September 12, 2008 9:30 AM

 

Ball Preparations

Mallory and Lizzy have been head-bent to the sewing machine for the last few days, in preparation for the Blue Gray Ball. Mary has made excellent seamstresses of the two of them, and the house is filled, stem to stern with silks and lace and festoonery. The hoop skirt itself, I'm told, is the easy part. The bodice is what takes a lot of fretting and cutting and re-fitting.

Even though I don't claim to be an expert on historic clothing, I do know this: fashion reflects the ideals of an era. Our age puts a great deal of emphasis on "the casual" and "the comfortable." The A#1 question people ask me when I wear a wool frock coat, wool breeches, and a wool waistcoat is "aren't you hot in that?"

Some historic costumers insist that the corsets women wore in the 18th and 19th century were relatively comfortable, and I can't confirm or deny that, (ahem), but I do know this: we have seen "casual" females in shorts and t-shirts transform themselves into radiant, angelic princesses just with a costume change. The Victorians, and the Georgians, valued beauty, and elegance, and refinement, and they achieved it in their clothing. Our generation values comfort and sex, and, well, you see the results daily.

Our own generation has been cheated by fashion. Flannery O'Connor wrote that "the gas we breath is nihilism." We also wear it too. The most recent entry is that frazzled man's haircut represented by "Extreme Makeover's" Ty Pennington, and several million others. You may like it. You may not. But doesn't it seem to be the very embodiment of confusion, disorder, accident? Can you imagine taking the presidential oath wearing this sort of do? It just seems to me that something majestic and flowing and more or less symmetrical is the right look for someone who sees himself as part of an ordered universe, with the Almighty at the helm.

I'm not legalistic about this, but I do get a kick out of contemporary baggy-jeaned, tattooed teen-sheep who mock the fashions of yester-year. Whenever an adolescent makes fun of a three cornered hat, or breeches, stockings, and buckled shoes, I say:

"Listen, Skippy, the guys who wore this clothing could load a musket four times in a minute, under fire. They fought off the greatest infantry in the world. They cut down whole forests with their hands and brought civilization to the wilderness. You can barely manage life without an Ipod, and your Deltoids look like bathroom art."

To each his own, I guess.

 

More of the Farm Journal -- September 11, 2008