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Summary
Summary
Relatively few garments survive from before the eighteenth century, and the history of costume in the preceding centuries must therefore rely to a great extent on literary and visual evidence. This book, the first of its kind, examines Stuart England through the mirror of dress. It argues that both artistic and literary sources can be read and decoded for important information on dress and the way it was perceived in a period of immense political, social, and cultural change.
Focusing on the rich visual culture of the seventeenth century, including portraits, engravings, fashion plates, and sculpture, and on literary sources--poetry, drama, essays, sermons--the distinguished historian of dress Aileen Ribeiro creates a fascinating account of Stuart dress and how it both reflected and influenced society. Supported by a wealth of illustrative images, she explores such varied themes as court costumes, the masque, the ways in which political and religious ideologies could be expressed in dress, and the importance of London as a fashion center. This beautiful book is an indispensable and authoritative account of what people wore and how it related to Stuart England's cultural climate.
Author Notes
Aileen Ribeiro is professor of history of art and lectures on the history of dress at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. She is the author of numerous books, including The Art of Dress: Fashion in England and France, 1750-1820 ; Ingres in Fashion: Representations of Dress and Appearance in Ingres's Images of Women ; and Dress in Eighteenth-Century Europe, 1715-1789 , all published by Yale University Press.
Reviews (3)
Guardian Review
From Holinshed's Chronicles we learn that Henry IV's drop-out son, Prince Hal, visited his father "appareled in a gown of blue satin, full of small eyelet holes, at every hole the needle hanging by a silk thread". Why such ostentatiously eccentric dress? In a popular Elizabethan dramatisation Hal explains: "Why man 'tis a sign that I stand upon thorns till the Crown be on my head." An Elizabethan dandy would have understood this emblematic equation of needles and thorns. It is typical of Shakespeare to cut the elaborate sartorial insult in his version. He avoided elaborate symbolism of costume. And yet, like Lawrence and Joyce, he relished, and mocked, the language of fashion. Via the ladies of Much Ado , Shakespeare praises a gown with professional particularity: "cloth a gold, and cuts, and lac'd with silver, set with pearls, down sleeves, side sleeves, and skirts, round underborne with a bluish tinsel". Via Petruchio, he ironises fashionable excess - "What's this? a sleeve? 'tis like a demi-cannon. What, up and down carved like an apple-tart?" Aileen Ribeiro's sumptuous book covers fashion from 1603-1714, the reign of six monarchs and the Cromwellian interregnum. It is indefatigably embellished with minute detail. Gradually we acquire fashion's fantastical terminology. "Confidante" curls, closely clustered by the ear. "Virago sleeves", puffed and tightly laced into a buxom figure-of-eight. "Fillemoate" silks - mispronounced French ("feuille morte") for the lovely, sombre amber of dead leaves. The various textiles, the "puffs, muffs, cuffs and ruffs", the linens "Washed and Starched, Slickened and Smoothed", fascinated articulate eulogists and detractors alike. Terminology is one of the delights of this book, and its major lack is a glossary for the common reader. For all the ostentatious complexity of costume in the early 17th century, tailoring left surprising gaps. Ruffs, collars, cuffs and sleeves were attached by a multitude of pins. Skirts, bodices, breeches and hose were held together by ribbons, laces and points tagged with metal. Things fell apart as fashions changed and items of dress became increasingly unmanageable. Doublets were worn unbuttoned, and short cloaks of slippery satin rode off the shoulder. Poor gouty Queen Anne had trouble controlling her ponderous coronation robes and the many-layered dresses of daily wear. A friend of Pepys spent an entire day with both legs down one half of his fashionably wide petticoat breeches, never noticing his mistake. Wigs were another problem. Men had to learn "wig behaviour" - you tossed the wig aside when bowing, or it all fell over your face. Pepys set one wig alight while sealing a letter, and worried feverishly about the safety of another, bought during the plague. Petticoat breeches were generously garnished with bunches of ribbons at waist and knee. In the 1650s a Kentish Parliamentarian bought 