WEARING HISTORY.

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXIII, Issue 18762, 29 December 1930, Page 16

WEARING HISTORY.

CUSTOMS IN CLOTHES. Few people realise what an intricate jumble of past conventions and customs we carry about on our backs in the clothes we wear. Some features in them have been preserved almost un-r changed right down from Greece and Anglo-Saxon England, others are traditions that have lost all meaning or the words themselves have had a new meaning given to them, writes L. F. Easterbrook, in John o’ London’s Weekly. The very word “garment,” for instance, means “garnishment,” or adornment, rather than a useful neces sity, and the fashionable lady who chooses her latest “robe” little dreams that the word is directly derived through the German from “rob,” and once referred only to the spoils stripped from a dead enemy. Her twopiece sports costume is only one of the many modes which she has stolen from the earliest days—in this case from the ladies of Greece and Grete, who wore a body “corslet” and skirt. Others she has stolen from men, for men were the first to wear gowns, robes, frocks, blouses, and even petticots! Gowns were originally made of fur, and were worn by monks, as also were frocks, as the extant phrase “unfrocking” a priets still be-tokens. “Blouse” is a French word that referred to the smock or overall worn by peasant, although in the beginning it was a silken overall that knights wore to prevent the rain from spotting their armour. Petticoat, of course, is merely a “petit” or “little” coat, first applied to a man’s short jacket. • What is a Jacket? “Jacket,” by the way, is a diminutive or “jack,” a coat made of many folds of cloth and a stag’s skin, became so hardened that it could effectually resist the point of an arrow or dagger. They must have been exceedingly uncomfortable, and were, in fact, referred to as “the great villainous English jacks.” “Jack” is evidently connected with leather, as witness “jack boots” and the old leather fiagons of that name. Our boots, correctly speaking, are really only half-boots, which were worn by the Saxons, who adapted l hem for riding by using leather hose, whence developed “boot” in its true meaning—viz., top-boot. “Golosh” is not a pretty word, and many will be surprised to hear that it is a classical one, being a conjunction of two Greek words that meant “wooden foot” —1.e., the shoemaker’s last. In England it was applied to the wooden clogs worn by the peasantry, and is mentioned in ‘Piers Plowman’ in the fourteenth century as being worn by a knight. Whence came the little perforated pat tern on the toe-caps of our modem boots and shoes no one seems to know. The Saxons copied them from the Romans, and Chaucer’s rather precious young priest had his shoes adorned with them, but there seems no authority for tracing any useful purpose of this decoration, which is unusual. One thinks of the utilitarian explanation of the cowboy’s spectacular dress —his big hat that shields him from the sun, the handkerchief tied round his neck because it is the most comenient place for a man with reins in one hand and a stock-whip in the other, while his thick chaps of sheepskin protect his legs from the scrubby undergrowth through which he rides. Use of Buttons. The buttons on our coats, now purely decorative, are a...n obvious survival of the days when co;f; tails and coat cuffs were buttoned back, even as the French infantry in 1914 buttoned back their blue coat-tails. Likewise the nick in our coat lapels is merely a survival of the Georgian fashion of a permanently tumed-up coat collar. “Cuff” used not to mean the end of the sleeve, but a fingerless glove, or mitten, or “bag-glove,” still in use in cold countries and in the English countryside, where they are called “hedger’s gloves.” The strips of braid on the backs of ordinary gloves are a testimony to the natural vanity of man, for they have been added to make the hand and fingers appear long and slender! One of the most peculiar features in the development of our dress is the manner in which fashion had been piled upon fashion, each new garment being worn over the former one that was once customary. Starting with the shirt, originally the “short” or ancient tunic, the waistcoat was devised in Tudor times to be worn over it, and this tradition is still preserved In the white jackets worn by the Guards in undress, called waistcoats. Originally women wore them also. There followed the coat, imposed upon the waistcoat for added protection with long tails looped bacg for convenience In riding. King Charles 11. introduced the “cassock,” or coat with long, full skirts, reaching below the knees and buttoning in front After that the topcoat or overcoat was invented, a fearsome garment of vast weight and size, with many layers of capes. As this gained popularity, so there became less need for the protection of the under-coat. Gradually it became thinner and shorter (one can trace its evolution in the frock-coat and morning coat) until eventually its tail disappeared entirely and left us with our lounge and reefer jackets. Brighter Colours. Now we seemed to hove reached the limit in the number of garments we wear. One can hardly visualise any further evolution, it is more likely to be in the form of brighter colours, or in abolishing our barbarous and unhygienic fashion of tight collars or our hideous trousers. The revival in wearing a pair of extraordinary looking cylinders on our legs, by the way, seems wrapt in mystery. Saxons %nd Normans wore them occasionally also 6hipmen and labourers, in the fifteenth century; they existed in the form of “trews" many years ago in Ireland and Scotland. But, according to Mr Walter Skeat, who is a great authority on these things, they were only reintroduced into England as s general feature of dress some time about the date of Waterloo, when the trousers of General Platoff’s Cossacka aroused universal envy in London.