The Development of Dress.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 7062, 7 February 1893, Page 2

The Development of Dress.

{Quarterly Iteview.) Dress, like all othrr forms of art, no doubt absorbs, and again to some extent reflects, the spirit of its age, and tbue a moral philosophy would not be found wanting in it. But in so far as it is an organic growth, it possesses a natural history as well. Carrying our imagination backward, let us recall, if possible the costumes of the British Islands at the period of the Komau, Saxon, and Norman invasions, and by way of contrast let us place beside them those of a modern London ball room. So far as appearance goes, there is little likeness, certainly ; but we have only to follow up the history of coat, waistcoat and trousers, or of petticoat, train, and bodice, to And ourselves led back by slow degrees to the garments of Caractacus and Boadicea, of Hengist, and of Horsa; to the tunics in which the Garths and Cedrics of ancient days kept swine in English forests, or feasted in English balls. The primsry object of dress according to the learned Herr Teufelsdrookh, was not protection, but ornament ; its further uses, whether for comfort or decorum, being only discovered incidentally. However this may have been with * our progenitor, the original savage,’ whose body the above mentioned philosopher describes as ' sheeted in its thick, natural fell,’ yet for savage man not so protected, clothing of some sort in the colder zones must always have been a physical necessity.

It is impossible to follow up the history of even our most familiar surroundings without observing how deeply the present has itf, roots in the past, and how often the names and forms with which we are best acquainted reveal an antiquity reaching back even into pre-historic times. The history of languages and of the arts of life, like the history of living organisms, is a history of development, in which the laws of evolution hold good, and the phenomena of evolution are discernable. The costume of our day thus exhibits in every direction marks of the various shapes through which it has passed—marks which tell of conditions no longer present, as clearly aa is the animal world do the sightless eyes of the Proteus, or the little lizard’s legs which lie bidden beneath the skin of the python. Not only docs dress supply us with examples of ‘ aborted ’ or * rudimentary ’ organs ; but where competition has bean choked or invention inactive, with instances also of ‘ survivals.’ Thus certain forms of costume dieusod in daily life are still retained for special occasions—the wigs, collars, and mantles of former times still do duty as insignia of quality and office; while, 'similarly, the shapes of mediaeval cloaks are perpetuated in modern college gowns, and the dress of the London prentice of the sixteenth century is that of the Blue Ooat Boy of today. Domestic animals and cultivated plants are both more susceptible to variation and more liable to produce tnontrosities than those in a state of natuse; and somewhat similarly, dress, whore its forms have come to originate in taste and fancy alone, apart from utility, shows the same abiding tendency towards extravagant developments a tendency which no amount of remonstrance, ridicule, or inconvenience seems able to overcome. Preaching friars thundered in vain against the towering headdress of the middle ages ; in spite of universal obloquy the hoop has throe several times made good its ground, while ever since the introduction of the modern idea of a ‘ waist,’ there has been an increasing endeavour, in the case of women,to* substitute a conventional figure for a natural one.