tury. The gown, lightly
girdled near the arm-pits with a tasselled cord, fell in straight
clinging folds. Soft muslin was the favourite material, and in muslin
fashionable women faced the winter winds, protected only by the long
pelisses which in summer were replaced by short spencers. Turbans,
varying from a light headscarf of lace or muslin to a velvet confection
like that of a Turk on a signboard, were the favourite headgear,
although bonnets, hats and caps are found in a hundred shapes. Muslin
handkerchiefs or small ruffs were worn about the neck in the morning
dress. About the Waterloo period the elegance of the classical gown
disappeared. The waist was still high at first but the gown was shorter
and wider at the skirt. For evening dress these skirts were stiffened
with buckram and trimmed with much tasteless trumpery. Large bonnets
were common, and the hair was dragged stiffly to the back of the head,
to be secured by a large comb. From 1830 begins a period of singular
ugliness. Tight stays came back again, the skirt swept the pavements, a
generation of over-clad matrons seemed to have followed a generation of
nymphs. The 'fifties showed even more barbarous devices, and about 1854
came in from France the crinoline, that strange revival of the ancient
hoop. Plaids, checks and bars, bright blues, crude violets and hideous
crimsons, were seen in French merinos, Irish poplins and English
alpacas. Women in short jackets, hooped skirts, hideous bonnets and
shawls seemed to have banished their youth. The empress Eugenie, a
leader of European fashion, decreed that white muslin should be the
evening mode, and at balls, where the steels and whalebones of the
crinoline were impossible, the women swelled their skirts by wearing a
dozen or fourteen muslin petticoats at once. Towards the end of the
'sixties the crinolines disappeared as suddenly as they came, and by
1875 skirts were so tight at the knees that walking upstairs in them was
an affair of deliberation. Before 1880 dress-reformers and aesthetes had
attacked on two sides the fashions which had halted at the "Princesse"
robe, draped and kilted. Both movements failed, but left marked effects.
From that time fashion has been less blindly followed, and women have
enjoyed some limited individual freedom in designing their costumes. Of
20th-century fashions it is most notable that they change year by year
with mechanical regularity. The clothes of smart women can no longer b