The tradition of a man’s suit originated in France, in the eighteenth century, with the fashion of wearing a coat, waistcoat, vest, and trousers of different fabrics, patterns, and colors. The cut was loose, bordering on baggy, and the suit was intended as informal country wear and known as a “lounge suit.” In the 1860s, it became fashionable to have all components of a suit made in matching fabric.
Because country lounge suits were also worn for horseback riding, tailors were often requested to slit the jacket up the back—the origin of the back slit in modern suits. Another suit feature originated for utilitarian purposes: the lapel hole, truly a buttonhole and not intended for a flower, since on cold days a man turned up the collar of his lounge suit and buttoned it closed.
Gentlemen found lounge suits so comfortable, they began wearing them in the city as well. Tailors improved the cut, and by the 1890s, the leisure lounge suit had become respectable business attire.
Tuxedo: 1886, Tuxedo Park, New York
On the night the tuxedo made its debut, slightly more than a hundred years ago, it should have been pronounced scandalous attire, inappropriate for a formal occasion. The tailless coat was after all an affront to the customary black tie and tails of the day, formal wear that originated among English dandies in the early 1800s. However, the coat was designed and worn by a family whose name and position tempered the social reaction.
The tuxedo story begins in the summer of 1886, in Tuxedo Park, New York, a hamlet about forty miles north of Manhattan. Pierre Lorillard IV, a blueblood New Yorker of French extraction, heir to the Lorillard tobacco fortune, sought something less formal than tails to wear to the annual Autumn Ball. He commissioned a tailor to prepare several tailless jackets in black, modeled after the scarlet riding jackets then popular with British fox hunters. There is some evidence that Lorillard was inspired by the fashionable Edward VII, who as Prince of Wales had ordered the tails cut off his coat during a visit to India because of oppressive heat.
On the night of the ball, Pierre Lorillard suddenly experienced a lack of daring and declined to wear the jacket of his design. Instead, his son, Griswold, and several of Griswold’s friends, donned the tailless black dinner jackets, and with a nod to the British riding coat that had inspired the creation, they wore scarlet vests.
In the 1880s’ highly restrictive code of proper attire, the splash of scarlet and the affront of taillessness should probably have done more than just raise eyebrows. The ad hoc costume might well have passed quickly into oblivion, had it not been designed by a Lorillard and worn by a Lorillard, in a town built on land owned largely by the Lorillard family. Under the circumstances, the informal wear was copied and eventually became standard evening attire.
The American Formalwear Association claims that the Lorillards’ act of rebellion launched a multimillion-dollar industry. In 1985, for instance, the sale and rental of tuxedos and their accessories grossed $500 million. Eighty percent of all rentals were for weddings, the next-largest rental category being high school proms.
For weddings and proms, one standard tuxedo accessory has become the cummerbund, a wide sash worn around the waist. It originated in India as part of a man’s formal dress. The Hindu name for the garment was kamarband, meaning “loin band,” since it was once worn lower down on the abdomen as a token of modesty. In time, the garment moved up the body to the waist, and it was appropriated by the British, who Anglicized the name to cummerbund.
The tuxedo took its name, of course, from the town in which it bowed. And today the word “tuxedo” has formal and glamorous connotations. But the term has a frontier origin, going back to the Algonquian Indians who once inhabited the area that is now Tuxedo Park. The regional Algonquian sachem, or chief, was named P’tauk-Seet (with a silent P), meaning “wolf.” In homage, the Indians referred to the area as P’tauk-Seet. Colonists, though, often phoneticized Indian words, and a 1765 land survey of the region reveals that they recorded P’tauk-Seet as “Tucksito.” By the year 1800, when Pierre Lorillard’s grandfather began acquiring land in the area, the name had already become Tuxedo. Thus, “tuxedo” derives from the Indian for “wolf,” which may or may not say something about a man who wears one.
Hats: Antiquity, Europe and Asia
The similarities in sound and spelling between the words “hat,” a head covering, and “hut,” a primitive home, are not coincidental.
