"Yester-year"; ten centuries of toilette from the French of A. Robida

Our ancestress of tlie Stone Ago, clad in skins of beasts, regarded lier costume as very becoming, and smiled at the notion of her grandmother in the petticoat of a savage. The fierce cavemen, her contemporaries, were of her way of thinking.

Yes, the prettiest fashion is to-day's, the only persons who have ever denied the truth of this unvarying assertion are gentlemen 'of a certain age,' indeed of a very certain age, for these veterans, to be found at every period, have invariably passed their sixth decade. Likewise they have always entered their protest by making another assertion.

" The fashions of the day are ridiculous," they exclaim in chorus, " people don't dress as they did in our time." Then it is—in 1830, or in 1730, in 1630, in 1530 etc., even in the year 30 itself, the fashions were becoming, elegant, distinguished, charming. Ah 1830, or 1730, 1630, 1530, or the year 30 ! what a grand period that was !

And so we have this dinned into our ears by the chorus of sexagenarians. Oh yes, a grand 2:)eriod, Lecausc it was ' tlie golden prime/ when these gentlemen were young, when the sun shone more brightly, the fields wore a fresher green, and the fashions were far more elegant. But all this is of no consequence, no matter what these elderly persons may say, and what we ourselves may say some years hence, the following axiom will always be proclaimed—

" We were never better dressed than we are this very day."

Since, however, nothing passes away altogether, and the lost hours marked upon the face of fashion's timepiece may all come back with the capricious circling of its hands, it is tolerably safe to predict the modes of to-morrow by merely studying those of yesterday.

Let us then rummage that vanished past, and allow ourselves the pleasure—it has some melancholy in it too—of evoking the beautiful and elegant dead fashions, buried under ages of accumulated inventions, the novelties long thrown aside and forgotten, and also the recent but no less forgotten finery of the grandmothers of the present day, who, as they recline in their easy-chairs, recall the images of themselves as

Full-dress : 15tb century.

fair or dark beauties, sprightly and gay, in the attire of their spring-time. Dear old grannies !

That past which seems to us so veiy distant, is it really so ? The grandmothers of our grandmothers were born under Louis Quinze, in the days of powder and furbelows.

Seven or eight grandmothers 'added up '—if we may venture upon such a proceeding—bring us to the time of Agnes Sorel and the tall ' hennin ' head-dress. It was only yesterday, you see.

One point to be settled, to begin with, is that the art of dress and the art of construction are very nearly related. Fashion and architecture are sisters, but fashion is probably the elder.

A house is a garment ; it is raiment in stone or in wood which we put on over our vesture of linen, wool, velvet, or silk, for our better protection against weather ; it is a second garb which must mould itself to the shape of the first, unless indeed it be the first that adapts itself to the necessities of the second.

Without going back beyond the deluge, we may ask, Are not the pictorial, and emblazoned gowns, the cut-out, snipped-up costumes of the Middle As:es, Gothic arcliitecturo of the most flamboyant kind, just as the more rude and simple fashions of the preceding period belong-to the rude and severe Roman style ?

When stone is cut, and twisted, and made almost to flash into magnificent sculptured efflorescence, the more supple textile fabric is cut and twisted and made to effloresce also. The tall head-dresses which we call extravagant are the tapering tops of the turrets which rise from everywhere towards the sky. Everything is many-coloured, the peoi^le of those days loved bright tints, the whole gamut of the yellows, reds, and greens is employed.

At a later date, costume, simultaneously with architecture, let itself out more freely. The Renaissance had come with its ampler and less rigid fashions; novelty was sought in the old. Italy acted upon dress as she acted upon building; everything, even to the princes' panoply of war or state, and the iron ' harness ' of the rich nobles, was made in the antique forms, and covered with ornaments of Roman design.

The severity, indeed we may call it the gloom, of the fashions at the end of the sixteenth century, was also a characteristic of the edifices of a troubled epoch.

The ponderously wearisome and sumptuous palace of Versailles, the big dull hôtels whose

Eenaissance.

architecture embodies morose conceit, are entirely appropriate coverings for the enormous and solemn wigs of the great King, and the starched tight-laced bodices and stiff ' heads ' of Madame de Maintenon.

After the tedious end of the seventeenth century comes the eighteenth ; the pompous

NOBLE DAME, FIN DU XIV SIECLE.

and the solemn are discarded at the same time by both dress and architecture, ' rococo ' toilettes, and furbelowed buildings—it is all one.