WHEN MEN WORE MUFFS

Evening Star, Issue 22362, 11 June 1936, Page 13

WHEN MEN WORE MUFFS

THE -GLORY OF THE DANDY THROUGH THE AGES It is only in comparatively recent times that women outshone men in the variety and brilliance of their clothes. As Mr H. P Price shows in a book on the story of men’s dress, men for centuries loved nothing better than to wear the gaudiest of clothes, lace, ribbons, plumes, and even muffs (says the Melbourne ‘Argus’). Fashion often makes fools of her followers, but never more effectively than when she goads a man into protest against women’s silly shoes, precarious hats, and useless ornamentations. This is because every man is the descendant of heroes who wore corsets, gaudy garters, lace-edged boots, strawstuffed fancy pants, fluttering ribbons, cosmetics, scent, and muffs, as well as silly shoes, precarious hats, and more ludicrous items. “ One law for the man and another for the woman ” is, in fact, only a recent injustice of fashion. Thro.ughout history, until less than a century ago, man’s and woman’s dress has been equally ornate, ugly, absurd, or sensible at any given period. The existing odd spectacle of woman wearing the plumes while the male, a sombre bird, caws his perhaps envious derision is an exception likely to be fleeting. It is not safe to predict that the situation may become reversed, in spite of the tendency of smart women to cling to tailored, lines, while man, Royally guided, inclines toward green pork-pie hats, merrier plus fours, and blue dinner jackets; but it seems certain that mankind’s inherited love of gorgeous garments is only dormant, and must some day break out in spots more brilliant than ever. Man’s present dullness of dress is no guarantee against such a revolution. The Greeks, masters of simplicity, bequeathed the one-piece togo to their successors, but it was soon belted, jewelled, gartered, fringed, and puffed out of all recognition. Whatever he asserts to the contrary, man likes to dress up. The .first man, as capable of keeping warm without clothes as aiiy other animal, donned the skins of slain beasts not for protection, but as a manifest sign of his prowess and as an aid to his courtships. Civilisation, as that which distinguishes man from the beasts, developed more quickly through dress than any other refinement of living. With the Middle Ages came an era of decoration, of panoply, and of heraldry which must have exercised a great influence on the mind and comportment of men new to chivalry. DISPLEASING. TO GOD. Cloaks, tunics, hose, and gloves were made of gorgeous stuffs in the 13th century, and styles became so exaggerated that Monstrelet could write, on the threshold of the Renaissance; —> “ At the same time, the men wore shorter dresses than usual. Even the varlets had jackets of silk, satin, or velvet ... they had also under their jackets large stuffings at their shoulders to make them appear broad, which is a very vanity and perchance displeasing to God.” Contemporary portraits of Henry VIII., whose wooings increased a right Royal wardrobe, show him with these “ large stuffings at his shoulders,” giving him a squat, top-heavy appearance above his short skirts and tight hose. Elizabeth’s vast ruffs above padded shoulders put an even more bloated appearance on her courtiers, both mas* culine and (feminine, and the puffed pantaloons of the men completed a picture to overflow the largest canvas. But under all this padding lived and moved the Tudor heroes, who not only strove to outdo the courtly Spaniard by stealing all his ideas or novelties in dress, and having them improved out of all recognition by the patriotic English tailor, but also swept him off the seas. In t t reign of the Stuarts, too, foppishness and valour were the mark of the man. Over his corsets a fashionable follower of Villiers, Duke of Buck-

