a hat meant only
that rigid, tall silk thing known to impudence as a "stove-pipe."
In town and country these men would wear no other hat, and, without
self-consciousness, they went rowing in such hats.

Shifting fashions of shape replaced aristocracy of texture: dressmakers,
shoemakers, hatmakers, and tailors, increasing in cunning and in power,
found means to make new clothes old. The long contagion of the "Derby"
hat arrived: one season the crown of this hat would be a bucket; the
next it would be a spoon. Every house still kept its bootjack, but
high-topped boots gave way to shoes and "congress gaiters"; and these
were played through fashions that shaped them now with toes like
box-ends and now with toes like the prows of racing shells.

Trousers with a crease were considered plebeian; the crease proved that
the garment had lain upon a shelf, and hence was "ready-made"; these
betraying trousers were called "hand-me-downs," in allusion to the
shelf. In the early 'eighties, while bangs and bustles were having
their way with women, that variation of dandy known as the "dude" was
invented: he wore trousers as tight as stockings, dagger-pointed shoes,
a spoon "Derby," a single-breasted coat called a "Chesterfield," with
short flaring skirts, a torturing cylindrical collar, laundered to a
polish and three inches high, while his other neckgear might be a heavy,
puffed cravat or a tiny bow fit for a doll's braids. With evening dress
he wore a tan overcoat so short that his black coat-tails hung visible,
five inches below the over-coat; but after a season or two he lengthened
his overcoat till it touched his heels, and he passed out of his tight
trousers into trousers like great bags. Then, presently, he was seen
no more, though the word that had been coined for him remained in the
vocabularies of the impertinent.

It was a hairier day than this. Beards were to the wearers' fancy,
and things as strange as the Kaiserliche boar-tusk moustache were
commonplace. "Side-burns" found nourishment upon childlike profiles;
great Dundreary whiskers blew like tippets over young shoulders;
moustaches were trained as lambrequins over forgotten mouths; and it
was possible for a Senator of the United States to wear a mist of white
whisker upon his throat only, not a newspaper in the land finding the
ornament distinguished enough to warrant a lampoon. Surely no more is
needed to prove that so short a time ago we were living in another age!