The psychology of dress

Front matter

m a> r^

.s

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DRESS

Preface

APPARENTLY there are two main reasons for writing the preface to a book. The one, that traditional practice may be duly observed, the other, that the writer may make suitable apology for what he has done or perchance fittingly acknowledge the assistance given him by his friends. The second, is the reason for this preface.

It would be presumptuous to present this book as a History of Costume. It attempts no such colossal task. It is equally absurd to claim for it a thorough, technical, psychological treatment of any one period or group of periods. It makes no such boast.

There has been in the last decade a remarkable awakening to the relations which exist between man and his works, between the mind and its expression in material objects, and also to how absorbing or dominating ideas and interests colour, if not determine, the entire externalized thought of man in religious, political and social life. It is this that makes history live, that makes psychology a vital thing and Art a quality essential to full human expression and inseparable from human life.

This is the thought the author has in mind in the selection, analysis, and treatment of such European periods as have most directly influenced our development and that illustrate perhaps, most clearly, the principles which are not only concerned in the development of style in clothes, but in that of the allied arts as well.

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Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Mediaeval Europe 3

II. The Renaissance in Italy (1400 to 1600) ... 47

Introduction

IT DOES seem that "there is nothing new under the sun" and *'there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so." Men are fundamentally the same in every land and every clime, having the same appetites and longings, with the same basic motives and vanities, differently proportioned, differently stimulated, therefore somewhat differently expressed.

The intimate connection between mind and material expression is daily becoming more clearly understood and their natural relationships grow the more absorbing as we study from history the various materials and forms through which human conceptions of life and its needs have been expressed.

For example : man's primal need for food and shelter have pressed him to conceive not only how this need shall be satisfied, but in what way things necessary to this end shall be made so that they may best answer the demand for which they exist. Another need, just as universal, has urged him to fashion things in such a way that the result shall be (as he sees it) a thing oi beauty — that is, that the material, form, and colour which he has used shall be so proportioned that the aesthetic sense, as well as the physical appetite, shall be satisfied through the thing created.

The House and Clothes have answered the human requirement for shelter and, whether we will or not, they also express the individual and the national ideal

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INTRODUCTION

of beauty in colour and in form, satisfying in this way the demands of the sesthetic instinct. The degree of satisfaction these things give the cultivated aesthetic sense is the measure of their artistic value, it is not their period, their oddity, or their cost that determines it.

These two aspects of function and beauty, in so far as art is concerned, must be observed if a production is to be a success in any field of man's creative genius; but in the matter of clothes or costumes (and we shall use these terms synonymously in this work) there are other considerations which affect his work more pronouncedly than in other fields, and must therefore be given a place in the examination of each period, and of those cases where a mode endured too short a time for the crystallization of a definite style.

The first of these mighty influences we will call fashion. I While this has doubtless greatly influenced architecture, furniture, manner of painting and of decoration, clothes have undoubtedly felt its power more quickly, more keenly and sometimes more fatally to the criterions of good sense and taste.

The reasons for this are obvious. First, there is the religious or ecclesiastical element. Spiritual concepts have found expression in combinations of material, design, and colour which have become fixed or symbolic of religious ideas. At times it has been the fashion to ape these forms so that their use has become general in secular life.

By reason of their political control a monarch or his satellites could, through the breadth of their power, so forcibly impress their personal preferences and idiosyncrasies, first on the ruling class and then, through their xxii

INTRODUCTION

tendency to imitation, on all classes below them, that they became absolute dictators of fashion. Sometimes this centralized power lasted for a sufficient time and was powerful enough to crystallize the fashion into a fixed form, whereupon it became a style, as in the reign of Francis I, Louis XIV, or Queen Elizabeth.

It is in social life, however, that the element of fashion has mainly flourished and only as ecclesiastical or political ideals were associated with or contributory to the social order were they prolific sources for fashion's exploitation. Sometimes it has been the whim to be modest, in affected humility; at other times it has pleased social fancy to seem to be "'old-fashioned" or mayhap classic in appearance. Either through a desire for novelty or a wish to express new thoughts and emotions, an abnormal love for sumptuous display or an apparently unquenchable thirst for the foreign or the grotesque, has appeared with equal frequency.

All these and many other motives found in the minds of men have caused them to draw from any source that seemed to give promise of a new material element capable of lending itself to the general expression of a given social order, ^he results in each period or division of time speak eloquently of the quality of its elements.