Long before Western man designed clothes for the body, he constructed thatched shelters. A haet, or hull, offered protection from the elements and from the darkness of night. And when he protected his head—from heat, rain, or falling debris—the covering, whatever its composition, was also labeled haet or hutt, both of which etymologists translate as “shelter” and “protection.”
The association between a head covering and a primitive home goes further than hat equals hut. The earliest inhabitants of the British Isles wore a conical hat made of bound rush, called a cappan. They lived in a shelter, also constructed of rush, known as a cabban. The two terms are, respectively, the origins of our words “cap” and “cabin.” The evolution of language is replete with examples of peoples borrowing words for existing objects to christen new creations.
The first recorded use of a hat with a brim was in Greece in the fifth century B.C. Worn by huntsmen and travelers for protection from sun and rain, the felt petasos was wide-brimmed, and when not on the head it hung down the back on a cord. The petasos was copied by the Etruscans and the Romans, and was popular well into the Middle Ages.
The Greeks also wore a brimless hat shaped like a truncated cone. They copied the design from the Egyptians and named it pilos, for “felt,” the material of its construction. It appeared with variations throughout European cultures, and with the rise of universities in the late Middle Ages, the pileus quadratus, or four-sided felt hat, became the professional head covering for scholars—and later, as the mortarboard, was worn by high school and college students at graduation ceremonies.
Hats today are more popular with women than with men, but this was not always the case. In classical times, women rarely wore them, while men kept them on indoors and in churches and cathedrals. The customs continued into the sixteenth century, when the popularity of false hair and the mushrooming size of wigs made wearing hats inconvenient if not impossible. As the fad of wigs died out, men resumed the practice of wearing hats, though never again with the devotion of the past. And three customs underwent complete reversals: a man never worn a hat indoors, in church, or in the presence of a lady.
It was at this time, the late 1700s, that women in large numbers began to wear hats—festooned with ribbons, feathers, and flowers, and trimmed in lace. Previously, if a European woman wore a hat at all, it was a plain cap indoors, a hood outside.
Women’s hats that tied under the chin became bonnets. The word “bonnet” already existed, but throughout the late Middle Ages it denoted any small, soft hat; only in the eighteenth century did it come to signify a particular kind of feminine headwear. Milan became the bonnet capital of Europe, with Milanese hats in great demand. So much so that all women’s headwear fell under the British rubric “millinery,” and a Milaner craftsman became a milliner.
Top Hat: 1797, England
John Etherington, a London haberdasher with a fashionable shop on the Strand, emerged from his store in the twilight hours of January 15, 1797, wearing a new hat of his own design. The London Times reported that Etherington’s black stovepipe hat drew a crowd so large that a shoving match erupted; one man was pushed through a storefront window. Etherington was arrested for disturbing the peace. Within a month, though, he had more orders for top hats than he could fill.
British costume historians contend that Etherington’s was the world’s first top hat. Their French counterparts claim that the design originated a year earlier in Paris and that John Etherington pilfered it. The only evidence supporting the Parisian origin, however, is a painting by French artist Charles Vernet, Un Incroyable de 1796, which depi
cts a dandy in an Etherington-like stovepipe hat. Though artists traditionally have presaged trends, the British believe the painting may be more an example of an artist’s antedating a work.
Fedora. A soft felt crown with a center crease and a flexible brim mark the fedora, whose name is derived from a hat worn by a character in an 1882 French play. Written by playwright Victorien Sardou, whose dramas were the rage of Paris in the nineteenth century, Fedora was composed for its star, Sarah Bernhardt, and it established a new trend in hats. A fedora, with a veil and feather, became a favorite woman’s bicycling hat.
Panama. Though it would seem logical that the Panama hat originated in the Central American capital it is named for, it did not. The lightweight straw hat, made of finely plaited jipajapa leaves, originated in Peru. Panama became a major distribution center. North American engineers first encountered the hats in Panama, during the 1914 construction of the Panama Canal, and considered them a local product.
