by Bill Bryson
All wigs tended to be scratchy, uncomfortable, and hot, particularly in summer. To make them more bearable, many men shaved their heads, so we should be surprised to see many famous seventeenth- and eighteenth-century figures as their wives saw them first thing in the morning. It was an odd situation. For a century and a half, men got rid of their own hair, which was perfectly comfortable, and instead covered their heads with something foreign and uncomfortable. Very often it was actually their own hair made into a wig. People who couldn’t afford wigs tried to make their hair look like a wig.
Wigs took a lot of maintenance. Once every week or so they had to be sent out to have their buckles (from the French boucles, meaning curls), reshaped on heated rollers, and possibly baked in an oven, a process known as fluxing. From about 1700, for reasons that had nothing to do with common sense or practicality, it became fashionably necessary to place on one’s head a daily snowfall of white powder.
The main powdering agent was simple flour. When wheat harvests failed in France in the 1770s, there were riots all over as starving people realized that diminished supplies of flour were not being baked into bread, but were instead being used to powder the privileged heads of aristocrats. By the late eighteenth century, hair powders were commonly colored—blue and pink were especially popular—and scented, too.
Powdering could be done while the wig was on a wooden stand, but it was widely agreed that maximum stylishness was achieved by powdering the wig while it was on. The procedure required the owner to don his wig, cover his shoulders and upper body with a cloth, and stick his face in a paper funnel (to avoid choking) while a servant or frisseur armed with a bellows dispensed clouds of powder onto his head. A few more fastidious people took matters further. A certain Prince Raunitz employed four valets, who puffed out four clouds of powder, each dyed a different color, through which the prince smartly strode in order to achieve exactly the right effect. Learning of this, Lord Effingham employed five French frisseurs just to look after his hair; Lord Scarborough hired six.
And then, pretty abruptly, wigs went out of fashion. Wigmakers, in desperation, petitioned George III to make wig wearing by males compulsory, but the king declined. By the early 1800s, nobody wanted them and old wigs were commonly used as dust mops. Today they survive only in certain courtrooms in Britain and the Commonwealth. Judicial wigs these days are made of horsehair and cost about £600, I’m told. To avoid a look of newness—which many lawyers fear might suggest inexperience—recently purchased wigs are customarily soaked in tea.
Women, meanwhile, took wig wearing literally to another level—building their hair up on a wire scaffolding known as a pallisade or commode. By mixing greased wool and horsehair with their own hair, they could attain truly monumental heights. Female wigs sometimes rose as much as two and a half feet, making the average wearer roughly seven and a half feet tall. When traveling to engagements, they often had to sit on the floor of their carriages or ride with their heads out the windows. At least two fatalities were attributed to women’s hair catching fire after brushing against chandeliers.
Women’s hair became so complicated that it took on a whole new vocabulary; even individual curls or sections of curls had names—frivolité, des migraines, l’insurgent, monte la haut, sorti, frelange, flandon, burgoigne, choux, crouche, berger, confident, and many more. (Chignon, for a knot at the back of the head, is about the only word that survives from this once-extensive vocabulary.) Because of the amount of work involved, it was not uncommon for women to leave their hair untouched for months on end, except to add a little paste from time to time to keep everything cemented in place. Many slept with their necks on special wooden blocks to keep their hairstyles elevated and undisturbed. One consequence of failing to wash was that their hair often swarmed with insects, particularly weevils. One woman reportedly miscarried when she discovered that mice were nesting in her upper decks.
Extreme hair: Miss Prattle Consulting Doctor Double Fee About Her Pantheon Head Dress (photo credit 17.1)
The heyday of the towering hairstyles for women was the 1790s, when men were already giving up wigs. Generally women’s wigs were festooned with ribbons and feathers, but sometimes with even more elaborate devices. John Woodforde, in his History of Vanity, mentions a woman who had a model ship, complete with sails and cannon, riding the waves of her headwear, as if protecting it from invasion.
