English Costume,
Painted & Described By
Dion Clayton Calthrop
Edited By Pauline Weston Thomas for Fashion-Era.com
English Costume by Dion Clayton Calthrop
Editor note - There can be few devotees of early English costume history who have
not seen a copy of the early C20th work entitled:-
ENGLISH COSTUME
PAINTED & DESCRIBED BY
DION CLAYTON CALTHROP.
You can see all of the images shown on this page
enlarged more and with many more extra colouring drawings for every
reign of English Costume by looking at the individual pages on site. Use
the gold sidebar or links at the bottom of every
Calthrop page, view the sitemap or use
the search facility to navigate to a Calthrop era of interest.
The Book - English Costume by Dion Clayton Calthrop
I love my battered old wine leather bound tomb of a book with
art nouveau patterns impressed on the cover. As a little girl I would
leaf my way through this book to find the coloured costume plates of the pretty dresses the ladies
wore.
I've never been so interested in male costume, but it was
clear to me even then some of the garments the men were depicted wearing
in the book plates were frequently
just as handsome ensembles as the ladies garb. Of course all the costume in the book is
pre1830 so dress for men was relatively more flamboyant. This website is about female dress
history, but by putting the bulk of this book online I have the opportunity to show
you some male dress from eras I would not normally cover, whilst I also continue with my personal passion for
adding more female costume.
You can see all of the images shown on this page and many more by
looking at the individual pages.
This 36 page section on fashion-era.com consists of a text copy of the book ENGLISH
COSTUME PAINTED & DESCRIBED BY DION CLAYTON CALTHROP. Visuals,
drawings and painted fashion plates in the book have a charm of their own and are
shown amid the text. The book covers both male and female dress history of
over 700 years spanning the era 1066-1830.
DION CLAYTON CALTHROP lived
1875 to 1937 and I am struck how his philosophy of life shines through this book
in his closing book introduction paragraph he
states:-
"The book is intended to be read, and is not wrapped up in
grandiose phrases and a great wind about nothing; I would wish to be
thought more friendly than the antiquarian and more truthful than the
historian, and so have endeavoured to show, in addition to the body of
the clothes, some little of their soul." I really love this attitude
since I also believe clothes
never live in isolation of a person and their daily circumstances. We can read
many messages into them and the character of the people who wore them. Lets take a look
at Impresario Dion Clayton Calthrop's opinion of costume history and
written in his own words over 100 years ago.
.
ENGLISH COSTUME
PAINTED & DESCRIBED BY
DION CLAYTON CALTHROP
Published in four volumes during 1906.
Reissued in one volume, April, 1907.
The book begins with an INTRODUCTION and
this illustration of A Man Of the Time - George IV 1820-1830 - Image
Right.
A MAN OF THE TIME OF GEORGE IV
Here you see the coat which we now wear, slightly altered, in out
evening dress. If came into fashion, with this form of top-boots, in
1799, and was called Jean-de-Bry. Notice the commencement of the whisker
fashion.
The text of this introduction is below.
You can see
35 other text chapter/images from the book in this section and navigate
it on the sidebar on the left.
INTRODUCTION
The world, if we choose to see it so, is a complicated picture of
people dressing and undressing. The history of the world is
composed of the chat of a little band of tailors seated cross-legged on
their boards; they gossip across the centuries, feeling, as they should,
very busy and important. Someone made the coat of many colours for
Joseph, another cut into material for Elijah's mantle.
Baldwin,
from his stall on the site of the great battle, has only to stretch his
neck round to nod to the tailor who made the toga for Julius Caesar; has
only to lean forward to smile to Pasquino, the wittiest of tailors.
John Pepys, the tailor, gossips with his neighbour who cut that
jackanapes coat with silver buttons so proudly worn by Samuel Pepys, his
son. Mr. Schweitzer, who cut Beau Brummell's coat, talks to Mr. Meyer,
who shaped his pantaloons. Our world is full of the sound of
scissors, the clipping of which, with the gossiping tongues, drown the
grander voices of history.
As you will see, I have devoted myself entirely to civil costume -
that is, the clothes a man or a woman would wear from choice, and not by
reason of an appointment to some ecclesiastical post, or to a military
calling, or to the Bar, or the Bench. Such clothes are but symbols
of their trades and professions, and have been dealt with by persons who
specialize in those professions. I have taken the date of the Conquest
as my starting-point, and from that date -a very simple period of
clothes I have followed the changes of the garments reign by reign, fold
by fold, button by button, until we arrive quite smoothly at Beau
Brummell, the inventor of modern clothes, the prophet of cleanliness.