Second, fashion's most powerful accomplice is now, and undoubtedly always has been, what we term "the commercial interests," i.e. the selfish desire of one man to enrich himself at the expense of the weaknesses of others. Where could abetter field be found .^^ Then, too, the element of personal vanity has not been left out of any one of us. In most of us it seems to outstrip all else in rapidity of growth and in the devising of ways

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INTRODUCTION

and means for its satisfaction. Closely associated with this quahty is the determination not to be outdone by one's neighbour and the desire to shine by comparison with him. What has this not led man to do?

''Commercial interests" have never been unmindful of these and other human weaknesses and while they have flourished, fashion, too, has become incredibly successful in dictating what people should wear and when they should wear it. We need to remind ourselves again and again to what lengths men have gone that fashion might be obeyed and we should carefully calculate the results. In this, surely, everyone will find human interest.

The powerful influences of geography, time, social and ethical standards, and strong personalities, as well as principles of art, on the development of clothes as a social art expression, may perhaps be mentioned here, though they are too obvious to require prolonged discussion.

Some dominant idea has been developed in every age and by every people. Sometimes it was political, often purely social, though in a very few cases the spiritual ideal seemed for a period to be striving vigorously to appear in what the best minds of the time considered an adequate expression of the ideal

The results in costume, as in other mediums, are but a material record of the great ideals that swayed the nations at the time of their creation. In other words, a man's clothes, like other reactions to his needs, are his material response to a demand for them, and by the results he must stand or fall, whether judged commercially, socially, artistically, ethically, or by a simple standard of common sense.

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THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DRESS

Chapter One

THE term "Mediseval" has been variously interpreted as a span of time included between established dates, as almost anything not commonly reckoned as modern, or as a vague something quite apart from things intimately concerning us as individuals or as nations. As a matter of fact there is some truth about each of these views but none of them gives the fundamental truth which is after all the most important.

Mediaevalism was first of all an institution, a real, living thing. It had its own ideals, its individual thoughts and feelings, its peculiar practices, and an externalized material expression peculiarly its own, yet somewhat related with all that had gone before, and wholly inseparable from what we know as the modern social order.

At first this statement may seem to be a contradiction, but it is not. Medisevalism may perhaps be likened, in a way, to that period in youth when one's ideals are fresh, romantic, chivalrous, perhaps even mystic; before contact with the cold realities of life has hardened the sensibilities, or the development of reason has supplanted the spontaneous play of the emotions, and before materialism has won an illegitimate ascendency over spiritual conception. Everyone realizes that there was such a period in his own life and he will find just such another state in the development of the national soul of which he is a part. This is mediae valism.

We are particularly interested in this state of mind as it was manifested in Europe (especially in France, Italy, and England), first because of the perfection of its expression there and then because of its direct contribution to what we know as the modern world, or the civilization of which we are a part.

Considered from the viewpoint of time, this period may be approximately placed between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries, although some historians include the tenth and eleventh centuries, or the "dark ages," as others term them. The truth is that its beginnings are to be found in the birth of Christianity and its youthful growth traced in the decline and decay of Greco-Roman civilization, for in this particular ideal a new conception of the relation of spirit with material was being formed, and the flower of it burst forth in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, being generally known by the somewhat indefinite name of the Gothic period, while its results were classed as Gothic Art.

Medisevalism can hardly be viewed from the standpoint of antiquity, for it is rather the slow death of the antique ideals or at least the gradual sinking into obscurity of the conceptions, practices, and works of the ancients, as the various nations of Christendom slowly espoused the new order, adapting its practices to new conditions, and originating new forms of expression as other needs became manifest. The finest and perhaps the purest expression of this period is found in France, 4 certainly when seen from the standpoint of art, ItaKan expression being more indissolubly mixed with the antique, while England's productions were crude, and less delicately fashioned. The reasons for this will appear as we proceed.

If we think of this period as unrelated to ourselves or to modern life, we are reminded that to it we owe not only our most perfect conceptions of western mystic spiritual idealism with its attendant expressions in architecture, clothes, and the decorative arts, but the system of Chivalry with its delightful accessories, which laid the foundation for the deferential elegance of the Renaissance and, in a more indirect way, for the enchanting charm of the eighteenth-century social order.

