Book Description

Excerpt from Modes Manners of the Nineteenth Century as Represented in the Pictures and Engravings by the Time, Vol. 1 of 3 The North American Indian is perhaps the person who has most thoroughly realised the possible significance of dress. To him dress was not so much a covering worn for the sake of convenience and fashion as a symbol of his state of mind. I have been told that a Red Indian prepared for the war-path, shaven, feathered, and chalked, is the most hideous emblem of the horrors of war that the artifice of man has ever produced. To test its success one need only glance at the mass of literature that has grown up round the subject. It is to the passions of the primitive man and their translation into dress and ornament that we owe a considerable amount of our local colour in costume; but there is another source from which much charm is still derived - the reflection of natural conditions in dress, hardened into custom. How wonderfully do the garish colours of the gipsy's clothes still suggest the oriental suns; how do the thirty embroidered petticoats of the Bulgarian young woman suggest the accumulated weight of custom, the lonely valleys, the wide coffer, and the still house; how empty of pleasure would our children's books be without the reindeer-skins of the Esquimaux, the Japanese umbrella, the turban of Arabia! It is of no use to grieve over the inevitable, over the sweep of universal law as it comes rapidly into action; but what a lament might be raised over the imminent disappearance of local art in dress. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.