Dress in the Age of Louis XIV. - The Effect of the Restoration upon Costume

To avoid recognition, black velvet masks lined with white satin were worn at this period. They folded in two like a man's pocket-book and so were very easily carried. Neither were there any strings with which to have to fumble when the moment for masking arrived. Instead of them a slender silver bar was provided on the inside of the mask, ending in a button which the wearer of the mask placed between her teeth so that she could hold her face-screen in its place. Women wore masks during the public promenade, at balls, and even in church. There were different patterns. Some hid the eyes only, others covered the face more completely and were a thorough disguise, not only because they obliterated the features but because, worn over the mouth, they changed the "timbre" of the voice.

In France during the minority of Louis XIV., when political troubles were rife and the great ladies of the day played their part in them, masks were used for a more serious purpose. Conspiracies were cradled in the boudoirs of the wealthy, and those great dames to whom the name of "belles frondeuses " was given, in allusion to the troubles of the Fronde, went masked to the councils of Conde and Beaufort in order to escape observation.

To pass to a more frivolous subject, let that of jewellery now take precedence. It was owing to the influence of Charles II. and his early life in France that the women of the Restoration Court were more wonderfully dressed and gorgeously bedizened than any who had gone before. The reaction after the sober guise of the Commonwealth accounted for exaggerations of all kinds, and extravagance in every direction reigned supreme. The materials worn were absolutely superb, and into them were woven silver and gold, while they were thickly plastered with jewels for high days and holidays.

Bodices were laced with pearls, festooned with diamonds, throats encircled with ropes of pearls, exquisite brooches and galaxies of jewels decked the corsage, the sleeves, and the hair of the great ladies of the day.

Jewellers of our own times keep ever before them ornaments worn in the reign of the Merry Monarch, and now, as then, ropes of pearls, rivulets of diamonds and emeralds.

and the great round boss brooches fringed with gems are fashionable.

When the hair was not decorated with a string of pearls a ribbon ornament was substituted, another source of inspiration for the coiffure decorations of our own day. Women wore their hair curled, and arranged with the greatest skill, adding to it in many instances what were called " heart-breakers," artificial ringlets posed at the side of the head on a neat arrangement of wires.

In the latter part of the reign of Charles II. hoods came into fashion, and were issued in various patterns, all of them bewitchingly quaint and charming. It was customary then to paint the face as well as to patch it, an act of vanity that was criticised with the greatest severity by Richard Baxter and other purists.

"I am no judge of painting," replied a Turkish Ambassador who was interrogated as to his opinion of the beauty of Frenchwomen.

There is a chronicle of the dresses worn at the festivities of a Royal betrothal in France which gives so graphic an idea of the apparel of the time that it is well worth repetition. The Duchesse de Bourgogne wore one day a gown of silver tissue with gold flowers, touched with a little flame colour and green, and in her hair the finest of the Crown diamonds. Her gown on the next day was of grey damask with silver flowers, and her jewels were diamonds and emeralds.

Mademoiselle (the young fiancee) wore a coat of gros de Tours richly embroidered in gold, and a skirt of silver tissue embroidered in gold touched with flame colour. She was adorned by a splendid set of diamonds and a mantle of gold point d'espagne, six yards and a half long - two and a half more than the Court trains of to-day. On another occasion her coat and skirt were both made of cloth of silver, and her jewels were diamonds and rubies.

The famous Madame de Maintenon introduced to the jewel-casket the cross called a la Maintenon. At that time she set a fashion for severity in attire, which consisted of forbidding-looking coifs and veils and black and sombre dresses.

The inauguration of fashions by the great Court ladies and the Parisian actresses of the period was a feature of the times. It happened one day that the beautiful Duchesse

Dress de Fontanges was present at a Royal hunting party, when a breeze disarranged her headdress. Promptly she tied it in its place by means of her ribbon garters, the ends of which fell over her forehead. Louis XIV. was so fascinated by this improvised novel effect that a head-dress, called a la Fontange, was instantly adopted by the ladies of the Court and afterwards by the Parisian bourgeoises.

It was a framework of cap wire about half a yard in height, divided into tiers and positively covered with bands of muslin, ribbons, flowers, chenille, and upstanding aigrettes. To each tier of the structure names were given such as the Duke, theduchess, the Capuchin, the Solitary One, the Asparagus, the Cabbage, the Cat, the Organ Pipe, the First or Second Sky and the Mouse. The last a little bow of "nonpareil" fixed in the fringe of crisply waving hair that was arranged below the curled "fontange."

The fash-ionab1e woman of these days was as inseparable from her pet dog as is her descendant of to-day. She therefore carried it in her muff, which was large and flat, and as limp as quite recently fashionable muffs have been. The dogs were small and went by the name of muff-dogs.

It was a thoughtless age. How the "French kickshaws" of the Court must have annoyed the sense of decorum cherished by the Puritans, who "shook their heads at folks in London." But it was a picturesque one, too. The Roundheads, for all they were as simply clad as could be, left us a heritage of the prettiest and most demure of fashions. We should not have known the full skirt hanging straight and unadorned, the big white apron and the hood, so closely tied beneath the chin that scarcely a wisp of hair was revealed, prettiest of frames for the sweet, unpainted face if the Puritans had not designed them for us. The pure white muslin "tippit" and the sensible square-toed shoes - would any mind save that spurred to a sense of violent contrast, by the extreme modes of an opposing faction have thought of aught so seriously sweet ? To the riot of bright hues the Royalists approved, to the musk-coloured silks and the starches of various tints they brought and used as a sedative; cold greys and duns and blacks they deemed suitable for the clothing of their poor flesh.

Mary Queen of Scots

Portrait similar to the one at Hampton Court by Mytens

The re-nowned diarist Pepys gives us a vivid picture of the great ladies in their fine array, interspersed with references to his own fine "camlet" and "jackanapes' coats and his wife's "new yellow bird's-eye hood ' and other delicate pieces of apparel. It is not amazing that the children's dress of that day serves as a copy for those of small damsels and boys who are to act as attendants and pages in wedding retinues to-day. They were garbed then in replicas of the pictutesque grown-up attire, the little maids with stift satin frocks falling to the floor and the little boys in satin knickerbockers and coats and silken hose with rosetted shoes. Their hair was cut across the forehead in a fringe and fell softly about their broad lace collars.

The painters of the period, such as Sir Peter Lely and Van Dyek, indeed, afford an endless source of inspiration to the designers of modern dress.