarth's figures prove the influence of the very stiffs stay, the figures being erect in an uncomfortable degree, for it is impossible to imagine any human creature achieving such excellence of carriage without considerable support from without, and some inconvenience from within.
In the later days of the eighteenth century greater comfort was granted, when the short-waisted dress prevailed, together with the most laudable ambition to copy the flowing elegance of the classic period. But the rule of ease did not obtain long, and in the early times of the nineteenth century the fashion of tight lacing was revived with enthusiasm, stays being composed of bars of iron and steel with the tops stiffly steeled so that the shoulder-straps might be dispensed with. Women suffered a craze for compression, until the sixth decade of the nineteenth century, when its influence was somewhat less essential by reason of the ubiquity of the crinoline, which gave a semblance of the small waist to the least slender.
The crinoline boasts as its great-great-grand-mother the farthingale or vertingale, which was worn in France in the reign of Henry II., when it is described as a cage put on beneath the petticoat to inflate it to extravagant extent. It was, however, in the days of Elizabeth that the farthingale reached its apogee, and according to Sir Roger de Coverley made its wearers look as if they were "standing in a drum." Early in Charles I.'s reign it went out of fashion, and when Catherine of Braganza and her Portuguese ladies wore it on coming to London for her marriage with Charles II., the anachronism attracted crowds of amused spectators. The farthingale, in fact, had become obsolete, to reappear, however, in the somewhat more convenient form of the hooped petticoat which swelled in the reign of Anne. The contour of this was very slightly altered in the reign of George I., the sides being more curved at the front and the back, and the old shape of the circular farthingale was. preferred with the trainless gown. 1796 is the date given when hoops were discarded except at Court, and the real crinoline made its appearance in 1854, the previous year having witnessed the crinoline petticoat as an ordinary adjunct to dress. The Empress Eugenie pronounced in favour of the crinoline, and it became the mode, remaining so for many years, while those few who refused to give it patronage gave hostages to fashion in the horsehair-stiffened petticoat. The crinoline in those days was of the skeleton kind and formed of hoops of steel held together by perpendicular tapes, but it soon developed into a petticoat of calico with the steels running through it at intervals from hem to waist. It is amongst the fashions over which even the most pessimistic may hopefully write "Ichabod."