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We shall come to be known as 'plain Boston' presently." There was no Worth or Pingat to charge enormous prices. Patterns were passed around. Ladies went visiting and took their sleeves along to make, or their ruffles to plait, and altered over their brocades and paduasoys and crapes, and some darned Brussels "footing" until it was transformed into really handsome lace.
The couturier the bearded dressmaker, the masculine artist in silk and satin is an essentially modern and Parisian phenomenon. It is true that the elegant and capricious Madame de Pompadour owed most of her toilets and elegant accoutrements to the genius of Supplis, the famous tailleur pour dames or ladies' tailor, of the epoch. But Supplis was an exception, and he never assumed the name of couturier, the masculine form of couturière, "dress-maker." That appellation was reserved for the great artists of the Second Empire, Worth, Aurelly, Pingat, and their rivals, who utterly revolutionized feminine costume and endeavored to direct it in the paths of art, good taste, and comfort. Enthusiasts of grace and beauty, these artists set themselves the task of preventing the inconstant goddess of fashion from continuing to wander off into ugliness, deformity, and absurdity. In their devotion to art, beauty, and luxury, they determined never to forget fitness and comfort, and since their initiative has regulated the vagaries of fashion we must admit that our women have never been the victims of such inconvenient, ugly, and absurd inventions as crinoline, leg-o'-mutton sleeves, the coiffure
Besides Pingat, the most artistic of the Parisian dress-makers, besides Worth, who has a specialty of court-dresses for exportation and showy dresses for American actresses, and whose style is pompous and official, besides Felix, the dresser of slender women, the favorite artist of the aristocracy of birth and talent, all three so well known that the mention of their names here cannot be regarded as an advertisement, there are a dozen other bearded dress-makers in Paris whose talent is worthy of admiration, and whose caprices might amuse us if we had time to dwell upon them.
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