In the same period it became fashionable to wear artificial moles, known as mouches. Gradually these artificial patches took on shapes, like stars or crescent moons, which were worn on the face, neck, and shoulders. One lady is recorded as sporting a coach and six horses galloping across her cheeks. At the peak of the fashion, people wore a superabundance of mouches until they must have looked rather as if they were covered in flies. Patches were worn by men as well as women, and were said to reflect one’s political leanings by whether they were worn on the right cheek (Whigs) or left cheek (Tories). Similarly, a heart on the right cheek signaled that the wearer was married, and on the left cheek that he or she was engaged. Patches became so complicated and various that they generated a whole vocabulary, too, so that a patch on the chin was known as a silencieuse, one on the nose was called l’impudent or l’effrontée, one in the middle of the forehead was a majesteuse, and so on all around the head. In the 1780s, just to show that creative ridiculousness really knew no bounds, it became briefly fashionable to wear fake eyebrows made of mouse skin.
Patches at least were not toxic, and as such were almost the only beauty aid in centuries that wasn’t. There was in England a long tradition of poisoning oneself in the name of beauty. Pupils could be attractively dilated with drops of belladonna, or deadly nightshade. Most dangerous of all was ceruse, a paste made of white lead and commonly known as paint. Ceruse was very popular. For females with smallpox scars it was applied as a kind of spackle, to fill in the divots, but even many women who were free of blemishes used it to give themselves a lovely ghostly pallor. Ceruse remained popular for a remarkably long time. The first reference to it as a cosmetic is in 1519 when it was recorded that women of fashion “whyte their face, necke and pappis [which is to say breasts] with cerusse.” In 1754, the Connoisseur, a periodical, was still marveling that “every lady you meet is besmeared with unguent ceruss and plaister.” Ceruse had three principal drawbacks: it cracked when the wearer smiled or grimaced, after a few hours it turned gray, and if used long enough it could kill. At the very least, it could make eyes swell painfully and teeth loosen and fall out. At least two well-known beauties, the courtesan Kitty Fisher and the socialite Maria Gunning, Countess of Coventry, are said to have died from ceruse poisoning, both while only in their twenties, but no one can begin to guess how many others may have had their lives shortened or constitutions unsettled by their attachment to ceruse.
Toxic potions were popular, too. Well into the nineteenth century, many women drank a concoction called Fowler’s Solution, which was really just dilute arsenic, to improve their complexions. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s wife, Elizabeth Siddal (who is best remembered as the model for the drowned Ophelia in the painting by John Everett Millais), was a devoted swallower of the stuff, and it almost certainly contributed to her early death in 1862.*
Men wore makeup too, and indeed for a century or so were inclined to display breathtaking effeminacy, sometimes in the most unexpected circumstances. Louis XIV’s brother, the Duc d’Orléans, “in spite of being one of history’s most famous sodomites,” in the startlingly forthright words of the historian Nancy Mitford, was a brave soldier, but an unorthodox one. He would arrive at the battlefield “painted, powdered, all his eyelashes stuck together, covered with ribbons and diamonds,” Mitford wrote in The Sun King. “He would never wear a hat for fear of flattening his wig. Once in action he was as brave as a lion, only afraid of what the sun and dust might do to his complexion.” Men as well as women festooned their hair with plumes and feathers, and tied ribbons to each bouncing curl. Some men took to wearing high-heeled
shoes—not clunky platform shoes, but slender, spiky heels up to six inches high—and to carrying furry muffs to keep their hands warm. Some carried parasols in the summer. Nearly all drenched themselves in perfume. They became known as macaronis, from a dish they first encountered on Italian tours.
So it is curious that the people who actually brought some restraint to matters—namely, the macaronis’ rival sartorial tribe, the dandies—have become associated in the popular consciousness with overdress. Nothing, with respect to male attire, could be further from the truth, and the quintessence of that muted splendor was George “Beau” Brummell, who lived from 1778 to 1840. Brummell was not rich or talented or blessed with brains. He just dressed better than anyone ever had before. Not more colorfully or extravagantly, but simply with more care.
