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CHAPTER XXXII.

Ladies' dress-French costume- Madame Recamier - The classical style

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Progress of the toilet "-False hair-Hair-dresser's advertisement-The Royal Family and dress-Curiosities of costume.

N ladies' dress more allowance must be made for the

I

caprices of fashion; it always has been their prescrip.

tive right to exercise their ingenuity, and fancy, in adorning their persons; and, save that the head-dress is somewhat caricatured, the next illustration gives a very good idea of the style of dress adopted by ladies at the commencement of 1800, some phases of which we are familiar with, owing to their recent reproduction—such as the décolletée dress, and clinging, and diaphonous skirt, as well as the long gloves.

However, the eccentricities of English costume, at this period, were as nothing compared with their French sisters. The Countess of Brownlow,' speaking, as an eye-witness,

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Slight Reminiscences of a Septuagenarian," by Emma Sophia, Countess of Brownlow, p. 2. London, 1867.

PARIS FASHIONS FOR WINTER DRESS-1800.

MADAME Recamier.

39

says: "The Peace of 1802 brought, I suppose, many French to England; but I only remember one, the celebrated Madame Recamier, who created a sensation, partly by her beauty, but still more by her dress, which was vastly unlike the unsophisticated style, and poke bonnets, of the English women. She appeared in Kensington Gardens, à l'antique,

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a muslin dress clinging to her form like the folds of the drapery on a statue; her hair in a plait at the back, and falling in small ringlets round her face, and greasy with huile antique; a large veil thrown over the head, completed her attire, that not unnaturally caused her to be followed and stared at."

The French Revolution and early Consulate were emi

nently classical, as regards ladies' dress; and, as a matter of course, the mode was followed in England, but never to the extent that it was in France. No one can doubt the beauty of this style of dress; but it was one totally unfitted for out-door use, and even for evening dress. It was very slight, and then only fitted for the young and graceful, certainly not for the middle-aged and rotund.

PREPARING FOR A BALL-1803.

There was a ladies' magazine, which began in 1806, called La belle Assemblée; and a very good magazine it is. In it,

of course,

are

numerous fashion

plates; but I take

it that they were

then, much as now, intended to be

looked at as indications of the fashion, more than the fashion itself. Certainly, in the contemporaneous prints, I have never met with any costume like them, and I much prefer for accuracy of detail, to go to the pictorial satirist, who, if he did somewhat exaggerate, did so on a given basis, an actual costume; and, moreover, threw some life and expression into his groups, which render them better worth

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