Woman as Decoration | Page 4

period costume has its fascinating story worth the knowing.--Brief historic outline to serve as key to the rich storehouse of important volumes on costumes and the distinguished textless books of costume plates.--Period of fashions in costumes developing without nationality.--Nationality declared in artistry of workmanship and the modification or exaggeration of an essential detail according to national or individual temperament.--Evolution of woman's costume.--Assyria.--Egypt.--Byzantium.-- Greece.--Rome.--Gothic Europe.--Europe of the Renaissance,--seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century through Mid-Victorian period.--Cord tied about waist origin of costumes for women and men
XV THE STORY OF PERIOD COSTUMES 172
A RéSUMé.
Woman as seen in Egyptian sculpture-relief; on Greek vase; in Gothic stained glass; carved stone; tapestry; stucco; and painting of the Renaissance; eighteenth and nineteenth century portraits.--Art throughout the ages reflects woman in every r?le; as companion, ruler, slave, saint, plaything, teacher, and voluntary worker.--Evolution of outline of woman's costume, including change in neck; shoulder; evolution of sleeve; girdle; hair; head-dress; waist line; petticoat.--Gradual disappearance of long, flowing lines characteristic of Greek and Gothic periods.--Demoralisation of Nature's shoulder and hip-line culminates in the Velasquez edition of Spanish fashion and the Marie Antoinette extravaganzas
XVI DEVELOPMENT OF GOTHIC COSTUME 192
Gothic outline first seen as early as fourth century.--Costume of Roman-Christian women.--Ninth century.--The Gothic cape of twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries made familiar on the Virgin and saints in sacred art.--The tunic.--Restraint in line, colour, and detail gradually disappear with increased circulation of wealth until in fifteenth century we see humanity over-weighted with rich brocades, laces, massive jewels, etc.
THE VIRGIN IN ART
Late Middle Ages.--Sovereignty of the Virgin as explained in "The Cathedrals of Mont St. Michel and Chartres," by Henry Adams.--Woman as the Virgin dominates art of twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries.--The girdle.--The round neck.--The necklace, etc.
XVII THE RENAISSANCE 214
SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES
Pointed and other head-dresses with floating veils.--Neck low off shoulders.--Skirts part as waist-line over petticoat.--Wealth of Roman Empire through new trade channels had led to importation of richly coloured Oriental stuffs.--Same wealth led to establishing looms in Europe.--Clothes of man like his over-ornate furniture show debauched and vulgar taste.--The good Gothic lines live on in costumes of nuns and priests.--The Davanzati Palace collection, Florence, Italy.--Long pointed shoes of the Middle Ages give way to broad square ones.--Gorgeous materials.--Hats.--Hair.--Sleeves.-- Skirts.--Crinolines.--Coats.--Overskirts draped to develop into panniers of Marie Antoinette's time.--Directoire reaction to simple lines and materials
XVII EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 233
Political upheavals.--Scientific discoveries.--Mechanical inventions.--Chemical achievements.--Chintz or stamped linens of Jouy near Versailles.--Painted wall-papers after the Chinese.--Simplicity in costuming of woman and man
XIX WOMAN IN THE VICTORIAN PERIOD 241
First seventy years of nineteenth century.--"Historic Dress in America" by Elizabeth McClellan.--Hoops, wigs, absurdly furbished head-dresses, paper-soled shoes, bonnets enormous, laces of cobweb, shawls from India, rouge and hair-grease, patches and powder, laced waists, and "vapours."--Man still decorative
XX SEX IN COSTUMING 244
"European dress."--Progenitor of costume worn by modern men.--The time when no distinction was made between materials used for man and woman.--Velvets, silks, satins, laces, elaborate cuffs and collars, embroidery, jewels and plumes as much his as hers
XXI LINE AND COLOUR OF COSTUMES IN HUNGARY 252
In a sense colour a sign of virility.--Examples.--Studying line and colour in Magyar Land.--In Krakau, Poland,--A highly decorative Polish peasant and her setting
XXII STUDYING LINE AND COLOUR IN RUSSIA 265
Kiev our headquarters.--Slav temperament an integral part of Russian nature expressed in costuming as well as folk songs and dances of the people.--Russian woman of the fashionable world.--The Russian pilgrims as we saw them tramping over the frozen roads to the shrines of Kiev, the Holy City and ancient capital of Russia at the close of the Lenten season.--Their costumes and their psychology
XXIII MARK TWAIN'S LOVE OF COLOUR IN ALL COSTUMING 276
Wrapped in a crimson silk dressing-gown on a balcony of his Italian villa in Connecticut, Mark Twain dilated on the value of brilliant colour in man's costuming.--His creative, picturing-making mind in action.--Other themes followed
XXIV THE ARTIST AND HIS COSTUME 283
A God-given sense of the beautiful.--The artist nature has always assumed poetic license in the matter of dress.--Many so-called affectations have raison d'être.--Responding to texture, colour and line as some do to music and scenery.--How Japanese actors train themselves to act women's parts by wearing woman's costumes off the stage.--This cultivates the required feeling for the costumes.--The woman devotee to sports when costumed.--Richard Wagner's responsiveness to colour and texture.--Clyde Fitch's sensitiveness to the same.--The wearing of jewels by men.--King Edward VII.--A remarkable topaz worn by a Spaniard.--Its undoing as a decorative object through its resetting
XXV IDIOSYNCRASIES IN COSTUME 292
Fashions in dress all powerful because they seize upon the public mind.--They become the symbol of manners and affect human psychology.--Affectations of the youth of Athens.--Les Merveilleux, Les Encroyables, the Illuminati.--Schiller during the Storm and Stress Period.--Venetian belles of the sixteenth century.--The Cavalier Servente of the seventeenth century.--Mme. Récamier scandalised London in eighteenth century by appearing costumed à la Greque.--Mme. Jerome Bonaparte, a Baltimore belle, followed