FIRST SILK STOCKINGS

Dominion, Volume 21, Issue 116, 14 February 1928, Page 3

FIRST SILK STOCKINGS

HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF It is amusing to find fashion history repeating itself. After a long spell of light-coloured stockings we are now to wear dark ones with black gowns. Exactly the same thing happened in the seventeenth century when lightcoloured hose and gay clothes generally had long been the mode. Then, however, masculine as w’ell as feminine attire was affected by the change. I’epys in his Diary tells that he bought a pair of black stockings to wear over his white silk ones when he had to go into mourning (says the “Westminster Gazette”). The first stockings were made of pieces of cloth sewn together. That was in the Aliddle Ages. Earlier, the women of France covered their nether limbs with linen trousers caught al the ankles with jeyelled bands. This was a mode dating back from the Roman invasion under Julius Ciesar; with it wen; cork-soled slippers with turned-up toes for house wear, and sandals for out of doors. Hosiery was bright-coloured as far back as the fifteenth century—doesn’t Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales mention the red hose worn by the Wife of Bath?

As for the men of that period, particoloured hose was their delight; often it was worn with footgear so long and narrow that the points had to be turned back and chained to the knees.

Though Queen Elizabeth is said to

have worn the first pair of silk stockings knitted in England—that pair which her silkwonian, Mistress Alontague, presented as a New Y’ear’s gift—she was not the first monarch to wear knitted silk hose. Her brother, the sickly Edward VL, was presented with a pair of long Spanish hose of silk during his brief six years of kingship, and a royal inventory records that their father, the much-married Henry, once possessed six pairs of knitted silk hose.

It was different with the Stuarts. They had to borrow what the Tudors generally had given them. At least,

:he first of that royal line was known io do so.

History tells that when the Spanish Ambassador was expected at Court, Tames VI. of Scotland wrote to the Earl of Mar begging the loan of a pair of silk stockings, since “ye wad na that your King suld appear a scrub on sic an occasion.” Clox on stockings were a French

innovation, and while the extravagant Madame de Montespan held sway at the Court of the splendour-loving Louis XIV., stockings of one colour with clox of another were the height of fashion. Garters, like stockings, have en-

livened the history of clothes. Jewels, rosettes, and even mottoes have adorned them. Two have become historic: One, that jewelled one dropped

by a fourteenth-century Countess of Salisbury which Edward 111 made the symbol of the highest Order the monarch has tn bestow. The other belonged to the Duchess de Fonlngnes She used it in an emergency at a royal bunting party to keep tier wind-blov*' hair in order, and set a fashion in headdresses (lie Ijelii-h king named after the resourceful lady.