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2. Clothes

2. clothes For me there was a positive intoxication in taking yards of shimmering silks, laces airy as gossamer, and lengths of ribbons, delicate and rainbowcolored , and fashioning of them garments so lovely that they might have been worn by some princess in a fairy-tale. -"Lucile" Posterity interprets the lives of notables in the long eighteenth century in many different and sometimes contentious ways, but everyone can agree that they wore fabulous clothes. Men shared fully in the glamorous bounty, for most of the period falls before the full imposition of what one influential fashion historian has called "the Great Masculine Renunciation.'" Among other abjurations , they bid adieu to embroidered waistcoats, lace jabots, and exciting colors. In Men in Black (199s),john Harvey describes the aggressive metastasis of invisibility that spread from clerical and judicial garments and mourning suits to male attire generally in the nineteenth century, when black became "the colour with which one buried oneself-the colour that, having no colour, effaced and took one's self away."" The long-term consequence of this dreary revolution is a far greater uniformity of men's attire and, except in specialized cases, a craven surrender of the most expressive uses of clothing to women. The retention of stylish costumes for all-men and women, rich and poor-in carnival festivity demonstrates by contrast what modern men of different classes and ethnicities have generally resigned to history. Tradition also clothE'S 83 makes certain exemptions a\'ailable to men in special categories of role-icon-fops, pimps, rakes, pirates, and gangsters-but important as these specialties are, and they will figure prominently in what follows in this and subsequent chapters, they remain colorful anomalies highlighted against a boring field of black, gray, navy, and brown. As historic ~pecimens of material culture, the spectacular clothes worn bv the effigy of Charles II in the Norman Undercroft ofWestminster Abbey likewise confirm by contrast the scope of the loss imposed by the great renunciatioll. In life they were his personal Garter robes, betokening his office at the head of the Most Noble Order 01 the Garter, the highest oreler of knighthuod in Great Britain, which took its nallle and its motto from a legendary incident in the reign of its medieval founder: when a garter worn by Joan, Countess of Salisbury, fell to the floor while she danced with Edward III, the king silenced the snickering courtiers by gallantly picking up the wayward item and bv binding it round his own knee, relllarking "Honi soit qui mal y pense," or "Evil to him who evil thinks." The tradition thus invented in a moment of public intimacy in 1349 burgeoned conspicuously under the easygoing Charles, when the king and some of his knights even began wearing their robes casually around town. scandalizing Samuel Pcpys: "Whereas heretofore their Robes were ollh to be worn d\lring their ceremonies and service, these. as proud of their coats, did wear them all day till night, and then rode into the park with them on." Pepys deplores the loss of "all gravity" among the knights even as he envies the smashing outfits (H: I 84-85). The Garter rubes, therefore, must have seemed apposite to the uriginal dressers who costumed the famously accessible monarch's effigy. Working from the canvas skin out, they began very intimately indeed, with the royal underpants, a pair ofwhite silk drawers (fig. 7). "\s decades or CCllturies would pass between changes of Charles's linen, only the curatorial experts, Sllccessors to the courtiers who personally attellded him at his daily levee while he lived, can be privy to what the Defender of the Faith wears by way of foundations in perpetuity. But t he original artisans clearly wanted the simulacrum of the king-'s person to be as complete as 80l possible, even the bits that were to remain out ofsight. They sewed stockings of bluish-white silk to the drawers. These remain partially visible on the fully dressed effigy. The undergarments are covered by the breeches and a doublet, made from cloth of silver with silver thread and silver bobbin lace, which opens at the neck to reveal a ruffled shirt ofwhite linen, topped offwith a cravat (the latter a modern restoration using antique lace). The doublet necessarily follows the English style officially set by Charles in 1661 as an intervention in the excessive reliance on fashions imported from France...