This period was marked not only as one of spiritual victory for our civilization, but as the era of our social escape from barbarism as well. Not that we have always kept clearly in sight this spiritual exaltation or that we have not, ever and anon, turned to the results of these back-slidings; indeed, it is in just this fluctuation of influences, diversions, and reversions that the intense human interest of the various periods lies, and there is surely no better field in which to trace the devious paths of human thought than in that of clothes, where man has ever given free play to self-expression, in a way which, though not always a credit to his intelligence, is yet quite true to his innermost self, whether he will acknowledge it or not. It is here that he has forgotten at times the presence of a spiritual ideal, the existence of a faculty called intellect and he seems to have denied or silenced his reason, his ethics, and his common sense; yet even in such periods clothes as a personal expression are interesting and amusing, if neither sensible nor edifying.

Let us look for a moment at the ideal which, when formulated, was expressed in what we know as Mediaeval Gothic Art. Greek, or Classic civilization sought the exaltation of material through sesthetic or artistic treatment and formulated its spiritual and social existence to this end. This conception became for them a religion, and the art expression which resulted showed the highest development of intellectual pure form in material that the world has yet known. We need only recall here how the Roman, modifying this ideal in a less exalted conception of material form, debased proportionately his expression, nor need we trace the consequent decline and ultimate decay of the whole institution known as Roman civilization. Decayed it was, but not dead, for the spirit lived though the body was inert, and it has appeared and reappeared in new forms, giving the intellectual pure form basis for our greatest succeeding periods and, we may add, the greatest hope for the future.

It was the business of medisevalism to displace this ideal for one of its own which incited exaltation of the spirit through neglect of the material, or mortification of the flesh, in the belief that with the attainment of spiritual ecstasy materials would lend themselves to the attempt to express it and that spiritual emotionalism would find a ready aesthetic reaction. In this it was not mistaken and thus the social expression of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was second to, and always influenced by, the ecclesiastic ideal. Gradually, however, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, due in part to the founding of the institution known as Chivalry, secular life began to make its appeal felt; over-wrought imagination sought relaxation; the body, through the appetites, re-asserted itself, so that by the beginning of the fifteenth century a death blow to the mediaeval ideal had been dealt (particularly in Italy), a new ideal was already forecast and a new order — ^namely, the Renaissance, or the first period of modern civilization, was initiated. ^Perhaps it may appear that there is slight need to recall these bare facts in connection with the thought of mediaeval clothes and yet we recollect that man fashions as best he knows, not only clothes but other essentials, according to his state of mind and in such manner as he believes at the time best achieves the satisfaction of his need. Admitting this, there is but one way to understand and appreciate results — ^namely, by investigating and becoming familiar with the causes which underlie the production of these results. Here lies the fascination of approaching any historic art period from the psychological standpoint rather than from that of the chronological or mechanical. If man felt no needs he would have no impulse to create. Feeling the need calls for creative thought as to what will satisfy it and involves a demand for material and craftsmanship to give the thought form. But this is not all, the aesthetic sense demands beauty as its rightful satisfaction and this quality, like others, appears in proportion to its presence in the mind of him who creates, no more, no less. That is, we shall recognize and appreciate exactly as much as we can react to and this is measured by the presence of the like quality in our own conception of the created thing. If there were no clouds one could always, during the day, find the sun. Often too much technique, too much fashion, or too much prejudice, may obscure art or perchance the reverse may be equally true. We shall see this freely illustrated in our study of period clothes, which are not always made for their aesthetic charm any more than they are made to facilitate human movement. It is, however, the state of mind in which they are conceived that determines this quality-ratio in the indescribable combinations we so often find.

Mediaeval art found its fullest and freest expression in the ecclesiastical field. Its churches, its monasteries, and its libraries demanded the greatest builders, the finest sculptors, and the choicest artists to be found. Such costumes as were essential to the ritual of the church claimed the greatest share of attention. This ecclesiastical dominance influenced the kind of materials produced, determined largely the colours used, and dictated not only the design of the pattern but the style of the garments, particularly in the tenth and eleventh centuries and later still in France, which w^as less committed to the old order and more ecstatically fanatical in its religious creative expression. In all countries where Christianity had been accepted and during the positive sway of the feudal system there was a pronounced ecclesiastical mode always more or less influencing even the secular costumes of the social order.

Under the feudal system only the great barons and their families wore fine clothes, and these were generally crude and quite individual in their style as they 8 were primarily an answer to the need for protection from the elements, and secondarily a symbolic expression of rank and importance. The individual baron's style grew out of his needs and was formed by his association with other and more elaborately accoutred families as well as by the ecclesiastical models with which he came particularly in contact. Tradition, too, had its effect, especially during the last decades of feudalistic domination, when each family had worked out its own distinguishing characteristics.