He was born in reasonably privileged circumstances on Downing Street, his father a trusted adviser to the prime minister, Lord North. Brummell went to Eton and, briefly, to Oxford, before taking up a position in the military in the Prince of Wales’s regiment, the Tenth Hussars. If he had any aptitude for command in battle, it was never tested; his function essentially was to look good in uniform and to act as a kind of companion and assistant to the prince at formal gatherings. In consequence, he and the prince became close friends.
Brummell lived in Mayfair, and for some years his house was the epicenter of one of the more improbable rituals in London’s history—that of a procession of grown men of great eminence arriving each afternoon to watch him dress. Among those regularly in attendance were the Prince of Wales, three dukes, a marquess, two earls, and the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan. They would sit and watch in respectful silence as Brummell began the daily process of grooming with a bath. It was generally thought an amazement that he bathed every day—“and every part of his body,” as one witness added with special astonishment. Moreover he did it in hot water. Sometimes he added milk, which itself set a fashion, though not an entirely happy one. When word got out that the withered and miserly Marquis of Queensberry, who lived nearby, was also in the habit of taking milk baths, milk sales in the district plummeted because it was rumored that he returned the milk for resale after he had immersed his crusty and decrepit skin in it.
The attire of dandies was studiously muted. Brummell’s apparel was confined almost entirely to three plain colors: white, buff, and blue-black. What distinguished dandies was not the richness of their plumage but the care with which they assembled themselves. It was all about getting a perfect line. They would spend hours making sure every crease or furl was perfect, unimprovable. A visitor, arriving at Brummell’s to find the floor strewn with cravats, once asked Robinson, his long-suffering valet, what was going on. “Those,” Robinson sighed, “are our failures.” Dandies dressed and redressed endlessly. In a day they would typically get through at least three shirts and two pairs of trousers, four or five cravats, two waistcoats, several pairs of stockings, and a small stack of handkerchiefs.
Some of the fashion was dictated by the ever-increasing stoutness of the Prince of Wales (or “Prince of Whales,” as he was snickeringly known behind his back). By the time he reached his thirties, the prince had taken on such a fleshy sprawl that he had to be forcibly strapped into a corset—a “Bastille of Whalebone,” in the words of one who was allowed to see it—which his attendants tactfully referred to as his “belt.” All this pushed his upper body fat upward through the neck hole, like toothpaste coming out of a tube, so the very high collars fashionable in his day were a kind of additional mini corset, designed to hide an abundance of chins and the floppy wattle of his neck.
The one sartorial area in which dandies did stand out, as it were, was in their trousers. Pantaloons were often worn tight as paint and were not a great deal less revealing, particularly as they were worn without underwear. The night after seeing the Count d’Orsay, Jane Carlyle noted in her diary, perhaps just a touch breathlessly, that the count’s pantaloons were “skin-coloured and fitting like a glove.” The style was based on the riding trousers of Brummell’s regiment. Jackets were tailored with tails in back, but were cut away in front so that they perfectly framed the groin. It was the first time in history that men’s apparel was consciously designed to be more sexy than women’s.
It appears that Brummell could have had almost any lady he longed for, and many men, too, but whether he did have any or not is intriguingly uncertain. On the evidence, it appears that Brummell was asexual; we don’t know of any relationship, male or female, he engaged in that involved intercourse other than aural. Curiously, for a man famed for his appearance, we don’t know what he looked like. Four reputed likenesses of him exist, but they are all strikingly different from one another, and there is now no telling which, if any, is actually faithful.
Brummell’s fall from grace was abrupt and irreversible. He and the Prince of Wales had a falling out and ceased speaking. At a social occasion, the prince pointedly ignored Brummell and instead spoke to his companion. As the prince withdrew, Brummell turned to the companion and made one of the most famously ill-advised remarks in social history. “Who’s your fat friend?” he asked.
Such an insult was social suicide. Shortly afterward Brummell’s debts caught up with him and he fled to France. He spent the last two and a half decades of his life living in poverty, mostly in Calais, growing slowly demented but always looking, in his restrained and careful way, sensational.
