United States or United States Minor Outlying Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"I'll fetch it," cried Dakie Thayne from overhead, and, as he spoke, came down on her side by the wheel, and, springing around to the house entrance, disappeared up the stairs. "Ginevra!" Then there came a laugh and a shout and some crinoline against the forward open corner of the coach, and Ginevra Thoresby was by the driver's side.
Then to complete the garniture of the head, to make all perfect, to leave no point of escape for the susceptible admirer of modern beauty, some dorsal appendage was necessary of mornings as well as in the more fully bedizened period of evening society. "Everything about the sweet Crinoline was wont to be green.
Indeed all the most ungainly and uncomfortable articles of dress that fashion has ever in her folly prescribed, not the tight corset merely, but the farthingale, the vertugadin, the hoop, the crinoline, and that modern monstrosity the so-called "dress improver" also, all of them have owed their origin to the same error, the error of not seeing that it is from the shoulders, and from the shoulders only, that all garments should be hung.
A good-looking girl without crinoline had a sort of unworldly freshness of air that really constituted a charm. If it had been a piece of refined coquetry, as certainly it was not, it could not have been better planned. Nothing could be more perfectly proper than the demeanor of this girl in relation to all the proprieties of her position.
When the crinoline went out the train came in; so that though woman had allowed herself more freedom, man could only walk behind her at a respectful distance with a ceremonial measure of pace. The dressmaker did not control all this; the resources of her transcendent art were strained to keep up with the march of womanhood that was all.
Our youngest was beside him, a small sister, then not quite in her eighth year, and arrayed apparently after the fashion of the period and place; and the tradition lingered long of his having suddenly laid his hand on her little flounced person and exclaimed with ludicrous horror: "Crinoline? I was suspecting it! So young and so depraved!"
No sooner have they despoiled Whiteley's than they will advance upon Jay's and Marshall and Snelgrove's. It is impossible to stop them. There is no safety from the Tea-Tray and the Red Weed but in instant flight." That night the world was again lit by a pale pink flash of light. It was the Fifth Crinoline.
As for the fashions of those days, it is probable that most of us would suffer severe penalties rather than return to them, beautiful as they then appeared to us by contrast with the exaggerated crinoline and flower-garden bonnet, which had given way to the somewhat milder form of hoop-skirt madness, but had not yet flown to the opposite extreme in the invention of the close-fitting princesse garments of 1868.
The follies and frivolities of absurd fashions are his proper game; and he does brave service in hunting them down. Still, his warfare against crinoline, small bonnets, and other feminine fancies in dress, has been tiresomely inveterate. Even Mr. Punch had better, as a general rule, leave the management of the female toilette to those whom it most nearly concerns.
"She knows what she wants and goes straight to it, without loss of time. Utterly regardless of fashion, for its own sake, she always contrives to be in the mode, though I believe that if hoop skirts were suited to her, she'd have the courage of her crinoline, and wear one." "Let us be thankful they're not," remarked Madame.
Word Of The Day