During the eleventh century the great mediaeval social system known in history as Chivalry was founded in France. This system was destined to revolutionize the ethics, morals, and manners, first of France, then of Italy, England, and other European countries where it found a place in the social fabric.

To realize the power, scope, and influence of the new order we must recall something of its nature, as well as its relation to the barbaric feudal system then existing. It was about the middle of the eleventh century, during the reign of Henry I of France, that some nobles, ashamed of their lives of brigandage, consecrated themselves and their implements of war to God's service, agreeing that in the future they would only "fight for right and benevolence." This was the. beginning of what is known as Knight Errantry, or Chivalry, which spread over France, in fact over Europe, with surprising rapidity.

When fully worked out, every boy of noble birth was trained to knighthood. At the age of seven he was apprenticed to some great lord as page. He attended particularly on the ladies and was taught from the first to honour God, reverence women, obey promptly, and to respect Christianity. At the age of fourteen he became an esquire and was then assigned to service in the various departments of the household of the lord whom he served; for example, one carved at the dinner table and distributed the food to the guests. We read that he was dressed in scarlet, wore a chaplet on his head, a coloured girdle around his waist, that he hung a horn around his neck, and carried a white wand. In manner he must be exact, respectful, attentive, and always alert.

Another esquire had charge of the stables, attended the horses, assisted his lord to mount and dismount, and directed the stable service. He was dressed in brown and white, but when abroad with his master wore blue and white, or sometimes gold and white. There was another called an armour-bearer. He performed for his lord the duties now performed by a valet, carried the armour, and accompanied his lord on expeditions of pleasure or war, as did the shield-bearer, who acted in a somewhat similar capacity.

Each lord had regular masters to teach his pages and esquires their respective duties, and they were also taught to sing, play the harp and lute, to dance, hunt, to salute properly, and to wait upon the ladies of the household. In some cases they were even expected to read and compose verses. At the age of twenty-one the esquire became a knight and was entitled to be called "Sir" and his wife, if he had one, to be called "Lady." His flag was the pennon. When a knight committed an offense against another he was tried and punished with great severity. His sword was broken, his flag 10

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M ~ taken, and other public disgraces heaped upon him, until he was permanently eliminated from his social class.

Not long after the establishment of this system a remarkable change was observed in the manners, tastes, amusements, and general pursuits of the social unit. Refinement, elegance, and delicacy characterized their lives. Chastity, politeness, chivalry, and truth were the watchwords of the time. This stimulated the aesthetic and poetic instincts and changed the character of literature; at the same time the elaborately set social system caused a great trade revival. Invention was stimulated, towns became important, and a working middle class was evolved, eventually undermining the feudal system where but two classes, lords and serfs, existed.

The manufacture of armour and fine materials for clothes, the training of horses, and the general exchange of necessities and luxuries opened up communication between distant parts of the country as well as between France and other countries. The mode of domestic life increased the number of servants, the desire for luxuries multiplied, and the effect of comfort and affluence was apparent everywhere.

We cannot believe, however, that even with the high ideals embodied in the institution of Chivalry, the ideal state really existed. Many were slow to practice the code which they publicly espoused. Tradition was strong, the people were still human, selfish, vain, and somewhat undeveloped; yet this system may properly be said to have sounded the death knell of heathen barbarism and to have marked the beginning of Christian civilization as we know it to-day.

In the last decade of the eleventh century began the Crusades, or rehgious wars, between the Christians of the West and the Mohammedans of the East for the domination of Palestine. At first the claim made was only for the right to visit the holy sepulchre, but as the Christian West gradually lost its distinctive idealism and became increasingly ambitious, it determined to own and to rule the whole of the Holy Land. With the detailed success of the first crusade "through fire and sword," with the strifes and hardships and partial successes and failures of the succeeding expeditions, we are not here particularly concerned, but in the effect of these wars on western thought and consequently upon western practices we have a particular interest, when they are seen in relation to the new order of Chivalry, and to the general life expression of the twelfth and succeeding centuries of medisevalism. Many men consecrated their lives to these expeditions, first selling their estates to the middle classes for ready money. These tradesmen, thousands in number, increased the bourgeoisie and changed the balance of influence from the nobles to the middle class; this state of things in turn reacted, raising the serfs to the former position of the middle class and assisting further to displace the old order.

