Costume

Costume (through the Fr. costume, from Ital. costume, Late Lat. costuma, a contracted form of Lat. consuetudinem, acc. of consuetudo, custom, habit, manner, &c.), dress or clothing, especially the distinctive clothing worn at different periods by different peoples or different classes of people.

Historical Legal Issues

Ancient Costume

The law forbade the creditor to retain it over-night as a pledge (Ex. xxii. 26 sq.), and consequently we may assume that it was a large outer wrapper which could be dispensed with out of doors by men, or indoors by women.

The woven decorated drawers in Cyprus do not appear to be of Semitic origin (J. L. Myres, Classical Review, x. 355), and it is not until later that they were prescribed to the Israelite priests (Ezek. xliv. 18). But the garment as explained by Josephus (Ant. iii. 7. 1) was properly a loin-cloth (cf. the examples from Punt), and the reason given for its use (Ex. xxviii. 42) points to a later date than the law which enforced the same regard for decency by forbidding the priests to ascend altars with steps (ib. xx. 26). As trousers were distinctively Persian—though the Persians had the reputation for borrowing Median and foreign dress (Herod. i. 71, vii. 61)—they were no doubt familiar in Palestine in the post-exilic age, and in the Roman period the braccae and feminalia were certainly known. On supposed references to breeches in Dan. iii. 21, see Journ. of Philology, xxvi. 307-313.

Egypt Royal Costume

This relationship between the gods and their human representatives is variously expressed. Khammurabi and the sun-god Shamash, on the former’s famous code of laws, have the same features and almost the same frizzled beard, and, according to Meyer, the king in claiming supremacy over Sumer and Akkad wears the costume of the lands.

Ceremonial costume

Tradition (Mish., Kil. ix. 1) does not endorse Ezekiel’s prohibition of woollen garments among the priests in the sanctuary (xliv. 17 sq.). Why the layman was forbidden a mixture of wool and linen (sha’atnēz, Deut. xxii. 11) is difficult to explain, though Maimonides perhaps correctly regarded the law as a protest against heathenism (on the magical use of representatives of the animal and vegetable kingdom, in conjunction with a metal ring, see I. Goldziher, Zeit. f. alttest. Wissens. xx. 36 sq.)

15th century

The tunic or gown, which was the garment of ceremony answering at once to our dress coats and frock coats, runs down to the feet. An act of 1463 ordered that coats should at least cover the buttocks, but fashion achieved suddenly what law failed to enforce.

The 16th century

High fashion under Henry VIII is all for broad toes, so broad that the sumptuary laws, from banning long toes, swing about to condemn excess in the new guise.

The new sumptuary laws, which were not allowed to become a dead letter, had their influence in restraining middle-class extravagance.

The neck of the gown, cut low and square, showed the partlet of fine linen pleated to the neck. In the days of Edward VI. and Queen Mary the dress of most men and women loses the fantastic detail of the earlier Tudor age. In the dress of both sexes the joining of the sleeve to the shoulder has, as a rule, that large puff which stage dressmakers bestow so lavishly upon all old English costumes, but otherwise the woman’s gown and hood and the man’s doublet, jerkin and trunk hose are plain enough, even the shoes losing all the fanciful width. Mary, indeed, added to the statute book more stringent laws against display of rich apparel, laws that would fine even a gentleman of under £20 a year if silk were found in his cap or shoe. Small ruffs, however, begin to appear at the neck, and most wrists are ruffled.

19th century

The wig and even the pigtail tied with black shalloon were abandoned by all but a few old folk. Soldiers cut off their pigtails in 1808. But judges and lawyers wear their wigs in court in the 20th century, state coachmen wear them on the box, and physicians and the higher clergy wore them even in the street long after laymen had given them up. George IV. refused to receive a bishop of London who appeared at court without a wig, and Sumner, archbishop of Canterbury, wore one until his death in 1862. A few powdered heads were seen as late as the ’forties. M. de Ste Aulaire, the ambassador, made, as Lord Palmerston writes, a very deep and general impression in London society of 1841, not because he wore hair-powder but because he used so much of it. It is now used only by a few lacqueys. In the early Victorian period the cropped “Brutus” head was out of fashion, many men wearing their hair rather long and so freely oiled that the “anti-macassar” came in to protect drawing-room chair-backs.

National and Class Costume

Nothing has more powerfully contributed to the social amalgamation of the “upper-middle” and the “upper” classes in England than the fashion, introduced in the 19th century, of extreme simplicity in the costume of men. But, apart from the properties of richness in material or decoration as a symbol of class distinction—at one time enforced by sumptuary laws—there have been, and still are, innumerable varieties of costume more or less traditional as proper to certain nationalities or certain classes within those nationalities.

Official Costume

Official costumes, in so far as they are not, like the crowns and tabards of heralds, the coronets of peers, or the gold keys tacked to the coat-tails of royal chamberlains—consciously symbolical, are for the most part ceremonious survivals of bygone general fashions. This is as true of the official costume of the past as of the present; as may be illustrated from ancient Rome, where the toga, once the general costume of Roman citizens, in the 3rd and 4th centuries was the official robe of senators and officials (see also under Vestments). Thus, at the present time, the lay chamberlains of the pope and the members of his Swiss guard wear costumes of the 16th century, and the same is true of the king’s yeomen of the guard in England.

In general, however (apart from robes, which are much older in their origin), official costumes in Europe, or in countries of European origin, are based on the fashions of the 18th and early 19th centuries. Knee-breeches, however, which survive in the full-dress of many British officials, as in ordinary court dress, had practically disappeared on the continent of Europe, surviving only in certain peasant costumes, when the emperor William II. reintroduced them at the court of Berlin. The tendency in the modern democratic communities of Anglo-Saxon race has been to dispense with official costumes.

In the United States the judges of the Supreme Court alone wear robes; the president of the Republic wears on all occasions the dress of an ordinary citizen, unrelieved by order or decoration, and thus symbolizes his pride of place as primus inter pares; an American ambassador appears on state occasions among his colleagues, gorgeous in bullion-covered coats, in the ordinary black “evening dress” of a modern gentleman. The principle, which tends to assert itself also in the autonomous “British dominions beyond the seas,” is not the result of that native dislike of “dressing up” which characterizes many Englishmen of the upper and middle classes; for modern democracy shares to the full the taste of past ages for official or quasi-official finery, as is proved by the costumes and insignia of the multitudinous popular orders, Knights Templars, Foresters, Oddfellows and the like. It is rather cherished as the outward and visible sign of that doctrine of the equality of all men which remains the most generally gratifying of the gifts of French 18th-century philosophy to the world.

In Great Britain, where equality has ever been less valued than liberty, official costumes have tended to increase rather than to fall into disuse; mayors of new boroughs, for instance, are not considered properly equipped until they have their gown and chain of office. In France, on the other hand, the taste of the people for pomp and display, and, it may be added, their innate artistic sense, have combined with their passion for equality to produce a somewhat anomalous situation as regards official costume. Lawyers have their robes, judges their scarlet gowns, diplomatists their gold-laced uniforms; but the state costume of the president of the Republic is “evening dress,” relieved only by the red riband and star of the Legion of Honour.

In the Latin states of South America, which tend to be disguised despotisms rather than democracies, the actual rather than the theoretical state of things is symbolized by the gorgeous official uniforms which are among the rewards of those who help the dictator for the time being to power.