loured garment. Civilians, like
Jos Sedley, would sometimes affect a frock frogged and braided in
semi-military fashion. The shirt collar turned upward, the points
showing above vast cravats whose careful arrangement was maintained by
one or two scarf-pins. Brummel the master dandy of his age, may be
called the first dandy of the modern school. Dressing, as a rule, in
black, he distinguished himself, not as the bucks of an earlier age by
bright colours, rich materials or jewellery, but by his extravagant
neatness and by the superb fit of garments which set the fashion for
lesser men. To him, according to Grantley Berkeley, we owe the modern
dress-coat. An idle phrase in Bulwer-Lytton's _Pelham_ (1828), that
"people must be very distinguished in appearance" to look well in black,
made black henceforward the colour of evening coats and frock coats.
With the perfection of the silk hat in the 'thirties, English costume
enters on its last phase. The coat cut away squarely in front was then
out of the mode; it remains but in the evening-dress coat now always
worn unbuttoned, and in the dress of the hunting field. The rest is a
record of such slight changes as tailors may cautiously introduce among
customers, no one of whom will dare to lead a new fashion boldly. For
many decades the fashionably dressed man has been eager to conform to
the last authorized vogue and to lose himself among others as shyly
obedient. The tubular lines of 20th-century clothing advantage the
tailor by the tendency of new clothing to crease at the elbow and bag at
the knee. In preserving the necessary straight lines of his garments, in
following the season's fashions in details which only an expert eye
would mark, and in providing himself with clothes specialized for every
hour of the day, for a score of sports and for the gradations of social
ceremonial--in these things only can the modern dandy rival his
magnificent predecessors. For ornament, other than plain shirt studs, a
plain seal ring, a simple watch guard and a rarely-worn scarf pin, is
denied him.

Women at the beginning of the 19th century were clad in those fashions
which revolutionary France borrowed from the antique. The simplicity of
this style gave it a certain grace; it was at the other pole from the
absurdity of the court dress which, until George IV. ordered otherwise,
perpetuated the bunched draperies, the flounces and furbelows and even
the hoop of the worst period of the 18th cen