ingham, would wear, according to contemporary description:— “ His doublet, of a strange cut ; the collar so. high and sharp that it would have cut his throat by daylight ... his breeches, a wonder to see, were full as deep as the middle of winter ... his back part like a monster ... a curious pair of boots of King Philip’s leather in such artificial wrinkles, sets and pleats as if they came new from the laundress . .' . with huge wide tops which swallowed up his thighs.” At this time the garter was almost equivalent in size and variety of design to a scarf; it was tied in a bow, with lace ends hanging down the side of the leg.* Lace was an' obsession with the cavaliers. They wore it at the neck, knee, sleeve, and waist, and their boots were spurred at one end and lace-edged at the other. The influence of the Purir tans was momentary, and after the Restoration men strutted again in their petticoat-breeches, ribbons, and curls, natural or periwigged. Alas, for the edict of the Puritans:— . “The custom of wearing long hair, after the manner of immoral persons and of the savage Indians, can only have been introduced into England in sacrilegious contempt of the express command] of God, who declares that it is a'shameful practice for any man who has the least care for his soul to wear long hair.” PEPYS COMPLAINS. A plaint by Pepys, after recording the expenditure of £67 on clothes, “ £l2 for my wife and £55 for myself ”: \ \ “ Walking •in the galleries at Whitehall I find the ladies _of honour dressed in their riding farbs, with coats and doublets with eep skirts, just for all the world like mine, and buttoned their doublets up to the breast, with periwigs and with hats, so that only for a long petticoat dragging under their men’s coats nobody would take thbm for women in any point whatever.” And it is Pepys who is quoted as the authority for the title of Mr Price’s book ‘ When Men Wore Muffs.’ On November 30, 1662, Master Pepys records: “ This day I did first wear a muffe, being my wife’s last year’s muffe.” Not a passing phase, either, for Rowlandson’s water colour ‘ Skating on the Serpentine, 1786,’ shows two men carrying fur muffs. In 1795 the partisans of Fox carried large red fox muffs. Contrary to general belief, the greatest affectations of the Prince Regent’s reign were not inspired by Beau Brummel. He ruled by taste, not by extravagance, and he spoke for the Englishman of the future when a friend, having told him of a passer-by so well dressed that people were turning round to look at him, the beau replied: “ Ah, then he is not well dressed.” Dandyism throughout the reigns of the Georges was brought to such nicety that a man’s politics, religion, and temperament were deduced from his dress. Compared with Beau Nash, the man who was advertised as missing from his home in Queen Anne’s time, wearing “ a dark brown frieze coat, a light drugget .waistcoat, red shag breeches striped with b!a,ck stripes, and black stockings,” was a model of inconspicuousness. Small wonder that he criticised so severely George IV., whose taste, commentators agree, was vile, and whose most crushing reply to his critics was the expenditure of £24,000 on his coronation robes. When Lord Essex reported to the Prince that ties, instead of buckles, would be worn on shoes. George, who had attended the House of Lords dressed in “ black velvet most richly embroidered with gold and pink spangles and lined with pink satin, with pink heels on his shoes and his hair frizzled into small curls,” replied: “ I’ll be damned if I’ll ever be so. effeminate,.”

COMING OP TROUSERS. > George IV. was one of the first Englishmen to wear trousers, formerly considered so lacking in proper dignityj that the Duke of Wellington in black trousers was turned away' from Almack’s, the fashionable resort of the day. The Iron Duke went home and donned his knee-breeches to atone fog his breach of good taste. Trousers were destined to triumph, however, although the earlier models resembled breeches.in showing off the line of a good leg. A fashionable man of the period announced to his tailor, when, he was being measured for his trousers:) “ And if I can get into them I wpn’ti have them!” Count D’Orsay, the last of tha beaux, countenanced trousers, and with the loss of .individuality in the coat, trousers became the factor reconciling Victorian modesty with tha vanity of man. Disraeli wore trousers of “ such a pronounced pattern that they almost shrieked.” The frock-coats, top hats, cloth-but-toned waistcoats, and Dundreary whiskers of Victorianism may be studied in the family album, along with tha equally ugly dress of women. King Edward’s Homburg hat, tha new “ lounge ” suit with many pockets, and the conventional dress suit, were an improvement, but also an eclipse of the ancient glory that is only, now emerging from its darkest. From the excess of extravagance to the excess of dullness “ standard suitings ” have brought mankind. With his sartorial follies he has shed nearly all his individuality and imagination m dress. As a modern wit has expressed it: “ Once it used to take nine tailors to make a man. Now it takes only one retailer to mar him.”