Derby. In 1780, Edward Smith Stanley, the twelfth earl of Derby, instituted an annual race for three-year-old horses, the Derby, to be held at Epsom Downs, near London. Popular at that time among men were stiff felt hats with dome-shaped crowns and narrow brims. Regularly worn to the Derby, the hats eventually acquired the race’s name.
Stetson. In the 1860s, Philadelphia haberdasher John B. Stetson was searching for a way to earn a profit from his hat business. Recalling a vacation to the Midwest and the number of wealthy cattle ranchers he’d met there, Stetson decided to produce an oversized hat fit for “cattle kings.” The “ten-gallon” Western cowboy hat, named “The Boss of the Plains,” transformed Stetson’s business into a success and became a classic symbol of the Wild West and of the men—and women—who tamed it. Buffalo Bill, General Custer, and Tom Mix wore Stetsons, as did Annie Oakley and Calamity Jane.
Gloves: 10,000 Years Ago, Northern Europe
Gloves evolved from the desire to protect the hands from cold and from heavy manual labor. Among the numerous examples discovered in parts of Northern Europe are “bag gloves,” sheaths of animal skin that reach to the elbow. These mittens are at least ten thousand years old.
The earliest peoples to inhabit the warm lands bordering the Mediterranean used gloves for construction and farming. Among these southerners, the Egyptians, around 1500 B.C., were the first to make gloves a decorative accessory. In the tomb of King Tutankhamen, archaeologists retrieved a pair of soft linen gloves wrapped in layers of cloth, as well as a single tapestry glove woven with colored threads. Strings around the tops of the gloves indicate they were tied to the wrist. And the separate fingers and thumb leave no doubt that hand-shaped gloves were used at least 3,500 years ago.
Regardless of the warmth of the climate, every major civilization eventually developed both costume and work gloves. In the fourth century B.C., the Greek historian Xenophon commented on the Persian production of exquisitely crafted fur costume gloves; and in Homer’s Odyssey, Ulysses, returning home, finds his father, Laertes, laboring in the garden, where “gloves secured his hands to shield them from the thorns.”
It was the Anglo-Saxons, calling their heavy leather hand covering glof, meaning “palm of hand,” who gave us the word “glove.”
Purse: Pre-8th Century B.C., Southern Europe
If you purse your lips, you are contracting them into wrinkles and folds, similar in appearance to the mouth of a drawstring bag, ancient people’s earliest purse. But it was the material from which those early bags were made, hide, or byrsa in Greek, that is the origin of the word “purse.”
The Romans adopted the Greek drawstring byrsa unaltered, Latinizing its name to bursa. The early French made it bourse, which also came to mean the money in the purse, and then became the name of the stock exchange in Paris, the Bourse.
Until pockets appeared in clothing in the sixteenth century, men, women, and children carried purses—sometimes no more than a piece of cloth that held keys and other personal effects, or at the other extreme, elaborately embroidered and jeweled bags.
Handkerchief: Post-15th Century, France
During the fifteenth century, French sailors returned from the Orient with large, lightweight linen cloths that they had seen Chinese field-workers use as protective head covers in the sun. Fashion-minded French women, impressed with the quality of the linen, adopted the article and the practice, naming the headdress a couvrechef, meaning “covering for the head.” The British took up the custom and Anglicized the word to “kerchief.” Since these coverings were carried in the hand until needed in sunlight, they were referred to as “hand kerchiefs.”
Since upper-class European women, unlike Chinese in the rice paddies, already carried sun-shielding parasols, the hand kerchief was from the start a fashion affectation. This is evident in numerous illustrations and paintings of the period, in which elaborately decorated hand kerchiefs are seldom worn but prominently carried, waved, and demurely dropped. Hand kerchiefs of silk, some with silver or gold thread, became so costly in the 1500s that they often were mentioned in wills as valuables.
It was during the reign of Elizabeth I that the first lace hand kerchiefs appeared in England. Monogrammed with the name of a loved one, the articles measured four inches square, and had a tassel dangling from one corner. For a time, they were called “true love knots.” A gentleman wore one bearing his lady’s initials tucked into his hatband; and she carried his love knot between her breasts.