Experience in sea travel stimulated ship building. The crusaders saw life from another angle by virtue of their new associations. Their respect for science and literature was increased. Their ideas on agriculture and commerce were broadened, and their minds were filled with new conceptions and new expressions for old ones. They brought back new and strange 12 clothes of fantastic and gorgeous patterns, gems and precious jewels, ornaments wrought in a curious manner, implements and garments strangely fashioned. All this and much more was added to the already wellestablished social expression of the period of Chivalry.

A rapid development in manufactures increased the size of towns until the feudal estates gave place to them in power. During the reign of Louis VI (1108 to 1137) the first Charter of Communities was granted to Laon and Amiens. Other grants soon followed and thus autocratic power was moved from the feudal lord to the town community. This communal interest created in the minds of the masses a civic ideal, with common aims, a pride in personal endeavour, soon manifest in the development of the Craft Guilds, and a desire for the fundamental liberties and privileges of citizenship never conceived under the feudal system. All this was a direct stimulus to the creative faculty of the time as well as a development of the ideal of civilization. Its effects were first seen in the number and style of ecclesiastical buildings that came into being during the next century. It was not long, however, before the creative impulse began to react on the new social order, until, by the first half of the thirteenth century, its results claimed a large share of attention from those who ruled and those who had grown rich through domestic trade, or commerce with the East and the Mediterranean countries.

In the reign of Louis VII, the third quarter of the twelth century, a copy of the "Institutes," or the laws of Justinian, was discovered. This institution, simple in itself, soon changed the educational current in all Christendom. Universities sprang up, the study of law became a mania, and a new code of civil law displaced, or rather made over, the feudal laws, adding the imperial Roman idea of civil jurisprudence to the new phase of civilization. Formerly trial was by combat or appeals to God and finally to arms, but from this time pleaders and juries were appointed and a crude scale of punishment in proportion to the offence was established. These steps taken within a century — the birth of Chivalry, the Crusades, the Charter of Communities, and the revival of civil law — ^form the foundation upon which was matured the system known as Medisevalism.

In the reign of Philip II (1180 to 1223) we find the development of these elements and their crystallization into an institution which really functioned. In fact Philip Augustus is said to have done for France what Caesar did for Rome. The narrow conventionalism and the rigid formalism of the eleventh and twelfth centuries gave way before the new order.

We read that during the reign of Philippe tournaments were often given. Not only were the guests of noble origin, but there were crowds of troubadours with their instruments, minstrels, fools, jugglers, dancers, and other strange and amusing people. Booths and tents were raised around the castle gate and merchants of all sorts hastened thither with their wares of cloth-of-gold and silver, velvets and silks, stuffs of all kinds, ermine and other furs, silver cups, gold clasps, ornaments of great variety for lords and ladies, cutlery, armour, and embroidered articles of personal adornment, as well as trifles for amusement. Flags, banners, pennants, and lovely tapestries hung and fluttered from 14 the windows and balconies of the chateaux. These tournaments persisted, growing in number and gorgeous sumptuousness throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

The helmet worn at the close of the twelfth centurywas a flat top steel one, with a steel hoop under the chin and a sort of grate over the face. When this was removed the knight put on a velvet cap the colour of which matched his garments. This was ornamented with jewels and the plumes were such that when the knights assembled on the battlefield nothing could equal the splendour of their costumes. Robes of brilliant scarlet, ornaments of gold, silver, and precious stones, fine furs, the finest silks, the most costly armour, were theirs by law. Their gaily decked horses formed an inconceivable mass of splendour. Each knight was attended by his esquire and a troop of troubadours and fools decked in the most gorgeous finery.

It is interesting to note that with all the huge chateaux, the wealth of gorgeous material, the sumptuous and luxurious ensemble of colour, pattern, and gems, domestic essentials and comforts of life were almost unknown. The rooms were large, with no ceiling but a vaulted roof. The sides were bare and decorated with armour, swords, helmets, battle-axes- and knives. Banners and tapestries were hung about, while the floor was covered thick with straw and rushes. Tables and benches were crude. Dining tables were covered with damask cloth and the place of each guest marked by a small loaf of bread covered by a napkin, a knife being sometimes placed with it. Forks were unknown, and before the twelfth century the girdle dagger was used in place of a knife. The dishes consisted of wooden platters, pewter trenchers, and silver drinking vessels done in fantastic designs.