II
At just the time that Beau Brummell was dominating the sartorial scene in London and beyond, one other fabric was beginning to transform the world, and in particular the manufacturing world. I refer to cotton. Its place in history can hardly be overstated.
Cotton is such a commonplace material now that we forget that it was once extremely precious—more valuable than silk. But in the seventeenth century, the East India Company began importing calicoes from India (from the city of Calicut, from which they take their name), and suddenly cotton became affordable. Calico was then essentially a collective term for chintzes, muslins, percales, and other colorful fabrics, which caused unimaginable delight among Western consumers because they were light and washable and the colors didn’t run. Although some cotton was grown in Egypt, India dominated the cotton trade, as we are reminded by the endless numbers of words that came into English from there: khaki, dungarees, gingham, muslin, pajamas, shawl, seersucker, and so on.
The sudden surge of Indian cotton pleased consumers, but not manufacturers. Unable to compete with this wonder fabric, European textile workers bayed for protection almost everywhere, and almost everywhere they received it. The importation of finished cotton fabrics was banned in much of Europe throughout the eighteenth century. Raw cotton could be imported, which provided a powerful incentive to the British cloth industry to exploit it. The problem was, cotton was very hard to spin and weave. The solution to that problem is called the Industrial Revolution.
Turning bales of fluffy cotton into useful products like bedsheets and blue jeans involves two fundamental operations: spinning and weaving. Spinning is the process by which short lengths of cotton fiber become long threads; the spinner adds short fibers a little at a time and gives them a twist—the very process mentioned with string. Weaving involves interlacing two sets of strings at right angles to form a mesh. The machine on which cloth was woven was a loom. All that a loom does is hold one set of strings tight so that a second set can be fed through the first to make a weave. The tight set of strings is called the warp. The second, “active” set is called the weft—which is simply an old form of the verb weave. Most everyday household cloths—sheets, handkerchiefs, and the like—are still made from this basic, straightforward type of weaving.
Spinning and weaving were cottage industries that supported large numbers of people. Traditionally, women spun and men wove. Spinning, however, took a lot longer than weaving, and the disparity grew even worse after 1733 when John Kay, a young man from Lancashire, invented the flying shuttle—the first of the breakthrough
innovations that the industry required. Kay’s mobile shuttle doubled the speed at which weaving could be performed. Spinners, already unable to keep up, fell ever more hopelessly behind, so problems developed all along the supply line, with enormous economic stresses for all concerned.
According to the story as traditionally recounted, weavers and spinners alike grew so furious with Kay that they attacked his home and he had to flee to France, where he died a pauper. The story is repeated in most histories even now with “dogmatic fervour,” in the words of the industrial historian Peter Willis, but in fact, Willis insists, there is no truth in it at all. Kay did die poor, but only because he didn’t manage his life very well. He proposed to manufacture the machines himself and rent them out to mill owners, but he set the rental so high that no one would pay it. Instead his device was widely pirated, and he spent all his funds unsuccessfully fighting for compensation through the courts. Eventually, he went to France, hoping—vainly—to find more success there. He lived almost another fifty years after his invention. He was never attacked or driven away.
A generation would pass before anyone devised a solution to the spinning problem, and it came from an unexpected quarter. In 1764, an illiterate weaver from Lancashire named James Hargreaves devised an ingeniously simple device known as the spinning jenny, which did the work of ten spinners by incorporating multiple spindles. Not much is known about Hargreaves beyond that he was born and grew up in Lancashire, married young, and had twelve children. There is no known likeness. He was the poorest and unluckiest of all the major figures of the early Industrial Revolution. Unlike Kay, Hargreaves really did experience trouble. A mob of angry locals came to his house and burned twenty half-finished jennies and most of his tools—a cruel and desperate loss to a poor man—and so for a prudent period he stopped making jennies and went into bookkeeping. The jenny, incidentally, was not named after his daughter, as is often stated; jenny was a northern word for engine.