72 yards of ribbon for one suit and 108 yards for another. One illustration shows a cream figured silk suit shapelessly trimmed with 218 yards of banana-bunch ribbons. The money spent on fashion is routinely scandalous. In 1613 an unelaborate collar and cuffs cost six or seven pounds - the annual salary of a working man. In 1629 a single suit for King James I (a quietly tasteful dresser) cost pounds 266. Sumptuary laws specifying the fabrics permissible for every social rank had been in force for three centuries. They were repealed in James's reign. Edicts continued to be published, however, debarring the lower orders from wasteful upper-class frivolity. In 1611 the fines for infringement were three- quarterpence a day - half to go to the informer, half to the parish poor. No Spanish leather shoes and no silk roses for the prentices. No farthingales, no silk, no stiffening with wire or whalebone for the maids. Plain woollen stockings and plain linen caps for them all. No wonder there was a revolution. One of the pleasures of this book is its succinct sartorial analyses of familiar figures, like the portrait of Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton - dedicatee of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece , and one of many contenders for the role of the Fair Young Man of the Sonnets. Lantern-jawed and morose, he is accompanied by a black and white cat - emblematic of melancholy, and colour-coded to match the white cuffs of his gloves, embellished with big black bows. Effete as he looks, Southampton married one of Elizabeth I's maids of honour, whose portrait is the oddest in the book. It is at once formal and intimately compelling. Elizabeth Vernon is shown in her dressing-room, combing her hair with an ivory comb not unlike the nit-comb of today. It is inscribed with a whisper, "Menez moi doucement" ("lead me gently"). She stares enigmatically at us, one lock of loose hair wound around her pallid fingers. She wears a prettily embroidered jacket and gauzy skirt. But her pins and jewels are laid out on her dressing table. An elaborate ornament attached to the back of her ruff is pinned to the velvet curtain behind her - "a wired, jewelled spray that would stand up at the back and tremble slightly as she moved", Ribeiro tells us. On a later page, the figure of Folly has a similar spray. The portrait is as quietly sexually suggestive as Desdemona unpinning for Othello to come to bed. Ribeiro aptly links this portrait to Donne's "Elegy, To his Mistress Going to Bed". Her analysis implicitly corrects John Carey's influential misreading of this deliciously tender poem. The lover is encouraging his mistress to undress: "Unlace yourself, for that harmonious chime / Tells me from you, that now it is bed- time". Carey, following standard editorial comment, takes this to refer to a chiming watch. From this "precious bauble" he deduces Donne's culpable snobbery. Donne fabricates the "luxurious accessories of his fantasy" to suggest he has an aristocratic mistress and so to gratify his "social and financial ambitions". This hostile reading is neatly (and unwittingly) demolished by Ribeiro's factual expertise. She tells us simply that "stay laces, like points, were edged with metal tags, which gave a click when laced or unlaced". This is the homely and erotic sound Donne calls "that harmonious chime". Such illuminating literary commentary is rare in this book. There is a one-way street from Fashion to Fiction. The fashions are illustrated, analysed and exemplified by subordinate snippets of literature. Only twice is literature actively elucidated. (Ribeiro tells us that, contrary to stage cliche, Malvolio's cross-garters would have been tied only once under the knee.) And yet, particularly in Shakespeare, tantalising cruces abound and their absence is regrettable. In the earlier half of the 17th century fashions were richer, the slashed, padded and embroidered fabrics more intricate, the court portraits more detailed. Here this book's sartorial expertise is at its best. With Van Dyck's classicising influence came rich but vaguely draped court portraits. After the 1650s there was little perceptible difference between the dress of a gentlewoman and her maid. The images begin to lose their fascination, and the complementary literary component of this cultural history is at its best. Fashion and Fiction is extraordinarily wide-ranging, superbly illustrated and richly informative. Its generosity of scope is precisely what prompts us to ask - churlishly - for more. Ann Pasternak Slater is a fellow in English literature at St Anne's College, Oxford. To