Henry Knighton, a 14th-century chronicler, describes women dressed as men in 1348:
“In these days a rumour and a great complaint arose among the people that when tournaments were held, in every place a company of ladies appeared... in the diverse and marvellous dress of a man, to the number sometime forty, sometimes fifty... in divided tunics, that is, one part of the one kind and the other of another kind, with small hoods and liripipes flying about the head... even having across their stomachs, below the middle, knives which they vulgarly called daggers placed in pouches from above. Thus they came, on excellent chargers or other horses splendidly adorned, to the place of the tournament. And in such manner they spent and wasted their riches and injured their bodies with abuses and ludicrous wantonness that the common voice of the people exclaimed.”
In 1646, diarist John Evelyn in Venice describes the fashion for high heels:
“It was now Ascension week, and the great mart, or fair, of the whole year was kept, everybody at liberty and jolly; the noblemen stalking with their ladies on choppines. These are high-heeled shoes, particularly affected by these proud dames, or, as some say, invented to keep them at home, it being very difficult to walk with them; whence, one being asked how he liked the Venetian dames, replied, they were mezzo carne, mezzo legno, half flesh, half wood, and he would have none of them... Thus attired, they set their hands on the heads of two matron-like servants, or old women, to support them, who are mumbling their beads. It is ridiculous to see how these ladies crawl in and out of their gondolas, by reason of their choppines; and what dwarfs they appear, when taken down from their wooden scaffolds.”
Samuel Pepys records in his diary on 12th June 1666:
“Walking the galleries at Whitehall, I find the Ladies of Honour dressed in their riding garbs, with coats and doublets with deep skirts, just, for all the world, like mine; and buttoned their doublets up to the breast, with periwigs under their hats; so that, only for a long petticoat dragging under their men’s coats, nobody could take them for women in any point whatever; which was an odd sight, and a sight that did not please me.”
On 25th July 1919, Liane de Pougy, one of the great courtesans of the Belle Epoque, by then married to Prince Georges Ghika, writes in her journal:
“Today we acknowledged that Paul Poiret [the French fashion designer] deserves his nickname, the Magnificent. He arrived by car, at midday, surrounded by boxes, suitcases, his most elegant and favourite mannequin, Germaine... and my vendeuse. Nearly twenty models, each more ravishing than the last... I chose three dresses: ‘Tangier,’ in thick black wool with touches of white embroidery and fringed with the same. It’s ravishing. ‘Saint-Cyr,’ in black silk, rather full pannier-style skirt, black bodice with little short sleeves, and three overlapping flounces of white organdy making a cape fastened with two silver tassels and a bow of violet velvet. ‘Agrigento,’ two splendid lengths of glitter knotted on the shoulders and at the waist—that’s all but such a ravishing all!... He was charming, allowed me a discount of 800 francs on the three dresses, which made them 3,000 net.”
Virginia Woolf observes in her novel Orlando, in 1928:
“Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than merely to keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us.”
Quentin Bell observes in his 1947 study, On Human Finery:
“The feeling of being perfectly dressed imparts a buoyant confidence to the wearer, and it impresses the beholder as though the fabric were a natural extension of the man… So strong is the impulse of sartorial morality that it is difficult in praising clothes not to use such adjectives as right, good, correct, unimpeachable, or faultless, which belong properly to the discussion of conduct, while in discussing moral shortcomings we tend very naturally to fall into the language of dress and speak of a person’s behaviour as being shabby, shoddy, threadbare, down at heel, botched, or slipshod.”
In July 1968, Cecil Beaton writes in his diary about Coco Chanel:
“It is quite incredible that she is today over 80. Her skin is drawn in tight wrinkles over the bone of her face, but her hands, her figure, are those of a middle-aged woman and her walk, her vitality and general animal grace are those of a teenager…
“Each time I left her presence it was in a condition of total exhaustion... I left her in her workroom with the swaying metallic bands running in and out of a thousand seams until five hours later she might have put another four dresses on the road to completion.
“[Note made later] Her large-boned, eloquently articulated hands are so accustomed to plying material that even when she is talking at lunch she is pleating the table napkin... squaring the edges, the fingers trembling with energy and sensitivity.”
