After Mademoiselle Bertin became dressmaker to Marie Antoinette, “all wished instantly to have the same dress as the queen,” wrote lady-in-waiting Jeanne-Louise-Henriette Campan. “The expenditure of the younger ladies was necessarily much increased; mothers and husbands murmured at it; some few giddy women contracted debts; unpleasant domestic scenes occurred; several families either quarreled or grew cool among themselves; and the general report was that the queen would be the ruin of all the French ladies.”
Miscellany
In 1993 Estelle Ellis, Seventeen magazine’s first promotion director, gave a speech at the Fashion Institute of Technology titled “What Is Fashion?” Ellis gave her answer. Fashion is a perpetual-motion machine expressed in four areas: “mode—the way we dress; manners—the way we express ourselves; mores—the way we live; and markets—the way we are defined demographically and psychologically.”
The wardrobe that accompanied Tutankhamen to the afterlife included ninety sandals, four socks, 145 loincloths with thread counts of two hundred, and a fake leopard skin made of linen with sewn-on spots.
Japanese athletic-footwear company Onitsuka Tiger changed its name in 1977 to ASICS, an acronym of the Latin phrase anima sana in corpore sano, “a sound soul in a sound body,” altering a line from one of Juvenal’s satires. “If you must pray for something,” wrote the poet, “then ask for a sound mind in a sound body.”
Southern women during the Civil War chewed on newspapers, believing an ingredient in the ink whitened their faces.
A greenish-brown, diamond-twill, boat-neck wool sweater woven between 230 and 380 and worn by a reindeer hunter was discovered by researchers in 2013. The tunic, which was mended with two patches, had been preserved in the Norwegian Lendbreen glacier and would have fit a slender man of about 5'9". “The hunter,” said researcher Lise Bender Jørgensen, “looked after his clothing.”
A Japanese shogun in 1615 attempted to eradicate the popular fashions of the kabuki-mono, young men from the fringes of samurai communities who favored long hair with shaved foreheads and temples, large swords with showy red scabbards, imported velvet collars, and short kimonos with lead weights sewn into the hem. “Clothing should not be confusing,” stated a new samurai dress code.
Winston Churchill claimed the soft texture of woven silk underwear was vital to his well-being; “I have a very delicate and sensitive cuticle which demands the finest covering,” he said. His wife, Clementine, told a friend that his pink underclothes “cost the eyes out of the head.”
Washington Post fashion critic Robin Givhan reported on a pink blazer and black V-neck shirt worn on the Senate floor in 2007. “There was cleavage on display Wednesday afternoon on C-SPAN2,” Givhan wrote. “It belonged to Senator Hillary Clinton.”
In 1876 Dr. Gustav Jaeger, zoologist and physiologist at the University of Stuttgart, began advocating the wearing of rough animal fibers, particularly undyed sheep wool, close to the skin; early customers of his “Sanitary Woollen System” included Oscar Wilde and Henry Stanley, who brought them on his expedition to Africa to search for Dr. Livingstone.
When Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic as a passenger in June 1928, the New York Sun ran an article with the headline MISS EARHARD SPURNS FASHIONS: SHE CARES LITTLE ABOUT CLOTHES, DOES NOT USE LIPSTICK—LIKES TO FENCE AND DRIVE CAR. “Flying is a perfectly natural thing in her opinion,” it read, “and requires no special togs: a dress is as good air equipment as trousers.”
In 1999 an Inuit organization complained that representatives from Donna Karan International had come to the Canadian Arctic and paid between $10,000 and $15,000 for handmade Inuit clothing. “They went to the bar up in Yellowknife,” the group told the Ottawa Citizen, “and people just sold them their clothes.” Items purchased later appeared in Donna Karan’s Madison Avenue store.
Julius Caesar was criticized for his loosely belted toga. “Beware the badly belted boy,” said Sulla; Cicero sneered at Caesar’s habit of “trailing the fringe of the toga on the ground like an effeminate.” His political rival Cato the Younger made a point of wearing a short toga with no tunic underneath, as was considered masculine. But a decade later it was common for young Roman men to grow goatees, wear flowing togas, and use “loosely belted” as a catchphrase.
A king in twelfth-century-bc China enjoyed women wearing dangling pearls and jade in a “Hair-knot Which Sways at Every Step”; the emperor who built the Great Wall favored the “Hair-knot Which Rises Above the Clouds”; Tang women wore the “Hair-knot of the Homing Bird”; and a writer in the last years of the Manchu dynasty offered the name “Hair-knot of Disintegration and Homeless Wandering” for a style of the day. “The times are indeed out of joint!” he wrote. “I tremble to think of what is to come.”
“Battle Hymn of the Republic” author Julia Ward Howe complained to her sister in August 1846 about the death of her sister-in-law: “My mourning has been quite an inconvenience to me this summer. I had just spent all the money I could afford for my summer clothes and was forced to spend $30 more for black dresses,” Howe wrote. “The black clothes, however, seem to me very idle things, and I shall leave word in my will that no one shall wear them for me.”