order Fashion and Fiction for pounds 36 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875. Caption: article-fashion.1 From Holinshed's Chronicles we learn that Henry IV's drop-out son, Prince Hal, visited his father "appareled in a gown of blue satin, full of small eyelet holes, at every hole the needle hanging by a silk thread". Why such ostentatiously eccentric dress? In a popular Elizabethan dramatisation Hal explains: "Why man 'tis a sign that I stand upon thorns till the Crown be on my head." An Elizabethan dandy would have understood this emblematic equation of needles and thorns. It is typical of Shakespeare to cut the elaborate sartorial insult in his version. He avoided elaborate symbolism of costume. And yet, like Lawrence and Joyce, he relished, and mocked, the language of fashion. Via the ladies of Much Ado , Shakespeare praises a gown with professional particularity: "cloth a gold, and cuts, and lac'd with silver, set with pearls, down sleeves, side sleeves, and skirts, round underborne with a bluish tinsel". Via Petruchio, he ironises fashionable excess - "What's this? a sleeve? 'tis like a demi-cannon. What, up and down carved like an apple-tart?" [Aileen Ribeiro] aptly links this portrait to Donne's "Elegy, To his Mistress Going to Bed". Her analysis implicitly corrects John Carey's influential misreading of this deliciously tender poem. The lover is encouraging his mistress to undress: "Unlace yourself, for that harmonious chime / Tells me from you, that now it is bed- time". Carey, following standard editorial comment, takes this to refer to a chiming watch. From this "precious bauble" he deduces Donne's culpable snobbery. Donne fabricates the "luxurious accessories of his fantasy" to suggest he has an aristocratic mistress and so to gratify his "social and financial ambitions". This hostile reading is neatly (and unwittingly) demolished by Ribeiro's factual expertise. She tells us simply that "stay laces, like points, were edged with metal tags, which gave a click when laced or unlaced". This is the homely and erotic sound Donne calls "that harmonious chime". - Ann Pasternak Slater.
Choice Review
Ribeiro (history of art, Courtauld Institute of Art, Univ. of London) investigates the history of clothing worn during the Stuart period (1603-1714) in England, using both artistic and literary sources. Not many garments exist from this time, which is why the examination of the visual culture of the Stuart era is so important. Ribeiro, a well-known fashion historian, analyzes clothing, fashion plates, paintings, and sculpture as well as poetry, drama, sermons, and fiction to provide information about Stuart costume. Although this book is arranged chronologically, following the styles of James I, Charles I, the Interregnum, and the Restoration and later Stuart era, it also covers major themes such as court costumes, the masque, and the importance of London as a fashion center. This book is sumptuously illustrated with photographs of clothing, paintings, woodcuts, and engravings that enhance the narrative. Ribeiro has written many highly regarded books on costume, and the current title is no exception. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through professionals. M. Fusich California State University, Fresno
Library Journal Review
Fashion books are often large, but Ribeiro's (history of art, Courtauld Inst. of Art, Univ. of London; The Art of Dress: Fashion in England and France, 1750-1820) is also otherwise substantial. Flipping through the pages is a treat enough, with their sumptuous reproductions of 17th-century English paintings, etchings, costume plates, clothing receipts, and fabric. But Ribeiro's clear text is a refreshing companion, deftly interweaving poetry, theater, philosophy, politics, and art into a generalized but engaging chronological survey of how dress can reflect society, literally becoming a part of its language and economy. This book delivers its evidence with humor and historical empathy, reveling in its discussion of the importance of men's garters and the close connection between emotion (particularly melancholy) and states of dress (or undress). Despite the author's scholarly background, the art historical potency of the works is sometimes subsumed by their role as illustration of fact. However, Ribeiro presents a banquet of fascinating images, from the most famous Anthony van Dyck royal portraits to the shockingly modern still life of Wenceslaus Hollar, and her book is not to be put down lightly. Recommended.-Prudence Peiffer, Cambridge, MA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
