On Sun, 1 Oct 2006, E House wrote: > The 'head to heeles' part does suggest a farthingale to me, I must > say, but as others have suggested, the farthingale seems like it would > be, at the least, less than fashionable in 1617
The Spanish farthingale would have been long out of style. The French farthingale, which created the wheel-like visual effect, would be just starting to become passe at court, and it was still worn by lesser-born women into the 1620s. > On the other side of the argument, though, what about that drawing > seen in Waugh's C&C, of the dancers wearing wheels around their waist? > Or would you say those are for dancers only? Whether they're wheels, exactly, is up for discussion, as is how they are made (they might be bones in casings, or they might be a series of connected small rolls, or a quilted pad, or lord knows what else). But what is certain is that this is stage costume. For men. Doing a dance performance. In a parody on the theme of deception. In 1625, by which point the fashion was laughably out of date at court and possibly cause for derision in and of itself. Given that this puts us four or five times removed from reality, and given the lack of any corroborating evidence whatsoever, I am not so optimistic as Waugh to assume that these are realistic representations of what real women were wearing in court in the early 1600s. --Robin _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list [email protected] http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
