File:Two centuries of costume in America, MDCXX-MDCCCXX (1903) (14576491750).jpg

Identifier: twocentsofcostu01earl (find matches)
Title: Two centuries of costume in America, MDCXX-MDCCCXX
Year: 1903 (1900s)
Authors: Earle, Alice Morse, 1851-1911
Subjects: Clothing and dress
Publisher: New York, The Macmillan company London, Macmillan & co., ltd.
Contributing Library: Getty Research Institute
Digitizing Sponsor: Getty Research Institute

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d, more furs, stronger shoes, but I can-not find that they adopted simpler or less costly clothing; any change that may have been made through Puritan belief and teaching had been made in England. All the colonists . . . studied after nyce arrav,And made greet cost in clothing. Many persons preferred to keep their property in the form of what they quaintly called duds. The fashion did not wear out more apparel than the man ;for clothing, no matter what its cut, was worn as long as it lasted, doing service frequently through three generations. For instance, we find Mrs.Epes, of Ipswich, Massachusetts, when she was over fifty years old, receiving this bequest by will: If she desire to have the suit of damask which was the Lady Cheynies her grandmother, let her have it upon appraisement. I have traced a certain flowered satin gown and manto in four wills ; adame to her daughter; she to her sister; then to the child of the last-named who was a granddaugh- Apparel of the Puritan and Pilgrim Fathers 11
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Governor John Winthrop. ter of the first owner. And it was a proud possession to the last. The fashions and shapes then did not change yearly. The Boston gentlewoman of 12 Two Centuries of Costume 1660 would not have been ill dressed or out of the mode in the dress worn by her grandmother when she landed in 1625. Petty details were altered in womans dress —though but slightly ; the change of a cap, a band, a scarf, a ruffle, meant much to the wearer, though it seems unimportant to us to-day. Mens dress,we know from portraits, was unaltered for a time save in neckwear and hair-dressing, both being of such importance in costume that they must be writ-ten upon at length. Let us fix in our minds the limit of reign of each ruler during the early years of colonization, and the dates of settlement of each colony. When Elizabeth died in 1603, the Brownist Puritans or Separatists were well established in Holland ; they had been there twenty years. They were dissatisfied with their Dutch home, however,

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