I have taken considerable pains to trace the influence of one garment
upon its successor, to reduce the wardrobe for each reign down to its
simplest cuts and folds, so that the reader may follow quite easily the
passage of the coat from its birth to its ripe age, and by this means
may not only know the clothes of one time, but the reasons for those
garments. To the best of my knowledge, such a thing has never been done
before; most works on dress try to include the world from Adam to
Charles Dickens, lump a century into a page, and dismiss the ancient
Egyptians in a couple of colour plates.
So many young gentlemen have blown away their patrimony on feathers
and tobacco that it is necessary for us to confine ourselves to certain
gentlemen and ladies in out own country. A knowledge of history is
essential to the study of mankind, and a knowledge of history is never
perfect without a knowledge of the clothes with which to dress it.
»
A man, in a sense, belongs to his clothes; they are so much a part of
him that, to take him seriously, one must know how he walked about, in
what habit, with what air. I am compelled to speak strongly of my
own work because I believe in it, and I feel that the series of
paintings in these volumes are really a valuable addition to English
history. To be modest is often to be excessively vain, and, having
made an exhaustive study of my subject from my own point of view, I do
not feel called upon to hide my knowledge under a bushel. Of
course, I do not suggest that the ordinary cultured man should acquire
the same amount of knowledge as a painter, or a writer of historical
subjects, or an actor, but he should understand the clothes of his own
people, and be able to visualize any date in which he may be interested.
One half of the people who talk glibly of Beau Brummell have but half
an idea when he lived, and no idea that, for example, he wore whiskers.
Hamlet they can conjure up, but would have some difficulty in
recognising Shakespeare, because most portraits of him are but head and
shoulders. Napoleon has stamped himself on men's minds very
largely through the medium of a certain form of hat, a lock of hair, and
a gray coat. In future years an orchid will be remembered as an emblem.
I have arranged, as far as it is possible, that each plate shall show
the emblem or distinguishing mark of the reign it illustrates, so that
the continuity of costume shall be remembered by the arresting notes.
As the fig-leaf identifies Adam, so may the chaperon twisted into a
cockscomb mark Richard II. As the curled and scented hair of
Alcibiades occurs to our mind, so shall Beau Nash manage his clouded
cane. Elizabeth shall be helped to the memory by her Piccadilly ruff;
square Henry VIII by his broad-toed shoes and his little fiat cap; Anne
Boleyn by her black satin nightdress; James be called up as padded
trucks; Maximilian as puffs and slashes; D'Orsay by the curve of his
hat; Tennyson as a dingy brigand; Gladstone as a collar; and even more
recent examples, as the Whistlerian lock and the Burns blue suit.
And what romantic incidents may we not hang upon out clothes-line!
The cloak of Samuel Pepys (' Dapper Dick,' as he signed himself to a
certain lady) sheltering four ladies from the rain ; Sir Walter Raleigh
spreading his cloak over the mud to protect the shoes of that great
humorist Elizabeth (I never think of her apart from the saying, 'Ginger
for pluck'); Mary, Queen of Scots, ordering false attires of hair during
her captivity - all these scenes clinched into reality by the knowledge
of the dress proper to them.
And what are we doing to help modern history - the picture of our own
times - that it may look beautiful in the ages to come ? I cannot answer
you that.
Some chapters of this work have appeared in the Connoisseur,
and I have to thank the editor for his courtesy in allowing me to
reproduce them. I must also thank Mr. Pownall for his help in the early
stages of my labours. One thing more I must add: I do not wish this book
to go forth and be received with that frigid politeness which usually
welcomes a history to the shelves of the bookcase, there to remain
unread. The book is intended to be read, and is not wrapped up in
grandiose phrases and a great wind about nothing; I would wish to be
thought more friendly than the antiquarian and more truthful than the
historian, and so have endeavoured to show, in addition to the body of
the clothes, some little of their soul.
DION CLAYTON CALTHROP.
Illustrations in Colour - 1. A Man of the Time of George IV. 1820-1830
Shown in the Book Frontispiece.
If you like this book you can probably find a copy on EBay or Amazon
at reasonable cost. I recently bought a copy for a friend who liked the
authenticity and handle of my 100 year old book. I paid under £10 for
the old copy for her. A leather bound book like this gives many people
great pleasure in a similar way to downloaders to iPods. The same yet
different. If you are more erudite in your approach and collect first
edition books you may prefer to pay Antiquarian book prices at £100+.
Fashion-Era.com looks at women's costume and fashion history and analyses the mood of an era. Changes in technology, leisure, work, cultural and moral values. Homelife and politics also
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