When, then, did the Chinese head cover, which became the European hand kerchief, become a handkerchief, held to the nose? Perhaps not long after the hand kerchief was introduced into European society. However, the nose-blowing procedure was quite different then than today.
Throughout the Middle Ages, people cleared their noses by forcefully exhaling into the air, then wiped their noses on whatever was handy, most often a sleeve. Early etiquette books explicitly legitimize the practice. The ancient Romans had carried a cloth called a sudarium, meaning “sweat cloth,” which was used both to wipe the brow on hot days and to blow the nose. But the civility of the sudarium fell with the Roman Empire.
The first recorded admonitions against wiping the nose on the sleeve (though not against blowing the nose into the air) appear in sixteenth-century etiquette books—during the ascendancy of the hand kerchief. In 1530, Erasmus of Rotterdam, a chronicler of customs, advised: “To wipe your nose with your sleeve is boorish. The hand kerchief is correct, I assure you.”
From that century onward, hand kerchiefs made contact, albeit tentatively at first, with the nose. The nineteenth-century discovery of airborne germs did much to popularize the custom, as did the machine age mass production of inexpensive cotton cloths. The delicate hand kerchief became the dependable handkerchief.
Fan: 3000 B.C., China and Egypt
Peacock-feather fans, and fans of papyrus and palm fronds: these decorative and utilitarian breeze-stirrers developed simultaneously and independently about five thousand years ago in two disparate cultures. The Chinese turned fans into an art; the Egyptians, into a symbol of class distinction.
Numerous Egyptian texts and paintings attest to the existence of a wealthy man’s “fan servant” and a pharaoh’s “royal fan bearer.” Slaves, both white-skinned and black-skinned, continually swayed huge fans of fronds or woven papyrus to cool masters. And the shade cast on the ground by opaque fans was turf forbidden to commoners. In semitropical Egypt, the intangibles of shade and breeze were desiderata that, owing to the vigilance of slaves, adorned the wealthy as prestigiously as attire.
In China, fans cooled more democratically. And the fans themselves were considerably more varied in design and embellishment. In addition to the iridescent peacock-feather fan, the Chinese developed the “screen” fan: silk fabric stretched over a bamboo frame and mounted on a lacquered handle. In the sixth century A.D., they introduced the screen fan to the Japanese, who, in turn, conceived an ingenious modification: the folding fan.
The Japanese folding fan consisted of a solid s
ilk cloth attached to a series of sticks that could collapse in on each other. Folding fans, depending on their fabric, color, and design, had different names and prescribed uses. Women, for instance, had “dance” fans, “court” fans, and “tea” fans, while men carried “riding” fans and even “battle” fans.
The Japanese introduced the folding fan to China in the tenth century. At that point, it was the Chinese who made a clever modification of the Japanese design. Dispensing with the solid silk cloth stretched over separate sticks, the Chinese substituted a series of “blades” in bamboo or ivory. These thin blades alone, threaded together at their tops by a ribbon, constituted the fan, which was also collapsible. Starting in the fifteenth century, European merchants trading in the Orient returned with a wide variety of decorative Chinese and Japanese fans. By far the most popular model was the blade fan, or brise, with blades of intricately carved ivory strung together with a ribbon of white or red silk.
Safety Pin: 1000 B.C., Central Europe
In the modern safety pin, the pinpoint is completely and harmlessly concealed in a metal sheath. Its ancestor had its point cradled away, though somewhat exposed, in a curved wire. This bent, U-shaped device originated in Central Europe about three thousand years ago and marked the first significant improvement in design over the straight pin. Several such pins in bronze have been unearthed.
Straight pins, of iron and bone, had been fashioned by the Sumerians around 3000 B.C. Sumerian writings also reveal the use of eye needles for sewing. Archaeologists, examining ancient cave drawings and artifacts, conclude that even earlier peoples, some ten thousand years ago, used needles, of fish spines pierced in the top or middle to receive the thread.
Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things Page 41
