re body, set the
fashions of her court, other women pinching their waists into the long
and straight stomacher ending in a peak before. She herself followed her
father's taste in ornament, and on great days was set about like the
Madonna of a popular shrine with decorations of all kinds, patterns in
pearl, quiltings, slashings, puffings and broidery, tassels and rich
buttons. Among men the important change is the disappearance of the last
of the long hose, all men taking to trunk-hose and nether-stocks or
stockings, while their doublets tend to follow the same long-waisted
fashion as the bodices of the women, whose doublets and jerkins,
buttoned up the breast, bring the Puritan satirists against them. Of
these satirists Philip Stubbes is the best-known, his _Anatomie of
Abuses_, published in 1583, being a very wardrobe of Elizabethan
fashions, although false or dyed hair, the ruff and its starch, and the
ear-rings worn by some women and many men draw his hottest anger.
William Harrison sings on a like note about the same time, declaiming
especially against the mutability of fashion, declaring that the
imported Spanish, French and German guises made it easier to inveigh
against such enormities than to describe the English attire with any
certainty. For him women were become men, and men transformed into
monsters. "Neither was it ever merrier with England than when an
Englishman was known abroad by his own cloth and contented himself at
home with his fine carsey hosen and a mean slop; his coat, gown and
cloak of brown, blue or puke, with some pretty furniture of velvet or
fur and a doublet of sad tawny or black velvet or other comely silk,
without such cuts and garish colours as are worn in these days, and
never brought in but by the consent of the French, who think themselves
the gayest men when they have most diversities of jags and change of
colours about them." He adds that "certes of all estates our merchants
do least alter their attire ... for albeit that which they wear be very
fine and costly, yet in form and colour it representeth a great piece of
the ancient gravity appertaining to citizens and burgesses." But as for
the "younger sort" of citizens' wives, Harrison finds in their attire
"all kind of curiosity ... in far greater measure than in women of a
higher calling."

17th century.

The coming of King James is not marked by any sudden change of attire,
most of the Elizabethan fashions running on into hi